Hell's Heart Read Online Free Page B

unmourned, never having accomplished anything. So Valandris tended to view the elders as less than authoritative.
    But they weren’t wrong that she loved to hunt and that she preferred the blade. Killing with a disruptor felt different, although not so different that it wasn’t satisfying. It was just a matter of preference. Choice of weaponry was dictated by terrain, Valandris thought—and, of course, the game.
    Today’s terrain was novel: the winding, poorly lit hallways of a starship well past its obsolescence date. Dinskaar, she had been told, had been a formidable pirate vessel working this region back when the Federation was more worried about watching the Klingon Empire than with protecting traders. Valandris hadn’t much experience with starships, but she could tell that Dinskaar had seen better times. Half the doors didn’t work and had to be blasted open.
    Her quarry was new to her too: Orions, the starship’s occupants were called. Green-skinned and bipedal, the males reminded her of garvoons , the mindless hulking primates of her homeworld. They certainly made a similar sound when someone shot them. And while the Orions here didn’t move anywhere near as fast as garvoons , she had been assured they were sentient, which should have made them more formidable.
    The Orions’ intelligence wasn’t helping them—any more than their shields had prevented Valandris from transportingaboard. As she and her fellow black-clad companions worked their way methodically through the starship, the Orions spotting them went not for cover, as sensible creatures should, but for their weapons. While she wasn’t used to hunting things that could shoot back, she didn’t think the ability helped the Orions much. By the time the creatures could aim, she and her kinfolk were already firing.
    Another green face appeared from around a corner, pointing a disruptor at her; Valandris’s rifle spoke, and the Orion vanished in a blaze of energy. The Orions weren’t much sport, but they were numerous. And that meant her companions had to stay alert.
    â€œWake up, Raneer!” Valandris reached out to the younger hunter to her left and slapped the back of her helmeted head. Twice Raneer had allowed Orions to get off shots before being disintegrated. “Pay attention, or they’ll be telling stories about you tonight.”
    â€œThat’ll be the day. This is—”
    â€œ Wait ,” Valandris said, kneeling and gesturing for her two companions to do the same. They crouched beside her. She led them on hands and knees behind a large overturned cargo container that the Orions had set up as a makeshift barricade earlier. “Listen.”
    It was hard to hear anything above the din of the alarms and the shouts from firefights in other corridors. But even without the high-tech assistance built into her helmet, Valandris had instincts second to none. There was something down the hallway amid the maze of tubing.
    Rising carefully, she took aim and blasted a metal pipe in the distance. It ruptured, spewing hot steam that drove several Orions from their hiding places. Raneer and Valandris fired in unison, disintegrating two of the green creatures. The third, a bulky warrior, braved the scalding mist and charged toward the hunters. Valandris’s other flanker, Tharas, cut him down before he went five meters.
    â€œThat one was mine,” Valandris said, mildly perturbed.
    Tharas laughed. “You just want to see what it’s like fighting one hand-to-hand.”
    â€œNot yet.”
    Tharas was right, of course, but there was no sense admitting it to him; her cousin talked too much as it was. But she couldn’t indulge herself, not now. They’d been on countless hunts together since childhood, but this wasn’t like any of those. They had a specific target. Valandris rose and resumed working her way up the hallway again, joined by her flankers.
    Alert, she