Maelstrom Read Online Free PDF

said.
    “Why shouldn’t they?”
    “Too heavy,” he said.
    “Not that much of a problem,” Johnny said. “
Our
all-terrain vehicles are just that—vehicles that adapt for all terrains. Terrain includes gravity. Might take a bit of adjusting but I reckon they’ll run, all right.”
    “That’s good, man,” Ke-ola said.
    They took the lift to the docking bay, where they suited up and prepared to disembark. The bay held all kinds of machinery—flitters, cranes, shuttles, and forklifts among them. The main entrance to the bay was cavernous enough to allow smaller ships to enter, but there was also another hatch for personnel only, and Ke-ola veered away from the flitters and headed for the air lock. It irised open, and the others stepped inside while it closed behind them and the gantry—a broad platform with an extendable staircase—extruded itself. Ke-ola took a step out onto the platform. It groaned beneath his weight.

CHAPTER 4
    R IGHT, THEN ,” J OHNNY said through his helmet’s mic. “Perhaps we’ll try it without the flitters for now.” He signaled the bay’s control room and gave the order that the flitters should be recalibrated for heavy g.
    Meanwhile, Ronan followed Ke-ola. Once he was out of the
Piaf
’s controlled environment, he found it hard work to pick up his feet and put them down again. It was as if he were wading through hip-high snow in heavy boots.
    “Use the antigrav setting on your boots,” Johnny instructed. “Two ought to do it.”
    Johnny tapped the control panel on the wrist of his suit. The twins had never had to wear such heavy protection before.
    I’m glad the controls aren’t actually on the boots,
Murel said, following Johnny’s example.
I don’t think I could see my feet real clearly with the helmet in the way.
    Yeah,
Ronan agreed, activating his own boots’ antigrav function.
But—hey, that’s a lot better!
    Dust and smoke rose from the dozens of meteors smoldering in craters like malign red eggs in nests of molten rock. The steam and smoke from them formed a gray-brown sludge that hung in the heavy air.
    Ke-ola swarmed down the ladder ahead of Ronan. He ran like a charging rhino toward the meteor that had landed on the residence enclosure.
    “Poor kid,” Johnny said. “We probably won’t even find bodies if they were under those things when they hit.”
    “Well, surely not everyone perished,” Marmie said optimistically. “If these meteor showers happen often, the inhabitants must have developed some sort of defense.”
    “Ke-ola would know about that kind of thing, wouldn’t he?” Murel asked.
    The three of them were on the ground by then. Ronan trudged over to the crater where Ke-ola was. The larger boy was circling it, examining the edges carefully.
    “They might be under there,” he said slowly, nodding to the meteor.
    “You mean crushed under the meteor?” Ronan asked as delicately as possible.
    “Maybe not. They might have had time to take cover in one of the root canals before this one hit. There were trapdoors inside the habitats. Believe it or not, we’re in the planet’s green belt here. The meteors usually hit the equatorial belt, which is a big desert where nobody lives. I remember the elders saying how the showers were changing the orbit of the asteroid belt and shifting the planet on its axis, so maybe they started hitting here because of it. Anyway, usually, when they’re not all burned up like now, there are some scrubby trees and other plants that grow here—only part of them grows on the surface, though.”
    “So how would those keep people from being . . . you know?”
    Ke-ola’s breath huffed through the mic into Ronan’s helmet, and with deliberate patience he explained. “
Because
there are so few nutrients or water in the surface soil, they have these roots that are maybe ten times as deep as they are tall. Where old ones have burrowed into the ground and then died and the roots rotted away—a long time ago—there