Z14 Read Online Free Page B

with the city in between.
    The hills of the Manoogla Heights are covered in jagged rocks that look like someone put mountains there originally and then smashed them clean away with an enormous hammer, leaving nothing but splinters and snapped fragments jutting from the ground. My personal terraforming theory says that something odd happened with the terraforming software in this place, but your average Boram Bay resident just shrugs dismissively and says well, it’s an alien planet, ain’t it?
    The Heights are named after the indigenous Manoogla lizard, also known as the ‘Man Oggler’. Fascinating creatures about half the length of an alligator, they used to utterly infest their namesake region. Humanity’s arrival put an end to that because Manooglas are, by all accounts, delicious. That’s always going to spell trouble for any species, but the Manoogla’s decline can also be attributed to two behavioural traits, one of which is defensive and the other, just plain baffling: They’re nicknamed ‘Man Ogglers’ because they are inextricably drawn to humans. They appear from nowhere and just stare at them, utterly transfixed. Field tests have proved that they will stop and stare at a human until they die from starvation or dehydration. Couple that with their daft defensive trait of exploding when cornered or surprised and you can see how they’ve gained the more recent nickname of ‘The Lesser Spotted Manoogla’. Honestly, exploding ? Stupid lizards. The idea is that Manoogla ‘sentries’ are supposed to explode, killing the predator and sparing the colony, but it’s just bizarre, frankly.
    I’d been scouring the Heights now for three hours – on foot, conserving jetpack fuel – trying to find this fucking hidden laboratory. I had had so many of those idiotic, supposedly endangered, lizards explode on me, that most of my flesh was shredded and my shiny robotic skeleton was showing through in a number of places. I felt strangely naked. I was also getting frustrated; the human emotion partially eclipsing the stolid, slavish computer routine, that just repeatedly said search the area. Search the area . On the ‘net the contracts were piling up, I should just break off this search and go kill somebo –
    “Access. Granted. Warden. Cleared. For. Entry,” said a robotic voice from within a huge rock in front of me. The rock began to shimmer and waver and I heard a swishing noise, even as I caught a glimpse of a solid metal door sliding open, through the suddenly translucent “rock”. In the next split second the rock was gone and I was staring at an open entrance buried in what I presumed was the real rock around it. Neat trick, I thought. I could do with something like that for my own not-so-hidden cave.
    “Warden. On. His. Way. In. Please. Put. The. Kettle. On,” I mimicked, before bending my arms at the elbows and hobbling through the doorway in a stiff-jointed piss-take of old-fashioned movie robots.
    Okay, seems like I’m a Warden then, for sure. Cool. It might even turn out to be more appealing than being a toaster. I had a feeling – well, a logical hypothesis based on factual evidence gathered to date, but ‘feeling’ was snappier – that I was about to find out.

Chapter Six
     
    The laboratory wasn’t a laboratory at all. It was an actual, real-life spaceship. Okay, that shouldn’t have been anything to emulate excitement about, since every one of Deliverance’s founding settlements had a converted spaceship at its core, but this one was still actually a spaceship. I was standing on the bridge of what, from the size of it, looked like it was a small space shuttle. It was operational too, or at least, it had power. Several screens and readouts to the front of the bridge showed ‘spacey’ things, including star charts and an image of a slowly rotating, earth-like planet that just, you know, might have been Deliverance itself.
    The door tried to slide closed behind me, but I’d been