War-Dancer (Tales of the Commonwealth Book 4) by Tom Noel-Morgan Read Free Book Online Page B

every so often, a war-dancer finds his or her way into the captaincy of a corsair ship. It’s a rare enough occasion, but it has been known to happen. When it does, one can expect the unexpected, for war-dancer captains are not known for their orthodoxy, but they are famously vengeful, most of all against Libertatian slavers.
     
    This is a tale about one of them:
     
     
     

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    War-Dancer
     
    Somewhere nearly four-hundred kilometres off the canyons to the south of the Black Rose slavers’ bastion on Titania, the air screamed with the arrival of two air-skiffs. Dropped from low orbit into the thin atmosphere, each of the freefalling craft was packed with unsavoury war-dancers and bioroid gunmen wearing polymesh void-suits and battle gorgets. They held-on to their lives on straps bolted to the floor of the skiffs, as the open-topped skimmers plummeted down towards the frozen surface of the second-largest moon of Uranus.
     
    Metres before reaching the raggedy frozen terrain, the streamlined vessels finally slowed to a hover thanks to their repulsor keels, but those of the passengers that had never done a low orbit drop rushed to press the med-dispensers in their suits, so to avoid barfing their breakfast into their void-helmets and respirators. After a moment’s allowance for the passengers to recompose themselves, the pair of skiffs speeded madly toward the direction of the stronghold. In the low gravity thin air of Titania, their hotwired mag-engines hurled the skimmers at insane velocities, and the scythe-like stabiliser fins sparkled under the azure glow of Uranus like a stream of light.
     
    As agreed, the lead skimmer carried Thorn and his party, while Razor and his raiders followed hard upon them in their own skiff. In less than an hour, the two modified craft negotiated the distance of some four-hundred kilometres, approaching the coordinates wherein they were to put into action Thorn’s stratagem. The magnetic propulsion drives of the skiffs ran silently enough not to rouse the undesired attention of the Black Rose’s automated lookouts, their energy signatures invisible as compared to the magnetosphere of Uranus. With but a hum and a sonic boom, they flashed over the frozen landscape.
     
    Then, quite abruptly, the skimmers slowed enough for Thorn and Zanzibar to jump off, and then the two vehicles yawed and changed course, so to make for an inconspicuous spot in the terrain. Thorn and his companion wanted to scout the bulwarks and watchtowers of the stronghold before they committed to the raid, and the best way of doing that without detection was to proceed on foot, carefully avoiding to do so by leaps and bounds.
     
    Hiding behind a stubby terraforming reclamation plant that stood about ten kilometres away from the tattered bastion, Razor was restless with anticipation. His prodigal blood burned with hate within envious veins. As a pure-blood bioroid, he felt he deserved to be directing the assault instead of following another, most of all a freed transhuman slave. He actively rejected the way Fu’Ryah had demoded him – which he regarded as a humiliation – and he would prove her wrong by his deeds on the coming raid. Truth be told, Razor was a capable filibuster, and if the sum of his spite could be made into some type of airborne toxin, every Black Rose thug in the region would have perished that morning.
     
    Nearer the Black Rose compound, the first-mate and the quartermaster made their way up a cliff overlooking the gorge wherein the stronghold was lodged. They modulated the hypermatrix visors on their helmets to magnify the view, so to spot the guards and the watchmen about the compound. Sure enough, a squadron of N-3 robots was about and restlessly pursing their job.
     
    The AI software running the robust Newton-3 chassis carried out the patrol with both precision and proficiency, and the individual units acted in cohesion to patrol the grounds. As they did their rounds, the