The Terminal War: A Space Opera Novel (A Carson Mach Adventure) Read Online Free Page A

each direct hit and spurt of blood.  
    Mach leaned closer into Beringer and grabbed his wrist. “Tell me,” Mach said. “How badly do you want to go to this shitty little planet to get this artifact of yours?”
    The archeologist tried to pull away.  
    Mach held firm.  
    Beringer slammed his other hand down on the table. “As badly as I’ve ever wanted anything, damn it! You don’t understand the significance of this find. I have to have it; it could change our perception of the Sphere and those that inhabited it before us. Don’t you understand how important that is?”
    Mach let go and smiled. “That’s all I wanted to know. My crew and ship don’t come cheap.”
    “I’m here, aren’t I? I don’t understand why it has to be so expensive. It’s just a routine task.”
    Mach leaned back in his chair and sunk the rest of the Whisper. “It’s not just the danger of going to some unknown rim world beyond the noncombat zone; it’s the opportunity cost. If I take your job, we’ll be gone for two weeks. I could earn more money than you have in a few days. I’m sorry, Beringer, but I ain’t in this game for anything other than cold hard cash. So if you want us to ferry you out there, you need to pay up, and that means…”
    “I know,” he said, staring down at his half-empty shot glass. “I just think it’s unnecessarily dangerous.”
    The crowd roared as one of the human combatants stood over a bloody pulp of an opponent, his hands raised in victory. Two bodyguards entered the steel cage and escorted the man out. He could barely walk.  
    A group of cleaning droids dragged away the body of the loser and then dashed back inside to clean the blood and assorted fluids from the fighting arena.  
    Mach could see Beringer trying not to look at Gracious.  
    “Just drink,” Mach said. “Keep your eyes on the cage. Did you bring the stake money?”
    Beringer tapped his wrist-mounted smart-screen. “Twenty thousand eros. It’s everything I have. If anything goes wrong, this will ruin me. You understand that, right?”
    “Sure, but the thing is, it’s not just my fee you’re covering, you’re also getting one helluva favor from Adira, and she will insist on collecting the favor at some point.”
    “I know this too,” Beringer said, resignation drawing his words out with a sigh. “I have no other option. I can’t go through official channels; they’d just lock the artifact away, hiding the truth. And no other freelancer has the skill or a ship like yours.”
    Mach checked the time on the large display above the cage. They still had another ten Standard Salus minutes to go before Adira’s headlining fight. Her opponent hadn’t yet been announced.  
    That, however, shouldn’t be a problem. Adira was out in the back room preparing with her usual deathly still meditation. Mach had offered to sit with her, but she gave him the eyes. And one does not simply defy the eyes.  
    “Tell me more about this discovery,” Mach said, to waste some time and hopefully ease Beringer’s nerves. “Why’s it so important to you? I mean, I get that it’s rare and can blah blah something about our perceptions, but why you? Why do you have to be the one?”
    Beringer finally swallowed the rest of his drink and leaned forward so that the small electronic candle in the middle of their table lit him from beneath like some shady effect from humanity’s old twentieth-century films.
    “I was just eight years old,” Beringer said, “forty years ago when my parents took me off Earth and to Fides Prime during the exodus. It was all so exciting for me then; I didn’t truly understand what was going on with the Century War. Earth was changing on a daily basis, Dad got killed, and then the next minute I know, I’m on a new type of starship, making my very first L-jump to the Fides system.”
    “Probably better for you that you were young,” Mach said. “What about your mother? What happened to her?”
    “Cancer,”