The Hangman's Daughter: The Bastard Legion: Book 1 by Gavin G. Smith

Author:Gavin G. Smith
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group
Published: 2017-01-26T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

FIVE MONTHS AGO

The net representation of the USSS Jimmy Carter was a metallic skeletal raven. Miska’s cartoon icon was sitting in the skull of the raven, the enlarged eye sockets of which showed lens feed from the real world. She was in orbit high above the white surface of Proxima E. Proxima Centauri was huge on the planetary horizon, its reflected light making the ice that covered the planet’s deep oceans look blood-red. From where Little Jimmy orbited, drifting around the cold planet, she could make out the ‘spoke’, the equatorial space elevator designed to pull the bounties of Proxima’s rich sub-ice ocean into orbit for export. The spoke had been grown, rather than built, by Small Gods who had named it Yggdrasil, after the world tree from Norse mythology. It looked different to other space elevators that Miska had seen. It was clear that the mega structure was all tech, but there was still an organic look to it, an aesthetic presumably inherited from its name. Through the lens feed she could see the light of High Yggdrasil, the spoke’s entrepôt. Freighters of various sizes docked with the station, and high above that was the asteroid tether that helped hold it all in place. Miska had worked on Proxima E, so she knew that if she magnified the lenses providing the feed she would be able to make out the ice-formed settlements surrounding the arcology-sized base of the huge spoke’s structure. Most of the inhabitants of the planet lived and worked in the oceans far beneath the ice, however.

Since she’d tranced into Little Jimmy’s systems, the ship was basically her body now. She wasn’t as close to Little Jimmy as the Chimera, who hard-wired themselves into their vehicles for optimum speed-of-thought performance, but it wasn’t far off. The ship was in full stealth mode. Miska didn’t dare use any of the active scanners, but the passive scanners were her eyes and ears as she searched the lower orbits until she found what she was looking for: the Mjölnir. The intimidating, hammer-shaped orbital defence platform that controlled the protective network of satellites encircling the ice planet. With a thought she magnified the image. Almost the same size as the Mjölnir was the ship docked with it for a high security prisoner transfer, the Hangman’s Daughter. The prison barge was long and rectangular, the tower towards the rear of the ship looking as much like a prison gun tower, to Miska’s mind, as it did a conning tower. Miska smiled, and with a thought an old rock ballad started to play within the Little Jimmy’s net representation.

A countdown appeared in the air before her. The numbers were rapidly approaching zero. Miska used the compressed gas jets to shift the position of the ship, hoping that the information on the Hangman’s Daughter’s flight path that Rafael had provided was correct. She got the ship in position and just as the counter reached zero she triggered the long burn. In the real

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