Strider's Galaxy Read Online Free PDF Page B

gale was blowing across the landscape so violently that many of the ears of the grass were being ripped away, to go tumbling high in the air before being lost in the distance. A pinkish sun lowered not far above the horizon. Strider touched the plastite: it was at approximate skin temperature, but at the same time it made her sense that it was cold. She felt a stinging in her nostrils, as if she had just breathed a whiff of ozone.
    "Is this Tau Ceti II ?" she said quietly. "It's beautiful ."
    Dulac chuckled behind her.
    "No. It's only a mock-up. We haven't got any pictures of the planet yet—we won't have until next year some time. You should know that."
    Strider nodded absently, still absorbed by the scene of wilderness. The Martians' Von Neumann probes were programmed to replicate themselves first, explore the stellar system they had encountered, and then only as a last resort descend to the surface of any major planet. In theory the probe could lift itself off again, but only at the potential cost of destroying every ecosystem for hundreds if not thousands of square kilometers around. In practice, if they decided to investigate a world close up, they would send transmissions home as long as they thought fit, then switch themselves off.
    She loved Mars. She thought of herself not as an Earthling but as a Martian. But she would have given virtually anything to be able to strip back the plastite of the fake window and throw herself into the mocked-up alien scene.
    "Strider," said Dulac. He had to say it a second time before she heard him, because a heavy creature with two huge horns jutting from each shoulder was strutting through the grass towards her. It seemed to have no head as such; its eyes were just beneath and to the front of the horns.
    "Yes," she said, forcing herself away from the view.
    "You've got yourself a job."
    "On the Santa Maria ?" She tried to make it sound as if the question weren't any big deal.
    "You could say that."
    "Oh, shit, you're not making me part of the back-up team, are you?"
    "No." Macphee took over. "We want you to be the Santa Maria 's captain."
    #
    It took them a while to explain to her what the word "captain" meant—hierarchical structures were of course present on Mars, but everyone tried to ignore the fact. It took them a while longer to tell her why she had been singled out for the role.
    In an era when almost everybody was booted up with various bits and pieces of technological augmentation, she was something of a rarity; some people were filled with more extraneous software than the average bot, which was fine when they wanted to play videogames in the middle of the night without having to get out of bed but not so exciting when they had to draw on more basic brain functions, like walking. And the two major troubles with technology were that eventually people came to rely on it and that inevitably, in time, it broke down. Sometimes it could be fixed, sometimes it couldn't.
    The SSIA was sending a party of human beings on a journey that might take a hundred and ten years. During this time, some of the potential colonists would certainly suffer mental collapse: the Santa Maria was as large as she could be built, but the confinement and the boredom would surely break a few of the party. What was more worrying, however, was the risk of technowithdrawal: people became addicted to their gadgetry, and were likely to become suicidal—or, worse, murderous—if it broke down and couldn't be replaced.
    Strider was a normal human being.
    This, they repeated, meant that she was very unusual. It had also made her a prime candidate for—she practiced the new word again that night back in her apt in City 19—captaincy of the Santa Maria . She'd told Dulac and Macphee that she wanted a week to sort things out before the SSIA podded her across to City 78.
    She felt like getting laid by way of celebration but she couldn't think of anyone to call whom she much liked and her sexbot was so goddam