Escape Read Online Free PDF Page A

again.
    Kieran frowned into the depthless, rainbow-colored swirl of the TLS wormhole. In a few seconds it would greedily swallow his flitter and accelerate him through interdimensional space — a maddening rush of flashing light and color which always gave him a headache to look at. Routine. Just another part of his day. Nothing to frown about. He was frowning because thinking about his father's untimely death always brought a rush of impotent fury boiling to the surface. Made even worse now by knowing that his father's death had come mere days or weeks before he would have struck it rich with the uncharted belt. Their lives could have been so much different. He could have gone to the Academy like Reddick. His father could have retired. Instead, his father's flitter had mysteriously exploded on the way to work. The hull was riddled with stress fractures, the FMG investigators said. Poor maintenance, the news reporters said. Another keficking injustice for the universe to laugh at, Kieran thought.
    Kieran watched as his ship drew closer to the wormhole. Tendrils of multicolored light appeared to be arcing and flicking out toward his ship, like a rainbow on fire. His navcomp began an audible countdown: three, two, one —
    With a blinding flash, the Fat Chance disappeared into trilinear space, leaving a spreading ripple fading across the surface of the swirling wormhole to mark its passage.
     
    * * *
     
    “Docking sequence initiated,” a robotic voice announced. Kieran immediately lost control of his flitter as Outpost 110 took remote control of his vessel. In order to avoid traffic accidents and terrorism, all stations maintain a no-manual-flight zone, the size of which depending on the value of the station and potential threat of attack. In this case Kieran had been forced to stop a quarter of an astrom — 250 milé-astroms from Outpost 110. A modest drone zone (as pilots like to call it). At that distance, even an interceptor with a maximum acceleration of 450 µA/s 2 (micró-astroms per second per second) would take half a minute to close to effective firing range, giving the station time to raise its shields.
    Kieran watched the red-tinted, metallic gray outpost slowly swelling against the breathless infinity of stars as flight control guided him in. Parts of the station were shadowed by its own bird’s nest of connecting corridors and modules, since the nearest sun, a red giant, was providing directional lighting from slightly above and behind. In the shadowed areas, Kieran could see the muted yellow glow of the station's viewports.
    Like all other stations of modular construction, Outpost 110 was one cylindrical, spherical, or boxy module after another, each one connected to another, and to another, and to another by skinny corridors, which jutted from the modules at consistent right angles. The structure looked haphazard, like a child had been left to play with a chemistry professor's models of atoms. It was flimsy construction, but cheap. Kieran didn't like to think what would happen if a crazed drilling platform pilot plowed his rig into that maze of toothpicks.
    Hence the drone zone.
    Kieran had given flight control his preference to land on the extreme port side of the station, where the claims department had its offices. He wanted to get his claim into the system as quickly as possible. For some reason, his father had waited to file his own claim, and then had never had the chance to do so. Kieran wasn't going to make the same mistake. Unfortunately, it seemed that the nearest hangar with an empty berth was closer to the middle of the station than the far port side.
    Looks like I'm going to be getting some exercise on the company treadmill.
    The flitter didn't even stop in front of the hangar bay doors, the automatons working up in flight control having timed his approach and opening the doors with precision that only an AI could manage. The doors were opening, his flitter was approaching, and the gap looked