Echoes of Earth Read Online Free Page A

a moment’s silence as the conSense view changed.
    Then: “Jesus fucking Christ!”
    It was the first time Caryl Hatzis had ever heard Jayme Sivio swear.

    1.1.3

    The cold hit Alander’s shoulders like an open-palmed slap as he sat upright and reached for the controls of the heating element. Cursing under his breath, he shut off the current and stood up. The bath was surrounded by a spreading muddy stain. He lifted out the end of the black hose and grimaced at the slow drip that issued from it.
    “ Shit. ”
    Swearing wasn’t going to solve anything, and neither was telling himself what he ought to have done. Yes, a cutoff switch of some kind would have stopped the tank from draining empty, but he hadn’t thought of it. It had never even occurred to him, because all he’d needed to do was keep an eye on the flow, and there wouldn’t have been a problem.
    But he hadn’t. His mind had drifted, and the mistake was made. His biggest problem now was how to explain it to Caryl Hatzis.
    An alarm pinged inside his head a split second before the communicator on the ground near his muddy environment suit did likewise. He stepped out of the bath and grabbed the makeshift towel he had prepared earlier, already dreading the call. He knew who it would be from. The tank must have had some sort of internal sensor, so the Tipler would’ve known the moment it had emptied. If only he’d thought.
    “Yes?” he said, clipping the headset over his scalp. He tried to sound casual, but the chill in the air was already making him shiver, giving a tremor to his voice.
    “It’s Jayme.”
    He felt a flicker of surprise and relief: not Hatzis. Not quite. “Listen,” he began, deciding to brave it out, “it was a mistake and I can fix it—”
    “Forget that, Peter. Just look up.”
    “What?” All he could see was a pale patch where the sun tried feebly to shine through the clouds. He was about to say as much when a streak of gold swept from one side of the sky to the other, above the clouds but moving as fast as he could swing his arm over his head, and so bright it left a faint afterimage. The line to the Tipler crackled furiously at the same time, momentarily deafening him.
    Another appeared a second later, heading in a different direction across the sky; then a third. All three paths intersected at a point behind the cliff wall against which his shelter huddled. He headed for the edge of the ledge to see better.
    “You should probably get dressed first, Peter,” said Sivio with some impatience. “We can’t afford to lose your body.”
    With some embarrassment, Alander clutched his environment suit to his chest and headed for the relative warmth of the shelter, where he dressed with as much haste as he could muster. Through the translucent material of the tent he caught the brief glow of another golden flash.
    “What’s going on, Jayme?” he asked when the interference passed.
    “We’re not sure. They arrived not long ago, and we’ve been trying to hail them. So far there has been no response.”
    Alander zipped the last seal shut.“ Who arrived, Jayme?”
    “I don’t have time to describe it to you right now. See for yourself. There’s a direct feed available on conSense. I just wanted you to know that it looks like they’re heading your way.”
    Sivio’s voice dissolved completely into static. Alander put down the headset and went outside. The sky was on fire with a wave of crisscrossing golden lines. He shielded his eyes with a hand and tried to work out what he was seeing. Some sort of aurora? Had the sun flared unexpectedly? It had all happened so suddenly and was taking place so silently that he almost doubted that it was real. Yet he knew it wasn’t anything coming through the conSense network, as had been the illusion of Cleo Samson; his eyes were seeing nothing but the sky, despite how unlikely that appeared.
    He tried to access the net but failed. The channel to Sivio was still nothing but noise. He waited