gaian consortium 05 - the titan trap Read Online Free

that should’ve been scrubbed out by the air processors.”
    “What was it?” Cassidy asked, despite her inner vow not to seem too interested in his story.
    His fingers tightened on his knees, and she noticed he wouldn’t look at her directly. “I asked for permission to go out and personally inspect the processors, since I was worried that something had gone wrong with their programming or their calibration. That permission was denied.”
    “By whom?”
    “The whole operation is under the control of a GEC officer named Colonel Marquez.”
    “GEC?” she echoed, surprised. Why would the Gaian Exploration Commission be in control of an operation on its home planet’s surface? Wasn’t its entire mission to discover and exploit new worlds, rather than Gaia itself?
    “The rationale was that the GEC has far more experience with terraforming and the equipment associated with it, so that’s why its personnel were put in charge.”
    “Ah.” It still didn’t make a lot of sense to her, but then again, she’d sort of stopped trying to figure out why the Consortium did half the things it did.
    Derek Tagawa went on, “I asked Colonel Marquez to explain the problems with the readings, and he said he couldn’t risk a valuable member of the team on a mission like that, but that he’d send one of his own engineers to look into it. I didn’t like it, but I decided to let it go. But the readings kept getting worse, and so it seemed obvious to me that his people were burying the data, or at the very least, not interpreting it correctly. In the end, I talked to one of the team’s programmers, Theo Karras, and he agreed to come with me to check things out.”
    “Even though you’d been told not to.”
    The dark eyes glinted at her as he looked up suddenly and seemed to pin her in place with his stare. “Do you always do what you’re told, Captain Evans?”
    Generally, no, but she wasn’t about to tell him that. “If it means saving my own skin, then yeah, most of the time I’ll let my self-interest do the talking.”
    He shook his head. “Well, I guess my scientific curiosity overrode my sense of self-preservation. So Karras and I borrowed a vehicle — ”
    “Stole,” she broke in.
    “Commandeered,” he amended, and despite the overall serious cast to his features, she thought she detected a small twitch at the corner of his mouth. “And we headed out to the nearest air processor. When we ran the diagnostics, everything seemed to be working fine. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen one, but they’re big, about five meters square, and we were careful to park our vehicle so it couldn’t be seen from the road.” His expression sobered abruptly. “Funny thing, that road. You’ve probably seen the images, how every street and highway and footpath was choked with people fleeing the Cloud. People died where they stood. And yet that road was so empty we could’ve gone two hundred kilometers an hour on it.”
    “Maybe the advance team cleared it off so your people wouldn’t have to worry about access to the air processors,” Cassidy suggested. It seemed obvious enough to her. What was the point in bringing in a team if they couldn’t navigate anywhere?
    “That’s what Karras said. And I was willing to go along with him…until I saw the convoy going by.”
    “Convoy?”
    “Military vehicles flanking a long line of open-bed haulers.” He took in a breath, gaze seemingly fixed on her, but Cassidy got the feeling he wasn’t looking at her at all, was instead seeing the desolation that used to be the most populated country on the planet. “And in those haulers were bodies. Hundreds…no, thousands…of bodies.”
    “But — ” She broke off, mind flailing at the wrongness of what he’d just told her. Everything that had been written about GARP and its objectives said the goal was to dispose of all those bodies humanely, to treat them with the reverence they deserved. Being told that the remains of the