God's Bounty Hunter (Biddy Mackay Space Detective Book 1) T Olivant (free ebook reader for pc .txt) 📖

“Augment C.”

“It’s a good a name as any.  And as the Knights have barely any info on him, let’s look at what we do know.” Biddy pointed at another monitor. “Here’s all the details of his escape from Widdershins 3.”

“What was he doing there?”

“Good question.  Our plastic friend didn’t seem to want to tell us who put him in the prison.  But the Geek took a look at the records of the facility for me.  Or what passed for records.  People come and go in this place, but half of them don’t even have names.  It’s a scary place.  You turn up and disappear for a decade or two.”

“Who runs it?”

“Another unknown.  There’s a company name: UTU.  No idea what it stands for, the Widdershins 3 cloud system didn’t have any more than the name.  There’s links to the trade alliances, but nothing concrete.  I’m going to get the Geek to concentrate on this.  I reckon when we find out who imprisoned him we might get a good idea of why our Augment escaped.”

Kenzie stifled a yawn and Biddy realized how late it was. “Well, maybe that’s enough for now.  I’d like you to start doing some research in your downtime.”

“What kind of research?”

“I don’t know.  I’ll cover the main areas, but I’d like you to use your instincts.  Go for any off the wall theory you might come across.  All intel is good intel.  Especially in this case when we’re still wandering around in the fog.”

“Right.”

Biddy waited until Kenzie had left before turning back to the screens.  She could have given the girl a little more guidance, but she needed crew members that could think for themselves.  Kenzie was promising, but untested.  Well, this mission was certainly going to take care of that.

One week until they reached the Fuller system.  Long enough for her to read all the information that filled her screens but would it be long enough to make any sense of it?

Chapter 10

The Fuller system.  A miner’s dream.  Each planet rich in minerals and precious metals and totally devoid of life forms.  It had been one of the first discovered in the years following Fast Light.  And people had fought wars over it for a hundred years.  Lu Tang had even fought in a few of them.  The scars of those battles cratered the surface of the planets.  Not that that mattered any more.  Hell, it probably made it easier for the miners to dig if half the work had been done for them by a uranium bomb.

It was peaceful now, or so they said.  Each planet was run by a different gang, or government as they now liked to call themselves.  Well, Lu Tang had seen war and he’d seen peace, and he knew that for the people working in the dark hells of the mines that there was little difference between the two states.

“Which one, Sir?” The Navigator asked.  He looked nervous, as did the rest of the crew.  They had been on Riker: they knew what mining colonies were like.  Mining planets now, they were another matter.  An entire world given over to the pursuit of riches.

And yet... where there was humanity there was always something more than the pure pursuit of capital gain.  Miners had families, children to feed.  So on each planet a semblance of society had sprung up, school and houses and bars and brothels.  Everything a modern civilization needed to continue the putrid human race.

“Sir?”

“We’re going to the fourth planet from the second sun.  We’re going to Eritree.”

The men looked relieved.

“That’s an automated colony, isn’t it?” One of the engineers asked, a young girl with scars on her wrists.

“That’s right, the mines are automated.  But the planet still has a few people living there.  If you check the screen you’ll see a city at the Northern pole.  Head for there.”

“Yes, sir.”

The Augment felt a shiver of apprehension slide up his back.  If the crew of the ship thought that an automated mine would mean less exploitation then they were about to get a rude awakening.  The wealth of Eritree had attracted a newer, harder kind of criminal.  They may not be the gangs that run the other mines which chains and fists.  Instead, they wore the latest fashions and partook of the trendiest drugs, but underneath it all they were the worst kind of humans.  The ones that lived off the misery of others.

None of this had mattered one bit to Lu Tang at first.  Humans were always cruel to other humans.  If you tried to intervene you would go mad.  But then the professional criminals had come for the Augments.  Lu Tang could not stand for that.

But today was not the day for revenge.  He had a different mission.

“Coming into orbit of the planet,” the Navigator announced.  Lu Tang checked over the automated landing systems and was satisfied.  The ship might have been old, but the systems were solid enough.

“We’ll stay in orbit for now,” Lu Tang said, pressing the relevant buttons.  He put the ship in a holding orbit around the planet’s only city.

The city was once called New Moscov, but since Lu Tang had last been there it had lost the ‘New’.  Moscov had a population of just under a thousand.  Not many people were required to man the automated mines.

When Eritree was first colonized it looked like no one would ever need human miners again.  They had perfected the robotic workers so that all the problems that previous generations of machines had faced had been overcome.  But beyond that small grey planet everywhere else had gone back to humans for one simple reason.  They were cheap.

And expendable.  And, through a process that Augments had abandoned long ago, self-replicating.  To design that sort of AI had always been a complex and expensive