Tangled Intersections by Eva LeFoy Read Free Book Online Page A

have I done to
deserve this?
    The doors slid open and Grison stood.
He peered out onto the C deck, blinking rapidly. A few people
milled about, and the lights were blazing. C Deck might well have
been paradise. Breathing a sigh of relief, he stepped out. Everyone
went about their business. If he didn’t know any better, he’d say
the station had returned to normal. He wiped the sweat off his brow
with his palm.
    To his left, the wall screens glowed
gaily. They showed the list of the ships in the docking bay, the
current station temperature and the day’s video news. Two soft
pings announced a new ship wide alert:
    Attention Nidi residents.
The security lockdown has been cancelled. The escaped prisoner has
been recaptured. Repeat, the prisoner has been recaptured. Please
go about your normal business.
    Grison’s heart
surged. They’ve got him. They must, that’s
why everything has returned to normal.
    On screen, a video displayed Rister’s
capture. Four security guards circled him. Two grabbed him by the
arms and just as when they’d first arrived, he kicked his legs and
twisted, trying to break their hold. But the other two guards moved
in, one punching Rister in the side of the head. When he dropped to
his knees, the guards holding him relaxed a little, and that was
all he needed. Rister sprang up and leapt forward, only to be shot
in the head by the fourth guard. Rister’s body fell to the floor
with a thump.
    Grison turned away from the video,
grinning widely, his glee unrestrained. He’d seen enough. All he
needed, really, to discover he’d won. The deed was complete. He was
Grison and Rister was dead. Finally able to take a deep breath, he
straightened his spine and tugged his clothes into place. Perhaps
lunch wasn’t a bad idea. Then, afterwards, he’d have a talk with
the ship’s captains about a girl…
    Striding confidently down the deck, he
glanced around at the unfamiliar area. C Deck wasn’t habitational,
nor was it mercantile. From the looks of things, it wasn’t
engineering either. Offices perhaps, or administration. The people
hurrying along beside him seemed purposeful, strident. He watched
them and tried to adopt their demeanor. Businesslike. Intelligent.
Efficient. He ended up following a group of young people down a
corridor where they congregated in a cluster, talking excitedly.
Grison stood off to the side, growing hotter and more uncomfortable
by the second.
    The heat in this section of the ship
was astonishing. It would easily have doubled for hell. It was an
oppressive, sultry warmth, too, that might have steamed him in his
clothes. He couldn’t invent a reason why this would be so. Other
parts of Nidi were quite comfortable. Stupefied, he looked over the
kid’s heads to read the name plate on the door. “Transporter Engine
Room.”
    Understanding dawned. The working
parts of the transporter beam must require immense amounts of
energy. Especially such an early model. Luckily they were near a
dwarf star kicking out plenty of gravitational wave. Harnessing it,
however, must have required less shielding on this part of station.
Grison loosened his collar, wiping the sweat off his neck with his
fingers.
    If the younger set was bothered by the
heat, they did not show it. Instead, the queued up and one by one,
were admitted to the chamber. In a few moments, Grison saw the
floor panel lights change colors. The one directly to his right
went from blinking blue to solid red. Then, a rush of energy beamed
past him. One of the youngsters being beamed off station, he
supposed. That’s what Ballantine wanted to do to me? Super heat me
and send me colliding into space?
    Yet as he stood there, he pondered how
pretty it was to be collapsed to one’s basic elements and shot
through the system at light speed. How deadly too. How perfectly
deadly. In the back of his mind, he’d kept the possibility of
pushing Rister into a transport beam as an optional murder method.
He would have enjoyed witnessing