Mercury Blade by James David Victor

Author:James David Victor [Victor, James David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fairfield Publishing
Published: 2018-05-23T18:30:00+00:00

7

I Brought My Friends

Whump. The jump, as always, sent the navigation systems haywire for a short period, with the display lights and signals that projected over the windows glaring and flashing as they sought out their current astronomical fix.

But El didn’t need to wait for the computers to pick up telemetry from the nearest deep-space satellites. He could see perfectly well where they were, because the dark field of asteroids, dotted with the stars of habitation grids, was clearly visible across the top half of the window.

Traders’ Belt.

“Irie!” he bellowed. Of all the places you could have chosen, you chose here?

“What? The coordinates were already plugged into the system!” she snapped on the other end of the line. “And it’s not like we can’t jump again, when we’ve cycled up, that is…”

“When we’ve cycled up? Outstanding,” the captain muttered, before hitting the controls for the automatic pilot to take over and turning back to the hold. “Seeing as we’re here, you might as well get that woman off my boat!” he shouted. He was in no mood for passengers at the moment, and all of his previous good will toward this ‘Cassandra Milan’—if that was even her real name—had vanished.

“She took out two of the Armcore attack-fighters, Captain.” Val’s words were heavy as he unclipped himself from his weapons seat and nodded to the other command chair, where the renegade archaeologist was currently sliding back her targeting visor and sitting up.

“You were on the guns?” El spluttered, halfway between surprise and outrage.

“We both were, Captain. Although the rail-guns can be controlled by one master gunner, they are best controlled by two,” the Duergar said. “That way, we can have independent targeting—two targets instead of one.”

El just stared at him. “You don’t say.”

“It’s fine.” Cassandra had already unclipped her harness and was standing up from her seat. “I’m good to go at the first opportunity.” She glared at the captain. “Just so long as you don’t intend me to swim over to Charylla, that is…”

“I’m getting close to it,” El muttered, earning a disapproving glare from Val. “But no, of course not. The Mercury doesn’t have a second escape pod, so we’ll have to make a quick docking…”

BWARP! Emergency alarms broke out from the cockpit, earning a shouted curse from the captain as he bounded back up the stairs.

“What is it?” Val asked, lingering around his gun control seat just in case.

El checked the sensors.

Weapons lock detected. Multiple systems targeting the Mercury. The screen flared multiple small red circles over the nearest asteroids of the Traders’ Belt. “The traders have activated the defense grid against us!” El shouted. “I bet it was Hogan, that toad!”

“They won’t fire on you, Captain,” Cassandra called up to him.

How do you know? El cursed. The trader defense grid wasn’t particularly sophisticated by Armcore standards—it mostly consisted of missile batteries years out of date and the odd orbital laser—but the Trader Council had been adding to it for years and finally managed to link everything up to a centralized firing computer.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.