A Fistful of Trouble (Outlaws of the Galaxy Book 2) Paul Tomlinson (reading strategies book .TXT) 📖

“How do you figure that?” I asked.

“Last night I got a report from someone who said they saw a spaceship fly low over the fields and come down somewhere near here,” the sheriff said. “I don’t normally go out and investigate reports of lights in the sky, but this one was from someone I trust.”

“There was a ship?”

“Yep. Sitting in the desert about ten miles east of here. I didn’t recognise the people working on it, but it looked like they were getting ready to lift off again soon.”

“You think it’s the Colonel’s ship?”

“I don’t know anyone else hereabouts that could afford one. I thought at first he was going to use it to step up his campaign against the town and the local farmers. But after what you just said, I reckon the plan is to go and collect those incoming robots.”

I got up and paced around the sheriff’s office. This changed the nature of my mission. Before it was to go up there and watch, see if it really was the robots coming in on that first ship. But now I was more or less certain that it was. I should have called Agent Rodriguez and told her – but what good would it have done? She couldn’t make the Interceptor get here any sooner.

She had told me not to engage the robot smugglers directly. That gave me a little wiggle room. I needed to come up with an indirect intervention that would stop the Colonel getting his hands on the robots – or would at least slow things down until the ACID Interceptor arrived in orbit.

I explained this change in our situation to Harmony as we loaded our stuff into the Trekker. It didn’t seem to bother her. I think she had been secretly hoping that we were heading for some sort of fight.

*

I stopped the Trekker and got out to take a swazz. Of course, I took the keys with me. We’d been travelling for about three hours at this point. I shouldn’t have ordered the large soda with my lunch. When I came back, Harmony was sitting behind the wheel. I thought about reaching in and dragging her out by her hair. But I was afraid I might get hurt.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“We need to get to the spaceport before that ship lands.”

“I know that.”

“The way you’re driving, we won’t get there until we’re too old to remember why we came.”

“I was just trying to get us there in one piece.”

“You move at the same speed as my great aunt Edna, and she doesn’t drive, she walks with a frame.”

“That’s ridiculous, I...”

“Navigation computer backs me up,” she insisted. “At our present rate, we’ll reach our destination two days after Yuletide.”

“It’s July.”

“Computers don’t lie.”

“You think you can do better? Over this terrain?”

“I’d put money on it,” she said.

I tossed her the keys. “But if you cause any more damage to my car,” I said, “you’re paying for the repairs.”

“I didn’t damage it while it was in my care,” she said.

“There’s two scratches on the rear bumper that weren’t there before.”

“You just did that at the truck stop. You reversed into a corndog stand.”

“There was no corndog stand,” I said.

“There isn’t now.”

“Would you just drive. You’re wasting time.”

“I’ll soon make it up.”

She smashed her foot down on the ‘go’ pedal before I’d closed my door fully. My forehead smacked into the doorframe.

“You might want to wear your seatbelt,” she said.

I might want a change of underwear, I thought as the Trekker left the ground for a second time and bounced down so hard the suspension cried out for mercy.

Chapter Twenty-Two

The spaceport handled mostly freight and was in the middle of the middle of nowhere. Nobody wants ships landing and taking off at the bottom of their garden, I guess. It was close to a point where two of the continent’s highways intersected, meaning that road access to all points of the compass was good. Road traffic in and out was mainly trucks and other commercial vehicles. Most of the craft that landed here never left the planet’s atmosphere. There were maybe half-a-dozen arrivals from off-planet in a month.

Harmony had parked the Trekker on top of a hill a couple of miles from the site so we could get a good view of the layout of the place. Seeing a location for real often suggested possibilities that wouldn’t occur to you if you just looked at a 3D map on a screen. We were taking turns looking through high-power binoculars with digital assist.

There were three runways for aircraft – one long, two short, and four round landing areas for spaceships. Though one of these looked like it was now being used for storage. And what was being stored was mostly junk.

The doors to the on-site fire station were open and I could see a couple of ancient fire tenders inside. This not being a passenger hub, the safety regulations were less stringent. If your shipload of cargo caught fire here, a handful of firefighters would scramble and do what they could to put out the flames – but they wouldn’t risk their necks in the process.

Two big hangars provided onsite storage for a few smaller craft and there was a repair shop just beyond them. A fuel depot and an electricity sub-station sat at opposite ends of the site, presumably to minimise the risk of sparks igniting flammable fluids. Looking over all of this was the terminal building, an uninspiring boxy warehouse with a control tower tacked on the side.

“Looks like the sort of place hijackers bring spacecraft to,” Harmony said.

I could see why the Colonel had chosen it as the location for his meeting with the gunrunners. There was just enough activity to hide what they were doing. If they’d chosen a dead spot out in the desert, the arrival of two ships would have looked suspicious. And the sand plays havoc with your engines.

Security was basic. A barrier across the road