Titanium Texicans Read Online Free PDF Page B

dropped altitude to no higher than three feet.
    Tasso continued watching the towns and farmsteads slide past his windows. It felt like he was creeping along, since he was increasingly less excited to get where he was going, he decided going slow was okay. He started waving ‘good morning’ to anyone he saw. Grandpa said it didn’t cost much to be polite, so he waved. Fewer people waved back the closer he got to Landing City until he decided to quit waving, too.
    He spotted a sign for the farm product processing facility. Due to his recent crash, he was hours behind his original schedule and the plant should be open and operating. Before he gave it a second thought, he took manual control of the flitter and guided it down a small road into a parking lot. He circled the lot slowly, but didn’t see any spaces marked for visitors or for tour parking. There were many empty parking spots reserved for this person or that person. He slid into an unmarked spot at the far end of the lot and eased the flitter to the ground. It sputtered and shook before shutting off.
    Leaving the flitter behind, he walked to the main building. He fell in behind a group of men and women. They all walked past the main doors, around the side and into the plant proper. The group went one way. He went another. He spotted a tractor pulling a long trailer as it floated into the plant. He followed.
    Everyone was walking along between two painted lines on the floor. He followed, watching the tractor-trailer’s progress across the facility. He couldn’t see what produce was in this particular trailer. There were tractor-trailers, shuttles, and even a few wheeled machines backed into spots along the central corridor of the huge facility. He saw men prodding hogs along a chute, beans of some kind pouring into a bin, and potatoes creeping along a conveyer.
    He tried to look at everything at once. He never imagined a building big enough to drive into except for a garage or a barn. He stepped aside to let a group of women walk past, standing outside of the painted lines on the floor.
    “Hey, kid! Get your helmet on,” a man shouted at him.
    Tasso said, “Yes, sir.” He wanted to say something back to the man other than a polite response, but he wasn’t quick witted that way. Grandpa always said the best response to a rude comment was to walk away. Grandpa had been saying that since he took on all three of the Lamont boys. He’d been a kid and he would’ve whipped them all no matter what Dougall said on the radio. He wasn’t a kid anymore and didn’t like being called one, but he let the comment slide and turned away.
    He stepped back between the lines and the man went away. He didn’t have a helmet, and as he looked around, the only people he saw wearing helmets of any kind were outside the painted lines. As long as he stayed within the lines, no one said anything to him. He followed the tractor-trailer. It stopped, backed into a slot, and emptied a full load of chiamra plants into a funnel feeding the plants onto a conveyer belt. Tasso followed the chiamra plants along the belt. The conveyer belt went up an incline until it dropped the raw chiamra into an agricultural-processing unit.
    Grandpa had shown him pictures of the agricultural-processing units. They were larger than their old farm shuttle, and the shuttle was big enough to put the flitter inside its storage bay. Without the automated processes, it wouldn’t be profitable to farm chiamra. The machines processed the blossoms into spice. The only market for the spice was off planet and the only place to sell chiamra plants for off planet sales was at this facility. He watched the agricultural-processing unit take in the raw material, but he couldn’t see where it spit out the spice or the stalks.
    There was a bin at one end collecting scrap plant sludge to rework into fertilizer. There was little market for the fertilizer on Saronno. The high concentration of nitrogen in the chiamra sludge was