Crash - Status Unknown Trilogy: Book 1 by N.S.Shajay

Author:N.S.Shajay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Coil Worlds Press
Published: 2018-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

THe DRUG COOK TOOK A look at the faces of those that still had faces, checked the tattoos and bodies of the others. “Beat his wife to death,” he said, pointing to one. “Asshole.”

As he moved down the line of bodies, Lucky’s personal code of ethics became oddly clear.

“Shot up a bodega because who the fuck knows. Stupid asshole.” He pointed to the next guy. “Stabbed his boss with a fountain pen, got the carotid.” A shrug. “Guy was firing him. Should’ve been more careful. Still, fountain pen was a psycho—he stabbed another prisoner with a shiv for looking at him funny.”

The other man moved on, identified several more dead. The final one—number eight, made his lip curl. “This one sold bad drugs to kids. Ten died.” A coldness Knox had never before seen on the affable prisoner. “Good you shot off his face.”

“Pot calling the kettle black?” Jina said, having come to join them.

Lucky looked mortally offended as he glanced up at Jina, the comms officer at least four inches taller than him. “I had ethics. Anyone I cooked for sold nasty shit to kids, that’s it, no more Chef Lucky for them.”

Jina folded her arms, her smile mocking. “Give it a break, Lucky. A cook doesn’t control the final destination of the product.”

“When he’s a five-star cook he does.” Shoving his hands into the pockets of the jeans he’d requisitioned from the scavenged supplies along with a formerly white shirt—all of which he’d achieved by somehow charming the hard-nosed Marietta—Lucky turned his attention to Knox. “You want me to go get more water?”

Knox nodded. The need to hydrate the sick hadn’t disappeared just because they’d been interrupted by guns and death. Looking around to see who he could spare to stand guard over the water carriers, he saw only bad choices. Either he pulled people off the already patchy security line or he went himself, and if he went himself, the encampment lost a trained shooter and the psychological edge of having him in sight.

“I’ll go.” Jina held out her hand for Knox’s weapon. “You can get another one from one of the sentries who are still down.”

“Jina, we can’t lose you.” She was, quite bluntly, irreplaceable—there was no one else who could do what she could. “You might be our only way out of here.”

Face tensing, Jina shook her head. “I’m stuck,” she said, her normally musical accent holding an unusual edginess. “I’m missing a part, and I can’t figure out how to compensate for it. Maybe the walk—”

“You remember the prison module had a communications system, right?” Lucky’s interruption was directed at Knox, the drug cook pointedly ignoring Jina. “Not a big-deal comm system, but a little one, for when it was dropped onto the prison planet.”

Knox nodded slowly. “It was so the prisoners could call up before the ship left.” He remembered the system only because it had been a peripheral part of the landing sequence for the module—there was a delay built in, before which the colony ship wasn’t allowed to depart the orbit of the prison planet.

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