McCade's Bounty Read Online Free

remarks.
    Easing the little ship into its bay, McCade fired the shuttle's repellors and lowered it onto the durasteel deck. The outer hatch slid closed shortly after that, air rushed in to pressurize the bay, and a pair of snakelike robo tubes slithered out to connect themselves to the shuttle. The tubes pulsed rhythmically as fuel flowed into the shuttle's tanks.
    McCade, Rico, and Phil left the shuttle the moment the bay was properly pressurized. The argrav was adjusted to Alice normal and felt good after Rister's Rock.
    Bright lights threw hard black shadows down against the durasteel deck. All around the three inner bulkheads, tools, torches, and hand testers were racked and waiting for use.
    McCade tapped a code into the lock and waited for it to iris open. The lock was necessary so that a loss of pressure inside the shuttle bay wouldn't affect the rest of the ship.
    McCade still felt a sense of pride when he stepped out of the lock into his ship. Pegasus had been comfortable and fast, but nothing like this. The Void Runner was larger, roomier, more heavily armed, and even faster than Pegasus had been. She was three years old, but she still smelled new, and McCade took pleasure in walking her corridors.
    As McCade made his way toward the ship's bridge he passed the hundreds and hundreds of items that mean little by themselves but taken together make a warship.
    There were com screens, remote status displays, zero-G handholds, navy gray bulkheads, damage-control stations, equipment panels, warning labels, first-aid kits, access doors, radiation detectors, patch paks, ventilation ducts, weapons lockers, maintenance ways, crash kits, miles of conduit, and, yes, brass that did little more than look good.
    McCade scrambled up a short flight of metal stairs and entered the bridge. The overhead lighting was subdued. Hundreds of indicator lights glowed red, green, and amber.
    There was a command chair located toward the center of the room, fronted by three control positions, one for the pilot, the copilot, and the weapons officer.
    McCade dropped into the captain's chair and touched a button. "Maggie? You there?"
    A screen came to life. It showed a middle-aged woman. She was all torso and no legs. Both had been horribly mangled during a drive-room explosion and scissored off by her self-sealing space armor.
    For reasons only Magda Anne Hornby could understand, she'd refused stim growth replacements and prosthetics, settling for a custom-designed argrav box instead.
    But legs or no legs, Maggie was still the best damned engineer for a hundred lights in any direction, and knew it.
    Maggie blew a stray strand of red hair out of her eyes. "Of course I'm here. Where the hell did you think I'd be?"
    McCade grinned. He knew from experience that Maggie was impossible to please. In fact it was Maggie's personality rather than her handicap that kept her from more lucrative employment on a freighter or a big liner. "My mistake. I'll need the drives about five from now."
    Maggie nodded curtly and the screen went black. Though welcome on the bridge, she preferred to ride where she worked, in the drive room.
    Rico ran a manual preflight check, while McCade tapped instructions into the ship's navcomp, and Phil sharpened a durasteel claw. Although the variant was a lousy pilot, his keen brain and amplified reaction times made him a crackerjack weapons officer.
    With all systems green, and a gruff "go ahead" from Maggie, McCade fired the Void Runners standard drives. The DE would reach the nav beacon in a few minutes, enter hyperspace, and exit about three standard days after that. A short run later and they'd see Alice.
    McCade allowed the seat to make him comfortable and delegated control to the navcomp. He couldn't wait to get home.
     

Three
    The ship's screens blurred momentarily as the Void Runner slipped out of hyperspace. McCade felt the usual moment of nausea and scanned his readouts for signs of trouble. Nothing. All systems were