No Surrender - Jeff Mariotte [0]
Starfleet Corps of Engineers series
from Pocket Books:
#1: The Belly of the Beast by Dean Wesley Smith
#2: Fatal Error by Keith R.A. DeCandido
#3: Hard Crash by Christie Golden
#4: Interphase: Book 1 by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore
#5: Interphase: Book 2 by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore
#6: Cold Fusion by Keith R.A. DeCandido
#7: Invincible: Book 1 by David Mack & Keith R.A. DeCandido
#8: Invincible: Book 2 by David Mack & Keith R.A. DeCandido
#9: The Riddled Post by Aaron Rosenberg
#10: Gateways Epilogue: Here There Be Monsters by Keith R.A. DeCandido
#11: Ambush by Dave Galanter & Greg Brodeur
#12: Some Assembly Required by Scott Ciencin & Dan Jolley
#13: No Surrender by Jeff Mariotte
COMING SOON:
#14: Caveat Emptor by Ian Edginton & Mike Collins
#15: Past Life by Robert Greenberger
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Copyright © 2002 by Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.
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Deborah Bradford clutched Ben’s small hand tightly as they boarded the shuttle on Kursican Primus. The boy had just turned three—big enough to walk on his own, but small enough that she was concerned about him getting trampled underfoot. She was especially concerned about some of the less humanoid races also boarding the ship—that Benzite, for example, whose bearing made him appear aloof, even haughty, might not have deigned to look down to notice someone whose head barely reached past his knees. Once they had taken their seats, though, she relaxed, as much as she could. The flight to the Plat—the Kursican Orbital Incarceration Platform—would take nine hours, the shuttle having been built more for load capacity than speed.
The Kursicans had apparently put little thought or effort into the passenger compartment of the shuttle. It held about one hundred and twenty seats, Deborah estimated, in four rows of three seats each, separated by narrow aisles. The bulkheads were undecorated metal, and there were no ports to show the view outside or anything else to distract the eye. Passengers willing to pay a premium could ride in a private cabin, but there were fewer than a dozen available, and Deborah hadn’t wanted to spend that much anyway. She just hoped Ben would be able to sleep in his seat. She wanted him rested and in a cheerful mood when he met his grandfather.
Over the course of the nine-hour trip, he met more of their fellow passengers than she did—not surprising, since he was a rambunctious toddler, and she was, as the mother of a three-year-old, near exhaustion most of the time. Ben, though, managed to make the acquaintance of Uree, a Deltan diplomat on his way to the Plat on Federation business; the Benzite, who turned out to have a soft spot for children; and three of the guards who kept wary eyes on the group. In the aisle seat of their row sat a medical technician named Isitov, a human from Val’Jon, which shared this planetary system with Kursican and Szylith. Isitov seemed glad of the distraction Ben offered; Deborah had the impression that he was nervous about this posting. But then he was very young, and she was sure that even a more experienced sort might be a bit on edge about taking a job on a space station that held one thousand criminals—well, criminals and political prisoners, she corrected