Sword of Minerva (The Guild Wars Book 10) Mark Wandrey (e novels to read .TXT) 📖

50 liters would allow a partial purge and give them more than enough range.

With only an hour left, he found F11 on a private computer listing. A few such listings for hard-to-find goods had been appearing and disappearing just as quickly. He’d set a bot to jump at the first one to appear, and this time the bot won. It was only a single 20-liter container, and they wanted 100,000 credits. Even for F11, that was an outrageous price. He offered cash and required delivery to his ship. The seller accepted.

The timing was working out perfectly. Sato was relatively certain the ship was space worthy. He’d run tests on the hull’s integrity and found it in surprisingly good shape, especially considering the slapdash appearance of the repairs. The reactors were functioning well, and simulations showed they would operate up to 95% of capacity, considerably better than the logs. Weapons were minimal, but he’d known that when he bought it. He hadn’t picked the ship for its guns; he’d picked it for its legs.

When the ship’s comms signaled a vehicle approaching their landing cradle, he tapped on Rick’s door. “F11 is here, come on down.”

“Be right there,” Rick said through the metallic door. Sato nodded and climbed down the ladder to the lower deck, where their boarding ramp was located. Since the vessel was a warship by design, it didn’t have a convenient cargo door. All stores had to be loaded from the personnel boarding ramp. It was a good thing it didn’t have missile tubes. Sato couldn’t imagine a crew trying to maneuver high explosives through the tight corners between decks.

Sato opened the door to the gangway and stepped out. The weather today was better. He wished it had been nicer the previous day so he wouldn’t have had to spend his time inspecting the hull in the rain. A small ground car was approaching. Of course, it wouldn’t take a truck to bring 20 liters of F11. He went to meet it.

The car stopped just inside the landing cradle when he was halfway there. The doors opened, and a tall Caucasian woman with long auburn hair tied back in a ponytail stepped out, as did a huge dark-skinned man. She smiled at him. “Hello again, Taiki.”

Sato stopped in his tracks, unable to decide on a course of action. “Adrianne,” he said.

“So you do remember my name. I was wondering.”

Sato slowly put a hand in his pocket for the little laser pistol stashed there.

“I wouldn’t do that,” the black man growled. He came around the end of the car. The pistol he held low wasn’t little, and he handled it like an extension of his arm.

Sato took a step backward, and Adrianne held up a hand. “Wait, I just want to talk.”

There was a high-pitched whine behind Sato and a woosh of air above him. “Lift that popgun and they’ll be finding parts of you for a year,” Rick warned the man.

“Where you find one, you find the other,” Adrianne said.

“Make the call, boss,” the man said.

“Stand down, Joey. We didn’t come here to test one war machine against another.” The man nodded and instantly returned the weapon to a shoulder holster under his jacket. “I’m not armed, Taiki.” She held up her hands. “I’m sure your Æsir friend can tell.”

Sato inclined his head to where Rick was hovering on his jets.

“I don’t detect enough metal for even a small knife, or power to run a laser. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t have some kind of weapon.”

“Surely you could handle me,” Adrianne said to Sato. “You want to strip search me?”

Sato felt his cheeks get hot. He shook his head and said, “No.”

“Why don’t your killer and mine stand just over there, neutral ground, while you and I talk?”

“I don’t know what I would have to say to you,” Sato said.

“How about if I offer you something for a few minutes of your time?” She glanced at the ship. “You want to be on your way, after all.” Adrianne walked to the rear of her car and opened the trunk. From inside she removed two COPVs, composite overwrapped pressure vessels, both with additional armor reinforcement. They both had the Union’s symbol for F11 on their sides.

Sato could clearly see the pressure gauges on the side reading full. The containers were standard in the Union, and of a clever design to avoid them being filled with anything except F11. The unusual isotope of fluorine was incredibly rare and valuable. A high incentive to forge such containers existed.

“I got you here offering 20 liters; this is 40. Surely it’s worth five minutes of your time?”

“Forget it, let’s get out of here,” Rick suggested.

<Anything funny about their car?> Sato commed.

<No, it’s a rental. Nobody hidden inside, and no explosives I can detect.>

<Then five minutes won’t hurt. F11 is hard to find anywhere. Go stand with that man, and I’ll see what she wants.>

<Be careful.> Rick maneuvered sideways and landed gracefully next to the big dark-skinned man. The two regarded each other from a meter apart.

For some reason, Sato wasn’t sure if the outcome would be guaranteed in a fight. “What do you want?” he asked her.

Adrianne walked closer, stopping less than a meter away. Her eyes scanned him carefully. “You look good,” she said.

“Thank you, but you’re wasting your five minutes.”

“Always the realist,” she said and gave him a wan smile. “What do you remember about me?”

“Your name, your face.” He shrugged. “I think maybe we worked together?”

“You could say that,” she said and shook her head. “Taiki, we met almost 60 years ago, when you were recruited into Section 51.”

“The secret Earth science and intel directive,” Sato said automatically, then blinked in confusion.

“Right,” she said. “Which is something only a few hundred people on this