Night Song (The Guild Wars Book 9) by Mark Wandrey (best ereader under 100 .txt) 📕

Pushtal twitched in excitement, turning his head to regard A’kef only a scant few meters away. Akohn had failed to see the entire squad of Zuul drifting across the bay. Neither had Akohn’s cargo handlers, who’d obviously been willing to fight a group of Humans and five Zuul. But with the arrival of another full squad of Zuul, his demeanor instantly changed.

“You are in no place to threaten me,” Akohn blustered.

“Oh?” Alan asked. “Aren’t we? Information should be cheap, or even free, if you are expecting us to be customers.”

“You won’t fight,” Akohn snorted. “There are too many of us; you will never make it out.”

“Humans don’t care about winning so much as not losing,” A’kef said.

Alan lifted an eyebrow at the Zuul merc commander. He was surprised A’kef seemed to understand Humans as well as he did. That said a lot about his contemporary.

“Yeah, you’ll win,” Alan said. “Then our ship will blow this place to hell. Your call.”

* * *

Shadow slid away as guns returned to holsters, Sonya’s rippling growl ebbed, and the tension broke. The other Pushtal, their carefully performed chaos, their effort to draw attention away…it hadn’t ended with the discovery of the CASPer. The demeanor of the pirates hadn’t shifted until the Zuul tensed, so that wasn’t what they were hiding.

And he was sure, now, that they were hiding something, and whatever that something was, it wasn’t the Starbright.

He moved lightly, not carrying any of the incipient violence of the siblings he left behind, drawing no attention to himself.

For all the Pushtal were all over, welding or climbing or sorting garbage, in and out of haphazard corridors, there was an area they never crossed through.

It could be an old, disused part of the broken-down near-hulk of a station, but that didn’t feel right. The Pushtal seemed comfortable around junk, and there was plenty back in this corner, but they repeatedly avoided it. As he approached, he saw a door, half-hidden by a convenient fall of broken-down conduits. The smell of Pushtal lay equally heavy on the air in this corner, so, as he’d suspected, they hadn’t avoided the area so assiduously in the course of recent events. He could be fairly sure it wasn’t solid vacuum on the other side of the door, and anything else he would figure a way through.

Shadow glanced at the door, and kept drifting, in case any of the Pushtal were paying attention to him rather than the scene playing out over the CASPer. He looped around yet another pile of detritus and studied the hatch again.

No control panel, no handy color-coded light to reveal a locked or unlocked status. Despite the clutter partially blocking the door, it was unlikely he’d have long to break through if there were a lock. His peripheral vision showed the bulk of the Pushtal still focused on the two groups of mercenaries in their midst—his father in full colonel-mode speaking to their chief, Drake half-crouched and ready to take out a throat—which made this his best opportunity.

He took a slow breath, ensured his feet were clear of anything that might rattle and give him away, and pushed off at an angle that gave him a gentle spin. Nothing too direct, too urgent, nothing to pull any Pushtal notice.

His aim wasn’t perfect—he’d been practicing on board, with his tail free, and with that essential rudder tucked into his suit, his balance was skewed—but he hit close enough for the junk to mostly hide him. His ears twitched to catch any raising of alarm, but the ambient noise changed neither in pitch nor volume. All eyes were on his father and the chief, it seemed.

There was no obvious way to make the door work, and he crouched for a few minutes, running his hands over it in an attempt to trigger something.

Pushtal are tall, he thought, closing his eyes for a moment. He’d been so concerned with sneaking, he’d missed the obvious. Slow and deliberate, he stood, raised a hand, and waved it. The door opened obligingly, and he was still shaking his head at himself when he pulled himself through.

And froze.

The space he’d left had been large—a bay-sized cavern, heaped with salvage and junk.

This area…From the outside, it looked like the Pushtal had lashed a few ships and station rings together and called it a day. From the inside…that must have been exactly what had happened, because the enormity of the area around him seemed like a hollowed out section of a scavenged station, tens of levels high and, compared to the area behind him, nearly empty.

Except.

Three repair cranes, several times bigger than what Silent Night kept for CASPers, stood at the points of a rough triangle. Towering between them, dwarfing even their height…

It took his mind a few moments to process it. He’d only ever seen one on broadcasts, or occasionally in his searches through the GalNet. Who on Earth would ever forget Sao Paulo? Jim Cartwright had landed with seven 30-meter tall war machines, laying waste to a huge part of the city while battling Peepo’s army, and the civilians of the city had been caught in a horrendous crossfire. Thousands had died. There was a never-ending stream of video recorded on everything from sat phones to Tri-V.

Raknar, he was certain of it. Nobody else in the galaxy had ever built anything on this scale. Damaged, but nearly whole, like the CASPer the Starbright had left behind. Standing, inscrutable, unmoving, frozen potential that could slam a hole in the side of this station…and Shadow wanted nothing more than to climb inside.

An elSha floated out of the Raknar with a part. The tiny reptilian examined the technology, removing a slate and running Tri-V comparisons.

The haze of Pushtal scents and the sheer size of the bay combined to keep him from scenting any other beings, and Shadow