The Disinherited Read Online Free PDF Page B

transmissions—our own communications devices are incompatible with yours. And, candidly, we were also motivated by security considerations; we wished to minimize signalling that might possibly be picked up at random." He paused thoughtfully. "I know this is all very overwhelming for you, Colonel," he continued in a slightly patronizing way. (Was it DiFalco's imagination or did the young woman roll her eyes heavenward?) "But I am going to have to decline to answer many of your questions at present, in order to avoid repeating myself later, when we reach the asteroid I believe you call 'Phoenix Prime,' your present destination. You see, I have approached you to solicit your aid in arranging a secret meeting with whoever is in ultimate authority there."
    "So," DiFalco said faintly, "you want me to . . . take you to our leader?"
    Varien brightened. "Yes. That's it. Well put. If you wish, I will gladly accompany you back to your ship, as a gesture of good faith." Does he think we primitives are into giving and taking hostages? DiFalco wondered. Varien motioned the young woman forward. "Or, if you prefer, I will send my daughter, Aelanni zho'Morna, who has full authority to make all arrangements."
    DiFalco heard a low moan from his helmet comm. "What is it, XO?" Varien and the others politely did not listen.
    "It had to happen," Levinson groaned. "Why am I even surprised?"
    "What are you talking about, Jeff?"
    "The mad scientist has a beautiful daughter!"

Chapter Three
    The potato-shaped asteroid known as Phoenix Prime turned slowly on its long axis. Its interior, hollowed out by lavish use of clean, laser-detonated fusion devices, was little more prepossessing than its rugged surface—none of the parklike spaciousness visualized for asteroid habitats by space-colonization advocates of the last century. It merely provided the basics of habitability for those who labored, in shifts, to prepare the large ice asteroid called Phoenix for the journey that was its destiny.
    DiFalco had often reflected that Phoenix was misnamed. The Phoenix of myth had arisen from the ashes. Its namesake would descend to the surface of Mars at interplanetary velocity and impact with the force of a billion average fusion bombs, blasting the planet's original atmosphere into space and triggering the seismic and volcanic cataclysms that would give it a new, dense one. In less than a generation, after the molten surface cooled, oceans would form and microorganisms would be introduced by the humans who would again be able to set foot on the surface. After another generation, a major human presence, and some oxygen-producing plants, would have taken hold and terraforming would enter a new stage. Less than a century after the initial impact, atmospheric oxygen should suffice for the formation of an ozone layer and large-scale soil fertilization would be underway. After another half-century, oxygen pressure would have reached Earth-like levels and simple genetically engineered animals would be released.
    So, he reflected, maybe the name wasn't so inappropriate after all. A new, living world would arise from the wreck of the old, lifeless one. It was incomparably the greatest engineering project in human history, conceived in the heady decades after the turn of the century when Communism had fallen and free enterprise seemed to have taken a new lease on life in the young republics of Eurasia and on the high frontier of space.
    It was the era into which DiFalco had been born—the full high tide of the Third Industrial Revolution—and he had often wondered, with an uncomprehending inner hurt, what had gone wrong with it.
    * * *
    With a beard and the right clothes, Brigadier General Sergei Konstantinovich Kurganov would have looked like an Eastern Orthodox saint. He was a Russian of the tall, slender sort, with a long, triangular face and a broad brow from which the gray-brown hair was beginning to recede. His English was only slightly accented—indeed, he