Read Hunt the Heavens: Book Two of the Shadow Warrior Trilogy for Free Online

wouldn’t do that. But I’d like you to come up with a plan for me.”
    “For
you
? Cormac, you’re a goddamned driver, not an op. You’re the guy who gets people like me in and out, remember?”
    Cormac stared at Wolfe. “Eleven years since I’ve seen her. And even before I got the letter I kept thinking about her, and feeling like a dickhead because I should’ve gone after her way back then, done something, but I didn’t. So this time I’m going to.
    “I’d already made up my mind before you showed up. When you did … I figured maybe I actually had a chance.”
    Wolfe took a deep breath. “Are there kids?”
    “No. She said that was one reason things went wrong.”
    “Do you have a way of contacting her?”
    “No.”
    “So you want me to come up with a way for you to get your butt down on Nepenthe, get to her, tell her your idea, hope to Hades she wasn’t having a momentary fit of pique at the old man, and then haul ass out with your lovely like you’re a harpless Orpheus, right?”
    Cormac nodded.
    “You realize you’re going to get killed pulling this stupid piece of knightly virtue, don’t you?”
    Cormac shrugged.
    Wolfe picked up the glass of Armagnac and drained it.
    • • •
    “You are not going to like this,” Wolfe said to Taen. “I’m not sure I do myself. But circumstances have altered our plans.”

CHAPTER THREE
    “This was a decision reached without logical consideration,” the Al’ar said. His neck hood was half flared.
    “No question about that,” Wolfe agreed.
    “I have more input on our dreams of insects,” Taen said. “I sense blue, I sense hazard, a danger that reaches beyond me, beyond you. That should be our immediate concern, not this person who may or may not desire to mate with your friend.”
    “Your data,” Wolfe said dryly, still in Terran, “was derived from cold, logical analysis.”
    “Certainly,” Taen said. “My brain has no other capabilities.”
    “But what my brain does is … never mind.”
    Taen’s hood slowly subsided. He stared long at Wolfe.
    “Do you remember our first meeting?” he said, returning to Al’ar. “You were being tested by some Al’ar hatchlings until my presence interceded.”
    “We’ll forget that I had just busted one clown’s ribs for being so interested in tests. Go ahead.”
    “You called them cowards at the time, which there is no word for in Al’ar, because they had the sense to attack you in a group rather than singly. I did not understand the term then and am not sure I understand it now.
    “But let me tell you of another occurrence I witnessed. During the war, after my special unit was dissolved and I’d been ordered to abandon my hunt for you, I was on the command deck of one of our ships, the kind we called a Large Ship Killer. We trapped two Federation probes and disabled one’s drive unit with a long-lance striker. The second ship would have been able to escape, most likely, while we delayed to destroy the first.
    “Instead, it reset its pattern and came back almost certainly in an attempt to rescue those who were aboard the first, which any rational analysis would have determined was futile, since they were doomed. The result was we destroyed both ships and their crews.”
    “Humans do stupid things like that,” Wolfe said.
    “Is the thought process, or rather emotional pattern, because there is no way it can be of rational derivation, which occurred to the captain of that second ship similar in any way to why you wish to aid Cormac?”
    “Possibly.”
    “Could this sort of thinking, which no Al’ar could ever comprehend, have anything to do with the fact you were defeating my people before we chose to avoid destruction and make The Crossing?”
    “Probably not,” Wolfe said. “We were just lucky.” He got up from his chair. “Come on, little horse. We have miles to go before we sleep.”
    “I doubt if I shall ever understand.”
    “That makes two of us.”
    • • •
    Wolfe knelt