Starfist: Blood Contact by David Sherman & Dan Cragg Read Free Book Online

Waygone. It was way gone all right.
    Oh, someone'll come, sooner or later, he told himself, but the question is, will we be around later? He suspected those things had left them alone for a while because they were busy with something else. Once they turned their attention back to the pirates... Well, no profit thinking about that eventuality.
    Cameron put himself back into the rags that passed for his trousers. He cinched the belt at his waist as tightly as he could. He'd lost at least thirty pounds since they came here, and he was conscious now of wearing the same clothes he'd worn when they landed at Aquarius. Well, who brings a change of clothes on a pirate raid? he thought. They were only supposed to stay a few hours anyway. There would be fresh clothes at Aquarius if he could get the others to go there with him. They'd fled the place in such a panic six months earlier that nobody thought to grab anything useful, much less replacement garments. In their wild desperation to get as far away from those things as they could, none of them thought he'd live six months anyway.
    If I can't convince these bastards to go back to Aquarius Station with me, Cameron thought, Minerva and I will go by ourselves. Anything was better than crouching in the caves like frightened troglodytes, even taking a chance they'd run into those things again. Jesus, how come nobody knew those things were here in the first place? he wondered for the nth time.
    Over the months in the mountains, Cameron had changed in ways that surprised even him. He'd taken charge of the survivors, imposed his will on them and made the correct decisions to keep them alive. At times he wished he'd just let them fend for themselves, but deep inside he knew he was responsible for them as much as for himself. He didn't much care for the survivors of Scanlon's band: Rhys Apbac and Lowboy were scum, and sooner or later he knew he'd have to deal with them. Minerva was a different case. He cared what happened to her, the first time in his life he'd felt that way about another person.
    And he'd forgotten how much he'd hated the Confederation. Just then, as he stood looking down the slope, he'd have given anything to be on board a starship, leaving Waygone, even if it meant spending the rest of his life in prison. Even if it meant again facing up to who he really was.
    But the most important change he'd undergone was that in the face of terrible danger, the man who called himself Cameron was the only one who had not given in to panic. Not like the last time...
    The sun was coming up. The first rays were already illuminating the peaks above him. Watching the sun rise was just about the only pleasure he could get out of life in the mountains—that and Minerva, of course.
    She'd lost weight too. Her pelvic bones and ribs had begun to show prominently when the two of them lay together. Cameron rather liked that, except that her slenderness was due to malnutrition. Thinking of her, he hitched up his trousers and walked back into the cave.
    The Red 35 Crew pirate band called itself that because their leader, Finnegard Scanlon, considered red his favorite color and the number 35 a lucky one for him. In real life Scanlon ran a legitimate import business from a remote mining and prospecting world called New Genesee, "Jenny" to locals. Jenny was the oldest settlement in its sector of Human Space, and had the largest population, but it was still a distant backwater compared even to Thorsfinni's World. And, as with any frontier world, the law had not yet reached Jenny in any force, so fortunes could be made there if a man was quick and ruthless.
    Scanlon made a living furnishing the colonists and surveyors of neighboring worlds with the necessities.
    That was the facade he lived behind anyway, with the hundred or so men and women he employed. But whenever a little smuggling operation was afoot or a raid was conducted, they all happily made the transition from employees to outlaws—to Red 35