Read Warpath for Free Online

don’t detect any
signs of a bomb, or anything else that could take me out. I’m going
in with a support kit,” Ronin said.
    “I’m going with
you,” Joyboy said. “Triton can send a couple fighters to pilot
us, and I have emergency training.”
    “Since when?”
    “Finished the course
three weeks ago.”
    “Oh,” Ronin
replied, turning his craft so it faced the small landing bay running
alongside the lower half of the ship. “Time to get you some
experience. Follow my lead going in.”
    “Aye, aye, Sir,”
Joyboy said.
    As Ronin approached the
landing deck he immediately recognized that the racks containing
emergency escape craft were all empty. His Uriel fighter retracted
all but two of his thruster pods, reducing the ship’s profile so it
could fit in one of the narrow slots for landing craft, and Ronin
touched down. There was artificial gravity in the starliner, but he
activated his landing clamps anyway. Nothing about the situation felt
right.
    He climbed out of his
fighter, checking his sidearm before he reached behind the seat for
the rescue kit. It was a metal case he could carry using its handle
or easily affix to his back by touching it to his light armour. He
opted to wear the kit and drew his sidearm as he watched Joyboy touch
down with a thud. “Easy, this deck is so thin it may as well be
decorative.”
    “Funny, ship looks
really good from the outside,” Joyboy replied. He was out of his
cockpit and geared up in under a minute.
    “Sure,” Ronin
replied, “But these starliner companies cut corners wherever they
can. Why do you think we keep getting ghost ships arriving with
depleted oxygen supplies or bad heating systems? They still use
oxygen tanks and crappy scrubbers that only last about thirty trips,
but the emergency deceleration systems are in great shape, because
they couldn’t dock anywhere worth flying to otherwise.”
    “Yeah, I get it,
they’re death traps if you don’t maintain them constantly,”
Joyboy replied. “Paula goes on about it whenever a ghost ship
drifts near the system.”
    “Ah, right, sorry,”
Ronin said. “Didn’t mean to go on there.” They saw the first
corpse then, perfectly preserved in the vacuum of space in front of
the airlock leading to the ship’s interior. “Okay, we have a
high-powered plasma blast,” he said as the forensic suite in his
command and control unit analysed the body. “This one was killed
using a close range weapon.”
    “Nearly cut in half
with one shot,” Joyboy muttered. “Looks like he was trying to
stop whoever was leaving?”
    “Yeah, or whoever
launched all those pods,” Ronin said. “All right, we’re here to
rescue two people. We scan and record everything else, we don’t
have time to analyse the scene.”
    “Aye, Sir,” Joyboy
replied. “Lead the way.”
    Ronin plugged an
emergency power supply line from his backpack in to a jack at the
bottom of the airlock door and triggered it open. He wordlessly led
the way into the passenger area, where he and his wingman were
confronted by a scene Ronin knew Joyboy would revisit in his dreams.
The man was more trustworthy as a pilot and soldier by the day, but
he hadn’t truly seen anything like what was in front of them. Ronin
had seen worse, but not by much.
    The desperate
expressions of the horror struck passengers were preserved by the
airless cold. “Someone evacuated the air here,” Joyboy said
sadly. “Was it the computer? Holocaust Virus got in from an old
inactive system somehow?”
    “No time to analyse
the scene, remember? Stick to the mission,” Ronin said, sure that
what he was seeing wasn’t the result of a computer virus.
    “Ronin, this is Oz.
Triton Fleet Command is watching. Our rescue team leader is staying
abreast of the situation and will be there in twelve minutes.”
    “This mission clock
is ticking slower. The rescue team was supposed to be here in two
minutes according to the first estimate your man gave me,” Ronin
said. “That puts