The Venusian Gambit Read Online Free PDF Page B

Unity-Halliburton, taken care of things. He didn’t want to go in shooting, of course, but there were worlds full of resources—and alchemy!—that were going unexploited.
    But the portal wasn’t stable. He didn’t have enough time.
    After that, Diaz shut him down and took over his worksite, his company disowned him, and he was busy getting drunk-as-fuck under the radar in Dubai when Greene—who had secretly been on Harry’s payroll—and Huntington walked up clear as day and convinced him to try again. The thing was, he thought Greene and Huntington were buried under the rubble after his particle collider blew the hell up. And Greene never told him he’d recruited Huntington.
    But since then…well, it had been a weird trip.
    First off, Harry didn’t know this Huntington woman in the slightest, but he knew Greene—and there were days Harry felt that the guy wearing Greene’s face wasn’t Greene. Greene was funny, for one, and cocky as hell and downright charismatic; the scientist used to host educational holovision shows before going to work for Diaz and, later, Harry. But lately, Greene was none of those things. Sure, he still had his trade mark mane of silvery hair, his bright teeth and holovision-ready looks. But he had some nervous tics to him, drumming fingers and the occasional twitch, and a near omnipresent thin sheen of sweat on his forehead, even in the air-conditioned offices. To Harry, Greene seemed…stretched. Thinned out, somehow.
    And from what Harry knew of U.S. Marines, the woman before him now was far less disciplined, cool and detached. There was a feral fervor about her that made “unnerving” seem like a garden party in comparison. The fact that she was physically ripped and nominally pretty was even more disconcerting.
    When Harry finally confronted Greene about his survival, the scientist said he’d been in contact with the aliens from the other side—just as Martian scientist/astronaut Yuna Hiyashi had been two years ago on Mars. Greene said he and Huntington had managed to avoid the worst of the building collapse in Siwa and, armed with new knowledge, were working to reestablish contact with the other side to re-open the portal that had flared wide and slammed shut in the temple below the Siwa oasis.
    But they seemed to be keeping Harry very much in the dark. And that wouldn’t do.
    “And you’ve been in contact?” Harry pressed.
    Greene and Huntington kept working away on their rented holostations. “That’s right, Harry,” Greene said coolly. “Not often, not every day, but enough. Soon, we’ll have enough resources available to us to rebuild what you did in Egypt, but better. Bigger. In the meantime, the dimensional phase communicators will help both Tienlong and ourselves better manage the entities aboard that ship so that they can be put to use in opening a new portal when they arrive.”
    Huntington smiled as she worked, a predatory expression that sent a shiver down Harry’s spine and, for the thousandth time, made him question just what the hell he was doing with these two.
    But there were no alternatives. Wanted by the authorities and running low on even his extensive lines of untraceable credit, he’d hitched his wagon to the notion that Greene and Huntington could reopen the portal between worlds, stabilize it and make it so that resources and people could be safely transported from one to the other.
    In business, the only way to correct a mistake is to achieve an exponentially bigger gain. And opening up an entire universe worth of new markets certainly qualified.
    “All right,” Harry said. “But we only have a few months left before my lines of credit run out. After that, all this gets shut down.”
    “It won’t get shut down,” Huntington said quietly. It was the first time she had spoken within earshot of Harry in a month.
    “See that it doesn’t,” Harry snapped, grabbing his coat. “I have to go see about making another tax payment to the local