Dark Space: The Invisible War Read Online Free PDF Page B

outlaws like him. Ethan had been a smuggler, too, but he was different. He was an outlaw because of what he did for a living, not because of who he was as a person. As for the man sitting beside her, Destra was pretty sure smuggling wasn’t the only criminal thing he’d ever done.
    “Just Doc and Petra.”
    “And they won’t mind us staying with them?”
    “Well . . . supplies are short, like I said, but don’t worry.” He shot her a small smile and his eyes twinkled with amusement. “I’ll convince them.”
    Destra frowned. She wasn’t convinced that this was a good idea at all, but it wasn’t as though they had a lot of options. At least she had some idea of how to handle outlaws, thanks to her early days with Ethan when they’d been making runs together. “All right,” she said. “But if we’re not welcome there, I’m taking Lessie and Dean and we’ll leave you lab rats to bake your brains with stims.”
    Digger snorted. “Sure thing, girlie.”
    Destra drove on for hours, listening with still-ringing ears as Digger railed against the world and how unfair it had been to him, until eventually the trees began to lighten with the first strokes of dawn. Destra wondered how much time had passed, and the answer flashed up before her eyes, fed to her brain directly from the small implant behind her right ear: 0750. Little more than an hour had passed since she’d seen her son off at the landing platform, but it felt like it had been much longer. By now the planet would be crawling with Sythians. They needed to get into hiding— soon .
    Destra snapped off the light amplification HUD overlay and found that now her eyes were just keen enough to see in the growing light. The cliffs running beside them had disappeared, and now trees rose to both sides, forming a leafy green corridor. Destra cut a quick glance to the nav and saw that it wasn’t more than another fifteen klicks to the point Digger had specified on the map. She looked up to see in her rearview screen that Lessie and Dean had fallen asleep in the back of the hover. Seeing the boy’s face finally relaxed in sleep, she was reminded of her own son, by now light years away from her, and she looked away quickly.
    “We’re gettin’ close,” Digger said, leaning forward to study the nav.
    Destra glanced his way, watching him pan and zoom the map with shaking hands. “You okay there, Digger?”
    “Yea, why?”
    “Your hands are shaking.”
    He sent her a quick smile. “Must be the adrenaline.”
    “Hmmm, right,” Destra replied. “Must be.” That or you’re getting a little edgy between doses of stim.
    Destra wasn’t sure why she was so mistrustful of this man. Perhaps it was the idea of an outlaw allowing them to hide with him and share limited supplies. In her experience, her husband notwithstanding, outlaws had a highly evolved me-first attitude. The less selfish ones were usually dead, or toiling away on a prison world in Dark Space, because they’d falsely expected their self-sacrificing attitude to be reciprocated by their associates.
    As the distance to Digger’s stim lab narrowed, Destra began to chew her lower lip. She wasn’t worried about being able to take care of herself—Ethan had taught her well—she was worried about the woman and her son sitting in the back of the hover, and whether or not she could protect them, too. Outlaws could be the exception to all the rules—like Ethan—or they could be the stereotypes which defined those rules, and it was a coin’s toss to know which. Based on her first impression of Digger, Destra’s bet was on the stereotypes, but she decided to reserve judgment.
    They came to a point on the road which lay parallel to the one which Digger had marked on the map, and Destra brought the transport to a slow stop. “What now?” she asked, scanning the immediate area.
    Digger nodded out his window to the trees. “In there.”
    Destra peered into the forest, noting that the trees were too close