The Science Officer by Blaze Ward

Author:Blaze Ward [Ward, Blaze]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: space opera, The Librarian, action adventure, space pirates
Publisher: Knotted Road Press
Published: 2014-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

Part Four

Lemuel considered his options as they ascended into the ship. They were many, but he bestrode a dangerous path.

Javier had introduced himself and made it clear that he could become a friend.

The Harlot had a name as well, but Lemuel had not bothered to remember it. Weren’t they all the same, after all?

The others, male and female alike, were obviously under the sway of the Harlot. From the looks and mannerisms, Lemuel could see that they considered Javier an outsider to their group, though they treated him with respect.

That gave him an opening. Did he have the courage to seize it? Was this place to become Megiddo, after all? The Lord had worked in his mysterious ways to place Lemuel here so long ago.

Had he finally proven the strength of his faith? Or had he failed and was to be irrevocably damned by the Harlot?

Lemuel prayed silently to himself as he led the troupe of strangers, invaders unto his quiet paradise, down into the realm of his earliest, greatest challenge.

Ξ

Suvi was having an adventure.

The flitter–ship was far more maneuverable than Mielikki had been. She could hover, and spin, and bob, and float, and saunter. She missed having a turret she could use, but on a hull this small, it probably wouldn’t do more than irritate a squirrel. Not that that was a bad thing.

She had already used a series of ultrasound pings to map the hallway and the first cargo hold they had entered. The humans hadn’t heard, but they missed everything anyway.

Now she was studying a small lizard–looking creature on a wall. Maybe the philosophical offspring of a gecko and a chameleon. It blended well, but moved quickly and gracefully. And couldn’t have been more than six centimeters long.

She watched it munch happily on the local equivalent of a spider that hadn’t heard him coming either. There was probably a moral to that story.

Suvi launched another aggressive series of pings, but nothing moved.

She flitted over to a crate and scanned the weathered coding on the side. The language of shipping containers was probably the first universal stellar language. You could write and speak in any number of tongues and get by, but you had to talk to a very limited intelligence computer to move big things around.

That meant simple codes, with descriptive tags built in, so that someone could point a laser scanner at a stack of containers, scan the whole wall, and inventory everything in seconds. Here, she was stuck thinking at almost human speeds, so it took much longer, and the flitter–ship had a very limited scanning laser, so she had to get close.

But it was fun.

This one contained quality glasswork, cups and vases and such, designed to be sold boutique–style on a frontier colony with some money. The sort of place that had been too poor to take anything initially that wasn’t directly related to immediate survival. And had then survived the first few years in the wilderness, and prospered enough that people were ready to have nice things.

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