Killer Bunny by Timothy Ellis

Author:Timothy Ellis [Ellis, Timothy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-11-24T16:00:00+00:00

Twenty Four

We made it into orbit without any apparent activity by the other ships.

I’d felt sure they’d be monitoring for other ships, and would see us leave the ground, but if they did, they didn’t care. The Keerah would have, and every ship with a gun on it would have come after us. They were not Keerah. And obviously not in any way military either.

From orbit the rings were much more obvious, but Zac directed me first to a point in space, and had me stop. There was a small clunk from the back, and a dot appeared on the HUD, labelled as a comnavsat. Immediately there was more detail available for the planet below, and the space around it on this side. We moved to another position, and dropped off another one. Apparently they had a tiny thruster built in, and were launching themselves out the hole where a missile launcher should be.

The third and last one went further out into the system, on the line between the planet and the jump point, but it had a limited window of being useful there, because the planet would eventually move out of range of it as it orbited the sun. But I hoped I wouldn’t still be here when that happened. For now, it would give us more warning of arriving ships. Not that there were any at the moment.

With almost full coverage of the planet now, and the revelation that there were fifteen freighters still down there, Zac pointed me towards the second freighter, and as he’d said, I found it landed on the dark side of a large asteroid. I let him dock us to a more or less standard airlock on the side of the ship, but first we had to hover over the top of the ship to drop off the three sleds in our airlock. There was a suitable clunk as the docking clamps engaged, which Zac could only trigger from the other ship.

I had to wait while he made sure the docking collars matched, and the result was airtight. He then opened the inner door for me, and I stepped through into the airlock. He opened both outer airlocks, and I stepped across again. There I shifted into the suit’s space suit mode, while Zac closed the hatch behind me. The hatch in front of me cycled, and I stepped onto the ship.

Three bots followed me. Two of them were repair bots, and the third looked like a cleaner bot. Zac confirmed that, and said it was heading for the bridge first to clean up the blood there after I removed the body.

“Yeah,” said Zac. “This is not as bad as the other ship, but the air has to be pretty unpleasant already, if I’m reading the trace element amounts right. So good choice with the space suit. Better start on the bridge.”

I sighed, and followed the arrow to the staircase, and then went up. The body of the captain was where I’d left it.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.