Echoes of Earth Read Online Free Page B

a minute and, when the fire in the sky had faded, tried again. This time he got through. But Sivio was already gone, no doubt dragged away by other duties. Swallowing his nervousness, Alander dipped into the net and surrendered himself to the conSense feed.
    A chaotic menu of images confronted him, all blazing and changing in real time. He selected one at random and found himself staring at what looked like a shining, yellow spindle extruding a white-hot thread out of one pointed end. Despite heavy processing, he couldn’t make out the background to the spindle, and when he checked the scale in one corner of the image, he refused to believe it. If it was true, the spindle was over two kilometers long.
    He jumped to another image, this time noting its vantage point. He was in a Lagrangian point between Adrasteia and its one moon, high above the Tipler and most of the observation satellites. The familiar muddy-brown globe was alive with light. Arcs and spirals flashed into view, then just as quickly disappeared; sudden, startlingly straight lines stabbed out from the equator, then also vanished. There seemed to be no order to the display, as though data from a Day-Glo cloud chamber had been somehow mixed up with ordinary biospheric information. But already his incredulity was beginning to fade. This was no mix-up, and it was too elaborate to be a joke.
    A third view showed him a second spindle from far away. It was in geostationary orbit, and it, too, was extruding a burning line toward surface of the planet below. The end of the line was dropping steadily downward at a rate of several meters per second. The view shifted slightly to show another, darker thread appearing from the far end of the golden spindle.
    A counterweight, Alander instantly thought. My God, they’re building—
    “You’re seeing this, Peter?” Cleo Samson’s husky voice startled him.
    “It’s an orbital tower!” he said in response. “They’re building orbital towers!”
    The ground beneath his feet rumbled.
    “We know,” she said, her voice fuzzed with static. “Take a look at this.”
    Alander’s view shifted at another’s command, disorientating him momentarily. This time he saw a rough three-dimensional map of the world beneath his feet. There were seven golden spindles in geostationary orbit around Adrasteia; all were dropping threads of various lengths down to the surface. As Alander watched, another appeared in the display at the midpoint of the arc connecting two others. A rough measurement confirmed that the spindles were equally spaced around the equator—or would be if two more appeared to fill the obvious gaps. Within moments of the thought, they had done just that.
    Ten spindles building ten orbital towers. And the longitude of one of them was disturbingly close to Alander’s own.
    “Who the hell are they? Are they from Earth?” He dispensed with the communicator even though speaking into the void brought back the terrible feelings of dissociation that had dragged him to the surface in the first place. “Jayme? Cleo?”
    There was no answer from the Tipler , and a moment later the conSense feed began to break up again. He eased gratefully out of it and stood blinking under the golden sky. A roar he had not consciously noted before turned out to be the shuttle negotiating the tight confines of the canyon, blue white jets issuing from its curved, black underbelly. Alander backed away as it maneuvered closer and extruded landing struts. A gray python whipped out of its side before it had touched down and began to suck at the water in the bath. At the same time, a hatch lifted open on the side of the shuttle.
    “You have ten seconds to board.” The autopilot’s crisply accented voice spoke directly into his head.
    Alander took the hint and clambered up the rungs built into the side of the craft.
    The space inside was close and uncomfortable, not designed for biological passengers. There was barely room for the two other