Milk Run (Smuggler's Tales From The Golden Age Of The Solar Clipper Book 1) Read Online Free PDF

back into the couch and bit her lip. “Now what?”
    “Now we relax and enjoy the ride. Coffee?”
    Zoya stifled a yawn and shrugged. “It’s that or a nap. I’ve been up way too long.”
    “Why don’t you go stretch out and get some sleep?”
    “You sure? You’ve been up as long as I have.”
    Natalya snickered. “I’m still buzzing. Something about being shot at makes me a little hyper. Lemme take the first watch, and you get some sleep if you can. I’ve got a lot to keep me busy.”
    Zoya rolled out of her couch and shuffled off the bridge. “Holler if you need me.”
    Natalya decided she wanted the coffee even if Zoya hadn’t. She released her belts and stood for the first time in what felt like days. A glance at the chrono on the bulkhead told her that it had barely been four stans since they’d left Newmar with TIC interceptors shooting up their kicker nozzles. She shook out her arms and twisted her shoulders as she crossed the bridge to the compact galley.
    The aromatic coffee beans reminded her of all the times she’d worked on the ship with her father and she wondered what he was doing at that moment. It gave her a small pang of homesickness, knowing she couldn’t go home again. Of course, she’d always planned on moving out to Toe-Hold space after graduation. The current circumstances just pushed her timetable up a few days.
    She filled a mug with fresh coffee, snapped down the lid, and returned to her couch. A few clicks brought up the communications interfaces. She took a couple of ticks to link up the voice headset. Dark Knight traffic control would want to chat at some point.
    She sipped the hot coffee and stared at the slow blink-blink on the long-range scanner. With nothing else to do, her brain replayed the scene in Sifu Newmar’s kitchen—Purvis falling, the blood spreading across the floor, the coldness in her hands and face. She’d had trouble putting enough of her thoughts in order to speak, let alone defend herself.
    Why had Margaret Newmar been so certain TIC would blame her? She and Purvis had a history but nothing that would add up to her killing him. Certainly not in the middle of the graduation party in a room where everybody knew she’d been alone with him.
    She inhaled the warm, dark aroma of coffee and sipped again.
    Why then? And why Zoya? She hadn’t even been in the room at the time. The only connection Zoya had was being Natalya’s roommate for her entire time at the academy. Natalya smiled at the thought that she couldn’t have been all that easy to live with. Most of their classmates had played musical roommates over the four stanyers. Some even played musical bunks, but Zoya hadn’t seemed interested in any of it. Neither of them had enough spare time to get involved sexually or romantically with any of the other cadets. They’d been well matched for their drives toward graduation. With nearly identical grade point averages and widely disparate backgrounds, they made a good team.
    Natalya assumed they had widely disparate backgrounds. Zoya never said much about her family, other than they were back in Dunsany Roads somewhere. Natalya had to admit to herself that she hadn’t talked much about her own history either. Forays into Toe-Hold space with her father didn’t make suitable conversation for polite company. Particularly when that company had any relationship with CPJCT.
    So why was TIC trying to kill them? She leaned forward in her couch and tapped a few keys to replay the log of their encounter with the TIC interceptors. She routed the navigation display to a window on her console and watched. For the longest time, nothing appeared, then the ship jumped to the edge of the system.
    Natalya froze the replay and enlarged the window. She added the time stamp and a text readout window beside the navigational display. As she triggered the replay, she leaned forward to watch the actions scroll up the screen. Her commands to change the ship’s speed and heading