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    Borderline
    Borderline
    Borderline
    Ebook108 pages1 hour

    Borderline

    By Robert Appleton

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Alone. Double-crossed. Pursued across thousands of miles of alien desert on his beloved hoverbike, Finnegan is holding onto two things dearer than life itself: the priceless biotech prize he’s stolen, and the opportunity for revenge against the treacherous employer who left him for dead. He’s never met her, but he knows all about her family, the most ruthless criminal syndicate of the inner colonies.

    But when he finds a beautiful stranded woman badly wounded in the middle of nowhere, claiming to be Lori Malesseur, his employer, he has to make a choice. Either take her across the border and accept her offer of a huge reward, or leave her for dead. She claims she was on her way to warn him when she was ambushed and shot. But can she really be who she says she is?

    Trusting one’s enemy is not something either of them knows how to do, but when the stakes are this high, going it alone might not be an option. The race for survival is on in this high-octane action adventure that puts the pedal to the metal and doesn’t look back.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRobert Appleton
    Release dateMar 31, 2013
    ISBN9781301887651
    Borderline
    Author

    Robert Appleton

    Robert Appleton is a British science fiction and adventure author who specializes in tales of survival in far-flung locations. Many of his sci-fi books share the same universe as his popular Alien Safari series, though tend to feature standalone storylines. His rebellious characters range from an orphaned grifter on Mars to a lone woman gate-crashing the war in her biotech suit. His sci-fi readers regularly earn enough frequent flyer miles to qualify for a cross-galaxy voyage of their choosing. His publishers include Harlequin Carina Press, and he also ghost-writes novels in other genres. In his free time he hikes, plays soccer, and kayaks whenever he can. The night sky is his inspiration.He has won awards for both fiction and book cover design.

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      Book preview

      Borderline - Robert Appleton

      Borderline

      Robert Appleton

      Copyright 2013 Robert Appleton

      Smashwords Edition

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

      This book is a work of fiction. Characters, names, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

      ***

      Table of Contents

      Title Page

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Chapter Four

      About the Author

      Bonus Excerpt

      Chapter One

      Finnegan hooked an arm over the top of his windshield, wiped away the dust with frantic strokes of his sleeve. A slight improvement, but he was barrelling at ninety kph over rocky desert terrain. Even a slight headwind would throw enough sand to blot his vision again in seconds, and tonight was a gusty bitch. Should have been a breeze, sure as shit wasn’t. About as far from one as he’d ever experienced, in fact, because every single thing about this operation had gone south, except one.

      He’d escaped with the merchandise.

      Alone. Pursued. Thousands of miles from safety. But at least he had the Fleece.

      A blizzard of tiny rocks pelted the windshield; dust and sand quickly coated it. An old hoverbike like Bess wasn’t much use at high speeds at night without her automapping, and the laser incision had cut right through her appendix cell, disabling her shield wipers too. Finnegan was driving blind.

      Hell with this. He drew his 8-yield Shelby pulse cannon from his leg holster, veered Bess to one side and blasted the windshield off into the wind. It took two shots. Then, as he watched his pursuers’ rose-coloured searchlights feel across the desert for his caboose in the rearview, he gripped the handlebars with one hand and leaned back. Touched the large pillion bag. It fluttered, and he heard a smothered grunt from inside.

      Good. The condor was still there. Still alive. He would do anything to make sure it lived through this. In the midst of this whole rad-suck operation, the condor was the only one who’d shown any kind of class. A genetically modified monster, maybe, but this bird had swooped out of its mangled cage like an avenging angel to rip Finnegan’s enemies to shreds just as they’d been getting the upper hand in the firefight. Why? It was a super smart flocker, yeah, a GenMod, but it had never seen him before tonight. And for its troubles it had suffered severe laser scarring to its right wing, so it could no longer fly.

      A strange intervention. Damned if he could figure it out. But the bird had earned this chance to survive. It might never fly again, but as far and as long as he could last, Finnegan would look after the poor brave fella.

      No sooner had he resumed his upright position when a blinding flash of orange rain from a clear sky made him jump. Much more than a simple hallucination or some superimposed fantasy brought on by tiredness, the orange rain was vivid, ferocious, and real. He almost swerved, but gained control just in time. Took several deep breaths to calm himself. Goddamn, he could’ve sworn that shit was real. Orange? What the hell? He checked the sky, just to be sure.

      Moonlight, starlight, the roving pinprick twinkles of orbiting satellites.

      He adjusted his goggles. Upturned the collar of his duster to cover his mouth. Limbered up in his seat, trying hard not to try too hard at predicting the road ahead. Take what comes as it comes. He lengthened Bess’s headbeam, though, just in case. The last thing he wanted was to barrel nosefirst into one of those statues mounted on rock pedestals some ancient alien civilization had built along a precise line of longitude. There weren’t that many, one every twelve-point-three miles—he’d measured on his way in to the Core—but they could easily sneak up on someone fuming this kind of speed at night. And anyway, this was all alien terrain, formerly a shallow lake; who knew what surprises waited for him in these wastelands. Or rather, what other surprises, because Malesseur’s bullshit intel was a tough fucking act to follow.

      One he had no intention of forgetting.

      The op had called for Finnegan and six other mercs to infiltrate Iolchis Core, a multi-billion-credit Genetics complex in the heart of the Iolchian desert. Their mission: to retrieve the Golden Fleece—some kind of watershed lab creation for rapid cell regeneration. A biotech bonanza, the patent for which the top companies were already engaged in a violent bidding war. To achieve this coup, Lori Malesseur, Finnegan’s employer for the op, had provided the team with all the tech they required to breach the facility: scattershocks, ghost points, nano-fluid cutters and other infiltration equipment, most of it illegal.

      But none of that meant a limp goddamn clip when the facility itself housed its own private army! At the first alarm, the entire complex had been surrounded, and four of his six team members had been shot to bits while making for their hoverbikes outside, including Manolo, an acquaintance of Finnegan’s from a few previous ops. In the shitstorm that followed, half the east wing had been damaged. Scattershock blasts had collapsed several massive aviaries. Genetically modified birds of all shapes and sizes were now perched on the facility’s roof. Unable to fly away unless they found the doorway in the compound’s forcefield that Finnegan’s team had shored up for their return run to the border.

      Lori Malesseur, then, had lied. A person with her connections—her dad was Simon Malasseur, a former shack sheik from the border colonies turned interstellar criminal entrepreneur—would know exactly how many personnel were in any facility in any star system in the inner colonies, not to mention their eye colours, mating habits, the number of times they showered in a week. That was the way the Malesseurs and assholes like them worked. Finnegan had dealt with their ilk most of his life, especially after Megan’s death, when he’d been glad to take any job that came along. Anal bosses, mostly, clever, paranoid and anal. But this was the first time he’d worked for the Malesseurs, witnessed their ruthless manipulations firsthand.

      They’d had nothing to lose by arming his crew to the teeth and sending them into a hurricane. Except the phrase Lori had used in her digital briefing, mostly automated security, had painted the op as a hi-tech burglary, not the OK-freaking-Corral.

      He wrung Bess’s throttle up a gear so that she screamed at over a hundred-and-twenty kph. Just over a thousand miles to his left, the border where Malesseur was waiting for his return. Ahead, empty, unmapped wasteland all the way to the giant dams over the Segado Lakes. At least there he might be able to find a neutral port, a band of traders, some way to get offworld without triggering the Interstellar Planetary Administration’s blockade satellites with their ever-watchful arsenals ready to shoot down any vessel that violated the no-fly sanction on this rock.

      The Iolchians would hound him every step of the way, but he’d made it this far, he had enough clips to buy a cot on a shuttle, and anyway he had Bess. His beloved Bess. She’d never let him down, not in eleven years. She could live without her windshield. And as long as the sun came up in the morning—only a couple of hours away—she had enough power to run indefinitely.

      Enough power to keep him alive long enough to find—and murder—that bitch, Lori Malesseur.

      With it being this

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