Star Risk - 01 Star Risk, Ltd Read Online Free PDF Page B

ship to reach the plant looking innocent, disguising himself in a miner's suit, even providing himself with false ID.
    None of which was necessary. Transkootenay's security was nonexistent.
    He decided they were, in the old phrase, too dumb to live.
    That made him grin.
    The way things were going out here, they wouldn't for very much longer.
    Tough for them.
    The man took a small box from his belt, went into the small operating room.
    He positioned the box over a large, red switch, and turned the timer on.
    Being a careful sort, he took out a plas sheet, and, even though he'd memorized his instructions, went through the checklist as he brought the processing plant up to ready state.
    Then he started the timer, went out of the room, and the plant.
    There was a watchman at the entrance to the field, snoring in his booth. But there were no fences around the prefab building, nor around the two barracks, one hundred meters distant.
    The man threaded his way to his stolen ship, boarded, and lifted away on antigravs. One hundred meters clear of the rocky field, he went to secondary drive, watching the planetoid dwindle in his screen.
    Forty-five minutes later, the timer clicked to zero, and the processor hummed into life.
    The watchman woke with a jerk, feeling the vibration in his hut.
    He sealed his suit, and cycled the hut's lock, awkwardly loading his blaster, as the processing plant fed the "boulder" into the crusher, which sized the rock, and hammers came down to break the boulder into chunks.
    The first crash was buried under the slam of the explosives in the boulder, as they, fused with a pressure-sensitive device, went off.
    The explosion could be seen fifty kilometers in space, as the processing plant fused, melted, tore itself apart.
    The watchman, surprisingly, had been alert enough to go flat when the plant blew up, and survived, although he had nothing at all to report to Transkootenay system officials when they arrived from Sheol half a ship-day later.
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    SIX � ^ � Former Alliance Army Captain Chas Goodnight slid easily from his hiding place, stretched, looked around the museum.
    He could piss better security than it had, he thought.
    Goodnight was tall, almost two hundred centimeters, slender. He had sandy hair, a square jaw, an honest face, and an easy smile. One of his lawyers had, fairly correctly, said that Goodnight was a textbook example of a sociopath.
    He wore expensive civilian clothing that just happened to be dark hued, shoes that just happened to have soft soles.
    Nobody'd seen him, just at closing, duck into the convenient exhibit of a mock spaceship lock, past the half a dozen bewildered-looking men, women, and children, wearing tattered shipsuits. The exhibit was labeled man's first arrival on tormal.
    Since the colonists weren't crouched behind crew-served weapons, or waving hand-helds, he figured it was a phony.
    Anyone this na�� or innocent� didn't deserve to have that lovely case marked our first family's GEMS.
    Especially since the jewels appeared to be most real.
    Nobody did that.
    Not anymore.
    You sent your crown jewels to Earth or another techno world, had copies made, and stuck the originals in a vault somewhere.
    Or, if you thought like Goodnight, you quietly sold them to Tiffany's and pocketed the profits.
    It was quiet, dark, and deserted.
    And time to go to work.
    Goodnight pressed a slight bulge at the angle of his right jaw, and transitioned.
    His reflex time went up by three hundred percent, his eyesight expanded into the infrared, his hearing became more sensitive than any feline's, and the radar antenna implanted behind the skin of his forehead came alive.
    He scanned the big exhibit hall.
    Nothing and no one.
    Good. He turned his sensors off.
    He had about another nineteen minutes left on his battery charge.
    Goodnight shouldered a small daypack, moved forward, walking toe-and-heel, as he'd been