Children of Scarabaeus Read Online Free Page A

waited for what seemed like an eternity until Finn pulled himself inside. He shut the access panel and put them in total darkness. She heard him rummaging around in the duffel again. “I need to weld this or the hull breach will set off security alarms.”
    “Won’t it already have done so?” Edie asked.
    “No. The toms will investigate first, and transmit an alarm to the company HQ if it’s serious.” Toms were small multi-functional droids used mostly for maintenance jobs. “I need to fix it before the toms get here.” Finn fired up a small torch and swept it over the edges of the hatch. After a few seconds he tapped the panel, and then nodded to Cat. She opened the inner airlock door. Air rushed in.
    Cat shone a flashlight down a dark, cramped corridor. “Where does this lead?”
    “It’s a maintenance tunnel for dockside repairs,” Finn said. “Should be a panel in the floor that we can drop through. See if you can find it.” He was still checking the welded panel for leaks.
    Edie crawled a few meters down the tunnel, feeling with her hands for handles or catches. Her fingers caught on an indentation.
    “Got it.” She pushed out the panel.
    Cat’s flashlight illuminated the hole. “Looks like a main corridor.”
    Finn caught up with them. “Set your e-shields to low, just for warmth. There’s no other danger.”
    They slid through the hole onto the deck. Each of the six walls of the corridor had a railing down the center in a shallow depression half a meter deep. It matched the struts Edie had seen on standard cargo crates. These passages were essentially conveyor belts that moved cargo from the port into allocated bays in the ship, and out again when it came time to deliver.
    Finn pulled another mysterious gadget from the duffel bag. It was clear there were no personal belongings in there, only endless Saeth tricks. He turned it on and began walking.
    “Echomapper,” he explained.
    A holo bloomed over the device, showing a blueprint of the corridor they were in and the cargo crates to either side with the indistinct shapes of their contents. One deck above and below were also mapped, their edges fading at the limit of the echomapper’s range.
    “There should be at least a couple of crates with cryo capsules,” Finn said.
    A rumbling noise came from behind them. Cat shone her flashlight. A cargo crate was advancing at an alarming speed, filling the entire cross-section of the corridor with no leeway around the edges: it would crush them.
    “This way.” Finn jogged down the narrow track. He ducked into an alcove, pulling Edie in with him. Cat pressed herself into the small space just as the crate rumbled past. They peered out to see the crate stop a few meters farther along, then it moved sideways into an empty bay.
    “Must’ve been loaded at Barossa,” Cat said.
    Finn climbed up, and Edie realized the alcove was a maintenance access area. There wasn’t much on the ship that was built for humans, but this alcove had a ladder.
    On the next deck, Finn walked up and down, mapping as much as his device could register, while Cat and Edie waited, listening for approaching crates. As Finn returned, another strange sound echoed through the ship.
    Edie pressed herself back into the alcove. “Is that—?”
    “It’s the engine,” Cat said. “We just entered nodespace.”
    Which meant they were safe from the Crib, at least for the duration of this jump. Nothing could track a ship in nodespace. And if the node had several exits, as most did, the ship might take any one of them. Its itinerary was flexible—recalculated after every port by the nav computer. As the Lichfield moved farther into the Reach, the Crib’s search would become even more futile.
    “Found what we need,” Finn said.
    He led the way down the corridor and turned when it branched. They stopped at a crate that looked much like any other, except that instead of the usual loading doors, this one had a tiny airlock, locked from the