The Lost Voyager: A Space Opera Novel Read Online Free PDF

plate with practiced agility.  
    “It’s not what it looks, I’m sure of that much.”
    “But that’s not what is bothering you,” Tulula responded, her back still turned to him.  
    Mach was detecting some odd friction between the two that went beyond just crewmates disagreeing about something. He wondered if the two hadn’t been a lot closer during their downtime on Fides Prime.  
    “What are you getting at?” Sanchez said, standing back, relaxing his shoulders—which Mach knew was a sign that he was really getting pissed.  
    “Nothing. I’m saying that you ought to have some eggs. Come, sit down, let’s talk and eat. We’ve got time to kill yet before we arrive at the Noven system.”
    The hunter sighed and turned his back to the counter and stepped across to the long table, pulling out a chair and sitting his large frame down. He placed his elbows on the table and propped his chin in the palm of his hands. He briefly looked up into the corner of the room, staring directly into the camera.  
    He didn’t know it was there, of course, he was just gazing about the room, but Mach could see there was something bothering his old friend. He had a cold, distant look, which was entirely unlike him. Sanchez was one of the warmest, most effervescent people Mach knew. From the moment Mach had got Sanchez out of the Summanus prison and back into his crew, Lassea, the JP was besotted with him.  
    Not in a sexual way, but in the way a young person is when they meet a legend of the arts or music, or in Sanchez’s case: a legendary rogue. For all of his combat and hunting prowess, Ernesto Sanchez had run one of the biggest gunrunning and smuggling rings in the Salus Sphere before the CW eventually caught up with him.  
    The difference with Sanchez, though, was that he wasn’t running guns to the enemy, the Axis Combine. Quite the opposite—his criminal activities were entirely noble. He managed to get some contacts within the Combine and smuggled out some of their experimental vestan weapons. This enabled the CW to reverse engineer them and build suitable defenses. But they gray-hairs in the government still felt the need to punish him as an example to the citizens of the Commonwealth that gunrunning wasn’t tolerated.  
    Mach wondered if it was this activity that had caused some friction between Sanchez and Tulula. She joined the hunter at the table, sitting opposite him. She placed two plates of food down and slid one across to him  
    “I’m not hungry,” he said. “It’s not the right time.”
    “Shame, the eggs will be spoiled,” Tulula said, stabbing a fork into the rich yellow yoke of a large egg. The insides ran out over a piece of grilled meat. She cut a slice off with a knife and took a large bite, nodding her head with satisfaction.  
    She spoke after she had swallowed her food. “I thought about what we spoke about yesterday,” she said, letting her thought drop away as she looked up at Sanchez, locking eyes.  
    Sanchez looked down at the table, breaking the contact. “It’s not the right time,” he repeated. “Especially now that Mach’s got us on the F&R.” F&R meant find and rescue, a fairly common task for Mach’s crew.  
    Job boards all around the Salus Sphere’s planets were filled with jobs from private companies, citizens, and various other organizations for someone to go out into the far reaches and find out what happened to a ship.  
    In almost all situations the answer was either horan rebels or pirates. Still, the people offering the reward often wanted whatever the ship was carrying, whether it was an important person, object, or data.  
    “You don’t believe it’s a routine rescue,” Tulula said, cutting more of her meat and dabbing it into the viscous egg. She said it as a statement rather than a question, as was her, and the vestans’, way of communicating. “So if we’re not just on a task to get a mining explorer, then what are we doing?”
    Sanchez