Gardens of the Sun Read Online Free PDF Page B

bootprints and scrape marks bent north again and crossed the low rim of a medium-sized impact crater. The spy stopped the rolligon and looked all around, the elevated railway skylined behind him, the moonscape all around utterly still and empty. He locked his helmet over his head and climbed down and followed the bootprints up the crater rim to the top, where a flat sheet of fullerene composite, the missing section of railcar floor, stood upright at one end of a mound built of loose ice-rock rubble. He unpacked the rubble at the foot of the sheet and uncovered a helmet, its faceplate blind with frost.
    The pressure suit had been powered down and the body inside was frozen solid. The spy had a little trouble unlatching the helmet, felt relief wash through him when he saw that the corpse was male, its face white and hard as marble. He uncovered the body down to its waist and jacked his patch cord into the pressure suit’s service port and studied the personal files stored in its memory. The dead man was Felice Gottschalk, born in a garden habitat called Dvoskin’s Knoll and currently a resident of Paris, an apprentice architect and sonic artist, twenty-three years old, no children. Perfect.
    He did not give another thought to the dead man, or to the people who had dragged him with them until he had died and then had buried him here in the hope that they could one day come back to retrieve his body, or tell others where to find it. He did not wonder whether they had reached the safety of the station or had run out of air or power and died somewhere out on the empty plain. His curiosity was strictly practical. With the exception of Zi Lei, he was interested in people only inasmuch as they were useful or dangerous to him.
    So without ceremony or second thoughts he carried the corpse to the rolligon, stashed it in an external locker, and drove south and east. The railway sank beneath the horizon behind him. When he saw the long gleam of an ice cliff at the horizon he turned towards it.
    The cliff, created by tectonic fractures when Dione had cooled and its icy crust had contracted, was more than a hundred metres high. Part of it had collapsed, forming a small, shallow basin. The spy drove up a lobate apron of consolidated mass-wasted rubble and parked in the shadows under the grooved face of the basin and interred Felice Gottschalk’s corpse deep in the dusty rubble, where no one would ever find it.
    He microwaved and ate a portion of rice, black beans, and shiitake mushrooms, then set to work, merging his biometric and DNA profile with the biographical data in Felice Gottschalk’s files and porting everything to the ID chip in his pressure suit. This fake identity would pass any casual check made by the occupying forces, and if he could reach one of the caches he’d set up while he’d been living in Paris he would be able to alter his appearance and change his fingerprints with injections of halflife collagen. The spy dozed in the driver’s seat, luxuriating in idle but pleasurable fantasies about Zi Lei until nightfall, and then he drove on towards Paris.
    He was certain that he would find Zi Lei there. If she’d managed to escape from the immediate vicinity of the city during the war she would by now have been caught in the occupying force’s sweeps and transported to one of the prison camps. And even if she had managed to evade capture so far, if she was hiding out in some remote oasis or shelter, he would find her. Even if it took the rest of his life, he would find her.
     
    Now, at last, the spy had reached the dead city.
    He’d driven as close to Romulus Crater as he dared and hiked in over the rim some thirty kilometres west of Paris, to one of the caches he’d set up before the war. He’d subjected himself to a few minor cosmetic alterations and altered his ID accordingly, picked up a memory needle containing back-up copies of his demons, and after night had fallen he’d snuck across the ancient landslips and