Battleship Raider by Paul Tomlinson (book recommendations website .txt) 📗

“Trixie, plot me a route out of town to the north-west that will get us picked up on a couple of security cameras, but nothing too high resolution.” I wanted to be seen leaving town but I didn’t want automatic recognition programs picking up my vehicles registration markings and alerting the local cops. The nearest spaceport was north-west of Margotsville, so hopefully the authorities would waste lots of time checking for me there. “Then find us a wide circular route that will take us south – ideally over terrain where we won’t leave too many tracks.” The jungle lay south of us and that’s where Old Jack said I’d find his treasure.

“Do you want me to highlight places of interest along the route?” Trixie asked. She was being sarcastic. Saphira doesn’t have places of interest.

“No, but if you spot a place that buys second-hand computers, let me know.”

It turned out that there wasn’t a treasure map as such. It was co-ordinates tattooed on a piece of skin. Human skin. Old Jack Sterling had removed the skin from his own forearm.

“Took it off myself with a razor, before anyone in here decided to take my whole arm. I told folks I’d sold it but that was a lie. I kept it hid. Even when the guards strip-searched me, they never found it.”

I hoped he’d rolled it up and stuffed it in his ear, but I wouldn’t bet money on the fact. It smelled bad when I unrolled it to read off the co-ordinates to Trixie. And it smelled worse when I burned it afterwards. I’d have liked to have taken a hot bath in disinfectant then, but there wasn’t time. It was entirely possible that Old Jack had memorised the co-ordinates and might be ‘persuaded,’ by application of pain or alcohol, to pass them on to Paulie Pickles. I needed to stay ahead of any competition. There was also the fact that I was an escaped prisoner, a fugitive with a bounty on my head. And then, of course, there was O’Keefe. I headed south in the Trekker and didn’t slow down until I saw jungle.

“Hey, you’re famous,” Trixie said. “Again.”

She flashed an image up on the dashboard screen. It was a wanted poster issued by the Saphira Central Policing Unit. I scrolled through the text.

Officers are hunting an inmate who has escaped from Margotsville Prison. The prisoner, thirty-two-year-old Quincy A. Randall, fled after climbing over the prison wall. Officers have said that he is not considered dangerous and is still believed to be planetside.

Randall is described as having black skin, brown eyes, and close-cropped black hair. He is five feet nine inches tall and of slim build. When last seen, he was wearing an old brown leather jacket, dark red shirt, jeans and boots. He was arrested last month on suspicion of theft and held pending an appearance before the judge.

Anyone sighting the fugitive should contact Margotsville sheriff’s office. A reward of five thousand dollars is offered for information leading to his capture and ten thousand will be paid to anyone who apprehends Randall alive.

Chapter Four

No one would ever find me here. Even I didn’t know where I was. I’d hidden the Trekker just inside the tree line. There was no way you could drive into the jungle, there were no roads. Or tracks to walk on. You had to slash your way through the leaves with a machete and make your own path. After five hours my arms ached and I had to keep stopping to catch my breath. I wanted to hurry, to reach the ‘X’ on the map before the sun went down. I was also worried by a note that had been scrawled on the bottom of Old Jack’s little piece of human parchment.

Here be dragons. This wasn’t just a bit of old pirate humour, Saphira really did have dragons. And I thought they probably came out after dark. If I could have, I would have started running as soon as I spotted the wreckage through the trees, but lack of oxygen was slowing me down. It wasn’t the altitude, I was barely above sea-level, but since crossing the equator the air had been thick and damp so you almost had to swallow it down.

To my left was a tree that was filled with some sort of pale yellowish fruit. They looked like big juicy grapefruit but they were probably hard, leathery and poisonous. I was going to lean against the tree for a moment, but backed off quickly when I was attacked by something that looked like a small lime-coloured turkey. Huge boiled egg eyes stared out of a face made from scrotum skin and it squawked angrily, defending a clutch of eggs in a scraggy nest built in the centre of a flower that looked like a fluorescent-orange toilet bowl. With renewed enthusiasm I hacked away at the foliage blocking my way.

‘Tropical rainforest’ sounds like a nice place for a vacation and I’m sure it looks great in the brochure. The trees are two or three hundred feet high and their leaves form a canopy overhead that blocks much of the sunlight and keeps you in a greenish twilight. The older trees were twisted, covered in vines and large eye-like wounds that oozed blackish ichor. Stringy moss hung down from the branches like hair and some trees held clumps of foliage that I thought were nests but are actually some kind of parasitic plant. Its fat purple berries looked delicious, which probably meant they were deadly.

The undergrowth I was hacking my way through was made up of smaller trees, palms, and ferns. Some of the plants had huge brightly coloured flowers with waxy flesh-like petals. You could easily imagine that they were carnivorous. As my blade sliced through the leaves they gave off scents like mown-grass, chopped cabbage, and something very like marijuana. The ground was mostly wet leaves and rotting vegetation and gave