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

hiding inside, a small bribe, probably no more than a thousand, would get them through nicely. System migrants with a decent wad of bribe creds could pass as easily from one system to another as any legitimate traveller.
    A one-k kick back if they got found at worst…and he'd still have nine ks in his pocket. A nice little earner, and, to be honest, it wouldn’t have been the first time he’d smuggled migrants from this shitty system to one of the other older, more established and affluent systems.
    But…only days after they’d set off from Harpers Reach to do their system-wide milk-round, the news had been all over the network. Quarantine. Captain Tez Mahmoud had been around the block a few times, long enough to know there was no lethal contagion going round.
    That was grubb-shit. This was the Administration’s heavy hand coming into play. The fascist sons-of-bitches were either covering up some disastrous screw up of their’s, that, or they were after someone. If it was the latter, then more than likely they were after a bunch of those Awoken religious fanatics.
    Which meant of course, every last goddamned official was going to be on amber alert, including those corrupt slack-jawed desk-monkeys in Freight Verification. No bribe-taking this time. For once, they’d be doing their jobs properly.
    So Tez had himself a problem.
    A problem he’d decided to resolve by dropping the girls off at the nearest viable location; that odd-looking half-finished installation. His sys-nav database had it down as some moth-balled commercial premises. There’d be life-support there of some sort, it might be rudimentary, but the girls would be okay until somebody eventually dropped by. And then they would be someone else’s problem.
    However, since he’d unceremoniously ditched them, some rather unsettling rumours had begun to surface.
Rumours
…that was all, but as so often seemed to be the case with rumours, there might be a kernel of truth behind them.
    Word on system-WhisperChat was that the Administration were after an Awoken terrorist cell; a cell preparing to carry out some horrific act of terrorism. And, making Tez just that little bit more twitchy, there was mention of…a
girl
.
    A teenaged girl.
    Now, he was sitting in a busy synthi-caff bar, looking out from his booth through a perspex bubble at the curving doughnut sky above, watching projected adverts for energy drinks and fashion-garb drift like lazy stratocumulus clouds along the artificial sky’s trans-radial axis.
    What if that old guy wasn’t just some old pervert?
    Shit
.
    What if he had something to do with those fanatics?
    Shit. Shit. and Double Shit
.
    Tez was beginning to feel queasy; he was beginning to get that you-might-just-be-in-a-world-of-fregging-trouble queasy feeling that he hadn’t felt since he'd been a kid and been marched up to a Law Marshal by his mother for sneakily swiping creds off her card.
    What if I just ditched an important terrorist?
    It didn’t seem particularly likely. They were just two girls, for crying out loud, two very normal teenaged girls who seemed to be perfectly happy watching crappy sopa-drams and quizzies and singing along to dance-dub songs and giggling at stupid things his crew said to them.
    But the taller one, what was her name
… ‘
Jaz
’
? Hadn
’
t she been suffering a gunshot wound?
    At the time he hadn’t asked. Didn’t want to know. Didn't need to know. He’d helped the girl into the ships medipod and it had turned out fine. And anyway, Harvest City was full of all sorts of unsavoury violent types; drug gangs, mumps, pimps…sex-traders. In his head, Tez had what he thought was 'their story' nailed;two girls, rescued from some sex-traffickers by some old man who wanted to help, but also remain anonymous….who maybe wanted to avoid a scandal.
    The money in his back pocket, all ten k’s of it was beginning to feel like a curse. Like…like, what was that old kid's story?….Jake and The Beanstalk, or