The Collector (Titanborn Universe Book 0) by Rhett Bruno

Author:Rhett Bruno
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub

Chapter Three

Luxurious was not an overstatement.

A molding made of wood so real I could smell it, sculpted with the images of fruits and vines, some of which were long extinct, wrapped around my room’s ceiling. A wide viewport was sunken into a portion of the floor on an angle, so I could see the wrinkled face of the asteroid around which Helix Station orbited. Hell, the bed positioned across from it could fit four of me and was covered with plush, silken sheets.

First, I scoped the room for hidden surveillance feeds or wires. When I was confident it was clean, I removed my belt and duster and set them down on the bed. Then I took a seat. My legs had never been so grateful for a rest. Despite knowing why I was on the station, I couldn’t stay away from this one glaring question: Who was Lucas Mannekin? A man who could stay off everybody’s radar, who had the resources to develop this station and the unbelievable technology it fostered.

I whipped out my hand-terminal and got to scouring Solnet. They’d probably be able to track my searches on their network, despite my Collector encryptions, but I didn’t care. Any discerning businessman would research their partner before he got into bed with them.

Lucas Mannekin was a ghost—as expected with a name like that. Nothing on him at all, and no Mannekin clan-family to speak of. Rich men often legally took on their own surnames to make themselves feel special, so I moved on to splitting his name into keys per syllable. Seeing if anything bit. I narrowed the newsfeeds down to former owners of any company or corporation in Sol. People who might have credits to spare and those who had disappeared. My eyelids grew heavy as I scrolled through thousands of potential articles. I was almost ready to doze off when one finally caught my attention.

THE FALL OF MANN INDUSTRIES.

Its CEO was Victor Mann and a quick look at the press conference showed me he and Lucas were one and the same, albeit with a significant amount of surgery in the present to keep him looking young. The article was from ten years prior. Mann Industries had made its name developing rare medicines, the most significant being a cure for a degenerative brain disease caused by early sleep-pod technologies. After Victor’s partner left for Venta Co., they developed competing products at a lower cost and their profit margins suffered. Then, Mann’s Mars-based complex suffered from an “unexplainable” hydrogen leak and was blown half to hell. Victor Mann’s body wasn’t ever found, but his company recouped its wealth from insurance before dissolving and spreading the credits throughout several holdings in the relatively ungoverned asteroid belt where unsanctioned clinics and casinos ran rampant.

As a Collector, it was part of my job not to believe in coincidences. It turned out my new friend Lucas had a checkered past and an invented name that I figured from the start, was too suitable to be real.

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