Quantum Read Online Free Page A

seized another.
    “There should be one in every single bag,” she murmured distractedly. In case people got separated after surviving the crash, the rescue party would be able to account for everyone—IPC standard kit and procedure.
    She tugged a few things from the top of the medical pack so she could search more easily in the bottom. Where was the med scanner? If she’d packed this bag, she would have put it right on top.
    “Yeah, there should be, but there’s not.” He tossed the bag away and scrubbed a hand over his hair. “I don’t understand. I have the shuttles and onboard provisions checked weekly. How could all those critical systems have failed on the shuttle, for a start, and how in the fiery pits of Erebus can there not be a single emergency transponder in any of these bags?”
    A shaft of ice cut deep through Mae, and she tore her eyes away from the admiral to concentrate on finding the medical scanner. There hadn’t been much time to think since they’d launched, but with the number of things that had gone wrong on the shuttle, it didn’t take a genius to work out the craft had been tampered with. Someone had wanted them to crash. No emergency transponders? Those same people didn’t want them to be found if they survived impact.
    What the hell did that mean? It would be easy to assume Captain Admiral Graydon had been the intended target. But nothing was what it seemed any longer.
    According to Rian, everything wrong in his life, and pretty much everything wrong with the universe, could be traced to the Reidar. Only a handful of people knew the Reidar existed. Most who learned the truth ended up dead, with Rian being the exception. However, it was more luck and divine providence that Rian was still alive—he’d nearly been killed more times than any person she knew. Which was why—despite the risk to her own career—she hadn’t been able to tell him no to this little arrangement. Truthfully, she’d been seriously considering it time to cut out of UAFA once she’d discovered the agent in charge of her division had actually been an alien body double.
    Besides, saying no to Rian had been a longtime problem of hers.
    Rian and she had clicked instantly when they’d met on her first posting, with her fresh out of military college. He’d soon worked out he could convince her to do pretty much anything with a smile and an irreverent gleam in his gaze. And of course there’d been that one night—
    Since then he’d become more like family, and they’d made sure they’d seen each other whenever they could. Until Rian had gone missing, presumed KIA. It had come on the heels of her parents becoming casualties of the war on her home planet, forcing her to lock down and become totally self-reliant. It was either that or cave from the double-tap loss.
    Two years later she’d found him, broken and maniacal, doing the dirty work of an infamous illegal trader. To this day, she still couldn’t say if it had been a blessing or a curse that she’d been the one to bring him back…what was left of the man, anyway.
    If she was going to take a leaf out of his playbook, she could just as easily presume, with a good dose of paranoia, that the shuttle crash had been meant for her, that somehow the Reidar had worked out what she was up to and wanted her out of the equation before she found evidence of their existence. A chill rippled down her spine, and she stole a sideways look at Graydon, who’d grabbed another pack to search, looking pissed about the missing supplies.
    Forcing the suspicions out of her mind, she returned to her own search. By the bottom of the second medical pack Mae hadn’t found the scanner, and the lack of several other essentials worried her. It seemed someone had stripped the important medical supplies out of these bags, the same way they’d apparently taken the emergency transponders.
    Maybe the why and how of the crash weren’t apparent yet, but the intended outcome was more than