Hellhole Read Online Free Page A

the windows, which was good, since Antonia didn’t want company, conversation, or any attention at all.
    The young woman stared through the star-sparkled blackness to the looming globe below. Hallholme looked rugged even from space. This planet had once been lush and hospitable to life, but now it looked mortally wounded. No wonder people called it “Hellhole.”
    But even this was better than Aeroc, the planet she’d fled in desperation. She had ridden the stringline network through the central hub on Sonjeera and back out, taking the transport line as far away from the Crown Jewel worlds as she could go. She only hoped it was far enough to hide and make a new life for herself.
    As the stringline hauler docked, loud noises shuddered through the hull of the passenger pod. The hauler itself was little more than a framework on which numerous cargo boxes or passenger pods could be hung like grapes in a cluster. Antonia waited in both anticipation and dread. Almost there, almost free.
    One after another, downboxes disengaged from the framework, drifting into lower orbit where they were automatically maneuvered towards the marked expanse of the Michella Town spaceport. Each time a downbox disengaged and fell away, she flinched at the vibration and thud.
    Hallholme rotated slowly beneath her, exposing patches of water, empty continents, and finally the inhabited section, not far from the concentric ripples of the impact scar itself. Antonia caught her breath when she saw the huge bull’s-eye where the asteroid had struck. The shattered crater was filled with glassy shock melt, surrounded by concentric ripples. Canyon-sized cracks radiated outward in a jagged pattern. Oozing lava continued to percolate to the surface through raw scars in the ground. Five centuries meant little on a geologic timescale, and the world was still wrestling with its recovery.
    Yes, Hellhole was the last place anyone would think of looking for her.
    At nineteen, Antonia knew how to take care of herself better than most adults did. During her past two years on the run, she had learned many ways to elude detection. She knew how to change her identity and appearance, how to get a job that would earn enough money for her to live on without raising questions; she knew how to be afraid, and how to stand up for herself.
    Two years ago – a lifetime it seemed – she had been precious and pretty, a creature of social expectations, the owner of a fashionable wardrobe with garments for all occasions and any type of weather. She had another name, Tona Quirrie, but that was best forgotten; she would never – could never – use it again. As a debutante on Aeroc, she had flaunted different hairstyles and cuts of clothing because her mother assured her that such things made her beautiful. These days, Antonia did everything possible to make herself less attractive: her dark brown hair hung straight down to her shoulders, and she wore only plain, serviceable clothes.
    She was the daughter of the manager of a large power plant on Aeroc, one of the old civilized planets long ruled by the Riomini noble family. They had a very nice home with a large kitchen, a pool in a terrarium room, and a well-tuned piano. Her mother loved music and often played at their special parties, but the best times were when she would withdraw to the conservatory alone, playing classical pieces or evocative, intricate melodies that might have been her own compositions, and Antonia sat in the hall, just listening. She even took lessons, hoping to become as good as her mother someday. Now the music was gone from her life.
    When Antonia was seventeen, a dashing young man named Jako Rullins came to work for her father in the power-plant headquarters. At twenty-one, Jako was handsome, intense, clever, and obviously moving up in the world. He quickly made himself indispensible in her father’s work and often came to their home for business meetings, which turned into social occasions.
    When Jako