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    Slab City Blues: The Ballad of Bad Jack
    Slab City Blues: The Ballad of Bad Jack
    Slab City Blues: The Ballad of Bad Jack
    Ebook94 pages1 hour

    Slab City Blues: The Ballad of Bad Jack

    By Anthony Ryan

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    About this ebook

    The Asteroid Belt, home to mining corporations and those who prefer to live beyond the heavily policed habitats of Earth orbit - the perfect hunting ground for Bad Jack, captain of the Dead Reckoning and the most feared pirate in the solar system. About to embark upon the biggest job of his career, Jack finds himself in need of a specialist, but his latest recruit has a new face, a new name and an agenda of his own. Chief Inspector Alex McLeod has been reset to war mode, and things are about to get very ugly.

    The fourth story in the Slab City Blues series, The Ballad of Bad Jack is an all-action future-crime thriller from the best-selling author of the Raven’s Shadow trilogy.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAnthony Ryan
    Release dateJan 31, 2013
    ISBN9781301555345
    Slab City Blues: The Ballad of Bad Jack
    Author

    Anthony Ryan

    Anthony Ryan was born in Scotland in 1970 but spent much of his adult life living and working in London. After a long career in the British Civil Service he took up writing full time after the success of his first novel Blood Song, Book One of the Raven's Shadow trilogy. He has a degree in history, and his interests include art, science and the unending quest for the perfect pint of real ale.For news and general wittering about stuff he likes, check out Anthony's blog at: http://anthonystuff.wordpress.com.

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    Reviews for Slab City Blues

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    • 5/5
      While not technically on the Slab, this story of Bryan's takes place in space on various ships. Bad Jack has a checkered past that clearly serves him well as he tries to survive this latest adventure and keep those with him alive too. He is up against a large corporate space venture with some very domineering plans that he has to stop, or everyone will be in hot water. There is betrayal, murder, mayhem, assassination, space battles, mistaken identity, secret hidden pasts and plots to take over the world.

      With his typical calculated brilliance, Ryan unfolds the plot small bits at a time - just enough to keep the reader invested and excited about the characters and the plot. Each time you get to unfold something new, the entire perspective of the story can dramatically change. Bad Jack himself is dangerous but a character that you will root for nonetheless. Ryan's characterizations are always detailed, three dimensional and human with those quirks and foibles that make characters and stories interesting. His imagery is spot on as he depicts onboard ship life as well as going out in space in specialized spacesuits. His imagination for advanced technology is so believable that it seems to make sense and in no way stands out or becomes a special effect - it simply adds to the worldbuilding he has already done for the other novellas.

      This is a very action packed read which starts with a bang and doesn't let up until you finish the last words. Ryan is simply a master of this type of noir style of sci-fi thriller. You don't have to read the other novellas to enjoy this one - though I recommend them all highly. Read them in order. It helps to understand what is going on in the series, and by all means read Ryan's novel Blood Song, Ravens Shadow Book 1. The novel is one of the best that I read in 2012. Happy Reading!

    Book preview

    Slab City Blues - Anthony Ryan

    Slab City Blues: The Ballad of Bad Jack

    By Anthony Ryan

    Copyright 2013 Anthony Ryan

    Cover Image Design by Humblenations.com

    This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

    ***

    Preface

    The Ballad of Bad Jack is a novella forming the fourth story in the Slab City Blues series, beginning two months after the events described in A Hymn to Gods Long Dead. Each story can be read in isolation. Free audio versions of the first two stories in the series, Slab City Blues and A Song for Madame Choi, are available on the author’s website: http://anthonystuff.wordpress.com.

    He was good, I could tell. Fast, clean burns between way-points, easy on the juice, making full use of momentum, maintaining a slow tumble to maximise visual scanning. A reluctance to rely solely on tech signified an old-time hard-vac veteran, even though his suit was state of the art: a Mark VI Lockheed Pendragon, packing a dizzying array of defensive hardware. He kept it passive as he moved, no lidar or tight-beam scans, staying stealthy. There was a plasma flare ten klicks away as the ship that had dropped him commenced its homeward burn, leaving him all alone in the gently drifting ocean of rock.

    When people visualise the asteroid belt, they normally imagine dense fields of spinning boulders careening into each other in an endless chaotic dance. In reality the belt is mostly empty space, each asteroid separated from its neighbour by a thousand klicks or more. The advent of large scale mining operations, however, had transformed some belt regions into something resembling popular imagination. When the big rocks are busted apart they leave dense debris clouds, fated to hang around for a few thousand centuries until gravity brings them together again. The clouds are extensively mapped and marked as navigation hazards, the tidal swirl of rock predicted and accounted for by even a bargain basement nav program. The man in the Pendragon, of course, had a nav-system that was anything but bargain basement, steering him easily between the rocks to his allotted rendezvous point on the edge of the field. He powered down and waited, little over a hundred metres from my position.

    Rock solid intel. Score one for the Colonel’s interrogators.

    As I said the Mark VI Pendragon was state of the art, but it lacked the little something extra the Colonel’s techs had added to mine.

    I kicked in a small amount of juice, CO2 instead of plasma, a small energy spike his sensors would probably write off as a minor asteroid collision. I approached from above, out of his eye-line though he wouldn’t have been able to see me in any case. I released the package within thirty centimetres of his plasma tank, armored like the rest of the suit but it wouldn’t make any difference at this range. I angled away and burned a one second burst of plasma to clear the blast radius.

    He saw me then, warnings blaring in my ears as his suit went to full readiness, a haze of icons dancing on the heads-up display as his weapons systems and active sensors blazed into life. His targeting was thrown off by my suit’s mods, the lidar sliding off the coating whilst the tight-beams managed only an intermittent fix. I could see his confusion in the slight shift of his helmet, eyes seeking the threat his sensors couldn’t find. But they wouldn’t help him today.

    The package exploded, thermite burning through the fuel tank armour and releasing the plasma in a brilliant secondary explosion. The Pendragon came apart in four chunks, tumbling off in a spiral of globular crimson. The helmet flew past me and for a moment I could see the face of the man within; lean, high-cheekbones and a prominent brow. I fancied there was some flicker of life in the eyes, just enough oxygen left in the brain for a few more seconds perception. If so, he may have had cause to wonder at the sight of his own face resolving out of the blackness as I deactivated the stealth-skin.

    The helmet was gone in an instant, a dim point of light soon lost to the black. Hywell Xavier Maddux, three times decorated veteran of the Coalition of Autonomous Orbiting States Marine Corps, fugitive murderer, armed robber and mercenary. I salute you.

    ***

    The ship arrived an hour later, a Terrapin class freighter maybe twenty years old, so heavily modified as to be near unrecognisable. She bristled with sensors and what appeared to be external grapples and fuel pods but were in fact disguised weapons arrays. The concealment was good, sufficient to beat a scan from a CAOS Security patrol craft, but my Pendragon was packing the kind of gear that made most camouflage redundant.

    The ship’s braking burn brought it to within a hundred metres of my position, the heads-up swirling with icons as various scans swept over the suit exterior. Her main lights were blazing, but I could make out the words Dead Reckoning stencilled onto the hull. I’m not a man given to excessive bouts of unease, but the fact that the Colonel hadn’t sent me on a snipe hunt did add a certain tingle to the occasion.

    The scans ended and the Dead Reckoning’s lights flashed once before she fired her port thruster and swivelled about, the rear airlock opening. As the CO2 thrusters took me closer I noted the multiple warning icons gleaming red on the heads-up. Four different weapons systems were locked on and ready to go should I twitch in the wrong direction.

    Close enough, Jed, a female voice said in my headphones. The Pendragon wasn’t picking up any radio emissions so this had to be coming via a comms laser, immune to eavesdropping and, unlike radio, wouldn’t go wandering off into the ether to be picked up by CAOS Security monitoring stations. Power down everything but life-support.

    Would Maddux have demured? It was possible, his psych profile told of a man walking a precarious line between paranoid sociopath and professional mercenary. I decided this was one occasion when professionalism would win out. No way he’d pass up a chance to work with Bad Jack, not after coming so far.

    I took the weapons and scanning array off-line and waited, the heads-up fading, leaving me naked.

    Another voice came down the comms laser, male this time, older. What colour are Shadrak’s eyes?

    New or old? I replied. "They were brown before the war. Now they’re a sort

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