Space Junk: A Military Sci-fi Series (Waymaker Wars Book 1) by Rachel Aukes

Author:Rachel Aukes [Aukes, Rachel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aethon Books
Published: 2022-05-02T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 19

Burn disconnected from the call and leaned against the shuttle’s panel as he let himself get lost in memories, and definitely not the memories he wanted to get lost in… not that he had many of those. But these memories—ones from their earliest months after the Aria mission failure—haunted him the most. The crew had worked nonstop transforming the ship, and every discussion during that time had revolved around General Metrell and the SC3. No matter how much they discussed, how much they researched, everything came back to Metrell. No one else at the SC3 had the power to cause a ship to purge itself and then cover up the murder.

The crew had scoured every news report on the Aria mission—Burn had practically memorized them—and every report had said the ship simply went offline. One year and a day after all attempts to reconnect to Aria failed, Sol Corps had officially listed the mission a failure and the crew deceased.

None of the crew could figure out why Metrell had sabotaged the mission. Burn figured it had something to do with money, because every shitty crime out there always had to do with money. Well, some were crimes of passion, but killing an entire crew nearly a light-year away didn’t exactly have a passionate tone to it.

General Metrell had to be dead. If he wasn’t, that meant the darkest part of Burn’s life wasn’t yet behind him. God, he hoped this Metrell wasn’t the Metrell. If the two men were one and the same, Burn would go Veda on Metrell’s ass.

The proximity alarm sounded, jerking Burn back to reality. The shuttle’s cameras picked up three people in hab-suits approaching. Since they were skulking rather than walking straight for the door, he assumed they were up to no good. As he watched them get closer, he noticed they were scrawny to be adults, though he’d seen some pretty malnourished people in some far-flung colonies. This group seemed a little too scrawny, though, and then he noticed the crowbars they carried.

Damn hoodlums.

He pulled on his helmet and lumbered to the airlock. While he waited for the outer airlock to open, he pulled out a gun and a knife and contemplated. He holstered the gun and looked at the knife, then changed his mind and sheathed that. No way. These were just kids.

He stepped outside. “Hey, guys. What’s up?”

The trio froze, clearly not expecting someone to be at the shuttle. Burn inhaled. Guess he’d ruined their little plans of thievery. The would-be thief nearest Burn recovered first and swung his crowbar. Burn avoided it with ease, grabbing the crowbar and yanking it from the punk’s hand.

Burn hefted the weight. “Seriously, you can scratch a perfectly fine paint job with one of these, and I painted this shuttle myself. Okay, well, it’s not exactly painted. It’s covered in a carbon fiber paste, which is a very tedious process. And it turned out beautifully, so I’d prefer if you didn’t try to pry or burn your way onto my very pretty shuttle.

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