Starship Relic (Lost Colony Uprising Book 1) by Darcy Troy Paulin

Author:Darcy Troy Paulin [Paulin, Darcy Troy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-05-14T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 31

Though its tough hull was undamaged, their vessel’s mast and rigging, and much of its deck was shattered or broken. Max and Snow quickly gathered what they could from the stricken vessel and moved to the killer’s boat, which was essentially a bigger, bio-engineered version of Max’s Garg-snail shell boat, having been shaped by its designers to improve upon nature.

When they’d looked for the killer’s body, they found none, and were left to hope it had been taken by something in the water. Max told Snow, and himself, that he would be surprised if the killer hadn’t been scavenged by canal monsters. The cargo vessel’s remaining crewman was also nowhere to be seen, but for various reasons, Max expected he’d run off through the brush to the north. They did not stick around to look for him.

Max piloted the boat slowly out of the lock and along the upper canal onwards to their destination of New York. The breeze was light, and so their progress was slow, but soon enough they had left the lock behind.

The boat contained a few items of interest. The killer did not seem to have much of his own on board, a bag held spare clothing, a small digester, and munitions consisting of a pistol, ammunition for the pistol, and a small satchel of fist-sized bombs. The bombs were not unlike those used by a certain cartoon coyote whose movies had cycled through the theaters a few years previous. The bomb had a round, ceramic body with a looped string threaded through a hole in its top.

Some of Max’s body was not bruised from the hard landing, but most of him ached, and his head felt fuzzy. Still, he counted himself lucky to have suffered nothing more serious. Snow too was bruised, but she’d not been broken. Doozer was worse off than either of them, having lost a leg in the blast. But he did still have the other nine and didn’t appear particularly bothered by the missing limb. Shortly after sailing from the lock, he pulled off the remaining stump of the damaged leg and ate it, perhaps just to show Max what a tough-ass little crab he was.

Together they licked their wounds and took turns trying to sleep.

Max didn’t tell Snow how terrified he had been when he woke on the yellow boat and she was gone. His memory had still been fuzzy in those first moments, but his blood, which he tasted in his mouth and could see smeared all over the yellow surface where he’d lain, filled him with foreboding. He’d leapt to the hulk of their boat and from there made his way to the top of the ladder where, he chucked some rocks to distract the killer.

Snow awoke from her sleep and sat beside him on the piloting seat. “How’s your face?”

She pulled on his lip to examine the cut in his cheek. She must have been genuinely concerned because, contrary to his expectation, that she would vigorously test the strength and elasticity of his lip, she was gentle.

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