Read Online Dark Space by Jasper T. Scott - Free Book Online Page B

trying to make Guardian Three’s call sign sound natural to his ears, but nothing he said sounded natural to his ears. His vocal synthesizer was faithfully mimicking the voice of the dead nova pilot whose identity he had stolen.
    “He’s arguing with a flight mechanic about a jammed-up laser cannon. We’d better go. We’re due for debriefing in the Lieutenant Commander’s office.”
    Ethan nodded absently. “Lead the way.”
    Gina turned and wordlessly began winding a path through the endless rows of scorched and battered fighters. Ethan eyed each fighter with a frown as they walked past. “Guess we’ve been running into more opposition than I thought. Either that or someone’s been playing with the Valiant ’s beam cannons again.”
    Gina turned and gave him a funny look. “These are salvage from the war, Adan; you know that.”
    Ethan nodded and tried not to meet her gaze. “Right, just trying to crack a joke, Gina.”
    She snorted. “Well, stick to your real forte. Jokes never were a part of your repertoire.”
    “So what’s my real forte, then?”
    Gina shot him a dry look. “Shooting and frekking everything that moves.”
    Ethan grinned wryly. “I’m not sure if that was meant to be a compliment, but thanks.”
    “Right, well since making conversation isn’t a part of your aforementioned skill set, let’s leave it at that.”
    “What did I ever do to you, Gina?” He asked. Ethan was curious about how things had ended between Adan and Gina.
    Gina turned to him with patiently raised eyebrows. “Really? You’re going to ask me that? You know damn well what happened.”
    Ethan shrugged. “We don’t have to be enemies.”
    “We don’t have to be friends either.”
    With that, Ethan decided to drop it. She was right. He wasn’t here to make friends—quite the opposite.
    They reached the far wall of the hangar bay and Gina preceded him into a waiting rail car. A handful of ground crew and pilots piled in with them, including Guardian Three, who walked up to Ethan with a smirk and said, “Looks like you’re losing your touch, Adan.”
    The rail car started forward with a subtle jolt and quickly accelerated up to a blinding speed. The walls of the rail tunnel blurred by them with bright streaks of light from passing glow panels, and Adan watched as Gina keyed a destination into the holoscreen mounted beside the doors of the rail car. Passengers were busily taking seats along the sides of the car, and Ethan followed suit, sitting down beside Guardian Three. He strapped in and then spared his squad mate a quick grin—just as he imagined the cocky Adan Reese might do.
    Ithicus Adari glared back at him. He was large and well-built like Ethan; he had short, thinning black hair that lay flat against his head and a slowly pulsing blue tattoo peeked out from under the left sleeve of his flight suit. Ithicus also had a haggard, well-lined face which Ethan estimated made the man about five years his junior—though Ethan had to remember that his holoskin was actually projecting the image of a twenty-one-year-old. Ithicus had a square jaw, a crooked nose, and an angry gleam in his honey brown eyes. The man was obviously mean-tempered and he’d had his nose broken at least once, which couldn’t have been an easy feat for a man his size.
    “Losing my touch?” Ethan repeated with an accompanying snort. “Not likely.”
    “You almost got nailed by friendly fire, and you kept drifting out of formation. You forget how to fly or something?”
    Ethan gritted his teeth. He’d only had a couple hours in the cockpit of a nova, and he was still getting used to the controls—the sensitivity, the idiosyncrasies of his particular fighter, and the raw, barely-contained power of a high-performance fighter versus his old sluggish Atton. The difference with his transport was that every maneuver had had to be exaggerated, but with a nova, just the slightest twitch of the controls could send him into an end over end