Dawn of Procyon Read Online Free Page B

just dumb luck we came across those critters. Think about it. Man creates the fold engine, and we gain the ability to bend space. Then, a little way down the track, we jump to, uh . . .”
    “Gliese Four-Twelve,” Landry supplied.
    “Yeah, Gliese Four-Twelve. We jump to Gliese Four-Twelve, and a Toad warship just happens to be there and follows us back to Earth. Bam! The war begins.”
    “Thanks for the history lesson.”
    “No, that’s not what I’m getting at. What I mean is, if that Toad warship hadn’t been there when we folded through to Gliese Four-Twelve, or we’d chosen a different system . . . we might have been living in peace all of these years. You and I might be taking a joyride across an unexplored planet right now instead of worrying about where the next attack was coming from.”
    “Hey, don’t go all mushy on me, huh?” Landry said.
    “Not a chance.” Gus turned to look at him, but couldn’t quite get his head around far enough to see him. “It’s just a hypothetical.”
    “Yeah, I get it,” Landry said. He’d often wondered the same thing himself—what their lives might have been like had humans not invented the fold engine and stumbled out into the depths of space, attracting the attention of a hostile species that had started a war with Earth without any attempt to communicate—but there was no point daydreaming about it. That just wasn’t reality.
    “Hey, I want to thank you for doing this, Landry,” Gus said awkwardly, unsure how to broach the topic of his gratitude. “For real. I know you’re taking a big chance. I won’t forget it.”
    “Well, you are my second best friend in the whole outpost, you know.”
    “Right after the guy with the beard?”
    “You got it.”
    Gus adjusted his heading, and they continued to rocket along just above the surface. Landry watched it all go by, but try as he might, he couldn’t see the beauty in it. He couldn’t see the infinite wonder of the alien world. Maybe he was just too jaded, too pessimistic.
    Or maybe he’d just lost the ability to see the beauty in anything.
    “Okay, I’ve got visual on the dead array,” Gus was saying. “Ten o’clock. Five, maybe six clicks ahead.”
    Landry craned his neck, spotting the tall spire of metal glinting in the sunlight. He activated the camera on his helmet, which in turn splashed an image overlay on the inside of his visor. The view before him grew to 4x and then 8x magnification, greatly enhancing the detail of the dusty metal plating of the array. Ghostly green numerals flicked across the HUD, displaying approximate distance along with a number of other parameters.
    “Yeah. Got it.”
    “The survey area where I left the storage module should be a couple of clicks north of that. We should be able to spot it, as long as it hasn’t been covered in dust already.”
    “I’ll keep an eye out.”
    Gus turned the scout and they made their way north, weaving between a cluster of boulders with precision. He eased back on the power and they slowed to a more gentle cruising speed as they tried to locate their target.
    “See anything yet?” Gus said.
    “No.” Landry adjusted his camera magnification again, then leaned forward as he tried to get a better view of the terrain. His visor bumped sharply against the acrylic of the cockpit canopy, and he sat up. “Y’know, this would be a lot easier if we had some more altitude.”
    “Like I said, that’s not an option,” Gus said. “We have to play some limbo here.”
    “Play what?”
    “Limbo, man. You know the game where someone holds a bar and you have to try to walk underneath it? You have to keep low—” He stopped. “Wait, there it is! Yeah, I see it. Eleven o’clock.”
    “I don’t see anything but rock.”
    “That’s it! That’s the storage module. Let me just swing around here . . .” Gus made another sharp turn, then began to curve the scout around to the east, still hugging the terrain. “See it? It should be