"Linnea Sinclair - Macawley's List" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sinclair Linnea)

Tales from the Second Chance Saloon:
Macawley's List
Linnea Sinclair




Telling her he loved her was on his list of things to do.

Dying before he had a chance to do so, wasn’t.

The metal decking of Starbase Delta Five skewed suddenly under his boots. The
shock wave of the first explosion blasted by him. He stumbled, slammed against the
bulkhead. Debris cascaded down through the ruptured conduit panels. He swung his
good arm up to shield his face and slid awkwardly to the floor.

“Macawley!” Her anguished voice called to him through the communications badge
pinned to his shirt.

He almost said it, right then and then. I love you. I’ve always loved you. I’m just too
much of a coward to tell you.

He ripped the badge from his shirt, threw it across the wide corridor. It skittered
against a chunk of ceiling tile. If he answered, she’d try to rescue him. Even though
he’d given her a direct order to pull out.

But she had a propensity to ignore his direct orders. That was one of the things he
loved about her.

The station rumbled again. A large section of the corridor collapsed into the level
below, taking the chunk of tile and his badge with it.

He hooked his good arm around a curved support pylon and hung on, though he
didn’t know why. He was already dead. A Duvri ion lance had severed his left arm at
the elbow, cauterizing it neatly. And he was bleeding profusely from a shrapnel
wound in his thigh.

But none of that mattered. What did was the destruction of Delta Five. His tactical
team set the charges for that purpose an hour ago. That would bring the Duvri’s
invasion of the Galleon Quadrant to a dead stop, like slamming into a black hole.

“A waste of a few damn fine pubs,” Briony Winn had quipped just before she
followed the rest of the team into the escape shuttle.

That was another thing he loved about her. She always had a quip, some little sotto
voce remark.

“I’m sure you and my crew will take it as a personal challenge to find replacements,”
he’d shouted to her as he jogged backwards towards the airlock. He was headed
down to the next deck to appropriate an X-7 fighter, and blow a few more holes into