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

Author:Rick Partlow [Partlow, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aethon Books
Published: 2022-07-11T16:00:00+00:00

12

I was still working on that when we hit the street.

You would have thought nothing had happened. Traffic was normal in the business district, people going about their day, vehicles taking shipments of cargo in and out of warehouses as if there wasn’t a dead psychic with his throat missing just a half a kilometer away, as if there hadn’t been a gunfight a few minutes ago.

“Where are the cops?” I wondered, eyes darting from one side of the street to the other, watching for the cyborgs. “There should be security out here. Someone had to have heard the blaster fire, and they should have sensors that would pick up the energy discharge, the Bartoli crystals…”

“Remember who we’re dealing with here,” Dog said. “They cracked Oscar’s security. The systems in this place are practically kindergarten level.”

“Are we going to talk about the fact that Dog just killed a psychic?” I said, unable to pry my brain away from what I’d seen in the warehouse.

“Not yet,” Dog insisted. “Business first, existential horror later.”

The entrance to Riviera Shipping, Ltd. no longer existed, but I suppose I could forgive passers-by for not noticing. From a distance, it seemed as if the door was merely pulled open inside, like one of the employees had forgotten and left it ajar. You had to get fairly close before you noticed the bits of it hanging from the hinges, closer still before you could see the haze of smoke still thick in the air.

I checked up and down the street before I pulled my blaster from its holster and approached the door from an oblique angle off to the right. Allie had her own weapon in hand as she took the opposite side and we carefully edged forward.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Dog muttered, then dashed straight through the gaping doorway.

He sure made it hard for a guy not to curse. I shot Allie a helpless look and ran after him. The reception area was deserted, even the robot attendant gone. I’d at first thought she’d been destroyed in the initial attack by the cyborgs, but there was no sign of her. Maybe she’d wandered into the street, lacking any guidance.

“It won’t be the way we followed Manny,” I mused as we all scanned the room. “Is there another door?” If there was, it certainly wasn’t obvious. I frowned. The robot. “Dog, can you spot the thermal signature for the receptionist’s power pack?”

He glanced at me sharply, teeth baring in a grin.

“I knew there was a reason I kept you around, meatsack.”

He turned in a small circle, looking very much like a dog finding a place to take a nap, but his loop ended with him facing the wall opposite the door where Manny had gone. I couldn’t see anything over there behind the reception desk, just white-stained paneling and another of those flower paintings.

“There,” Dog insisted. “There’s something back there.”

“I’ll check the desk,” Allie offered, moving back to the reception area.

I ran my left hand over the

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