Renegade Empire by J.N. Chaney

Author:J.N. Chaney [Chaney, J.N.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-05-03T22:00:00+00:00

13

After an hour or so of rummaging through the strange room with the pods, the walk to the ships was a quiet one. None of us spoke as we hauled what we could find back to the shuttle, though I was mostly quiet because I was keeping a close eye on the Union soldiers marching ahead of me, pretending they didn’t feel my glare on the backs of their necks.

Thanks to Dressler’s direction, we’d managed to scrounge up some useful bits of tech from among the pods. Hard drives, mostly—at least as close to them as we could figure, as Celestial tech was truly unlike anything we’d ever seen before. They had been connected to some kind of supercomputer, and while we didn’t have all the details yet, Dressler had apparently managed to scrape together and download quite a bit of what promised to be useful information. I wasn’t so confident, however. There was a time when we had banked on the scout ship having useful data, and all it did was bring us here.

My crew looked antsy as we loaded the new cargo. We weren’t done here, not yet, even though everyone seemed about ready to leave. Though Freddie especially looked set to jump on the ships and bail, I wasn’t about to give the retreat order until I was sure we had something undeniably useful. We might never get another shot at getting intel off this planet, and I had to play it safe. Well, as safe as possible on a metal planet created by the enemy.

I thought of Tanner’s corpse, still smoking on the floor back in that room up above us, nothing but boiling blood and bones by the time we’d left. Truth be told, I still couldn’t believe Dressler wanted to bring back samples of that disgusting goop that had fried him. I hated the thought of the Union ever getting hold of it. Were they to weaponize the blue slime, it could easily make them unstoppable. Most of all, though, I hated the idea of that poison being on my ship, but she knew more about this stuff than me. On this, I had to just trust her word that it would be useful and hope she was right.

There was that word again—hope. I sure didn’t like how often I’d been using it lately. So much of even this mission relied on it: the hope we would find something useful; the hope we would be able to decode it; the hope we would be able to actually figure out how to use it as a weapon against the Celestials before they crushed us all to dust.

I didn’t like it. Not one bit. I hated being backed into a corner, but the gods help the fool who tried to keep me pinned.

We had outfitted one of our shuttles to act as a storage container, which was operated entirely by Sigmond. Once secured, no human passenger would be aboard, and the equipment and supplies would be ferried back to the Nebula Prospect at once.

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.