Empire of Dust - Softcover

Chapter One

FLIGHT

I’m dead if I don’t get out of here.

Cara Carlinni stared at the display on the public terminal. She gripped the edge of the console, feeling dizzy and sick. Too many cups of caff, not enough food.

Her fellow workers erupted from Devantec’s packing plant, one or two trying the other terminals in the bay just off the main walkway, and discovering, as she had when she first took the dead-end job, that this was the only functioning link.

She’d scooted out ahead of the crowd to grab it.

Good that she had. At least she was forewarned. What the hell was an Alphacorp ship doing here if not looking for something, or someone? What were the odds that someone was her?

She’d been barely one jump ahead of them on El Arish, and on Shalla colony she’d spotted wanted posters and moved on quickly, thankful that she’d ducked port immigration by hitching a flight with a smuggler.

She’d spoken to a man on Shalla who’d once been a low-grade Psi-Mech for the Rowan Corporation, and who was now living off the grid, with a new identity furnished by an organization that was definitely not the right side of legal. On his advice she’d come all the way out to Station Mirrimar-14 chasing rumors of a breakaway group of psi-techs, but she hadn’t found them. If they were here, they were well-hidden and well-shielded.

She swallowed bile and checked the screen again, focusing on the immediate problem—a light passenger transport—a ship design she recognized as an unmarked Alphacorp Scout. It threaded along the flight corridor toward the passenger terminal, past the heavy freighters lined up for docking in the space station’s commercial bays.

“Hey, Carlinni, you coming to Sam’s with the rest of us?” Jussaro, her packing line partner, broke his stride.

He was always friendly, but she kept her distance outside of working hours. A purple-black-skinned, genetically engineered exotic from the Hollands System, he’d once been a high-grade Telepath until being busted for some misdemeanor he wouldn’t admit to.

They’d killed his implant. He was alone and silent.

Permanently.

He was the thing she most dreaded becoming.