The Lost Voyager: A Space Opera Novel Read Online Free Page B

like spying on them since he had told him that all parts of the ship were observable from his operations room. They took that with good grace and no resistance.  
    They trusted him.  
    They were his friends first and crew second.  
    Which made keeping the truth from them that much harder to deal with. He knew it would eat him up inside, but it was for their own good. Once they had found the lost craft and recovered the cargo for OreCorp, they’d all have more money than they’d ever seen before in their lives. They would no longer have to do these kinds of jobs, working freelance as a group of renegades, willing and able to do almost any mission regardless of its legality and danger.
    Adira was sitting at her console to the right of the bridge. Her responsibility was to keep weapons operational and ready for use. Mach thought back to an issue he and Adira had recently overcome: her contract to assassinate him. For years he wanted to know who had taken it out, but she refused to tell him.  
    He found out anyway, and truth be told, he wasn’t surprised, but he let it go. The fact Adira hadn’t actually completed the contract—the very first time she had done such a thing in her career—told him that he and Adira’s relationship went beyond captain and crewmember.  
    She was a hybrid human-fidesian, taking the best—and the worst—of each species. Though she looked human apart from her green tinged skin, her physiology was actually closer to fidesian, which was responsible for her deep emerald eyes.  
    Tulula was different. The vestans could grow and manipulate their limbs to suit their environment and job, making them highly prized engineers and spies. This was the prime reason why the lizard race of the horans, the main constituent of the CW’s enemy, the Axis Combine, had fought so hard to bring the vestans into their alliance with the lacterns—a minor race that did little more than weakly probe the southern edge of the Salus Sphere with their drone ships.  
    A ghost sensation of Adira’s warm body against Mach’s remained on his skin as he sat and watched her manipulate the controls. She was calibrating the laser batteries and ion cannon. Mach wondered if she were thinking about their time together the past few days. Was it more than just sex for her?
    He told himself it was; otherwise she would have completed her contract long ago. But neither of them had openly spoken about their feelings to each other. He guessed it was due to the nature of their work. Always being the ones to go in and clean up other people’s highly dangerous screw-ups didn’t exactly give the sense of a secure future together.  
    With a sigh, Mach shifted his attention across the bridge. The young former junior pilot from the CW academy, Lassea, sat forward at her navigation console.  
    It wasn’t strictly needed; the Intrepid had some of the best AI programming in the known universe—especially since Kingsley Babcock and his drone assistant, Squid Two, had made ‘efficiencies and upgrades.’ What they actually were, Mach didn’t really want to know. Once Babcock got talking about his creations, there was no stopping him.  
    Mach guessed it was all those years the old guy spent in self-imposed exile on the planet of Minerva, where nothing but dust and mountains awaited any visitors—which of course, meant there were few visitors, making it the perfect place for someone like Babcock to run away to and live with his creations.  
    But the universe needed people like Babcock.  
    Mach needed him.  
    Without him, the CW would be in ashes by now, not that the hierarchy saw it that way. Due to Babcock’s insatiable curiosity, he had nearly lost the CW the Century War with the Axis Combine.
    During one of the battles in the far reaches of the Salus Sphere, he had discovered an alien computer mind. Unable to resist, he hacked his way in to look at the programming and, by doing so, opened up the CW’s vast and intricate network