Star Viking (Extinction Wars Book 3) Read Online Free PDF

to question me. I cannot allow myself to be captured and give away Lokhar secrets. Instead, I will kill you any way I can.”
    I stared into his eyes. He seemed to mean what he said.
    “Listen, Sant,” I said. “You don’t realize—”
    He pulled the trigger seven times, sending seven poisoned slivers into my stomach.
    I stared at him. Then, I collapsed onto my knees.
    He tucked the needler within his robes. Then he shoved his broken wrist there as well.
    I sucked air into my constricted throat. “You shot me,” I wheezed.
    “I killed you, Commander Creed.”
    “No,” I said.
    “Are you daft? Look at you.”
    “Don’t you realize I still have medical monitors in me?”
    Sant frowned. Maybe he didn’t understand.
    Intense dizziness struck me. The chamber seemed to spin. Then the door slid open and several assault troopers rushed in.
    Sant managed to redraw the needler in time to shoot the first one. The rest reached him and bore him onto the floor.
    That’s when I fell unconscious for the second time in a little over a week. I couldn’t believe it.
     

-4-
    Sant’s poisoned slivers came closer to killing me than the damage I’d taken in Wyoming. I learned this in retrospect after several days with a one hundred and five degree temperature.
    I regained consciousness in Mars Base medical hooked to a Jelk machine we’d salvaged from the battlejumper. This time, it took more than the healing tank to save me.
    Lying there drowsily, I realized I’d gotten too cocky. I should have been ready for something like that, kept a weapon in my chamber. Sant had surprised me with his force blade and then the needler.
    Where others go unarmed, there it is wise to go armed .
    It was an old proverb, one well worth remembering. Sant’s attack also hammered home the truth of a surprise attack. The Shi-Feng had used tactical surprise as well. Since prehistoric times, it had been a force multiplier, and it would continue to be so in the future. Next time, it needed to be on my side.
    I ached all over. My eyelids felt gritty every time I blinked. I thought about getting up anyway. Instead, I drifted back to sleep.
    The next day I couldn’t keep anything down. The fever returned, this time only reaching one hundred and thee.
    I drank liquids and spewed them back up onto my hospital gown. A nurse put a green solution into the tube sticking in my arm.
    I slept more. By now, it seemed as if I’d done it forever. The fever broke and then came back at one hundred and six. I had a terrible dream of Abaddon and his Kargs. The reality of it startled me.
    I drifted in the void in a spacesuit. Far away in the distance, I saw a stellar snowflake. Stars shined behind it. That didn’t make much sense, even in my dream. Then I realized that was no snowflake. It was a giant Karg vessel. We’d faced far too many just like these in hyperspace.
    I moved toward the snowflakes, and I realized more were coming. Dread filled me at the thought. The giant Karg ships weren’t in hyperspace but regular space. I began counting them, soon reaching fifteen.
    Then I saw Jelk battlejumpers, one hundred of them, at least. They moved in a cone formation, with the endpoint farthest away from the Kargs. The open part of the cone faced the giant snowflakes. In front of the cone-formation at a precise distance was a gauzy substance like a titanic lens. It was most odd.
    All at once, the Jelk battlejumpers in the cone fired their lasers at the gauzy substance. The rays filled the lens with bubbling light. Suddenly, a gigantic coherent ray beamed from the other side of the lens. It was then I saw smaller Jelk vessels at the edges of the lens. Did the ships do something to focus the massive beam? I suspected yes. In any case, the giant ray reached out and struck a Karg snowflake-vessel.
    The beam disintegrated the alien structure, melting what turned out to be individual Karg moth-ships attached to the gargantuan mother ship.
    The Jelk lens ray snapped off. The