Wreckers: A Denver Boyd Novel by George Ellis (ebook reader ink .TXT) 📕

surroundings. She was crouched in a dark corridor, peering around the corner.

“Batista?”

“We got a problem,” she said, her eyes scanning the corridor. “Feds.”

“Have they spotted you?”

“One did, but I don’t think he had time to tell any of his friends,” she answered. “I’ve got his handheld now and they are getting concerned about him being missing.”

“Is he…”

“He’s alive. I think.”

Well, okay then. “Can you get back to quad six?”

“Nope, they have the corridor blocked. Gonna need a little help.”

I looked at Jiang. I didn’t even have to ask. He was already grabbing his own handheld, along with a gun. He knew better than to offer me one. I made eye contact with Batista on screen. “Alright, we’re coming to you. I’ll let Edgar know we’re pulling a fast evac.”

I stuffed the device in my pocket and followed Jiang out the door, shoving the rest of the egg roll into my mouth along the way. Jiang shook his head and smiled.

“I’m noth gonna wathe ith,” I managed, my mouth full.

Once we were in the atrium, Jiang whistled sharply and signaled toward a pair of teens sitting at a nearby picnic bench, vaping. They hopped up and hustled over.

“Got any charges?” Jiang asked them.

The taller of the teens, probably closer to his early 20’s now that I got a good look at him, nodded to Jiang and patted his jacket. He and his companion fell in step behind us as we hurried to the bridge leading to quad five, where Batista was holed up.

I was nervous about the bridge. Each quad was its own ecosystem, run by its mayor, in this case Jiang. But the bridges were another matter. They had at least two sentries at each end, and they all worked directly for Aldo Jones. Part of his Elite Moon Guard (EMG). He may have been a quirky character, but I’d heard stories of him cracking down hard on anyone causing trouble on M12. The EMG had a reputation as well for being tough and not necessarily fair.

As we approached the bridge, one of the sentries gripped his gun a bit tighter. The other stepped toward us.

“Mayor,” he said, nodding at Jiang, then flicked his eyes over the rest of us, eventually settling on me.

“Lieutenant,” Jiang greeted in return. “Any idea where a guy can find a good taco at this hour?”

The Lieutenant grinned, and it seemed sincere. “What hour is that? I lost track years ago.”

The man stepped aside and motioned for his partner to do the same, and we walked on past the checkpoint. No ID checks or anything. When we were out of earshot of the sentries, I turned to Jiang. “What was that?”

“His brother’s family fell on hard times and needed a place to stay, and I was more than happy to help,” he said. “The perks of being a nice guy. Though I don’t know how far those perks will get us if we try to come back the other way with a bunch of feds on our tail.”

I frowned. “I thought the feds had no jurisdiction here.”

Jiang held his hand up and tilted it back and forth. “It’s all relative. They don’t technically have jurisdiction, but piss them off enough and a few hundred more will come back and slap you around.”

Yeah. Made sense. In small groups, the feds were kind of a joke. Their true strength was in their numbers. By some estimates, they had half a million soldiers in their ranks. The problem here was getting off M12 before they identified us. Even if we wiped out the unit on station, one alert and we’d have the cavalry to deal with.

I was so deep in thought I hadn’t noticed Jiang was speaking into his handheld. I listened in as he asked someone what fed ship was docked at the station. He disconnected and informed me it was the Burnett.

“That mean anything to you?” Jiang asked.

Jiang saw the answer to his question written all over my face. I didn’t even have to utter a word.

I was hoping for a worse ship with a worse crew. The fed vessel Batista had been on, for example, the DTL Graymore, would have been fine with me. The guy in charge, Jeffries, was a hot-headed moron, straight out of the Interstellar Federation officer’s catalog. A ship’s crew tended to be molded in its captain’s image.

The Burnett had Slay at the helm. She seemed like the type that didn’t tolerate anything less than ultimate obedience and top-notch work. That didn’t bode well for our chances of getting off M12 undetected, let alone alive.

“Are we gonna be able to get back through that bridge with feds on our tail?” I asked Jiang.

“My reach only goes so far beyond quad six,” he said. “But the bridges aren’t the only way to get around this station.”

That was a ray of hope, at least. I checked my handheld and saw we were approaching Batista’s location. She was near the middle of quad five, which housed one of two major commerce areas of the station. Food markets. Clothing depots. Ship repair shops. If you needed to buy, barter or sell something, quad five was your place. Unless that something was sex, then quad eight was in order. That’s where Edgar had gone.

Damnit. I’d forgotten to ping him.

I tried to connect, but received a message saying his handheld was not in service. The guy had turned it off and was already getting laid. I didn’t blame him for it, but I was still upset. Jealous too, if I was being honest with myself. Well, first things first: extract Batista.

Unlike six, a converted craft, quad five was actually its own station back in the day. It had spent the majority of its 30-year run orbiting the earth as a sort of convenience store for ships either passing by or stocking up after they burned Earth’s atmo. Three times the size of Jiang’s old ship, it was the largest jigsaw piece of the M12 puzzle, and probably