Read Online Time Siege by Wesley Chu - Free Book Online Page A

Bulk’s Head was expensive.
    It took James days of futilely working on rumors and leads before he got his first break. Word of his inquiries must have spread after the way he threw scratch around at several different establishments. Eventually, on the morning of their tenth day at Bulk’s Head, he received a hit. A boy approached him as he was sitting alone at the Drink Anomaly and held out his hand. The boy, likely no older than ten or twelve, demanded James buy him dinner. When James refused, the boy told him that naming a collie Collie was stupid and lazy and that James better buy him a meal. James signaled to the waitress and bought the boy all he could eat and drink for the rest of the night.
    That bit of information could mean only one thing. Only a few people were aware that James’s old collie—the one that was destroyed by ChronoCom when they attacked the Farming Towers—was named Collie . It had been a running joke among some of his tier.
    He watched as the boy ate his fill and got drunk off two drinks. Before the boy passed out, he handed James a piece of paper. On it was an address. It took only a few more minutes of asking around to find out that this address was located in the Puck Pirate section of the colony. Well, James did want to attract a salvager’s attention. It seemed he had attracted the biggest one.
    James finished his drink and looked at the young courier passed out on the table. He debated whether he should leave the boy there. If he was lucky, he would wake up with a splitting headache tomorrow. If he wasn’t, he might wake up without a kidney.
    Feeling parental, James grabbed the back of the shirt and hauled him to his feet. “Let’s get out of here, kid.”
    He smacked the the boy a few times to rouse him and then escorted him out of the bar. They walked all the way across Bulk’s Head until the boy’s head cleared a bit. James honestly wasn’t sure where the Puck Pirate section was, so he had the boy lead him there. When they arrived, he bought the boy a bag of water and sent him on his way.
    James was accosted by three security guards as soon as he neared the Puck Pirate security zone. When he provided his credentials, he was blindfolded and led around for another ten minutes. He had a sense that they were descending to the lower levels after having made dozens of turns. They could be walking him out to an airlock for all he knew. Finally, they took his blindfold off, and he found himself standing in front of an ornate metal door at the far end of a long hallway.
    He inhaled; the air here was much cleaner than that in most of Bulk’s Head. An important or rich person must live here. The guards spoke with someone through a comm next to the door, and then it clicked opened. James was greeted by a familiar face.
    Hubbs had been two years from earning out from ChronoCom when he was caught smuggling miasma regimens to the Puck Pirates on the side. When the monitors tried to take him in, he killed three squads and a Tier-3—he was a Tier-1, after all—and then fled to Bulk’s Head, far enough from ChronoCom’s grasp not to make it worth their while to get him back. He had been running the Puck Pirates’ salvaging operations ever since. Currently, he was hovering at number nine on ChronoCom’s most wanted list.
    â€œBlack abyss, James fucking Griffin-Mars,” Hubbs exclaimed as he waved James into his extravagant quarters. “I thought you were dead until you started poking around my neck of space. Poked a giant in the eye by now or something. You always were a little broodier than the rest of us. Heard about your split with the agency. Rumor has it you broke a few time laws.”
    No sooner did James walk ten steps into the room than he found two burly men on either side of him. He didn’t miss a beat as he eyed both men up and down, making note of the weapons in their hands. One had a close-range ion hand