Ghost Spin by Chris Moriarty
Author:Chris Moriarty [Moriarty, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 0553384945
Publisher: Spectra
Published: 2013-05-28T04:00:00+00:00
The ship that Li found waiting for her at the civilian docks had as little to do with the sleek silver pirate hunter as anything dignifying the name of spacecraft could have. It was a hulk, running on hand-me-downs and keeping the vacuum at bay with spit and chewing gum.
The name on the corporate papers had been the Sprite—as anodyne and unmemorable as all the names of all the sad-sack corporate freighters that plied the backwaters of the Periphery during their long, slow decline from serviceable to salvage. But there was no name posted on the passenger boarding gate of its berth, and there was no one waiting there to check Li’s papers, either.
She helloed the ship, waited for what seemed like a reasonable time, and then boarded. As she stepped into the main airlock, she realized that deferred maintenance was the least of its problems. In fact, it looked like a bomb had gone off in here. And even before the bomb blast, housekeeping didn’t look like it had been a priority.
She moved deeper into the ship, winding down the curve of the hab ring toward where she thought the bridge must be. The more she saw the less she liked it. This wasn’t just bad housekeeping, or even a discrete system failure. Something terrible had happened on this ship. And unless Li’s well-honed professional instincts were wrong, the something had been a vicious and bloody battle for control of the ship.
The scars of the conflict were everywhere. And the closer she got to the heart of the ship, the more obvious it was that the ship’s crew had lost. They’d been beaten back, cabin after cabin, hold after hold, corridor after corridor. In some relatively intact sections of the ship, she guessed that the crew had either folded in the face of the boarders or made a tactical decision to fall back to more easily defended positions. But in others they had fought and fought hard. By and large they’d done what she would have done. Which meant that the boarding party must have known what they were doing, too; they’d rolled over the defenders like an incoming army, taking one position after another as methodically and savagely as any troops Li had ever commanded.
The one thing that puzzled her was the weapons. In one corridor after another she saw shattered and pitted wall panels that looked like they’d been hit by shrapnel. But no professional soldier—and the boarders had certainly handled themselves like professionals—would be crazy enough to use grenades with hard vac waiting just one hull’s width away.
The mystery only got deeper when she reached the bridge.
It looked like it had been put through a meat grinder. Shattered lights, dented instrument panels, eviscerated upholstery. Data screens reduced to broken mirrors. Even the ceramsteel walls, theoretically indestructible, had been scratched over with a graffiti of black scuff marks.
Li turned on her heel, suppressing the urge to whistle in awe—and to grin in rueful admiration as her mind
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Crime | Mystery |
Thriller & Suspense |
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