Jolo stood up. Put his hand on the smooth wooden handle of the Colt, eyed the air lock door and took a deep breath. “You can stay here. But I don’t want to see you anywhere near the bridge. When we get to Marco’s I’ll let him deal with you. I am not your little toy and if Katy wasn’t here I might have sent you straight out the hole into space.”
“Thank you for everything,” said Merthon. He stood and bowed low.
Jolo held out his hand to Katy and they walked together to the mess hall.
“You did the right thing. Again,” said Katy, wrapping her arm around his shoulder. “But there’s one small detail you forgot.” He looked down at her with no expression and waited. “Merthon saved your life,” she said. Suddenly the pain in his chest and leg started to come back.
“My life,” he said. “I ain’t even sure who I am.” He couldn’t process any of it right now and didn’t want to. All he knew was that it felt good to be with Katy.
“You ain’t a synth, are you?” said Jolo.
“Nope.”
“That’s the best news I’ve had in a long while.”
“What do we do now?” said Katy. “The Fed and the BG are going to be coming for us.”
“You forgot the bit about the BG having an army of synthetic girl assassins: faster, stronger and smarter than any human. And I don’t think they made ‘em to help grow kale on Harvel 2.”
Katy stopped walking and stared at Jolo with big, wide eyes. Jolo could see she was starting to breath a little faster and had that same pained look on her face like she got when they were doing something crazy in a gunboat.
Jolo put his hands on her shoulders. “Listen. I don’t care who’s coming for us. We’ll figure it out. We always do.”
“Okay,” she said and took a deep breath. “I just wish we hadn’t pissed off all of the major governments in the galaxy.”
“Well,” said Jolo, “We ain’t pissed of the pirates.” And he smiled and led her into the mess hall and ordered the bot to bring two cups of coffee.
……
Jolo’s journey is just beginning. The synthetic blond assassins and the BG mechs bring the fight right to Jolo’s front door in book 2: 43 Days to Oblivion. How will Jolo, the half-synth, overcome the full weight of the BG force in an old Argossy with a crew of cast-offs?
Please leave a review if you enjoyed this book, it would really help out.
Email JD Oppenheim at [email protected].
