Read Return - Book III of the Five Worlds Trilogy for Free Online Page A

the sight of blue-white Pluto looming before his ship.
    Pluto! In all his days, Shatz Abel had never thought he’d see this ice ball again. Its cracked, ugly surface, the gaping rend of Christy Chasm into which he and King Shar had descended, the fuzzily lit blot of Tombaugh City toward which they descended—
    “Hold off on that landing for a bit,” Shatz Abel suddenly growled.
    Beside him, in the copilot’s seat, Andrew instantly obeyed, but sounded almost surprised.
    “Sir?”
    “Just do what I say. I want you to find a heat source for me. Very faint, but it’ll be there.”
    The attendant pilot answered, “Of course.”
    Shatz Abel activated a switch on the pilot’s panel before him; as so often happened, his thick finger hit the wrong button and a warning light went off; a moment later the cabin door behind him slid open.
    “Problems?” a gruff voice said, and the grizzled face of Yar Pent, lately liberated from one of the late Prime Minister Acron’s Earth prisons appeared; the fact that he had been, amazingly, justly accused of forgery, bribery, theft, robbery, and embezzlement had not stopped Shatz Abel for a moment from trusting him with his life.
    “Not a problem, just a thick finger,” Shatz Abel said, turning to look at the younger man, whose remarkable scar crossed his craggy face from forehead, across the nose, to deep under the right side of his chin. “How’s everything back there?”
    “Oh, just dicey. Just like old times, old man. A fight every minute and pickpockets galore.”
    Shatz Abel grinned, and turned to punch the right button this time. “Just keep a lid on ’em, Yar.”
    “That I’ll do,” Yar Pent said cheerily; in a moment the door slid closed behind him.
    “Let’s see if I can find …” Shatz Abel said tentatively, as a Mercator projection map of the surface of Pluto slid out before him, glowing lightly in blue and red. He traced his finger across the surface slowly, up and down, and stopped at a point.
    “Try there,” he said to Andrew, who leaned his chromed head over to look at the coordinates, then punched them into his own console.
    “Right away, sir.”
    “That’s the only way to do it, Andrew.”
    The ship, a sleek wedge originally built on Earth and finding service on Titan and Mars before being hijacked from a contingent of Martian Marines in the process of raiding Callisto, shot out of its holding pattern. Its aft engines whined red-hot, and soon they stood over the icy surface the pirate had indicated.
    “Can you get any closer?” Shatz Abel said, peering through the bottom porthole, which irised open at his command between the two pilots. There was nothing but blue ice visible, the hint of a snow squall.
    The view below drew closer, but still there was nothing.
    “Bring the ship down lower, Andrew,” Shatz Abel said.
    “I wouldn’t advise that, sir,” the pilot answered. “We’ll be violating local airspace and liable to low-level attack by local forces.”
    Shatz Abel laughed. “Just do what I say, robot.”
    “Of course, sir.”
    The ship descended sleekly, nose first, and stopped when Shatz Abel gave the signal.
    “I think I see something, now,” he mumbled. “Bring the view tighter if you can.”
    In the floor port, the view zoomed in, and there it was.
    “This is the only heat source within twenty kilometers,” Andrew announced. “There is a recently downed orbiter, its power sources depleting, exactly twenty point four—”
    “That’s enough, Andrew,” Shatz Abel said, studying the icy front of what had been his prison, barely visible in the side of its hill, a faint light visible in the frosted-over window.
    “Arm fore plasma charges,” Shatz Abel ordered.
    “Sir—?”
    “Just do what I say,” Shatz Abel said; and then, impatient with the robot’s hesitation, he reached over to arm them himself from the attendant’s control panel.
    “This is for you, Dalin—and me,” Shatz Abel said, firing the weapons, which