Dreaming of Atmosphere Read Online Free

seemed a little distracted. He was a good soldier though, and his double brain came in handy more than once. I rather miss him, to be honest; I used to bounce ideas off him all the time. I miss a lot of my old squad...
    “Donny! You getting in?” Maxine yelled at me from the back seat of the cab we'd just hailed, jolting me out of my memories.
    “Sorry, got lost in thought.”
    “Did it hurt?” She joked.
    “Yeah, it kind of did. “ She saw the look in my eye and softened almost immediately.
    “Thinking about Gossamer?”
    “A little.”
    She squeezed my knee as I sat down beside her in the cab, but said nothing more. She looked out the window with a sad look on her face. She knew she couldn't say or do anything to make me feel better, so she didn't. I was grateful.
    Our cab, a computer controlled air vehicle with 4 seats, sped off into the station access corridor. The corridor was a hundred metre wide lane about a hundred and sixty metres tall that ran the length of the station, about a hundred and twenty kilometres in total. Side access corridors opened at various sections further down that led to other sections of the station. The custodians of the station ran a monopoly on transportation, having banned personal transports inside the station, and the only way to get around without using small shuttles out in space was to pay a fee and use one of the many taxi vehicles such as the one we were using now. All up, there were about forty something different station sectors that were once smaller stations or habitats themselves, all linked up to this large corridor. In an emergency energy fields popped into place that could prevent atmosphere from leaking out of the corridor and all the station sections were isolated in a similar manner, as well as with their original airlocks when they were standalone stations.
    I read somewhere that the same person owned all the stations. An Argen entrepreneur bought up a heap of these old habitats that were all being mismanaged by their previous owners and gradually towed them all into one place in the middle of the two main population centres of the system. Add to that its nearness to the system's only operational Jump Gate and it wasn't long before his investment paid dividends.
    Jump Gates, by the way, were the only way to travel faster than light. They directed traffic to a single destination, light years away, linked to a matching Jump Gate at the other end. The Argessi System, as previously mentioned, only had one that led to the Harakiwa System. A second Gate was under construction but was several years away from completion. This meant that the Argessi System was the current end of the line, so to speak.
    The known galaxy is a vast, sprawling mess of Jump Gates connecting literally thousands of star systems together. To organise the many systems, the governing body of the galaxy – called the Galactic Protectorate, or just the Protectorate – classified groups of star systems together around significant systems and features and called them Networks. We were at the far end of one such Network – The Votus-Eridani Network.
    Each time a ship enters one of the Jump Gates, it's sent many light-years away to the next Jump on the Network, and this is when relativistic effects take place. Although the science is a little beyond me, the way I understood it is that they act much like a wormhole, although at some point I knew we left behind regular space and entered into a kind of adjacent dimension, call a brane. I've heard scientists talking about strings that interact with the branes, and pull us along or something, but it all gets messed up in my head and I feel dumber every time someone tries to explain it to me. The description that works for me is that a string connects the Jump Gates to each other, through another brane, and we travel along outside along the string, to the other brane and back into our brane. Moreover, it takes a couple of months to do that. Inside our ship, it