Ellie Quin Episode 5: A Girl Reborn by Alex Scarrow Read Free Book Online Page A

do?'
    'You talk to them, give them orders.'
    'Uh…so…' she clapped her hands together loudly, ‘uh, good morning everyone!’
    ‘Truly inspiring,’ muttered Shelby to himself. ‘You’d make Sun Tzu proud.’
    For a moment her voice echoed unaccompanied around the square walls of her castle. Then as one, in a feminine-sounding chorus, they replied.
    ‘Good morn-iiiing General!!!!’

CHAPTER 8
    Captain Tez ‘Big T’ Mahmoud should have been feeling immensely relieved. He
should
have been feeling a crud-load better than he was. His company freighter, like every other ‘delivery donkey’ in the system was parked along one of the many five mile-long radial docking arms of GateWay, unable to proceed about its business because of the system-wide quarantine being enforced. That meant he and his small crew were stuck here in this vast playground, on full pay of course, for the foreseeable future.
    It could have been a lot worse. They could have been stuck on Holstein, where there was a planet-wide religious ban on alcohol and narcotics and a population of glum-looking pious cattle farmers. Or New Mercurio, a small super-heated world far too close to the sun, populated by ore refineries and an almost entirely male workforce comprised of snarling convicts.
    GateWay, truth be told, was by far the best place in this system for him and his crew to be kicking their heels until the quarantine was eventually lifted. They had back-pay to spend and places to spend it; flesh-bars, PlusParks, Drinkos; a veritable orgy of hedonism for his crew to indulge in until either they’d exhausted their swollen credit accounts (and had to live back onboard the ship) or until things eased up across the system and they got company orders to saddle up and take their ship through the gateway. They had a cargo hold that was mostly filled with a consignment of refrigerated meat due to be delivered to the Neumann system at a grotesquely inflated price. Some senior ‘Suit’ in
Harmony Transport
’
s
HQ had probably already calculated that keeping this freighter waiting at GateWay, ready to go through as soon as the quarantine was lifted, made more economic sense than ditching the meat cargo and sniffing around for any crumbs of permitted business within the Seventh Veil.
    So, Tez Mahmoud was stuck in quite probably the best place to be stuck in this little system. GateWay wasn't
just
the exit/entry portal for the Seventh Veil. Around the vast circular Hawking-Voltram fold-space field loop - a circular energy field that contained a singularity tuned to an exit field in another system - had developed a vast free-floating doughnut shaped metropolis. The centre of the doughnut, the hole, was of course the gateway itself. Since it also functioned as a powerful gravity well in the vicinity, it provided a useful uniform gravity ‘floor’ for the hoop construct built around it. And that’s why virtually every systemgateway in Human Space had become a free floating ring-shaped 'world' in its own right.
    And Tez should have been as happy as a
kravitt in mutterjuice
(as his mom used to say) about being marooned here. Except he wasn’t. He was worried. Very worried.
    He’d originally suspected that the old man who’d cornered him back on Harpers Reach in Harvest City port was attempting to cover up some personal scandal. Tez's first suspicion was that the dirty old bugger had something going on with one, or even
both
of the girls, and needed them to be gone…like, ghosts, like,
yesterday
. Gone As Far Away As Possible. That this was some seedy scandal he was trying to cover up.
    Tez didn’t blame the old man. After all, the taller, sassy-mouthed one was an absolute
stunner
to look at. He’d been happy to back-pocket the ten thousand creds the old fool had pushed into his hands to drop the girls off at GateWay. It would be easy enough to get them past the freight verification officials. Even if one of their cargo pods was scanned and the girls found