Dragonfly Read Online Free Page A

little too hard, scorching my fingertip. The past didn’t matter any more. I was smarter now. I’d be frosty, professional, detached. I wouldn’t fall for his lies. We’d bring Dragonfly down and I’d walk away. Right?
    A trigger on my console flashed, indicating transition velocity, and I confirmed the nav course equations and engaged slipspace drive. The air in the cabin glowed momentarily red like sunset, and in the clearview window the stars winked out.
    Bumps prickled my arms, and I turned up the heating. Slipspace is dark and motionless. There are no streaking stars or swirling mist as you hurtle on, faster than light, through the slit you’ve made in space–time. No visible light, no color, no sensation of movement. It’s an in-between place, a wacky warp-assed dimension where relativity doesn’t ruin all the fun. But stay there too long and you’ll lose your mind.
    I rolled down the clearview shutters—all that nothing gives me the shivers—locked on to the nearest navnode and hit the automatics.
    Long ago, the first slipspace travelers left beacons to find their way, and, with a bit of Imperial maintenance, their ancient tech still works. These days, slipspace navigation is like following the strands of a four-dimensional cosmic spider’s web. You can’t always travel the shortest route, and straying too far from the beacons is asking for trouble. It’s a bit tedious, but it’s the only way. Get disoriented out here and you could disappear forever.
    Corporations will pay millions to get an exclusive on a new streamlined slipspace trade route, and if you’re the suicidally reckless type, you can make a very good living mapping out new beacons. But beacon jockeys don’t usually get to enjoy their riches for very long. They strike off into the black unknown and don’t come back. Some say that slipspace is a dimension humans were never meant to navigate.
    Bullshit, if you ask me. There’s nothing out there. Maybe they get lost, disoriented, too far from any beacon to recover. Maybe their ships malfunction or their fuel depletes beyond return. Or maybe their minds crack, out there all alone in endless silent darkness.
    Sometimes, death just happens.
    With the nav neurospace keeping RapidFire safely on the slipspace web, and drive coolant humming softly beneath the floor, I opened a bottle of fruit juice—you can tell when the galley’s been stocked by a woman—and slouched back into the command chair to read my omega briefing and get my mind off what I’d say to Malachite.
    Curiosity itched me about this mission. Something had tasted odd when I’d swallowed Director Renko’s story. I’d visited Casa de Esperanza before: a glitzy space station on the Imperial fringe, run by Empire-sanctioned mob bosses with freightloads of cash. Gambling, guns, drugs, black biotech—anyone with enough imagination who wants something done away from the spotlight goes to Esperanza. It’s a luxury pleasure palace for high rollers, a place where if you have to ask how much, you can’t afford it. Many negotiations, legitimate or otherwise, go on there. First, it’s nominally neutral. And second, Esperanza’s security is notoriously infallible. The vault has one of the nastiest reputations in the galaxy for impregnability, and the mob aren’t known for mercy toward those who piss them off. Attempting a heist there is a suicide mission.
    It didn’t sit right with me. I knew how Dragonfly’s mind worked. The man was a coward with an inflated opinion of his own importance, surrounded by sycophants and brainwashed disciples. The night my team was massacred, he’d burned Urumki City and murdered hundreds of people so he could get away. As much as he loved to embarrass the Empire, I didn’t think he’d be prepared to kill himself to do it. He had plenty of people ready to kill themselves for him.
    More likely, Dragonfly wanted to muscle in on the mob action the Empire took such a large piece of, and Renko wanted it