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

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    It was a low, fast surface pass in a light survey ship, the ochre body of Triton filling his view to one side, the full piloting readout directly before him, the scanning-instrument readings to the other side, Neptune a blue reference point behind him at five o'clock. His altitude was reeling down, and he needed to make these course adjustments to a fine degree of accuracy...and every maneuver he made seemed to just miss, always a fraction of a second late, and now he had to fire his course outward again to keep from plowing a groove into the moon with his ship, and it was driving him crazy.
    /Krackey, is this image-cruncher lagging half a hiccup behind my movements?/
    /What's that, Bandie?/ The voice of his coworker and simulation instructor seemed to vibrate in his head, like a bad acoustic speaker. That wasn't right, either; it felt as if there was a bad connection in the neurolink.
    /I said, the image processor seems to be lagging. Is that lag going to to be real in the survey runs, or is the damn sim computer screwing up?/
    Krackey's voice rasped back, /Lagging, you say? Naw, it shouldn't be. Hang on a sec', I'll check. They had a system malfie yesterday, and maybe they didn't get it all flushed out./
    /Great./ Bandicut hesitated, half tempted to just dive into the moon. It was only a sim, after all. Still...
    /Hang on a sec' longer, Bandie—/
    He hung on, orbiting at a safe distance, thinking maybe he ought to just unplug from the thing until this was straightened out. The whole point of running the sim in neuro was to make it totally realistic, just like flying around the rock in realtime. The last thing he wanted to do was rehearse under misleading conditions and practice wrong habits. If they'd put these sims on the shuttle out, he wouldn't have had to be wasting everyone's time with it now that he was on Triton.
    There was a crackle of static in his head. He almost grabbed for the abort-cutoff, but then he heard Krackey's voice through the static, saying, /Bandie, the sim-ops guy is on it, he says for you to just hold tight for another minute or two. You want some muzak or something?/
    /Shit no, I don't want no muzak, I hate that—/
    And then the pain hit him, like a flash of fire across the top of his skull, like a blazing poker—
    /Bandie...you okaaaaay...?/
    —and he wanted to scream, but he couldn't even breathe—
    /Bandicooooot, what's wroooonng—?/
    —and then the voice fled, and Triton and all of the readouts with it, and the only escape from the pain was by diving into the silence and blackness of unconsciousness
    >
    >
    >
    >
    >>
    >
    >>>>>>>>>>>—< loss of signal >—>>>>>>>>>>>>>
    >
    >
    >
    >>>>>>>>>>>—< alpha-disconnect >—>>>>>>>>>>
    >
    >
    ——
    ——
    ——
    ——
    —— . . .

    *

    For the second time that day, Bandicut awoke from a faint. It took him a few moments to focus his eyes on the icy ground and realize where he was—on Triton, on the surface. Not in a neurosim.
    Of course it was not a neurosim. There were no more neurosims. There was no more neuro. He had been having a terrible nightmare, a dream-memory of something he desperately wanted to forget—the accident, the system malfunction that had fried his neuronal connectors beyond repair, had put him in the hands of incompetent company doctors, ended his piloting career, and left him with recurring silence-fugue. It made him tremble to remember it.
    /// Forgive me.
    It was...helpful...to me to see that. ///
    /Aaa—!/ He gasped in shock at the voice inside his head. His heart pounded as he remembered who, or what, was speaking to him. An alien. A quarx.
    /// Are you injured? ///
    He sat up, clutching his helmet. He wanted desperately to rub at his forehead. He wanted to rub at that presence in his mind, peering out through his eyes, taking in the landscape with infuriating eagerness. /You! You're still with me!/ he thought, almost numbly.
    /// Yes, of