Hellhole: Awakening Read Online Free

that.
    Down in the Buktu operations center, Tanja met with Walfor inside a smooth ice grotto, where a porthole field presented the black starry sky and the pocked ice field. He sidled close to her. “I brought you here for the view.”
    “I can get a view anywhere.” She looked at him stiffly. “You brought me here to help deliver ships to General Adolphus—and also because I’m the only one who can negotiate for the stardrive engines you need.”
    Walfor gave her a roguish grin. “True, you can pull strings with Administrator Frankov on Theser, but my reasons don’t have to be all business.”
    Tanja had long, inky black hair, high cheekbones, and large eyes. For several years, she had enjoyed (and diverted) Walfor’s flirtations. He was an attractive man in his own way, with a weathered face and wavy black hair, and she did enjoy his company. One day she might accept his advances—when the Deep Zone was free and safe, and she could turn her attentions to romance. For now, her duty to the rebellion, and to Candela, consumed her.
    She had been hardened by many difficulties and tragedies, most of which she blamed on Constellation corruption and on the Diadem herself. It was a barbaric fantasy, but she often imagined the withered head of evil Michella Duchenet thrust onto a stake; then Tanja could relax.
    Seeing her expression darken, Walfor said, “You’re beautiful when you’re angry.”
    She drew her brows together. “Then these days I must be beautiful all the time.”
    He let out an exaggerated sigh. “We’re all in this together. I don’t know why Frankov’s engineers refuse to leave Theser. They’re like conceited lordlings forcing everyone to come to their court. How can they refuse to travel? Don’t they trust their own stardrives?”
    Tanja was also annoyed at the inconvenience, especially during a war. The brilliant Theser engineers supplied vital components, but no amount of coaxing would budge them from their laboratories inside the crater walls on Theser. Through her friendship with Sia Frankov, the planetary administrator, Tanja had arranged to get the shipments herself. She straightened, keeping her mind on the goal. “That’s a difficulty we can overcome,” she said. “In fact, it’s not even much of an inconvenience, now that the new Candela-Theser route is established. Trust me, it would take longer to argue with them, and we still wouldn’t succeed. Leave it to me—I can round up stardrive engines for your scrap heaps.”
    “ Defense ships, ” he corrected. “They need to be functional, not pretty. And we’ve got plenty of hulks here that nobody ever noticed.”
    Of all the Deep Zone planets, Buktu was the farthest from Sonjeera. Years ago, the original pioneers had made the long journey from the Crown Jewel worlds, theoretically a one-way trip to a comfortable new home, where they would be far from the Constellation.
    Unfortunately, the long-distance remote surveys of Buktu gave falsely positive images, and, after two years in transit, the colonists found only an ice-covered planetoid with virtually no ecosystem. Without enough fuel to return to civilization, they were stuck there. Though hardly a garden spot, the planetoid did have resources, and the determined colonists tunneled outposts into the thick ice, excavating cozy chambers where people could live. The large ice sheets were saturated with numerous exotic isotopes that could be harvested and used for FTL stardrive fuel, long-term energy sources, and containment-field systems.
    Meanwhile, back on Sonjeera, the Diadem had set her sights on the many untouched planets in the Deep Zone, sending out trailblazer ships to open stringline trade routes, and to annex the worlds that assumed themselves to be independent. Also tricked by the rosy measurements from the original probe, Michella dispatched a Constellation trailblazer to Buktu. She was deeply disappointed by what she found.
    When the unexpected stringline ship arrived