A Fistful of Trouble (Outlaws of the Galaxy Book 2) by Paul Tomlinson (free ebook reader for iphone .TXT) 📕

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

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Also by Paul Tomlinson

About the Author

A Fistful of Trouble

Copyright © 2019 by Paul Tomlinson

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced or transmitted, in whole or in part, or used in any manner whatsoever, without the express permission of the copyright owner, except for the use of brief quotations in the context of a book review.

A Fistful of Trouble is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events, is purely coincidental.

First published April 2021

Publisher: Paul Tomlinson

www.paultomlinson.org/outlaws

Cover image and design © 2021 by Paul Tomlinson

Dedication: For Michael & Leonia

Chapter One

The big blue robot ran through the desert. It had once been red, but that made the robot too easy to identify, so it got itself a nice new paint job. But running through the desert scratched the blue paint and made it look old and weathered. The robot had been running a lot recently. It had to run because someone was chasing it.

My name is Quin Randall and I am the robot hunter. If I catch this one and turn it in for scrap, I can get two hundred dollars. If I’m lucky, I’ll get a thousand dollars by selling it to someone who needs a big ugly robot. I don’t think the robot is keen on being sold. But a thousand dollars would get me another step closer to buying a ticket off this squit-hole planet. I chase the robot. The robot tries to get away. That’s the game.

The robot is a machine that doesn’t feel pain and never gets tired. I’m human. You have to even the odds somehow. That’s why I chase the robot in a Trekker – an all-terrain vehicle with chunky tyres. I also have a big gun. I stole the robot’s weapons and hid them. Its gun was bigger than mine.

There’s not much cover in the desert. Just sand, an occasional outcropping of rock, and scrack-all else. The robot was a mile or more ahead of me but I could still see it plainly. Until it disappeared. It literally dropped out of sight.

“Scrack!”

I jammed my foot down on the pedal and the big electric motors whined. The acceleration threw me back in the seat. The ground here was uneven, peppered with lumps of reddish rock. The big springs in the suspension creaked and bounced me around and the tyres kicked up red dust.

The Trekker skidded to a halt. There was a fissure in the ground – not large enough to be a canyon but big for a gulch. Sloping down into it was some rough-looking scree. It was steep – forty-five degrees or worse – and the robot was almost at the bottom of it.

I dropped the Trekker into hill descent mode. The lower gear might help, but there was still a good chance I’d flip ass over teakettle and the Trekker would slide down on its roof. I could survive that – as long as a sudden jolt didn’t snap my neck. I crept forward slowly and tried to hang on to my breakfast burrito when the front wheels went over the edge.

I tried steering but soon realised I wasn’t achieving anything useful. The Trekker’s system selectively locked and unlocked the wheels, trying to keep us upright and in a nose-first controlled slide. My butt cheeks were clenched all the way down – I was down to my last pair of clean underpants and didn’t want to stain them. I didn’t relax until the front wheels scrabbled for grip at the bottom.

I turned to follow the escaping robot and pushed the selector into high gear. I needed to make up ground – and quickly. There was a dirt road in the bottom of the gulch so that made progress smoother. A little.

At the far end of the valley, where it opened out, I could see what the robot was heading towards. A small desert town that had grown up around some sort of mining operation. I wasn’t sure what they mined in this part of Saphira, but judging from the state of the town it didn’t pay well.

The robot had known the town was there, of course. The buildings would offer it all sorts of hiding places – and opportunities to lie in ambush and attack its pursuer. I had to catch up with it before it could conceal itself. It was part of the game. The robot might be smarter than me, but luckily I was quicker. Or the Trekker was.

The stratified rock of the gulch walls did weird things with sound, sending back and amplifying echoes. I could hear the thudding of the robot’s feet over the whine of the Trekker’s motor – but I decided these footsteps weren’t loud enough. I punched the button on the dashboard that would fire up the fake engine sound and I turned it up loud. I wanted the townspeople to hear us coming. They needed to be warned. I could just have easily cranked up the William Tell Overture or something, but I’d blown out a speaker the last time I tried that.

As we approached the town, I saw people start to appear. They