Xantoverse Shadowkill Read Free Page B

eyes on the middle-distance. A few more steps and she left the corridor, walking into a wider area. The steel walls were no different. They wore the Haven patina of blood, grease and rust.
    While Kina made her way across this landing area to the operator-less elevator, she wondered what had happened to those who originally built the station. The Drifts had their ideas, but kept them to themselves. Rumors were it was the Xantonians, others suggested it had come through into Hollow Space like all other craft here—sucked in via hyperspace. Kina didn’t buy that.
    Though she didn’t really know what to believe. Although she was born and raised on the station, she never felt like it was her home. The place just had an… alien feel to it. Mostly due to the number of new species and arrivals that constantly flowed in after their ships jumped into, and got trapped within, Hollow Space.
    Such a turnover never made the place feel settled.
    Kina got into the elevator, sliding the door shut behind her. There were only two such elevators on the station—the others all had operators within to work the grav-plates that lifted or lowered the cars.
    Where she was going, she would prefer to work it herself, knowing that Miriam Cauder, aka, the Red Cauder, head of Cauder Industries and one of Haven’s most notorious and feared gang bosses—not that you would guess that upon looking at her leather-covered rotund figure—had ears working for her all through the two-hundred plus levels of the station.
    Short of working her way up through the dark levels, which would only bring added risk, given the creatures and nefarious dealings that went on in those uncharted places, Kina had little choice but to be as invisible as possible.
    That’s if she could actually carry out the hit.
    She pulled a series of levers to work the system and stood back as the grav-plate switching took over to propel her up to the Cauder level. While she waited for the climb, she lamented the lack of computerization and digitally controlled electrical motors.
    Although Kina was born on Haven and thus never knew any life outside of the weird physics of Hollow Space, the tales of those who were pulled into the bubble universe often spoke of amazing things that could be done with computers and technology.
    But none of that worked here—within or without the station.
    The Scholars blamed the dead planet and the dead race they believed had set these strange effects in motion: the Xantonians. A technological race lost to a history no one could access. All the peoples of Hollow Space knew was that when ships were pulled in from their hyperspace jump, their systems failed within minutes.
    Some field or particle, emanating from the cold, dead planet atrophied the workings of digital and magnetic devices. Over the centuries of standard time, Haven had devolved and subsequently evolved into a mechanical, organic, non-digital soup of scoundrels, thieves, murderers and engineers.
    Despite her twenty-four standard years of life on Haven , she still didn’t know where she fit in the hierarchy. Even now, on the knife-edge of a career with the Wraiths, she wasn’t sure. Not that she wasn’t capable; but whether she wanted to do it.
    In light of her mistake with the MAD device, but considering her exemplary performance in all other aspects, the Wraith’s had given her as clear a path into her future as she had ever received.
    If she completed a contract to eliminate one Tairon Cauder. Son of Miriam. Kina’s childhood friend. Her only friend.
    The elevator continued its slow rumbling ascent. Her guts twisted with every second. Her daggers felt like tombstones, dragging her down. It could have been anyone but him. Even Miriam would have been preferable. The fallout for killing the Red Cauder, if such a thing were possible, would guaranteed Kina having to persuade a Drift to change her at the cellular level in order to avoid the payback, but she would have taken all that over having