Home: Interstellar: Merchant Princess Read Online Free PDF

scotch. M
     
    To which she received an immediate reply.
     
    Ack. On duty. Will collect at TarnGirl.
     
    Meriel knew the place, a spacer bar in Lander’s blue-zone docks, just around the rim. Her thoughts drifted to John standing at the window gazing at the nebula. Like a tree rooted to the deck , she thought , looking up at the stars . She shook her head. No time for that now.
    She pulled up her personal log and added a new category, attacks in open space, and included what she had learned from Cookie. In her calendar, she added a reminder to talk to John or Jerri about coordinating in space.
    Nav, she thought and fiddled with the sim-chip on her necklace, the chip with the jump program that had rescued them a decade ago. She took off her necklace and plugged the sim-chip into her link. So what was it that Mom wanted me to know?
    She opened the research on Home and scrolled to a holo file. It was unreadable, like all of the other files on the sim-chip, but she knew from the file name what it was—the single thing that said that her mom was right about Home, the most sought-after real estate for everyone who didn’t already live on Earth.
    She cued up a copy from a conspiracy site that had the same name as her mother’s file: “Interview with J. Mouldersen.” The vid was a low-res, fuzzy version of a hologram squeezed onto 2-D, maybe shot using a personal link held in an unsteady hand while autofocus struggled to find the right subject—or by a holographer trying to hide. A forest of white jackets filled the foreground beyond which two men and a woman sat at a table looking haggard, or maybe tipsy, but smiling. Meriel could not make out any insignia of affiliation.
    The woman behind the table stood. “Ladies and gentlemen, I have the most wonderful news,” she said. “A few years ago, one of our remote survey probes returned and found what we’ve all been searching for. The data looked crazy until we found a key. We discovered something wonderful that—”
    A woman’s voice interrupted the speaker. “Cut the hyperbole, Jeannine. What did you find?”
    “An earthlike object that—”
    Loud grumblings interrupted Jeannine again. The conversation was almost inaudible and sounded like they were speaking inside a tin can with their mouths full of bread.
    “We’ve found lots of earthlike objects but not like enough to be livable,” said another voice.
    Livability was the issue. People existed on lots of habitable bodies in space, but habitable referred to what humans could survive. The best were domed structures like Mars and Moon-1, that had enough wealth and energy to provide continual artificial gravity. The worst were low-g communes or overcrowded arcologies . These were hellholes that stretched the limits of what could be called human life.
    Jeannine continued. “It’s really earthlike—liquid water, [incomprehensible static] high oxygen atmosphere, close to one-g, temperate—” she said, her voice disappearing in loud mumblings.
    “It’s bad data, Jeannine,” said a new voice. “This is a scam or faulty instrumentation. The probe should have come back with the others decades ago.”
    “Yeah, how did it get lost?” someone asked.
    “Apparently, there’s lots of EM noise and dust nearby,” Jeannine said, “and the probe got confused. It took the AI algorithm a while to figure out where it was in order to get back home. Clever thing used spectra in the Magellanic cloud to orient itself.”
    “Did some real-estate speculator sign you up for this?”
    “No, no, really. Have an independent lab review the data,” she said, and others at the table nodded.
    Meriel heard scuffling on the vid, and the image spun and looked up—as though the camera had been dropped under a chair—as black boots and tailored cuffs walked past the link.
    “Meeting over. Stop recording,” a man’s garbled voice said. After a few unintelligible sounds, the vid cut off, either due to a dead battery or a judgment that