The Last Symbiotes 1: Living Starship by Dante King

Author:Dante King [King, Dante]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-10-23T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 20

Decker stared out from behind a pile of scrap, which looked to have either once been a part of a habitat module for some commercial space-ferry or the odd bits of a heat radiator, and observed the still and silent Farrago. His tactical contact lens and the HUD on his helmet’s faceplate provided him with more than adequate data to realize the severity of his predicament. That data all pointed to one conclusion. That conclusion was that Decker was—

“In the shit. Well and truly in the deep and sticky stuff,” he muttered to himself.

There were half a dozen men and women stationed around the Farrago. All of them were dressed in the matching navy blue long coats, boots, and helmets of the Port Protection Bureau.

He zoomed in on a couple of the guards strolling leisurely around at the thruster end of his ship, selected the three-star emblem intersected with the stylized dragon that some marketing asshole had probably thought looked pretty cool, then logged it into the recognition software linked to his tactical contact lens. At once, the contact lens recognized all those people in Decker’s field of vision that were wearing the emblem and outlined them in a nice red color.

“Decker, I can still take off,” Lorelei said to him through her telepathy.

“Yeah, but don’t,” Decker said. “Zizara Yasine is very definite about that sort of thing. She’s the kind of woman who’d let you think you’d broken her custody and then remind you that you haven’t with a couple of surface-to-orbit thermal nuclear missiles.”

“What is your plan then, Captain?” the symbiote asked.

“I’m refining it,” Decker growled.

He watched the half dozen or so PPB guards as his brain flipped through a few possibilities.

“Lorelei, are you capable of hacking into the Dracone public video feeds and figuring out which PPB station house Rosa and Saavi are being held in?” he asked.

“Of course,” came the confident reply.

Decker couldn’t hear anything the Port Protection Bureau were saying inside their helmets. However, he could tell from their relaxed stances, their lazy walks, and the way that some of them were waving their hands around as they talked to one another that they were quite at their ease. They looked like a bunch of thugs for hire who were eager to have the swish-looking spaceship dismantled and the proceeds divided up between them.

“They’re not expecting any trouble,” Decker said.

“Are these Mistress Yasine’s employees?” Lorelei asked.

“No, she unofficially runs the Dracone Port Polis,” Decker said, hunkering down tighter into the shadows of his scrapheap when one of the little red-outlined figures turned in his direction. “If Dracone is a haven for bounty-hunters and more unsavory types first and foremost, then, probably, its second highest concentration of workers are tied up in the private security forces operating out of here.”

“How do they decide which security force picks up which criminal?” Lorelei asked.

Decker snorted. “The old-fashioned way. First come, first served. There’s probably some kind of formal agreement, maybe a division of areas within the port.

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