Assassination Game Read Online Free PDF Page A

she’d hung up in a huff.
    “A Deltan ,” he lamented with a moan.
    “Daydreaming again, Jimmy?”
    Kirk snapped up straight. He knew that voice. He knew that voice all too well. Before him stood Jake Finnegan, an upperclassman who’d tormented him from the day Kirk hadset foot on campus. He was bulky and silver-haired, with ruddy cheeks and a mean smile. Future redshirt material. He’d never known what he had done to draw his attention, although Kirk suspected he’d just happened to be the first plebe Finnegan had seen on that first day of school. From that point on, Kirk had been Jake Finnegan’s personal project.
    “Finnegan. What happened? You eat your handlers?”
    Finnegan pulled a spork from his pocket and twirled it between his fingers. “Yeah,” he said. “And now I’m ready for dessert.”
    A spork. The Assassination Game , Kirk realized with horror. Finnegan had pulled his badge from the black velvet bag? How unlucky was that?
    Kirk scanned the room. It was empty! There had been at least three other cadets in here working when he’d come in, but he’d been so focused on his own work, he hadn’t even noticed them leave.
    Finnegan smiled and took a step closer.
    Kirk stood quickly, knocking over the test tubes he’d been mixing chemicals in. Finnegan was around the lab bench in a heartbeat, bearing down on Kirk with the spork.
    “Hold it, Finnegan! Seriously! Stop!” Kirk cried, his eyes on the spilled chemicals.
    Finnegan paused, looking back and forth between Kirk and the lab bench. “What?”
    “Don’t … move,” Kirk said. He held himself rigid andstared wide-eyed at the lab bench. “Finnegan, do you have any idea what corbomite is?
    “No.”
    That didn’t surprise Kirk, as he’d just made it up.
    “It’s highly reactive,” Kirk explained. “Just the slightest bump, the smallest vibration, can set it off. It takes the energy of whatever hits it and returns it a thousandfold. A millionfold. And I just … accidentally … made some.”
    Finnegan looked like he didn’t want to believe Kirk, but he didn’t know enough to be sure. Kirk kept his eyes on the grayish blob, even though Finnegan was close enough now he could have reached out and touched Kirk with the spork if he’d wanted to. The fact that Kirk was ignoring him completely and focusing on the “corbomite” helped sell it.
    “Just this much could destroy everything within ten kilometers and leave a dead zone for four years,” Kirk told him.
    “What the hell are you doing making a bomb for?” Finnegan asked.
    “I told you. It was an accident . You come barging in here while I’m working with chemicals and—”
    The chemicals began to bubble and hiss.
    “Get out! Get out!” Kirk cried. He dropped to the floor, his hands over his head, and watched from under the table as Finnegan bolted from the room.
    Kirk stood quickly, swept the harmless mixture intothe sink, snatched up his PADD and his backpack, and ran for the door. He had to put as much distance as he could between him and Finnegan before the lunkhead realized there hadn’t been a boom.
    “A Deltan ,” Kirk muttered as he ran. “I could have been getting my mind blown by a Deltan….”

    “It’s a phoretic analyzer,” McCoy explained to Nadja as they walked along a trail in the Marin Headlands. A bright, glowing panorama of San Francisco at night was framed across the bay by the Golden Gate Bridge. “Dr. Huer developed it, and a few other cadets and I were invited to be a part of the laboratory trials. The idea is that it can take a complex mix of substances and identify individual molecules within it.”
    “A superscanner,” Nadja said.
    Nadja’s dog, a little cairn terrier, stopped to sniff a bush.
    “You could call it that. With a very specific medical use. Nothing like those scanners the Varkolak are supposed to have, of course. What I wouldn’t give to get my hands on one of those.”
    The conversation lulled, and McCoy realized he’d been