Neptune Crossing (The Chaos Chronicles) Read Online Free PDF Page A

sensation in his mind.
    /// You could call me..."Charrleeee." ///
    " Charlie! " he grunted aloud. Jesus. He snapped inwardly: /Are you making fun of me now?/
    /// Fun?
    It's the closest...approximation I could find.
    That you could pronounce. ///
    "Great," he whispered. "Charlie. Right?"
    /// Charrleeee. ///
    He sighed. It could be worse. Better than that horrible shriek. He turned around, clumping in his awkward boots. Hadn't this...Charlie...told him that it could help him get out of here? They had better get moving, if he was to get out alive.
    /// You mean,
    if WE are to get out alive. ///
    He froze. Yes, he supposed that was what he meant. He blinked suddenly, realizing that something had just changed in his headlight beam. The walls were no longer revolving around him. There was a strange sensation of stillness about the cavern, and he stepped toward the wall for a better look. Maybe now he could try to climb out. Or jump. He might be able to jump high enough in this gravity to reach a handhold near the ceiling.
    /// You don't want to do that.
    Too risky. ///
    /I have to get out of here, damn it!/
    /// Yes, but wait. ///
    /For what?/
    /// A better way. ///
    /What's that supposed to mean?/
    There was no immediate answer. But something made him turn back to the alien device, and his heart thumped. The thing was glowing, and the movement of the spherical sections had become quicker and more frantic, or erratic. He felt a chill of uncertainty. /Is that thing going to blow? Christ, I do have to get out of here!/
    /// Wait. ///
      /But I—/
    Before he could complete his thought, he felt a sudden rush of warmth and light, and a spinning wooziness. Then his vision went cottony and white, and he floated up into a dreamy unconsciousness.

Chapter 3
    Beginnings

    Remembering the flight out...
    In the crystal clarity of the neuro, the planet Neptune floated in deep space with the kind of majesty that only heavenly bodies seemed to possess. She was ghostly and beautiful, a pale blue orb streaked with white storm systems and ringed with faint circles of dust that glinted into visibility only when his thoughts stroked the augmentation driver and brightened the scene to an astral glow. He recalled how the planet looked through the unamped porthole of the ship, cerulean and dim, almost sepulchral, floating like a phantom against the stars; and he felt a powerful rush of gratitude for the vision of the neuro, for the union with the ship's AI that let him experience the approaching planet as a vision of beauty, of wonder.
    Bandicut was practically the only person on the shuttle who'd actually enjoyed the long haul out from Ceres Base. While everyone else counted the weeks and months, slowly going stir-crazy as they crossed the endless billions of kilometers, Bandicut had spent hours viewing the approaching planet through neuro-enhanced imagery, and exploring various threads of related information from the datanet.
    At this point, near the end of the flight, they were starting to get fairly clear realtime images of their actual destination—the moon Triton, in its crazy, backwards, interloper's orbit around Neptune, well outside the ring system. By fiddling with the image mag, he could enlarge Triton from the small disk that the naked eye saw to a full-sized, three-dimensional body. It was about the same size as Earth's Moon, but there the resemblance ended. Triton was covered with a brownish pink coloration from the darkened methane that coated much of its surface ice. Its countenance bore the scars and craters of a face with a complexion problem. Bandicut could not yet resolve the MINEXFO encampment in the realtime imaging, but he'd glimpsed a few puffs of haze above the areas where he knew the great mining lasers were vaporizing swaths of the surface, exposing veins of metals that lay beneath...veins of alien metals, exotic alloys that had melted and refrozen eons ago.
    It was an exciting prize, those alien alloys that offered