Galaxy's End: Book One by LeRoy Clary (pdf ebook reader txt) 📕

information is as valuable as cargo. They can delete the file from my tablet, in fact, they will. But short of killing all of us, the crew, and the passengers, we’re supplying invaluable help for them. I think they will allow us to be on our way. I mean, I haven’t told anybody about them in two years, why would I start now?”

I could tell that Fang didn’t agree. Neither of us spoke out loud about our doubts. We didn’t have to.

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

 

Captain Stone

 

Kat had amazed Stone with the simple solution to the problem of the ship following them. As Bert had suggested, the girl’s mind worked differently than the orderly manner that the captain of a ship required. Not that she had known about the secret base building warships, but if it was not that, there may have been something else.

Bert and she made a formidable team. They needed to hold a conversation about what to do with Chance. He was an admitted murderer, and the Bradley Concord were strict in their laws. If they revealed his part in the mutiny, the Concord would take that problem off her hands.

The problem remained. If placed in the same situation, what would she have done?

To relieve her mind and stretch her legs, she announced to the bridge, “I’m going to check on Bill and see how he’s doing.”

She entered the engine room and found the furry engineer bent over an array of parts as he watched Bill reassembling a small engine. She paused at the door and observed them, the rumbling of the machines masking her entry.

Both had greasy hands, bent backs, and smiles on their faces.

She had been like that once. With her father. She was a child, he a god. She’d gazed at him as Bill did with the engineer. Both laughed. They still hadn’t spotted her.

Captain Stone sidestepped out the door and slipped away, somehow feeling far better. She hadn’t slept in a day. Her bed called. She went to the cabin, found it empty. She decided to rest for just a few moments.

Her mind twisted and turned, leaping from one set of facts to others, often not connected. She reviewed each of the new people, one after the other. She had gone to Low Town to find and recruit Kat. If that meant she would take Bill also, she would. However, there were also Fang and Bert, a pair like no other. Their skills were superior to all but the best.

The Guardia had room enough for all her new crew—and more. Her First Mate had begged for another engineer, navigator, trader, and cargo handlers. She could fulfill a good part of his wish list with those four. Thinking of his reaction brought a smile to her lips.

Then her thoughts turned to the steward named Chance, who was a killer. She had no doubts he should face punishment. Her concern was that he was an empath with family on Prager Four. Bert said that Kat had been born on the same planet. And there was herself, who had come from the same backwater planet. The idea the two of them might be related was not farfetched.

Kat, she realized, was just as susceptible to an empath implanting ideas into her head, as with the head of anyone else. Only she was an anti-empath who recoiled at the slightest touch to her mind.

The entire subject of empaths had to be withheld from the military arrests she expected when they emerged from the wormhole system. She needed to speak with each of them and make them understand that the ship would be boarded, each of them intensively questioned, and perhaps arrested.

She intended to cooperate fully. The technology on the ship pursuing them would take center stage—especially if she conveyed the information properly. She would make it a gift to the Bradley Concord military higher-ups and explain all she knew about the new race that was entering the human sphere. If their technical superiority didn’t excite them, she didn’t know what would.

But the technology found on the pursuit ship, if kept secret, could tip the balance of their war. In truth, she didn’t care about their little war or which side won. But she could barter the knowledge of how to follow another ship in a wormhole and use it to gain their freedom.

The thing she had to do was make certain that when the ship behind them emerged, an entire space navy was there to greet it. Done properly, that would happen.

It was no more complicated than trading products on one world and selling them on another. Probably easier, since she knew both sides would pay dearly for the knowledge. Her eyes finally closed as her mind worked on methods that suggested they might not only be released but earn a little profit at the same time.

That was her strong point. She took a negative and made it a positive. That and luck made her good at her job.

The clatter of alarms woke her.

She leaped to her feet and ran, stuffing her legs into the pants she’d worn for a few days. The bridge was at the end of the passageway and she fastened her belt as she palmed the door for entry. Fang opened it. Kat was sitting at a monitor and watching as a second red dot appeared to pace the first. It looked like an electronic echo.

Fang climbed back into his chair and said in a disgusted tone, “That one,” he pointed at Kat and continued, “identified a second vessel with the first.”

Captain Stone perched on the edge of her chair and chided Fang, “That is interesting, but did you have to wake me like that?”

“The pair of them are closing on us.”

“Oh,” she said. She examined her monitors