McCade's Bounty Read Free Page B

to McCade's eyes. As he bounced toward the shuttle McCade wondered what had made this one so special to Rister. He'd never know.
    The shuttle, like the ship it belonged to, was of military design. Both had been gifts from a grateful Empire after McCade's last ship had been lost while searching for the Vial of Tears.
    The Vial, a religious artifact sacred to the alien Il Ronn, had been stolen by a renegade pirate named Mustapha Pong.
    The Il Ronn had sworn to regain the Vial no matter what the cost, and faced with the very real possibility of interstellar war, the Emperor had requested McCade's help. But that was history and something he'd just as soon forget.
    The shuttle was a squat wedge-shaped hunk of metal, built to haul heavy loads and survive atmospheric landings under combat conditions. It had a blunt nose, a boxy fuselage, and short extendable wings. The shuttle crouched on retractable landing jacks and looked more like a primeval bug than a ship.
    McCade punched a series of numbers into the key pad located on the shuttle's belly. A line of light appeared and expanded into a rectangle. Stairs slid down, found the ground, and stopped.
    The three men made their way up the stairs, waited for the lock to cycle through, and took off their suits. They attached the suits to wall clips and entered the crew quarters.
    Farther back, and almost full of goods and equipment, there was a cargo compartment. It could be pressurized to carry additional passengers or left unpressurized as it was now.
    Passing between curtained bunks, through the tiny galley-mess area, and into the control room, McCade dropped into the pilot's position. Rico sat on the right, with Phil one seat back, in one of the two passenger slots.
    McCade fired the shuttle's repulsors, got a clearance from the rock's computerized traffic-control system, and danced the ship toward the glare of greenish loading lights.
    The loading docks were unpressurized and, outside of one or two space-suited figures, completely automated.
    Auto loaders wove complicated patterns around one another, tall spindly robots stepped over and around piles of merchandise, and computer-controlled crawlers towed trains of power pallets toward distant ships.
    Acting on a string of radio commands McCade skittered the shuttle over to loading dock seven, opened the main cargo hatch, and watched via vid screen as an auto loader positioned two silvery cylinders in the middle of the cargo bay.
    The auto loader had four headlights, and as they swung away, a number of smaller robots scampered through the hatch to lock the cylinders in place. As soon as they were finished the robots left as quickly as they'd come.
    McCade sealed the hatch, ran an auto check on all systems, and fired his repellors. The shuttle lifted and dust fountained up from the asteroid's surface. Then, with the ship safely aloft, McCade engaged the main drive.
    Seconds later they were free of the asteroid's light gravity and headed out toward the area where the Void Runner and some of the other large ships drifted miles apart.
    The Void Runner had originally been a Destroyer Escort and, as such, was twice the size of McCade's previous ship Pegasus.
    Although still small enough to negotiate planetary atmospheres, and therefore streamlined in appearance, the Void Runner wasmore ship than one person could comfortably run by himself.
    The ship had carried a crew of eight back in her military days, but McCade had modified her to operate with a crew of four, and could fly her single-handed in an emergency.
    So, Rico and Phil had come along to keep McCade company and crew the ship. They chatted with each other as McCade sent Void Runner a recognition code, countersigned the return password, and slid the shuttle toward the lighted berth on DE's port side.
    There was another similar berth on the starboard side presently occupied by a four-place speedster. More toy than tool, McCade justified it as a lifeboat and ignored Sara's disparaging