Rainbow Mars Read Online Free Page B

back empty. We load your next module inside, and we can take our sweet time doing it. Days, weeks, a year if there’s a budget cut. Then we send it back to Miya and Svetz in the moment following the first launch. Launch again the same way. Or send it back to ten hours later, give them a sleep break.”
    â€œYou can do that?”
    Ra Chen smiled a fat ruddy smile. “Time travel is wonderful, isn’t it?”
    *   *   *
    Three months stretched to four, and wouldn’t stretch further because the Secretary-General’s annoyance was becoming overt. And one morning they were ready.

6
    The new extension cage was transparent nearly to invisibility. It was no smaller than the old extension cage, which had once held Svetz and an angry Horse. But Svetz and Miya were nestled in the bottom of a spherical shell, and that might have felt cramped—
    â€œCozy,” Miya said. “Why isn’t one of us in the control chair?”
    Svetz smiled. “You’ll see when we get moving.”
    She nudged Svetz’s bag with her foot. “What did you bring?”
    â€œFood, medical, and the trade kit. You?” He waved at the upper curve, where bubble helmets and the pelts of two rubber men were splayed out on stickstrips. “I haven’t trained with pressure suits.”
    â€œIf we have to go EVA, I’ll take you through it slow and thorough. Trust me.”
    They lay foot-to-head, waiting while the Center milled around them. Svetz had become very comfortable with Miya. Her head was pillowed on his foot. He felt his own long, wispy hair brushing her ankle. He’d considered suggesting greater intimacy, but—as often in his life—he was afraid of losing what he had.
    Through the open hatch he heard a murmur of techs and hum of the motors, and:
    Gorky: “There never were canals on Mars. Miya’s always been a bit flaky about canals.”
    Ra Chen: “Willy, you should have done this years ago! Pick up some Martians and you’ll never have a problem with the SecGen again. You’d have Martians voting your ticket in the UN! Futz, you’d want to know what they knew about terraforming, too! Mars wasn’t supposed to stay habitable that long, was it?”
    Gorky: “We should look at Saturn’s rings too. They’re recent.”
    Ra Chen: “How recent?”
    Gorky: “A few … hundred thousand years. Never mind. This is already costing too much! Antigravity, pfah!”
    Ra Chen: “Antigravity beamers came from Space Bureau. Don’t you always launch by antigravity?”
    Gorky: “Oh, no. It costs four hundred a kilogram to launch with rockets. It costs a thousand to lift the same kilogram with antigrav. When Svetz lifted Whale into the big extension cage, that must have killed around three thousand people.”
    Ra Chen: “You said that before. Killed how, Willy?”
    Gorky: “Lights brown out in an operating theater. Food half spoils but someone eats it anyway. Somebody can’t afford to repair his floater, but he has to get to work. A construction company buys cheaper supporting girders for a new arcology. The money runs out on building a nuclear fission plant, but the power has to come from somewhere, so they burn coal. Soot winds up in a hundred million lungs, and there’s more rads in it than they’d get from the fission plant.
    â€œWhen wealth goes down the death rate goes up, even if you don’t have a unique corpse to identify. Poverty kills. Most politicians have no idea what things cost. It’s a United Nations tradition. But Waldemar Eleven, he’s very aware of that. When a bureau diverts power and resources, people die. What he really wants, even more than that futzed portrait—”
    â€œWhat’s in the trade kit?” Miya asked Svetz.
    Svetz withdrew his attention from the talking Heads. “It turns heavy metals to gold. It’s easier to