Messiah Read Online Free Page A

“It’s over now, one way or the other.”
    “Do you think it worked?” Karl asked.
    “It’s how Parvi said to fight this thing. Dump as much energy in as small a space as possible.” She rubbed her face, and Toni II saw the strain in her features. Taking over as the nominal captain meant that she had been getting a lot less sleep than her elder self.
    Toni II saw the pain upon mentioning Parvi’s name and realized that her twin was thinking of the Khalid and held the same doubts about Parvi’s suicidal snipe hunt that she had. They had lost their one pilot who’d had direct experience in combat with this thing.
    “I don’t think—” Toni II had been about to console her twin, but she was interrupted by a sudden burst of radio chatter. The other Toni fell back to monitoring the command console.
    “Well, we achieved something,” she muttered while checking the new incoming transmissions.
    Toni II could see the comm channels all lit up by chatter, and she could see why. The tachyon radiation meters had slammed the upper limits of their resolution across the board. If the Daedalus hadn’t shut down their tach-drive completely, a good part of their engine would have burned out even with the damping coils.
    Mallory’s voice came over the general comm channel, telling the fleet to render what aid was possible to the damaged ships in range.
    Please, after all this, let us have destroyed it.
     
    The Daedalus was a heavily modified craft. The interior had been retrofitted to hold much more cargo than a stock craft of its design, at the expense of no longer having any sort of artificial gravity or being able to reenter an atmosphere. The Daedalus would be unable to land even if the blockade was lifted.
    There were other advantages for a family business that had made at least half its income from contraband.
    Former family business, thought Stefan Stavros.
    He had seen his birthright stolen out from under him, and he had seen his father capitulate again and again, until he thought he no longer knew the man. He had dutifully waited for his father, the man who had built their livelihood, built this ship, to come up with a strategy, some sort of plan to retrieve the Daedalus from these pirates. It didn’t matter what the priest, or the Valentine bitches, or any of them thought they were fighting. Stefan didn’t believe in the Antichrist or the end of the world, all he saw was him, his father, and their ship being hijacked into a war they shouldn’t have any part in.
    But instead, his father, Karl Stavros, seemed to have joined in with the insanity around them. They had once prided themselves on being above dirtside politics; the Daedalus had always been a nation unto itself. But now that the priest was ready to wage war, Stefan had given up on waiting for his father to act.
    Stefan pulled himself through a gap between the nominal ceiling of the upper cargo deck and the skin of the ship. The space was designed to hold a manifold that would vent contramatter plasma from the ship’s contragrav generator in order to provide some measure of pseudo-gravity for the ship’s occupants. The manifold had been stripped, along with all the contragrav support systems, when the cargo capacity of the Daedalus had been upgraded. The space occupied by the manifold had been too small to be reclaimed.
    Not in any obvious fashion.
    The space was barely wide enough to accommodate him as he pulled himself along the long, flat conduit. The only light came from a small pinpoint lamp embedded in a sweatband on his brow, and that only showed him four or five meters before the curve of the ship’s skin blocked his view.
    He had to crawl about twenty-five meters to reach his destination; an inaccessible junction nestled between the rearmost cargo bulkhead and the tach-drive. Not a place he’d want to be if the tach-drive was active, but fortunately the priest’s directives to power the plant down completely made Stefan’s destination as safe