Read Online Mapped Space 1: The Antaran Codex by Stephen Renneberg - Free Book Online Page B

bench seat in the spaceport terminal.
It was some time before I had the strength to stagger onto the walkway back to
the Silver Lining and fumble my way
through the airlock. When I stepped into the darkened pressure-suit
compartment, a short barreled shrapnel gun almost took out my eye.
    “Easy!” I yelled, lurching clumsily
away from the business end of Izin’s street sweeper. “It’s me!”
    It had been several thousand
years since the shotgun had been invented, but looking into the business end of
its descendant was as intimidating as ever. Magnetic acceleration and exploding
micro munitions might have replaced gunpowder and shot, but the effect on human
flesh in a cramped passageway was just as gruesome.
    “My apologies, Captain,” Izin
said, lowering the shrapgun and stepping back from the inner hatch, motioning
towards a twenty centimeter long polished metal object lying on the deck. It
was as thick as my fist in the middle, tapered at both ends, with a single neat
hole blasted through its center.
    “What is it?”
    “A minidrone. It attempted to
board the ship several hours ago.” He tapped the small six millimeter shredder
pistol at his hip, confirming where the tiny hole in its side had come from. With
his tamph eyes and inhuman steadiness, Izin was a frighteningly deadly shot
with any precision weapon.
    My DNA sniffer gave the minidrone
the once over, but it was clean. “Why the artillery?” I asked, nodding at the
shrapgun.
    “Hull sensors covering the pressure
bridge have been deactivated. I don’t know how or by who.” Izin was a walking Earth-tech
encyclopedia. If he didn’t know how it was done, it meant alien-tech had been
used against us. “I considered it to be an attack on the ship, so I selected
the optimal weapon for fighting in confined spaces.” He lifted the shrapgun
meaningfully. “Only the hull sensors aspecting the pressure bridge have been
disabled, so this was clearly the point of attack.”
    “Only one came through?”
    “Yes, Captain. I have a hull crawler
outside inspecting the damage now.”
    My bionetic memory didn’t
recognize the minidrone, so if it was Earth-tech, it was custom made. “Take it apart.
Tell me anything you can about it – highest priority.”
    Izin picked up the minidrone. “Is
there something I should know, Captain?”
    “I’m working on a deal and we have
some unfriendly competition.”
    “Is the order prohibiting lethal
force revoked?”
    Tough question. If I let Izin off
the leash, I could end up with problems with the port authorities and if I
didn’t, the next attempt to get inside the ship might succeed. I decided to
play it safe, for now. “Not while we’re in port, unless they start shooting
first.”
    “As you wish,” Izin said.
    He led the way back to
engineering, setting the shrapgun and minidrone down, then took in his six
screens with a glance. “The hull crawler reports five hull sensors were
destroyed by a highly concentrated thermal effect with an active area of nine
microns.”
    “That’s kind of small, isn’t it?”
    “Nine millionths of a meter,”
Izin said. “Earth technology is incapable of producing a thermal weapon with
that level of precision.”
    “Can you calculate where the
weapon was fired from?”
    “Perhaps.”
    “There’s a ship called the Soberano . Find out if they could hit us.”
    Izin tapped into the spaceport’s
datanet and quickly scanned the ship registry. “The Soberano is a Mammoth class super transport less than three years
old, owned by Pan Core Shipping.”
    “A mammoth?” I whistled softly. “She’d
make us look like an Kunarian buzzfly.”
    Mammoths were over two hundred
thousand metric tons – fifty times the size of the Silver Lining – and they rarely left Core System space. No wonder Vargis’
office was so spacious.
    “The Soberano arrived a few days ago.”
    “What’s she carrying?” Ten years
of supplies for Hades City?
    “Her manifest says she’s empty.”
    “No