The Transmigration of Souls Read Online Free PDF Page B

In my dreams, as you say.”
    If this was some old movie, I’d reach down now and rip that pretty little pecker out by its bioengineered roots. Still, no rule says you can’t grow up. If you want to. She glanced at her chronometer, and said, “You just get my ship ready, Brucie. You’ve got about four hours left.”
    Craft displaced by ingenuousness once again. He said, “That so, Sarge?” A shrug. “Well, we get to fly our toy. That’s all that really matters.” And a serious look, gazing fondly at the little Scavenger spaceship, superimposed against the broad, flat blue Pacific.
    Something, Kincaid thought, we have in common. She looked up into the sky, and said, “Yeah. We shouldn’t have stayed home. There’s more to life than living forever.”
    Softly whispered: “No shit, Sarge. No shit.”
    o0o
    Floating. Floating in the softest sea. No weight. No where. No when. Just floating with my eyes closed. Floating on my way to Heaven. God, I could stay like this forever. Just drifting, alone and unafraid...
    Soft whisper of machinery somewhere. Faint hum of electronic something. Whisper of a turning motor. Soft tickle of air blowing in my face, just under my arms, coming from somewhere behind me. Faint itch of clinging sweat, drying sweat, hardly there, hardly there at all, just like me...
    “All right. I’m ready.” Inbar’s voice, suddenly loud in her ears.
     Subaïda Rahman opened her eyes and felt her insides clench hard. Bright moonscape sweeping by below, no more than twenty kilometers straight down to the lowest plains, corroded, rolling mountains reaching up more than half that. Going by fast ! No wind here...
    Laughter. Alireza’s voice, same volume. “Your heart rate was down below 55. I thought you went to sleep.”
    “Um.” Cough. A throat-clearing noise. Smooth, gray-brown plains flying under her now, running north along thirty, Mare Frigoris coming up. Just now over what? Lacus Mortis. She said, “Almost. Not quite.”
    “I understand al-Qahira Journal ran a big article on you in this morning’s edition. They said you were very... calm, I think was the word they used.”
    Inbar’s voice, fatigued, maybe a little out of breath, said, “ I’m not calm. I’d like to get this done .” Though he’d been trained for zero-gee EVA, against just such an eventuality, Omry Inbar did not like this business of floating along in naked space. Rahman couldn’t imagine... Maybe he was just afraid. Maybe a little motion sick.
    Down below, the plains were ramping up into the north polar highlands as they passed by 70N. That wide caldera coming up to the west would be Meton, meaning in another few minutes they’d be over the rim of mountains separating Peary from Rozhdestvenskiy, where the old American base lay in ruins. We ought to be down there already. Timeline shot to Hell.
    She toggled the two little hand controllers on her AMU’s armrests, listened to the little peroxide thrusters stutter, noise transmitted through various structural members until it was inside her suit. Inertial tugging on her harness destroying the illusion of weightlessness for a moment, Moon moving beneath her, getting out from under her feet, going behind her back, featureless black space, starless space, sun-glare-dominated space coming round.
    Al-Qamar ’s golden cone was about 200 meters away, floating free, skewed at an angle, nose away from her, foreshortened, broad annular aerospike engine bulging toward her, three landing legs down and locked... and the forth one stuck half open, main joint bent up like a dancer’s knee, Omry Inbar a fat white manikin clinging to the hull beside it, tools in place and strapped down. He said, “I need you to position the jack now.”
    “All right. I hadn’t realized I’d drifted so far...” More thruster thudding from behind her back and the ship started to grow. Down near the southern horizon, far beyond the ship, Earth was a tiny blue-white sliver, mostly black and