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

accepted the offer immediately.
    In the following months, Cameron showed he could supervise the loading of a cargo hold, draw up an accurate shipping manifest, and carry his own weight on a raid.
    The raid had been a small affair, just a brief touchdown on a nearly uninhabited world to heist construction robotics, but Cameron neutralized the tiny work force at the site quickly and effectively and established a defensive perimeter immediately afterward, from which he held off the security force until the snatch was completed. Everyone in the Red 35 Crew had gotten off safely, and no witnesses were left behind. Even Lowboy had been impressed, although the new man had demonstrated some reluctance when ordered to kill the survivors. But a man could learn to do that sort of thing.
    About a month after he'd joined them, Minerva attached herself to Cameron. A clerk in one of Jenny's mining camps, she'd been recruited on Old Earth under false pretenses. The company actually wanted someone to service the men in its operation on Jenny, and not by keeping their pay records straight. She soon became very unpopular with her bosses, but she did keep the men's pay records straight. When her contract ran out, she decided to find other work. After pushing drinks in the dives around Sodus Bay for a while, she wound up a shipping clerk in Scanlon's business. She was pretty and, just coincidentally, had guts and brains.
    The other men in Scanlon's crew respected her. Scanlon's inflexible rule on women in his organization was that no man could force himself on one who was a member of the crew. Minerva and Cameron met because he knew unarmed combat and had volunteered to teach his skills to the others. During a demonstration, while thinking of someone else whom he wanted to hurt, he'd applied too much pressure to Minerva's left arm, which had snapped. Cameron was genuinely sorry, and she liked the awkward way he tried to make up for it. After her experiences in the mining camps and the bars on Jenny, it was refreshing to have a man pay attention to her not because he wanted something from her, but just to be nice. And with Minerva, Cameron really tried to be nice; when he was with her, the burning hatred and disgrace that had driven him to the fringe world of New Genesee subsided.
    The raid on Society 437 had been Cameron's idea.
    "They have scads of stuff we can use," he pointed out during one of Scanlon's strategy sessions. "They have three stations operating down there. We take the one called Aquarius, in the tropics. There's forty or fifty technicians there, tops. We'll outnumber them two to one, and we can shut them down in no time flat, heist their hardware and be gone before the big station, Central, knows what's happened."
    "Hell, George," Lowboy said, "that's a goddamn scientific survey team down there! The Confederation's invested trillions in that expedition. You don't think they'd sit by and let us strip the joint!"
    "Who's to stop us? They have no—repeat, no—military security. If the survey team has followed the standard TO and E, the only weapons they have are to protect against unfriendly animals. Shit, they're all scientists and eggheads! I bet most of them don't even know how to use the few weapons they have.
    Besides, they're so spread out, they couldn't possibly reinforce Aquarius."
    "Why not, Cap'n?" Rhys Apbac chimed in enthusiastically. Rhys was always ready to go on a raid. He grinned fiercely at the others and recited the only piece of poetry he knew, an ancient highwayman's ditty he'd managed to memorize after years of practice:
    "Come tighten your girth and slacken your
    Buckle your holster and blanket again;
    Try the click of your trigger and balance your blade,
    For he must ride sure who goes riding a raid."
    Scanlon ignored Rhys, who sat there grinning triumphantly at the others after finishing his recitation. He said to Cameron, "The Confederation might get pissed enough to send a really significant naval force out