Polaris Read Online Free PDF Page B

previously unknown Shenji outstation. In case you don’t stay up with these things and have no idea what an outstation is, corporations used them as bases when travel around the Confederacy took weeks, and sometimes months. I know I’m dating myself when I admit that I was a pilot in the days before the quantum drive, and I remember what it was like. You left Rimway and headed out and it took a full day to go twenty light-years. If you were doing some serious traveling, you got plenty of time to improve your chess game.
    Outstations were placed in orbit at various strategic points so that travelers could stop and get refreshed, pick up spare parts, refuel, replenish stores, or just get out of the ship for a while. Some were run by governments, most were corporate. Unless you’ve been on an old-style flight, you have no idea what sitting inside one of those burners for weeks at a crack can be like. It’s all strictly eyeblink now. Turn it on, and you can be halfway across the Arm before you finish your coffee. No limit other than the one imposed by fuel. Alex gets credit for that, too. I mean, he was the one who found the original quantum drive. And I won’t be giving away any secrets if I tell you that it hasn’t made him happy that he was never able to cash in. It seems you can’t patent historical inventions thatsomebody else, uh, invented. Even if no living person knew about it anymore. The government gave him a medal and a modest cash prize and thanked him very much.
    If you’ve read Alex’s memoir, A Talent for War, you know the story.
    The outstation was orbiting a blue giant whose catalog number I’ve forgotten. Doesn’t matter anyhow. It was close to six thousand light-years from Rimway, on the edge of Confederacy space. If the sources were accurate, it was eighteen hundred years old.
    Outstations are almost always reconfigured asteroids. The Shenji models tended to be big. This one had a diameter of 2.6 kilometers, and I’m talking about the station, not the asteroid. It was in a seventeen-year orbit around its sun. Like most of these places that have been abandoned a while, it had developed a distinct tumble, which, of course, tends to shake up whatever might be stored inside.
    It was the first time in its history Rainbow Enterprises had discovered one of these things. “Are we going to register it?” I asked. We would do that to claim ownership.
    â€œNo,” he said.
    â€œWhy not?” It would have been just a matter of informing the Registry of Archeological Sites. You gave them a brief description of the find, and its location, and it was legally yours.
    He was looking out at the station. It was dark and battered, and you could easily have missed seeing what it was. In its glory days it would have said hello and invited you over for some meals and a short vacation. “Off-world law enforcement doesn’t exist,” he said. “All we’d be doing is giving away the location of the site.”
    â€œMaybe that’s what we should do, Alex.”
    â€œWhat is?”
    â€œGive it away. Contribute it to Survey. Let them worry about it.”
    He stuck his tongue into the side of his jaw. “That might not be a bad idea, Chase,” he said. We both knew we could carry off pretty much everything of value, short of the site itself. Giving it to Survey would generate goodwill with an organization that had always supplied well-heeled clients. And Rainbow Enterprises would get plenty of free publicity. “Exactly what I was thinking, my little urchin.”
    Most of its space had been given over to docking and maintenance. But there had also been a couple of dining areas, living accommodations, and recreational facilities. We found the remains of open spaces that had once been parks. There’d been a lake. And even a beachfront.
    It was all gray and cold now. Eighteen centuries is a long time, even in near vacuum.
    There was no