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

I didn’t panic.

See, the thing about fighting is that I’ve always been kind of good at it. I never took martial arts lessons. I’m not extremely flexible. I don’t even have the quickest reaction time.

But I hardly ever lose a fight.

My brother used to call me “brick,” because hitting me was like hitting a brick wall. No matter what punishment he doled out, it just didn’t faze me that much. He’d punch me in the jaw and somehow his wrist would be the thing that broke.

And thanks to years of working with my hands, I’ve got overdeveloped forearms and palm muscles. Yes, palm muscles. You don’t really think about those in the gym. I grabbed the hands of the guy holding me and squeezed. I felt a series of crackles and pops as the fragile bones in his hands broke.

The guy groaned and his grip loosened. I snapped my head back, caving in his nose. Effective, but messy. I could feel his hot blood spray onto my neck as I freed myself from his clutches. Gross. I turned and swung my wrench to the side of his head, putting him to sleep for a good long while.

I caught a navy blur and flash of black metal out of the corner of my eye, and turned just in time to see Batista slam into the soldier that had been aiming his gun at my head, forcing the bullet to miss by mere inches.

She finished him off with a hard elbow to the temple.

“Thanks,” I said, regarding the bullet lodged in the wall next to me.

“Yeah,” she replied, getting back to her feet. “Not so bad yourself.”

My momentary swell of pride was blunted by the pain I felt in my arm. The knife had torn skin and muscle, and the wound was bleeding freely. My brother might have thought of me as a brick, but I was still a human one.

“That was fun and everything, but we’ll never make it out of here,” I surmised.

“Your brother was way more optimistic than you,” she replied, raising an eyebrow. “Shorter, though.”

Then she looked at the soldiers strewn about the deck, and smiled.

* * *

“I always told myself I’d never be caught dead in one of these,” I said, tugging at the collar of the federation uniform as we zigzagged our way toward the airlock. It was a bit tight around the shoulders and neck.

“Let’s hope you never are,” Batista chirped. She seemed to be enjoying herself.

Me?

Not so much.

The day had definitely taken a weird turn. I’d been looking for information about my dad and brother since their disappearance, hoping to punish anyone even remotely responsible. I spent the first six months after their deaths following scores of rumors and I came up empty every damn time. Space was a big place (infinite things are like that), filled with a lot of bad people who got away with murder on a regular basis. And when the two people killed are just some wreckers from the lunar quadrant, nobody cares. Especially not the so-called authorities.

So, I spent half a year chasing dead ends all over the solar system, encountering some of the worst humans the universe had to offer, and all I got for my troubles were some nasty scars and a near-zero credit line.

I followed Batista from one corridor to the next, wondering how much she actually knew about what happened at Missura. And why had she bothered to contact me? There had to be easier ways to get off a federation ship. Or maybe not. Generally, you had to enlist for 10 years, and the feds didn’t take kindly to people skipping out on them. Desertion was grounds for execution.

By helping her, I’d pretty much sealed my own fate, too. Which meant that she better know something or I just became an intergalactic fugitive because some mechanic needed a free ride off her ship.

Batista dispatched another crewman who got in her way and we ducked into an engineering shaft. 405’s were filled with them — tight passageways that ran between sections of the ship, giving the engineering staff access to the ship’s systems. I turned sideways and edged along behind her until she opened a hatch and climbed out. As I did the same, I realized we were right next to the airlock. Batista gave a roundhouse kick to a female soldier’s head, and the coast was clear.

I pulled the lever to depressurize the 15-foot bridge between the 405 and the Stang. Then I opened the door.

Batista was about to step in when I blocked her path. I half-expected her to kick me in the head and steal my ship, but instead she looked right in my eyes and nodded.

“Deal,” she agreed.

“Deal?”

She stuck out her hand. “If it turns out I made all this up just to get off this ship, you can space me,” she said. “Well, you can try anyway. But I’m not making it up and we should hurry before they get here.”

When she put it like that, I had no choice but to trust her. I welcomed her onto the bridge and shook her hand, searching her eyes to see if she was impressed by my grip. It’s one of my best qualities after all. Her eyes went wide. She was either extremely impressed or…Jeffries and two soldiers had arrived, guns drawn. Yeah, it was the second thing.

“Almost, but not quite,” Jeffries sneered.

Batista turned and backed into the bridge alongside me.

“Another step and it’ll be your last,” warned Jeffries. He and the other two men entered the airlock. “I can’t say I’m surprised, Boyd. Though I can say I’m pleased. I’ve never liked your kind.”

“ “People that are taller than you?” I mused, nearly getting a snort out of one of the soldiers.

“Independents. Aka deadbeats,” he hissed. “You think you’re better than the system. But in the end, you’re just a nobody.”

“Kill this particular nobody and who will