Under Strange Suns Read Online Free PDF

or one near enough to it, so long in coming.
    All those years learning, studying, positioning himself, all to reach this point, this moment. This horrible moment. And yet he did not hesitate, his resolve did not waver. Did he not owe an obligation to his family? Did he not owe his allegiance to God? “God,” he whispered, “is great.”
    He socketed the lead into the power supply, trying to hold the image of his mother in his mind. The graviton splitter whined to life. The Y-Drive pulsed once, redly.

Chapter 2
    A CHIME DECLARED COFFEE’S AVAILABILITY, AS IF the smell hadn’t provided her advance notice. The apartment’s automatics cycled through their routines. Sensing damp clothes, the dryer kicked on the touch-up tumble. The refrigerator displayed the pending ‘use by’ dates on the dairy products. Routine, normal, as befit a state-of-the-art condominium unit boasting all the latest appliances, all finishes high-end and tasteful. Though somehow the space left an impression of cold austerity, as if it belonged to someone seldom at home, serving as little more than waystation and storage locker. Perhaps that very coldness made the routine functioning seem an exercise in artifice, as if the El Paso apartment ran through its quotidian functions to mock its tenant.
    Brooklynn Vance slumped on the couch facing the wall panel television, sound off, the screen showing images of the spot that had until yesterday been Washington, DC. Brooklynn was no longer watching, having been for hours absorbing the pictures of the perfectly hemispherical crater slowly filling up with water. She was drained. Tears had ceased near midnight. An outburst of screaming ended around dawn. Aching grief gave way to numbing exhaustion as the sleepless night began to catch up with her. The shock had worn off. The anger ebbed, though it lay not too far beneath the emotionally hammered-flat surface.
    Now she was staring at the box on the coffee table before her. It had required multiple rings of the doorbell before she had noticed the drone delivering the package on her doorstep. Brooklynn had struggled with the incongruity that such things as package delivery still occurred in the world, a world in which the U.S. capitol could disappear in a single deadly instant. She couldn’t grasp the notion. It made no sense. But drones did not care, any more than the pre-programmed coffee maker.
    The box remained unopened. Brooklynn could not tear her eyes from the name on the return address: M. Azziz. Fucking Mehmet Azziz. Azziz, a man she had considered a friend. And the same man she had seen throughout the night over and over and over again talking to the committee–then making them all disappear.
    The box tormented her. That name, Azziz, printed in proximity to hers across the tape-sealed surface. Some part of her suggested that if she opened the box, DC would magically reappear. Slide the letter opener along the taped-over join and this would all prove to be a bad dream, an elaborate hoax concocted over a lifetime of repressed humor. Please let that be true , she thought.
    How could he have perpetrated this monstrous, murderous atrocity? Committed this massive obscenity? Azziz had never shown evidence of fanaticism. After Uncle Brennan’s disappearance, Mehmet Azziz had stepped in. Not precisely filling the void, but nonetheless there.
    The man she had known was reserved, even kind. Brooklynn’s gaze slipped up from the box to the framed certificates above her office niche in the corner between the television wall and the kitchen door. When her thoughts drifted to her professional achievements she almost always looked at the sheepskins and licenses as if for confirmation, an affirmation of her hard work and recognition of her accomplishments and value. Her BS degree from the University of Houston, where she had studied astrophysics with an emphasis on astronavigation. Mehmet Azziz had sat in the front row during commencement. Varnished oak framed her