Spectra Arise Trilogy by Tammy Salyer

Author:Tammy Salyer [Salyer, Tammy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2015-03-01T13:00:00+00:00

Twenty-Two

Streamers of steaming exhaust billow out from the pipes and turrets of the industrial complex surrounding us like a post-apocalyptic graveyard. The air glides slickly into my nostrils and down my throat, tasting more like a chemical vapor than oxygen, which is perfect. We all still wear our nostril-implanted air filters to protect our lungs, but no one else wants to come near an urban junkyard where ragged and dangerous dregs of people mix like rotting vegetables with the toxic soup that stands in for the environment.

Tunis City, despite being located on the most populated Obal planet, still has its industrial blights. Once they outsourced dangerous manufacturing jobs to the already hazardous Spectras and smaller moons, these dilapidated factories were simply abandoned, one by one. Over time, they’ve been picked bare by vagabonds and skulkers looking for materials that can buy them a meal or a fix. The only thing left is the sludge and pollutants that were never cleaned out, slowly aging and festering like wounds and occasionally spewing out their noxious residue. Like I said—for a quiet, witness-free location, it’s perfect.

Rob put us down two days ago on a busy resource shipping dock, and we’d gotten off the Horizon with almost unbelievable ease. Most of the transports in the area were older and bigger, beaten from traveling to and from the Spectras carrying heavy loads of metals, minerals, and ore, making the Red Horizon almost conspicuous in its newer, shinier state. Rob procured a small land transport and snuck us aboard while the dock controllers read the ’Rize’s manifest and checked his crew’s IDs. Lying in back of the transport, I could smell smoke and hear shouting and alarms as the engines of a nearby ship went to shit. The airspace around was crowded and getting worse by the minute thanks to the grounded ship, and the controllers moved on without hesitation. With Rob at the wheel, we merged with the general din of road traffic and traveled quickly to this section of town, more a satellite district of Tunis than part of it. And the wait for La Mer to track down contacts from his past to aid us began.

Though it’s dark inside the old factory, the gloom is still more inviting than the penetrating fog barely held at bay outside. The last forty-eight hours have ticked by with the painful slowness of waterboarding while La Mer sends out queries. If there is a bright side, it’s Rob’s assurance that he can get us off-world when the time comes. Maybe we’d accepted his help a little too fast, but without him here, Brady’s tendency to painstakingly consider every option before making a call got dropped. If our choice was too brash, there’s only one way we’re going to find out.

It’s almost my watch on the rooftop, and I glance at La Mer on the way up. He’s been monitoring his netwave console almost constantly, barely leaving to sleep or eat, but he’s not looking too worse for the wear.

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