At Empire's Edge Read Online Free

target, Cato took a quick look around. The incoming fire had stopped, Honis and Batia were busy securing a group of Vord prisoners, and the other two were going from body to body checking to make sure that the beings inside were truly dead. “Hey, Cato,” Tonver said, as he knelt next to a badly scorched Vord. “The big sonofabitch is history—but it looks like the slug might be alive. It’s sealed in a pressurized pouch.”
    Cato went over to inspect the body and saw that Tonver was correct. Even though the Vord was dead, a pressurized sack had been deployed to protect the parasite wrapped around his neck. Tonver winced as Cato put an energy bolt through the taut semitransparent plastic film. Green goo erupted from the newly created hole as all of the pent-up air gushed out of the container. “That’s for Ritori,” Cato said grimly. “Rot in hell.”
    Tonver wasn’t sure that aliens went to hell, but it was a moot point, so he let it go. The battle was over.
     
     
    The better part of one standard day passed while both of the badly damaged ships floated side by side off Nav Beacon INS4721-8402. There was a lot to do, including treating the wounded, in-processing the Vord prisoners, and conducting a bow-to-stern survey of the Pax Umana to determine how spaceworthy the vessel was.
    Finally, having completed their inspection, Captain Hong and her engineering officer concluded that while one of the ship’s in-system drives was still functional, her hyperdrive was going to require a complete overhaul before the Umana would be able to complete the journey to Sagatha.
    That was the beginning of an effort to identify a planet with a Class III or better shipyard that was within the range of a vessel traveling at sublight speeds from Navpoint INS4721-8402. The answer, because there was only one possibility, was a former prison planet named Dantha. None of those on the Umana had ever been there; but, according to the NAVCOMP’s files, Dantha was a mostly preindustrial Corin-Class planet, having large deposits of iridium located due west of a Level Eight settlement named Solace. And Solace, in turn, based on a two-year-old database, was home to a Class III shipyard.
    So with nowhere else to go, Hong had her crew place explosive charges aboard the Vord raider, cut the destroyer loose, then put a lot of distance between the two ships before sending the necessary signal. Most of the crew were watching the video feed when the explosion took place, but the momentary flash of light was strangely anticlimactic, and left most of them feeling sad rather than jubilant. All except for Cato, that is, who was taking a nap when the charges went off, and was snoring loudly.
     
     
    It took almost two standard weeks to reach Dantha. Long, increasingly difficult days, during which one of the four air scrubbers went down, the water-purification system failed, and everyone went on short rations. Including the Vord prisoners, who suffered in silence, unlike Verafti, who complained nonstop.
    The Xeno cops were used to that, however, and proceeded to ignore the shape shifter, who was forced to entertain himself by showing the neighboring Vords what they would look like if turned inside out! It was a pastime Cato rather enjoyed—and did nothing to discourage.
    So it was with a communal sigh of relief that the Pax Umana entered Dantha’s atmosphere, bumped her way down through layers of air, and leveled out over a vast water-filled crater created some fifty million years earlier when a sizeable meteorite had roared out of the sky to slam into Dantha’s surface.
    The lake glittered with reflected sunlight as the space-ship flew over both it and the vast plain beyond, on its way to the Imperial settlement of Solace. And it was then, as the ship circled the city prior to landing, that Captain Hong felt the first stirrings of concern. Because rather than the neat, carefully laid out city typical of Uman-controlled planets, Solace was a sprawling