B00BFVOGUI EBOK by John Jackson Miller Read Free Book Online

making your millions. You don’t see where it comes from! To you, all the goods the expeditions send back just appear out of thin air. Magic through the wormhole! But somebody has to strike the deals, set up the warehouses, install the factories and keep the traders from getting killed by whatever’s out there. That’s us , you moron! Altair is… was Falcone’s whole expedition. You didn’t just wipe yourself out. You took us down, too!”
    Jamie shook his head, chastened by the barrage. “Look, I know you’ve got a lot to write off. I’m sorry about that—”
    “He’s sorry!” Bridget said, laughing.
    “—but you’ve got time, and this is a trading center. You may be able to square the books in a quarter, if your traders hustle—”
    Falcone glared. “And you leave us holding the bag, right? I’ll tell you, Sturm, I don’t care if we all go down, but I’ll sure as hell see you digging sewage lines in the Sahara if we do!”
    The new Q/A spoke up. “We couldn’t do it from here anyway,” Trovatelli said, matter of factly. “This station’s done for.”
    “We were discussing our careers just now,” Falcone said, annoyed at the young woman he’d brought.
    “That’s not what I mean.” Brown eyes scanned the ceiling. “I saw that crater out there,” Trovatelli said. “Seven-Alpha must have gotten into the substrata.”
    Bridget stared. “You can tell that just by looking?”
    Falcone waved his arms at Trovatelli. “No, no, no! We did a gravimetric analysis. The asteroid is still sound—”
    A low thunderclap rumbled through the dome. Jamie looked up. “Don’t tell me.”
    Bridget’s eyes scanned the walls. In the shadows, a thin crack now traced from the floor up the inside of the dome.
    Falcone saw it and shook his head. “That’s nothing! We patch bigger than that all the time.”
    “No,” Bridget said, walking to the wall. She traced the fissure with her gloved finger. “I saw another one, earlier.”
    The new Q/A flipped out her pocket isopanel. “This asteroid may have been just fine this morning,” Trovatelli said. “But Altair’s gas giants are coming around soon. There’s enough mass intact to keep Alabeyd from breaking up, but they’re perturbing this body just enough—”
    “I’m already perturbed!” Falcone blanched. He looked off into the distance. “Will we decompress?” he asked, his throat dry.
    “Not today,” Lissa said. “But you’ll have to reinforce every surface to keep the place airtight.”
    “That means emptying ASPEC,” Falcone said. “We won’t be able to trade out of here for months!”
    “Then we’re dead,” Bridget said. She glared at Jamie.
    “And you killed us.”

7
    His clothes sticking to his skin, Jamie followed Falcone and the surge team chief to the head office. There was nothing else for him to do now. Yes, the odds had been against the surviving ’box being the right container, but so much had gone wrong he’d clung to the slim hope that his treasure had survived. So much for that.
    “I bet his horsing around is how we got the wrong armor,” Chief Yang said accusingly.
    Jamie staggered into the meeting room and collapsed in the nearest chair. The woman’s latest accusation could be true, for all he knew; couriers had made all his trades, and something could have gone wrong. But there wasn’t anything he could do about it now — not that it’d stopped the woman from haranguing him further.
    He looked up, idly staring into the holographic star chart in the rotunda above the meeting table. Dots and lines, stars and connections. All his life, the network had meant money to him. Now, he wondered if the map held any place to escape to.
    Could he run? It was a pointless thought. He wasn’t a pilot. He couldn’t get a ’box to the whirlibang, much less activate it.
    Clearly, the chief cared about her team and the operation here: he knew intelligence and spirit when he saw them. Even now, she was imploring Falcone, trying