Star Bounty: Absolution: (A Military Sci-Fi Series) by Rick Partlow

Author:Rick Partlow [Partlow, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aethon Books
Published: 2022-06-14T05:00:00+00:00

10

It took my brain a few seconds to process exactly what had happened. Something had yanked hard on the tail of my jacket and I was flying backwards, the fall seeming to take forever, and before my back even hit the floor, something hot and blinding was passing through the space where I’d been a half-second before. Time snapped back like a broken rubber band on impact, the cold concrete and the contrasting heat of the blaster fire just over my head bringing me to reality.

They were shooting at us. It seemed like an overreaction, but I wasn’t going to stick around and try to argue them out of it. Dog had pulled me down, his senses and reaction time better than any human’s, and now he yanked me up, grabbing my left sleeve and tugging me forward, his claws scratching against the floor for purchase. Beckett was staring in disbelief, the proverbial deer in the headlights, until I crashed into her, my chest ramming against her shoulder and carrying her along back the way we’d come.

People were screaming and scattering, already panicked by the alarm and now pushed over the brink by the gunfire, and their chaos kept us alive a few seconds longer than we had any right to expect. Not even Neanderthal and his goons were willing to fire into their own workers to get to us, which was more ethics than I’d given them credit for, but the respite was going to be brief.

“Where are we going?” Beckett asked, her voice high-pitched and tinged with panic.

I made a split-second decision, my subconscious processing data I didn’t even remember knowing.

“Back to the Nautilus lab!” I said. “Stay close to the right-hand wall!”

The workers running away from the gunfire were mostly keeping to the right side of the corridor, a natural herd reaction to danger and one I was going to do my best to take advantage of. We weaved through the clusters of workers and a face here and there struck me: a middle-aged man with a grey-streaked beard and cheeks ruddy with exertion; a woman so young I might have justifiably called her a girl, with her blond hair tied into a ponytail and her eyes wide with abject fear.

A flare of blaster fire spalled burning concrete off the wall just above our heads and someone screamed. Guilt stung hard in my chest, because I was the cause of the fear, the reason they were in danger, and I would have given myself up if it had been an option, but summary execution didn’t appeal to me. I felt a mixture of relief and fear when the civilians began to turn off from the main corridor ahead of us, heading somewhere I guess they considered safe and leaving us with no cover.

“Faster!” I urged Beckett. I wanted to grab her and pull her along, but it was an irrational impulse and would have just thrown us both off balance and slowed us down. But we were

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