Parker Interstellar Travels 4: The Trilisk Hunt Read Free Page B

Fabrication
Corporation, she had been contracted as a frontier worker whose expertise could
be drawn upon to get Valomine moving quickly.
    She walked down the factory
floor, admiring the brand-new setup. The smell of virgin lubricant filled the
vast room. Fabricators of all shapes and sizes littered the space. Belts and
overhead hooks waited to bring the raw materials in for processing into
countless parts. Then she heard her name called aloud.
    “Siobhan Cutter?”
    She peeked around a bank of
equipment. It was a man, short, with ugly hair. He wore a courier’s uniform.
Most everyone here seemed short to Siobhan, who had grown up in less than one
Earth gravity.
    Siobhan had only a second to
decide: duck and run away, or walk up and ask what he wanted? The man did not
have weapons or even seem alert. So she walked up to him.
    “I’m Cutter. Why the shout-out?
Your link not working?”
    “Oh. I’m used to this place
being a dead zone. I guess everything is ready to go today, though, huh? Except
you. You’ve been pulled.”
    “What? I’m still configuring
things in the controller.”
    “Speronautics is doing it
themselves now. All the local contractors are being let go. A couple dozen big
company folks came in this morning on a UN transport.”
    “But that’s illegal?”
    “The council passed a close
vote. Speronautics is allowed to bring in all their own now to set up the whole
colony. The company practically owns the planet under the new arrangement.”
    “Unbelievable! Doesn’t anyone
remember Spero Five?”
    The guard shrugged. “No. Nobody
remembers that crap anymore.”
    Siobhan almost struck the man
down. But if she had succeeded, all she would get out of it would be a detail
of security robots hunting her down and then a stunner or a glue grenade.
Suddenly she got very sad.
    “Okay, I’m out of here,” she
said, turning away.
    She checked a news feed and
caught herself up on the new law. She had been so busy with her plot she had
not seen it coming. She thought Speronautics had no choice but to use local
workers, at least until it got itself good and settled in. But now, their own
teams were coming in to do everything—on core government transports, even! The
UN was rotten to the core. It had all been arranged by using the alien menace
for an excuse. Speronautics was a big part of the space fleet buildup.
Freelancers like her would have to flee the system or risk getting stuck on a
world owned by the corporation. There were still limits on what they could do,
in theory, but she was not about to rely on them. Her ancestors had made that
mistake and paid dearly for it.
    “Frackjammers!” Siobhan snapped
in annoyance.
    It’s happening all over again.
The stupid UN is in bed with Speronautics. The people of Valomine are going to
be slaves to Speronautics just as my great grandparents were on Spero Five.
    Her plan had almost worked.
With her back door to the controllers in place, she would have been able to
walk into any factory on Valomine and set it to making whatever design she fed
into it.
    The damage she could have
caused Speronautics would have been incalculable. But it had all come to ruin.
“Because Speronautics owns too many UN parasites,” Siobhan growled. The new law
would block her out.
    But it’s worse than just that.
    Siobhan realized the
Speronautics engineers would give everything the once-over before starting up
the factories. They might even have an AI to help them check it all out. If
they found her back door, she would be on a list no one wanted to be on. Now
she had to leave the planet fast.
    What contacts do I have?
Precious few.
    Siobhan remembered she had
received an intriguing job offer the other day. What was it? Parker Interstellar
Travels.
    She found the contact. A man
named Jason Yang. As she worked, her link delivered a message.
    “Miss Cutter, please report to
the factory office.”
    Dammit!
    Siobhan opened a connection to
the contact for the job. An Asian man answered