Return to the Fractured Planet by Dave Stone

Author:Dave Stone [Stone, Dave]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, Science Fiction, Space Opera, Adventure
ISBN: 0426205340
Google: XeUFAAAACAAJ
Amazon: 0426205340
Publisher: Virgin Books
Published: 1999-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

BACKGROUND 6

I‟m going to gloss over our escape from the Sleed

Incorporation. I‟ve mentioned how my own life doesn‟t often

contain the sort of things that dramatic convention always

seems to require - but I suspect that those exciting running

escapes with hails of blaster bolts and suchlike, all to the

sound of alarm bells and klaxons, don‟t really happen to

anybody. We just made our way down, through the passages

and spaces, avoiding basically human creatures - who I‟m

certain were looking for us in their droves - at the first sign of

them, backtracking or hiding or waiting them out so that we

never came in contact with them directly.

That was just fine by me. Despite Kara‟s own

enhancements, the last few days had hit her hard and left

her severely weakened. If we had encountered said basically

human creatures in their droves, it would have been up to

me to try to sort it out, and I wasn‟t exactly feeling that

chipper myself.

Like so much else in this account, the specifics in all their

complete and tedious, deep-hypnosis detail can be found in

my debriefing transcripts and those of others, complete with

blueprints, flowcharts, schematics of the galvanistic wiring

conduits and suchlike ultimately unimportant bollocks, put

together by AI processors with too much cycle time on their

slaved servomanipulators and a liking for complete and

tedious detail. I have to mention one thing in particular,

though, because it became important later.

We were in a wide corridor that, when the incorporation

had been operating at its full capacity, was presumably

something of a major thoroughfare. Now it was dimly lit by

the ambient light from some blinking light source (an

advertising vapour sign for some alien consumable taken

from what might have been the window of a bar, as it

happened) around the bend of the corridor before us. It was

almost too dark even for my own optic nerves, but I was

dimly aware that we had passed a large archway with what

might have been a stairwell, leading upward, behind it. Going

up was of no interest, but as we passed the archway I stuck

my hand out quite by chance - or it may have been one of

those deep-level flashes of insight I‟m always going on about -

and felt something.

„Hang on a minute,‟ I said to Kara, and stopped to

investigate. It was a metal plaque fixed discreetly to the wall

with what appeared to be letters cut into it. I ran my finger

over the plaque to feel the shape of them. They read, in

Galactic Basic: EXECUTIVE BOARDROOM.

„Anything interesting?‟ the dark shape of Kara said.

„Nah.‟ I shook my head. „It‟s nothing important.‟

We headed downward, following more or less the same

route I‟d used on my ascent. One of the minor detours took

us through a series of chambers far larger than those we‟d

either of us encountered before. They had conveyor belts in

them, and slaughterhouse hooks and racks that seemed to

have been designed to fit the basically humanoid body. At

length we came to one of the chambers housing steam-driven

vehicles of the sort that had brought us here, more than a

hundred of them in this chamber alone. We picked our way

through them, noting that a

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