Trapped: Chaos Core Book 1 by Randolph Lalonde Page A

case someone finds
you out there.”
    Looking past his corpse
she saw Larken and a pang of sadness struck her. It was followed by
something that burned just as deeply – anger. “I’m going to
make every one of them suffer.”
    The console behind her
beeped twice quickly, indicating that they were close to coming out
of faster than light travel mode. Aspen set it to start calculating
the next jump, a longer stretch that took the Fleet Feather to a
charted world it had never been to before so she could lessen the
chances of pursuers guessing her destination. Kort would be the first
to come for her. He was legendary for cheating death, and she was
sure the damage she did – though significant – wasn’t enough to
put him down.
    Using her new Captain’s
access, she deactivated the transponder and entered her personal
communication codes, so the ship wouldn’t contact anyone using its
own identity. Running with smugglers for a year had taught her many
tricks.
    Sadly, it didn’t make
getting rid of one body and figuring out what to do with another one
that was much more treasured any easier. Aspen opened the armoured
cockpit door and heard voices coming up from below. After closing and
locking it quietly, she checked the internal security monitor and
discovered that there were four lower members of the Countess’s
court from the Rinnel company sitting together. She recognized two of
them right away – Tilly and Dexter Rinnel. They were children in a
growing empire and professional lobbyists who were partially
responsible for having laws against slavery repealed on dozens of
civilized worlds, and that was before the Basic Era started. Aspen
could only imagine how easy it must have been after artificial
intelligences went mad and began to fight each other for them to do
business as slavers. There were numerous worlds where the military
destroyed all the complex technology with electromagnetic pulse
bombs, leaving millions of people stranded.
    As Aspen stared at them
on the screen she wondered how many dolls their company owned, and
how many they sold. It took her seconds to find the pilot’s sidearm
and check it for ammunition. He’d expended fourteen shots, there
were twenty-one left. She found two more clips in the drawer in his
console along with a few snack bars, a bag of dill rice puffs, a pair
of women’s underwear which she discarded without touching, and
control chips for devices across the ship. “Thank God you were a
stupid pervert. You may as well have left the whole ship unlocked.”
    She searched him
rapidly, finding the data chip containing the ownership documents for
the ship in his boot and another snack bar. The ship emerged from
faster than light mode and Aspen checked the scans of the area. There
was an unmanned communication station, and a slow transit shuttle at
long range.
    With a few button
presses she set the computer to jump as soon as anything with a
weapon arrived in the area. She had some cleaning to do before moving
on.
    Gun in hand, Aspen
opened the hatch and walked down the stairs into the main passenger
area.
    “Oh my God, what
happened, Aspen?” asked Tilly, her slender hand covering her mouth.
    Spin almost forgot that
she was covered in Larken’s blood. “Stand up and get against that
bulkhead,” she said, raising the weapon and pointing it at Dexter
Rinnel. “All of you.”
    “She’s gone insane,
I’ve heard of this happening to dolls,” Tilly said, clutching his
arm.
    With nary a thought,
Aspen fired at the seat next to one of the servants. The round burst
apart in the air, sending spinning fragments forward in a shot seven
centimetres wide. Her soft target exploded in a puff of white
padding. “Do it! Now!” she shouted.
    They rushed to the
bulkhead, hands raised, shrinking away from her. “Where were you
when the ship took off?”
    “We were already
settling into our quarters,” Dexter explained. “We were the last
to move our things in and were almost on our way