Gardens of the Sun Read Online Free PDF Page A

Australia - and the Brazilian forces were small in number and would be mostly deployed around Paris. Even so, he would now and then spot in the black sky swiftly moving points of light crossing from west to east, and feel as exposed as a bug crawling across a microscope slide.
    Every day the spy risked tuning into the military band for a few minutes, listening to chatter, trying to work out how the occupation of Dione was unfolding. The Brazilian flagship was still in orbit around the moon, and Brazilian marines were free to move everywhere on its surface, challenged only by a few deadender holdouts - and these were being eliminated one by one. Paris, the self-proclaimed centre of resistance, had been badly damaged. Its tent was ruptured and most of it lay open to freezing vacuum. More than half of its population had been killed; the rest had either fled or had been taken prisoner. And now the Brazilians were rounding up Outers from oases and habitats scattered across Dione and transporting them to temporary prison camps outside the stricken city.
    If he was going to find Zi Lei, the spy thought, he would have to go to Paris. It was his first best hope of finding her, and if she wasn’t there he would look everywhere else.
    One day he climbed the rim of a big crater that cut across the trough and at the top saw, far across the great circle of the crater’s floor, a steep-sided pyramid of construction diamond panes and fullerene struts lit up within and crowded with tall trees. Another day he walked past the outer margin of fields of vacuum organisms like pages of dark and twisted characters printed on the pale land.
    His wound healed and he wrapped up the halflife bandage and folded it away.
    At last, the cliff of the eastern wall slumped downward and the floor of the trough rose, cracked in blocks and little ravines. He’d reached the southern end of the chasma. He’d walked almost a quarter of the way around the little moon.
    Someone had cut a trail through the chaotic landscape. The spy followed it across the tops of broken blocks and over ravines bridged by elegant spans of fullerene composite. He walked around the broad, uneven ridge at the edge of a small crater and climbed a natural ramp of consolidated debris onto the rolling, cratered plain beyond.
    When he reached the next refuge, he found that it had been cleaned out and left open to vacuum. Tyre tracks and bootprints marked the dust all around, and the vacuum-organism flowers had been chopped down. Certain that the Brazilian occupying force were responsible for this despoliation, feeling lonely and hunted, he walked on. He had no choice.
    Four hours later, he was approaching an oasis whose angled tent was pitched on the low rim of a crater some five kilometres across. There were no lights inside and the three sets of doors of the main airlock stood open and the gardened interior was dark and frozen. The spy believed that the place had been raided and cleared out by the Brazilian occupiers some time ago, and although he was by now low on air and power he spent a good hour scouting its perimeter before he dared walk in.
    He found spare batteries and air in the airlock of one of the outlying farm tubes. Better still, he found a rolligon hidden under camouflage cloth in a shallow pit dug at the edge of a broad field of tangled black spikes. He spent the time interrogating the vehicle’s AI, but it couldn’t tell him anything useful, so he dozed until shadows had everywhere crept out to cover the moonscape, and then he started up the rolligon and drove up the shallow ramp at one end of the pit.
    Navigating by the soft light of Saturnshine, scarcely brighter than starlight, the spy drove due south, with the ramparts of Eumelus Crater doubling the horizon to the west. Using the rolligon was a big risk, but not as big as hoping to rely on resupply from refuges and caches that the occupying force was now targeting. At last he picked up a road that stretched away in a