The Lost Voyager: A Space Opera Novel Read Online Free

lithe fingers across it with elegant movements. Lassea, a young pilot of twenty, leaned closer to her older colleague, and one she looked up to—but then it was more out of fear of her reputation than a respect for her skills, not that they were regarded as anything less than incredible—and deadly.  
    “Huh,” Lassea said, reading the search results from Adira’s smart-screen. “A dead mining operation, two dwarf planets, no signs of life or activity for over ten standard years… what’s that got to do with this shiny trinket?”
    “That trinket, my dear girl, Babcock said, “is a security token for the NMO—Noven Mining Organization—main facility. Each token holds a terabyte of security protocols. Each member of the corporation carried one for both visual and computational inspection.”
    “Seems medieval,” Adira said. “Why not just use remote biometrics like the rest of the Salus Sphere’s organizations?”
    “You have no sense of romance,” Ernesto Sanchez, the hunter, said as he entered the mess hall, striding with those long legs of his. “Each token is made from a pure sample of whatever the facility is designed to mine. They were reminders of all the hardship the workers went through, as well as a status and security symbol.”
    His rounded shoulders hunched over a wide, bulky torso. His leather jerkin looked as worn as his weather-beaten face. A threaded necklace of varied animals’ teeth around his neck swayed and clinked with each step. The big man nodded at each of the crew, except the vestan engineer, who stood in the shadows of the kitchen to the rear of the mess.  
    Tulula and Sanchez looked as if they had had an argument, Mach thought, watching the two of them. The female vestan refused to return Sanchez’s nod of greeting. The alien woman hadn’t had much trouble integrating with the crew since Mach picked her up on a previous mission, but over the last few days he had noticed her becoming more withdrawn, spending most of her time in her private berth or here, in the kitchen, cooking up only God knows what.  
    “I think it’s pretty,” Lassea said, holding it by the edges with the tips of her fingers and angling it so a rainbow of colors glimmered beneath the lights. “But what do we have it for?” She looked up at Mach with the same look of innocence she had kept since the very first day she and her brother, now no longer a member of the crew, had met Mach.  
    Mach thought back to that time briefly and smiled as he remembered how green she was, how naïve. But now, after a few months with the Bleach crew, she had toughened up into a highly capable pilot, despite her apparent innocence.  
    “It’s payment of sorts,” Mach said. “A kind of deposit on our services. It represents our next job and the future security of this ship and its crew—as long as we’re successful.”
    Babcock and Squid Two stepped closer to Mach’s right. Sanchez was on his left, and even Tulula, with her strange shiny black alien features, leaned forward out of the serving hatch of the mess kitchen. Adira, cool as ever, just rested back in her chair, stifling a yawn.  
    She only ever seemed to come alive when her, or one of the crew’s, life was at risk. One of the many reasons Mach liked her: she was dependable when it mattered, and usually when it didn’t either.  
    “So what are we doing?” Sanchez said.  
    “Well, there’s a mining exploration craft that’s gone missing. OreCorp sent it out to destroy some corporate data and carry out another little job.”
    “No communications from the explorer?” Lassea asked.  
    Mach shook his head. “The ship, named Voyager , last communicated with OreCorp headquarters a day away from the Noven system. After that there was nothing. Not even a distress beacon.”
    “Could have been taken out by pirates,” Adira said. “The Noven system is in deep space outside of the Salus Sphere’s CW protection force.”
    “It’s a possibility,”