Terminal Pursuit (Sunken Spaceship Book 2) by Anthony J. Melchiorri

Author:Anthony J. Melchiorri [Melchiorri, Anthony J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aethon Books
Published: 2024-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

-22-

It turned out Valeria was right. We spent the better part of the night searching her lonely palace. And by the better part of the night, I mean the entire night plus most of the next morning. We tried to find secret storage places like the cliché passage behind a bookcase or maybe a safe stowed under a loose floor tile.

Thing was, there weren’t many bookcases and there were practically no floor tiles. Most of the flooring consisted of clear polyglass so you could see the flowing water beneath it. To search the waterlogged portions under the house, we would probably need days to drain the water and then dig up every centimeter of ground beneath it.

When Renata’s eyes were well and truly bloodshot, I was feeling a fogginess in my brain, and Drake was crankier than usual, I had to call it. We needed a break.

Valeria had insisted we could stay at her place. While the luxurious guest bedrooms we’d seen during our search were tempting, I couldn’t accept the offer. I needed some privacy away from Clarnro’s ghost.

We found a rinky-dink hotel that offered rooms for an affordable price. And when we got into the rooms, I figured out why. ‘Course with the Celebration going on, the rest of the nicer hotels were at capacity. Somehow, in the middle of a dry, dry desert, this place was so rundown that mold crawled up the walls in big black veins. There were a few insectoid creatures skittering about when I opened the door to my room. I swore they looked up at me as if I was the one that shouldn’t be there.

I wasn’t a fan of the way they shook their tiny claws at me. Maybe they were harmless. Maybe they were poisonous. Either way, I didn’t want to tousle with them, so I shooed them out the door and shut it behind them.

I pretended like that would keep them out, and then, so exhausted from the journey and search, I fell back into a piece of furniture that best approximated a bed made of concrete and broken nails and passed the hell out.

When I did wake up a few hours later, not well rested, but too anxious to get on with this case to enjoy any more sleep, I got out of bed. I found the various holes in the bathroom that were used for evacuating various alien’s bodily movements and then tried the handle to a cleaning hose that I supposed was for rinsing the sand and dirt from one’s body. A cracked display next to where the hose met the wall warned there was a surcharge for every milliliter of water used.

I brushed a hand through my hair. My fingers came away with a thick coating of fine orange dust. Try as Landonshir might to appear as if it wasn’t in the middle of the desert, even the thick plants and streams of water couldn’t ward off the tiny grains of sand carried by the winds.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.