Sliding Void by Stephen Hunt Read Free Book Online Page B

it’s all about risk and reward.’
    There wasn’t going to be much evidence left behind to show that Rex Matobo had been on this planet. Not after he’d packed and left the cold world of Hesperus light years behind him. Never let it be said that Matobo the Magnificent wasn’t a careful man. Matobo had grown even more cautious after the events of a few months ago. The heavily armed scout ship jumping out of hyperspace into Hesperus system. Coming looking for something incredibly valuable. Expecting only a few axe-wielding barbarians as opposition. Matobo chuckled. Nobody expected a wizard. Certainly not one paranoid enough of uninvited visitors to have seeded Hesperus orbit with hundreds of stealth mines. Hardly a fair fight at all, but then that was the only sort Matobo got out of bed for. Any other kind of conflict was far too dangerous and unpredictable. Matobo was even going to jettison their pilot’s corpse into the sun before he jumped out. Burn it up on the same trajectory he had used to dispose of the mine-wrecked scout ship. Not a scrap of DNA left to indicate that one of their crew had been captured alive, the pilot’s mind probed and stripped of every useful scrap of data, putting Matobo back in the game. And back on the run, of course. But he was used to that.
    ‘You are letting the Gravity Rose ’s crew run the risk,’ accused the hound. ‘If Calder Durk is traced back to the ship, everyone on board is going to be murdered to ensure their silence.’
    ‘Lana and Zeno owe me their lives,’ said Matobo. ‘I think we can call that debt balanced out now, don’t you? And it probably won’t come to that, let’s plan for the worst and hope for the best. We just need to find ourselves a buyer for Calder Durk. Can’t do that with the merchandise on board, waiting to be jacked out from under us, can we? After we secure ourselves an honest buyer for the prince, then everyone is happy.’
    ‘Do I look happy?’ asked the genetically modified hound.
    ‘You’ve got a naturally sad face,’ said Matobo. ‘Even as a puppy, you looked like you were chewing a wasp.’
    The hound sucked in its cheeks and sloped off. Matobo’s own conscience on four goddamn legs.
     
     

CHAPTER THREE – Sliding void
     
    Calder felt a sprinkle of water on his face as he came around, his head throbbing as badly as it had been inside the wizard’s tower. Except he wasn’t in the wizard’s tower, he was in a metal-walled chamber with the strange golden sailor, Zeno, sitting in a chair opposite a bunk unit built into the wall where Calder was laid out. ‘What happened?’
    ‘You went freaky-deaky when we lost gravity. I tranked your ass. You were getting kind of hysterical anyway, after Lana let you mark your territory back in your old castle. Shit, you fleshies, water in, water out. I don’t know what psych handbook she got that shit from.’
    Floating , Calder remembered floating and the panic rising in him, as if he was cast adrift in the darkness, the infinite night. Calder moaned and rubbed his throbbing temples.
    ‘Matobo—’ sniggered Zeno, — ‘the Magnificent filled your head with a new language back in his tower when he was fixing your leg, used an information virus to rewrite your brain. That’s why you’re feeling that hell of a headache. Your superior temporal gyrus is still adjusting itself. And it’s why you can understand Lingual. You kind of spoke a variation of it anyway, accounting for nearly a thousand years of cyclic drift in syntax and the fact that your ancient ancestors once hailed from a Swedish factory world.’
    Calder cast about the room, a steel vessel? How did it work? He noted that the round portal of glass across from him had been tinted with a mirror-like surface, hiding the sight of whatever lay outside the ship.
    Zeno picked up a hypodermic filled with a bubbling red substance. ‘Got your orientation virus here, but seeing as you have a headache already, I’m not going to burn