Free MECH EBOOK by B. V. Larson

the asteroids,” Sarah said, stress making her voice raise up in volume and pitch.
    “It’s not a Nexus patrolship, is it?” whispered Bili, fearing the worst. The new ropy muscles on his regrowing arm constricted in tension and the pain was sickening. He closed his eyes and sucked his lower lip.
    “No. It’s another smuggler, he’s going to beat us, he’s coming in to steal my ride,” Sarah said with sudden conviction, putting the pieces together. “He’s planning to beat me to the Yeti and go down with her! Damn it!” Sarah smashed her gloved fists down on the armrests of her crash-seat and growled inarticulately.
    Bili waited, relaxing a bit. As long as it wasn’t a Nexus patrol ship. He didn’t want his Mom doing time over this. He wondered, not for the first time, what they would do to him if his Mom went to prison and his Dad was dead. It was an unpleasant idea, so he pushed it from his mind.
    Sarah looked at Bili, her face deadly serious behind her faceplate. “Bili, we’ve got all our money tied up in this run. We paid for this ticket down and we can’t let them steal it.”
    “We can go back down, Mom. Just drop the cargo. We can sell the ship and hide in the West Annex, or Amazonia.”
    “No, Mudface and Daddy would find us, they’d have us killed.” She glared back down at the ship coming in. “No, no way. Nobody is going to just steal this ticket from us.”
    With a quick friendly slap of her glove on Bili’s helmet, Sarah fired up the jets and increased her speed of approach. Together, the two small ships converged on the big freighter as it began it’s arcing descent into the atmosphere.
    It quickly became apparent that the intruder wasn’t going to just give up and run away. Pressing in hard with the intruder on their heels, Sarah swung underneath the looming freighter and hit the brakes hard. Multiple forward jets flared into brilliant life all around the viewports, which automatically darkened to filter the glare. Even so, Bili blinked as purple splotches stained his vision.
    The intruder was braking too, expertly following her right between the huge steel ribs of the freighter and rising up toward the massive central spine that held the framework of engines and cargo pods together. Following her example, the intruder found a slot between the massive bulbous sacks of cargo and secured itself to the spine like a leech. Up close, the other craft appeared to be fractionally larger than theirs and of a strange design unknown to her.
    “If I didn’t know better, I would have thought it was a small warship.” she said, perplexed and angry. How could this be happening? “Fortunately, its sensor profile doesn’t match any of the Nexus warship designs.”
    They all descended together, a mothership coming in on grav drive with two delinquent children hiding in her skirts. Just over five miles above the surface before the ship cleared the slopes of the forested hills around the spaceport, Sarah was supposed to let her ship freefall down into a valley and then land undetected. Unfortunately, at a ridiculous altitude of seventeen miles the stowaway ship suddenly disconnected and dropped from sight into the cloud cover.
    Sarah cursed volubly, something she rarely did in front of her son, heaping abuse upon the second ship. “I only wish we had a gun mount, I’d blast him.”
    Bili giggled uncontrollably at his mother’s bad language. What his mother said next made him swallow his amusement.
    “He’s flagged us. We have to follow him now, the traffic-control diagnostics couldn’t have missed that stunt, and they will dispatch atmospheric patrol craft to find him. We can’t stay here, either. They’re sure to go over this ship with a pipe wrench when we land after that,” said Sarah, speaking half to Bili and half to herself. Bili saw in her eyes how scared she was, and that scared him more than anything.
    With a gulping breath, Sarah pulled a hand-lever and the ship was instantly