By Blood Alone Read Online Free PDF Page B

Food, water, and medical supplies-all were aboard his ship. The prospector ran for the lock.
    The next two hours were a race against time. As Jepp struggled to remove the things he needed, the nano took the vessel apart.

    The prospector wondered about the supplies at first, fearful that the microscopic robots would claim those too, but the machines showed no interest in anything beyond the Pelican herself.
    Logical, he supposed, lest the nano attack their own ship, and eat themselves out of house and home. That being the case, Jepp was able to secure a considerable amount of food, all the water he could find containers for, medical supplies, and, since there was no one to object, his flechette thrower.
    Once those materials were safely stowed the human turned his attention to a box full of emergency light wands, a portable generator that might be coaxed into life, and a reasonably powerful data comp. That’s when the lights went out. The nano, voracious creatures that they were, had burrowed into the emergency power stacks.
    Jepp played a beam over the wreck, cursed his captors, and backed away.
    There were dozens of nano streams by that time, all wending their way through the same portal and into the darkness beyond. Jepp followed the intertwining rivulets through the arch and down a funnel-shaped corridor. It narrowed alarmingly and barred his progress.
    The metal was like an enormous snake by then, a silvery pseudopod that pulsed as if invested with a life of its own. Jepp watched as his ship, and the drifter that might have put him in the black, were sucked into the funnel.
    Frustrated, angry, and more afraid than he would have cared to admit, the prospector returned to the hold and what remained of his vessel. “Okay, you win. So what now?”
    The scout ship heard inarticulate sounds and sensed movement deep within its belly. The sensation was easy to ignore. The vessel had fuel, a purpose, and the means to fulfill that purpose. What more could any living creature want?

3
    I drew these tides of men into my hands and wrote my will across the sky in the stars.
    T. E. Lawrence
Dedicatory verses to Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Standard year1935
     
     
    Planet Earth, the Confederacy of Sentient Beings
    The bar was located near the Los Angeles spaceport and catered to a wide variety of clientele. Smoke floated above the tables like neon clouds. There were patrons, plenty of them, including a group of cloned spacers, a pair of spindly Dwellers, something in a hab tank and some Naa legionnaires.
    Dancers, most of whom were human, writhed within specially designed holograms. The music, much of which was alien, throbbed within carefully engineered “sound cells.”
    Legion Colonel Leon Harco had been wearing uniforms for more than thirty years and felt uncomfortable when clad in anything else. Yes, there was some degree of correlation between civilian clothes and the status of the people who wore them, but you couldn’t be sure.
    Not uniforms, though. Thanks to badges of rank, service stripes, unit badges, decorations, and yes, the tattoos many chose to wear, a knowledgeable eye could read a legionnaire’s uniform like a book. A single glance was sufficient to establish another person’s place in the chain of command, ascertain the kind of skills they had, figure out where they had served, and guess who they might be acquainted with.
    Harco liked the surefire certainty of that, and felt uncomfortable, if not downright silly, wearing a floral shirt, black trousers, and buckled sandals.
    The two men who sat opposite Harco looked equally uncomfortable and sported poorly coordinated clothes, short haircuts, and tattoo-covered arms.
    Taken together, the soldiers had more than forty-five years of service between them, had been “demobilized” within the last six months, and weren’t too happy about it.
    Despite the cover offered by the bar, there was no such thing as a safe place to discuss mutiny, so they were intentionally