The Belter's Story (BRIGAND) Read Online Free PDF Page A

spot the tiny diggers, and there were many, clustered underneath his torso, doing what they were made for — digging.
    I knew I couldn't get to them physically. And even if I could, I wasn't a surgeon. There was no way to pluck them out of Rox's body.
    But maybe I could drain them — the way my companions drew from me.
    Jase, help me. We have to stop these things, but I don't know how. I reached back and tugged on Su’s compartment and the feeding wire sprung free. I sliced a small hole along the forearm of my suit and allowed Su to take over guiding the wire into my vein. Then I probed into one of the blood-slicked gaps in Rox’s knee joint and jabbed the wire into him.
    He didn’t even react.
    Connected to him now, through blood and tissue and energy, I narrowed my attention to one of the little eddies in the colors that swirled around Rox. Imagining a cup of cool water at my lips, I sipped… and then I felt it. A tiny rush seemed to flow into me and suddenly I felt more… alive.
    Like so many things, it was hard until it was easy. Once I knew what it felt like, the act was almost instinctive. One by one, I found the diggers inside Rox's suit and pulled the life from them. In less than a minute, they were gone.
    But the damage was already done. Rox's body had been penetrated in who knows how many places, which meant internal bleeding. He was still dying. And then it came to me. If I could pull, maybe I could push.
    I focused again. This time on Rox. His life force glimmered with an orange hue that varied in intensity over his injuries, as if his body was struggling to keep his glow from sifting out of his flesh.
     I knew this would cost me, but I was out of time and ideas. I bore down, trying to focus my attention on my own glow. I pressed hard, imagining a powerful cataract jetting between us. Almost instantly, I could feel the sensations of feeding, but more intense. For a moment panic froze my diaphragm and halted my breath. Fatigue swept over me in a fierce wave, swamping my awareness to within a whisper of blackout. But it worked.
    Feebly at first, then with increasing urgency, Rox struggled to sit upright. "Bitch!" he grated. I halted the flow from my glow into his as I strained against the vertigo that spun the cavern around me.
    "You're okay, Rox. But we need to get out of here," I croaked as I yanked the feeding wire free and let Su reel it into her housing.
    There was a pressure building at the fringes of my mind. It loomed like the mass of Kuyper comet hurtling in silence toward the Inner. Something was happening. A decision had been made.
    The mountainous expanse of europine spheres before us surged and then spilled away, revealing a phalanx of the most massive diggers we'd ever seen. They moved with slow deliberation. Advancing toward us with obvious hostility. For a tiny moment, I felt the voice of Jase/Su/Other, halting, thin, as if it was being crushed under the weight of something huge beyond comprehension. Something as big as the world.
    Destroy…
    I didn't know if Rox heard it too, and I didn’t stop to ask. It didn't matter. He just acted the way any soldier might act when cornered by the enemy.
    He fought.
    Rox reached up to a device affixed to the outside of his suit. He flipped open a safety cover and pressed the button underneath. The little orbs we'd placed around the entrance to the cavern detonated. A white hot flash blotted everything and my hypersensitive perception was completely overcome. I was blind and deaf. Incapacitated. And, in my head, I could hear an inarticulate howl of agony as if a billion lives were snuffed in an instant.
    The war with Europa had begun.

CHAPTER SIX
    "What did you do?" Rox stared at me from the float-bed, dark brows pulled inward and down into what seemed to be his favorite expression. Our infirmary had a single autodoc and supplies were limited. The medics had only patched up the worst of Rox's injuries. He'd spend weeks recovering the old fashioned