Starship Conquistador (Conquest of Stars Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page B

frontier?” This he was genuinely
curious about.
        “We are cataloging asteroids,” the
woman replied, “It’s been less than a century since the Army opened up this
planet for civilian and commercial settlement. Hundreds of thousands of
asteroids still need to be entered in the Imperial Space Database.”
        “Good work,” Magyar said. The empire’s
bureaucrats were fanatic about cataloging every damn object in space. He was
glad he himself couldn’t be found in any database in the entire galaxy but that
had taken some work. Time to go to work.
        Magyar yanked out his laser pistol and
shot the man and woman dead with one laser bolt each. He felt a slight remorse
about killing unlucky bystanders; he was a professional hitman after all, not a
psychotic murderer. And if he had time to plan it out, he would have chosen to
use trick or deception to get his hands on an observatory. But time was short
and the money was large. His crimes were too many that two more did not make a
huge difference to him.
        He dragged the bodies to the corner,
took out some metallic components from his bag and went to work assembling them
into a large laser gun.
         It took him about half an hour to put
his gun together and then he mounted it on a bipod and placed the bipod on the
top of the large telescope tube. He looked through the sight of his scope and
wiped off any dust or particles on its lens with his gloved finger. Next, he
pushed a switch on a small panel attached to the telescope to make the roof of
the observatory slide off over the side walls. The sky was black and filled
with stars that twinkled brightly.
        “Let’s see what you were looking at,”
Magyar sat down on the seat behind the telescope and looked through the eyepiece.
He saw a large asteroid in his view that seemed hazy. He slowly turned the
focuser knob back and forth till the image became crystal sharp. He turned on
the laser sight of the telescope but it went out of the view.
        “Hmmm…” he muttered.
        For a moment he thought that he should
have let the woman finish calibrating the telescope fully but he had no idea
how long that would have taken her. He took up the task of calibrating the
telescope upon himself and was satisfied when the laser sight was in his view
and a green dot was visible on the asteroid. He did not need to get it exactly
in center sight and that would have taken too long.
        He looked up from the eyepiece and then
looked through his laser gun’s scope. The asteroid was too far away to be seen
even through the scope but that is why he had this telescope. He took out an
‘alignment robot’ from his bag and attached it to the telescope tube. The robot
spread two ‘wings’ in each direction to measure the diameter of the telescope
and then automatically adjusted itself to the spot that was the exact center of
the telescope tube. It was precise to less than a nanometer. He had customized
the robot by drilling out a spot in its center that was a few nanometers larger
than the diameter of his laser gun. He took off the gun from the bipod and
shoved the barrel in the hole in the center of the robot and pressed a button
to lock it in place. Now his laser gun barrel was exactly in the center of the
telescope.
        At least that was the theory, now he
had to test it out.
        He looked through the eyepiece and
reached out to the laser gun above with his finger and pulled the trigger. A
laser shot out and took off a chunk from the asteroid leaving behind some dust.
It was in the opposite corner from the green dot of the telescope’s laser
sight.
        He would have needed far more precise
instruments and a lot more time to get it exactly on the dot. But this would
do.
        He set his laser gun to continuous fire
but switched to ‘low energy’ to prevent his battery from draining. He pulled
the trigger again while watching through the eyepiece. He flicked on a switch
on