A Planet for Rent Read Online Free Page A

enough to try harming one of these insectoids, he’d find it a hard job to pull off. Selshaliman’s shining chitin carapace was practically invulnerable to every sort of projectile, and it was absolutely forbidden to own or manufacture energy weapons on earth. Planetary Security agents and their minimachine guns made sure the rule was scrupulously followed.
    Armored, with four slender but incredibly strong arms and another four matching legs, grodos were rapid fighters, whose strength was second only to that of the massive Colossaurs, and not by much. Besides, they had that stinger, good for injecting their lethal venom into their victims.
    And for doing other things, as Buca knew all too well...
    The inner ring of the astroport was empty of any sort of cyberaddict or social worker. Only travelers had access to this zone.
    Through the large windows you could see the runway with the shuttles waiting in an orderly line, broken here and there by the occasional squat, aerodynamic suborbital patrol ship.
    Buca smiled, amused: It appeared that, despite all of Planetary Security’s boasts about “maintaining control,” the problem of illegal departures from the planet kept getting more and more serious. They’d had to buy so many of these ships from the xenoids to control the fugitives that their own astroports weren’t enough to serve them all.
    Buca had never entered an astroport’s last ring before. The simple fact that she was able to walk through these corridors was almost a guarantee that Selshaliman would make good on his promise. That before you knew it, she would be boarding the shuttle, and then the hypership, leaving Earth. Forever.
    Nostalgia invaded her, with its troop of memories.
    She remembered her birth on the small island whose name she would rather forget. Her mother, happy to finally have the daughter she had wanted, baptizing her with the name María Elena. Her father, a bearded astronaut in the satellite-hunting patrol, only an occasional presence at home, between one trip and the next. She remembered her childhood, free of poverty, free of dependence on Social Assistance, believing that Planetary Security agents existed only to protect her. Believing in terrestrial hospitality and the goodness of xenoids... And her mother, looking at her and sighing, as if to say, “Play and enjoy life now... There will be plenty of time for suffering later.”
    And was there ever.
    But nobody could take those years of happiness away from her.
    Later, everything came all at once. When she was ten, she discovered the lie of the Galactic Protectorate, the cruelty of the Ultimatum, what xenoids really were. Her birthday present was a one-week trip to Hawaii, all first-class. They even went to the astroport to take the suborbital shuttle. She loved it! Never suspecting that it would be the last time her whole family would be together. Her mother and father cried the whole time, whenever they thought she wasn’t looking. They were hugging all the time, and Buca couldn’t understand why.
    Until, after they had been sitting for hours in the cosmodrome waiting area, it was officials from Social Assistance who came to pick her up. And she knew she would never see her parents again.
    Driven to the brink by their mounting debts, they had sold themselves for life to Body Spares. In return for that farewell trip, and for a clause guaranteeing room and board for their daughter until she turned fifteen. And also for canceling the debt she otherwise would have had to pay in her parents’ place, which would have made her a lifelong slave of the Planetary Tourism Agency.
    She never forgave them.
    Boarding-school hell, surrounded by kids rescued from the streets and marked for a life of crime almost from birth. A happy and sheltered childhood was a handicap there. Common girls, who had grown up keeping their distance from the turf wars between the Yakuza and the Mafia and making fun of the xenoids who prowled for healthy young native