Pelquin's Comet Read Online Free

too; the river bringing with it a hint of the uplands that had birthed it. A buzzing insect landed on the back of his left hand. He squashed it with a deft slap of the right before the thing could bite, and then brushed away the small corpse, leaving a black smear.
    Under the bridge itself, pushed up against the mouldering brickwork, a pile of rags and cardboard had been heaped in apparently haphazard fashion. Only as he walked towards it could Pelquin make out the shape of a man sitting in the middle of the small mound, head bowed, tatters and off-cuts of packaging material and clothing gathered around him like a flowing cape fashioned out of refuse.
    He frowned, torn between conflicting urges to say something and to walk on. This didn’t look anything like the person he was expecting to meet here. Then the figure glanced up and the eyes gave him away.
    “Nate?” He barely recognised his recently returned second in command, the man who was the closest thing to a friend he’d known in a decade or more. Nate Almont looked filthy, his hair unkempt and his customary stubble sprouting towards ragged tufts of bristly beard – ginger peppered with grey.
    “Shh…” the figure urged, staring down again. He was fiddling with something cradled on his lap, pressing keys with deft assurance. A console of some kind, Pelquin realised – an oversized perminal. Seconds later the man sat up straight, to stare past the new arrival, towards the river. Pelquin followed his gaze but couldn’t see anything.
    This parody of the man he knew grunted and said, “That’s better.” Only then did his attention return to Pelquin. “Spyflies,” he explained. “Two of them. I hijacked their command frequency and ditched them in the river.”
    “Thanks.” Spyflies? No wonder he hadn’t spotted them, but since when had Jossyren grown so sophisticated?
    “I thought you were going to be careful!” Almont snapped.
    “I was… Or at least I thought I had been.”
    Pelquin let the other’s tone go, this time. After all, the man had been living rough for the past few days, blending in, losing himself among the dregs of New Sparta’s homeless, doing all he could to remain beneath the authorities’ notice and enduring who knew what indignities for their mutual cause. Nate had jumped ship the moment they docked, smuggled off within the small cargo they’d delivered here. An endeavour whose success had taken a lot of planning, considerable discomfort on Nate’s part, a pinch or two of good luck, and a well-placed bribe. However, all that would have been worthwhile if in the process they’d succeeded in getting one particular item off the ship unnoticed.
    “You’ve got the gonk?”
    “Of course I have. You don’t really think I’d be sitting here dressed like this if I didn’t, do you?”
    “Don’t push it, Nate,” Pelquin advised.
    Almont rummaged around among the rags that swaddled him and produced what looked to be a fist-sized ball of screwed-up greasy paper. He thrust the unsavoury object towards Pelquin, who took it gingerly. The weight immediately told him that there was something a lot more solid than mere paper at the ball’s centre. He carefully pulled the bundle apart, to reveal a dull matt-grey object. Half an ovoid, like an egg sliced in two lengthways, the ‘gonk’, as Bren had christened the thing for no good reason anyone could think of, looked unremarkable in the extreme. Then again, the first indicator of so many fake artefacts was their artfully bizarre appearance. The genuine ones were often like this: mundane on the surface. It was only once you saw what they could do or tried to analyse what they were made of that their truly alien nature revealed itself.
    Pelquin grinned and pulled the papers across to cover the thing once more before stuffing it into a pocket. “Good job,” he said. “You’d better get back to the Comet .”
    “No kidding. Don’t worry, I’ll be out of here as soon as you’re on your