B00BFVOGUI EBOK by John Jackson Miller Read Free Book Online Page A

to find a solution to their problems. “There’s got to be a way,” she said. “If they declare us insolvent, Quaestor will cut us all loose!”
    Jamie knew it was wasted energy at this point. “What can I do?” Falcone said. “A hundred billion! You know we’ve never cleared a tenth of that in a quarter.”
    “There’s always a way,” Bridget said.
    “I know how much it means to you, Bridget,” Falcone said. “I know you kind of got stuck working here — and I appreciate your devotion. God knows you try harder than anyone else in this outfit. But I just can’t see a way out.”
    Jamie’s ears perked up. “ Bridget? ”He looked over at the dark-haired woman in disbelief. That face. He’d seen it in the news. She was the right age, too — around thirty-three. “You’re Bridget Yang!”
    Bridget looked at him coolly. “Yes.”
    “I know you,” Jamie said, trying to recall the historical account of the infamous Overland disaster, years earlier. “You’re Bridget Yang! You started the war!”
    “Hey,” Falcone said defensively. “It wasn’t that simple.”
    Bridget wasn’t looking at him. But Jamie kept on, remembering the events from eight years earlier. “The Arcturo-Solar War — the first interstellar war we ever got into. It all started because of you!” He looked probingly at her. “Quaestor hired you ?”
    The question sounded worse than he’d intended. But Bridget looked up at him, unruffled. “They hired you , too.”
    Jamie didn’t know what to say to that. Finding Yang out here was certainly the capper. A lot of people died in that war, and rightly or not, Bridget had come in for some of the blame. He didn’t know the company was into human reclamation projects — but if there was any place to hide someone like Yang, Altair was it. He slumped back down, and Bridget returned to her appeal.
    For a place so full of opportunity, space certainly collected a lot of people on their last chance. His father had used all the money the family had — and some it didn’t have — to buy a seat to the stars, back when it cost a fortune. Marty Sturm’s trip, allegedly to clear his head, had ended with the man “going migrant,” as so many had in the early 2110s. The family had never heard from him again.
    Was Jamie’s father running a falafel stand on Porrima — or had he perhaps become lunch for a spore? Jamie had spent little time wondering about that over the years. All he knew was that he somehow inherited the black sheep status himself when his mother married into the politically powerful Keeler family. Since childhood, his ambition had been getting ahead on his own — far ahead of his mother and stepfamily.
    The rhodium deal was supposed to do it. Instead, Jamie would be going home. Quaestor would have his hide, and others would want a piece of him as well. The Keelers would deny being aware of his existence. The end.
    Falcone wasn’t listening to Yang’s pleas, Jamie saw. No, he was blowing his nose again and missing the handkerchief. Nauseated, Jamie turned his tired eyes back upward.
    They saw something unexpected.
    “What’s that?” Jamie pointed at a line heading from Altair’s whirlibang station in Aquila to a lonely point in Draco. “That hub, with all the links coming out of it?”
    Falcone looked over his shoulder for a second before returning to his despair. “That’s nothing. Sigma Draconis.”
    “Yeah, but it’s in your color,” Jamie said. “The whirlibang, the depot — it’s your territory. Your expedition owns it.”
    The gruff administrator chortled. “It’s useless. An old station — God knows who built it. Some white elephant that PraetorCorp picked up in a deal with the Regulans. Nobody else in Quaestor wanted it, so we got stuck. Mothballed. Nobody’s even visited it in years.”
    Jamie stared. “But it links into a slew of inhabited systems,” he said. From near the northern astronomical pole relative to Earth, the connections zigged and