The Mind Field by Blaze Ward Read Free Book Online

water, so you’ll want to dial your suits up now.”
    Javier glanced around. The people surrounding him were almost scary competent. Paying attention. No questions. No complaints. Already setting switches and dials, based on the word of an engineer they barely knew.
    He put actions to thought and turned his temperature up to a balmy twenty–five degrees. A beach would be nice about now.
    Javier checked all the gauges and dials on the remote’s control board, watched them adjust themselves for the environment over there and smiled to himself as he started typing.
    Good morning. Ready to go? JA
    Affirmative. Can we steal it so I have someplace nicer to live?
    He suppressed a snort. If the pirates around him found out about Suvi, his life wouldn’t be worth warm spit. That was why she was hidden in the remote. They forgot about the device most of the time, and he could work on it without arousing suspicion.
    Let’s wait for these chickens to actually hatch?
    
    Yup, it was going to be one of those days.
    He looked up to see Sykora watching him from across the way. She would be in charge as soon as they stepped onto the other ship. As well she should be. You never knew when you were going to find monsters out there.
    Just because mankind had been exploring the galaxy for more than four millennia and not found anybody didn’t mean there was nobody to find. Just that we hadn’t gotten out far enough, or soon enough, or something. And not all monsters were aliens.
    “Ready, mister?” she asked.
    He looked at the heavily armed people in the party. “Can I have a sidearm, just in case we run into monsters?” he asked. It was mostly pro forma at this point.
    “Aritza,” she smiled calmly down at him, “I’m the bogeyman.”

Part Four
    Suvi watched the hatch grind slowly open, at least slowly to her, and directed her sensors into the other ship.
    275 degrees Kelvin, so warm enough to keep water liquid and not rupture things. Atmospheric pressure at the low end, roughly two thousand meters equivalent elevation. Gravplates set to one quarter standard. Not as light as Homeworld’s famous moon, Luna, but she would have to hop across the gap in freefall and dial everything down so she didn’t mash into the ceiling.
    Piece of cake.
    She watched Sykora, the big woman Dragoon, the dragon lady , nod to Javier. He pushed a button on his little console that normally handled the flight controls. Now, it just displayed a happy face in her cockpit and started up mood music for flying.
    Today, she was flying an early heavier–than–air aircraft known once upon a time as a helicopter. Hers wasn’t as loud as those primitive machines, although she had considered adding sound effects for verisimilitude.
    Like the two pathfinder women, Suvi went in first.
    It was a boring place. Industrial design heavy on gray, with square corners that actually looked welded instead of cast. How droll.
    The hallway from the airlock was relatively short. The dimensions were human, 2.5 meters wide and tall. Coarse texture on the deck plating for traction under gravity. Boring walls.
    The whole ship appeared to exist on a single deck, laid out long and narrow, pointy at one end and flared at the other, from the pictures Javier had uploaded.
    Suvi flitted to the place where this little hall debauched out onto the longer hall that ran down the central axis of the ship. In her mind, she echoed Javier’s question. Why couldn’t we just bring it aboard the pirate ship to open it up?
    She replayed Captain Sokolov’s comment: “Because I want it go boom outside the ship’s armoured hull.” He reminded her of her first Captain, Ayumu Ulfsson, back before the probe–cutter Mielikki even had a name, back when she was just a hull number scouting for Concord fleets during the Great War. Maybe it was the Academy training. It hadn’t stuck with Javier, but it had with Zakhar Sokolov. It brought back some of her earliest memories.
    Suvi smiled.
    From the