Red Planet Run Read Online Free Page A

Red Planet Run
Book: Red Planet Run Read Online Free
Author: Dana Stabenow
Pages:
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questioned the consequences of the Big Lie. If we hadn’t gone full-throttle into space, we wouldn’t have built Terranova. If we hadn’t built Terranova, Simon wouldn’t have built Archy to run it. If Simon hadn’t built Archy, the Librarians would not have been intrigued enough to introduce themselves. If the Librarians had not introduced themselves, my niece Elizabeth would still have been with us instead of light-years across the galaxy, enrolled at Cosmos U., separated by space and time from home and family, perhaps never to return.
    That untraveled world gleamed less brightly for me after her departure. And to the rest of humankind, space became less a mystery and more a resource. Back before the discovery of a planet predating the Belt, back before the Librarians came to top off the tank on Sol and returned home with Elizabeth, anything went in imagining what was out there. Bug-eyed monsters chased little green men in flying saucers equipped with light-speed and ray guns. After the Big Lie, after Frank and Helen “proved” there really was life in them thar stars, the scales tilted toward resource, and exploitation shifted into high gear. The Librarians’ appearance gave the Big Lie credence; and, more recently, the discovery of evidence supporting the hypothetical existence of a planet orbiting where the Belt was now only confirmed the fact that we were not alone, may in fact have been the sole residents of our own Solar System for less than three thousand years. Much of the mystery was gone, and most of the romance, and I was only just beginning to realize our lives were the poorer for it.
    “The Big Lie jumpstarted us back into space, didn’t it?” Helen retorted, but her fleeting smile came and went. Serious again, she said, “Star, there is evidence that Cydonia and Prometheus are connected. We’ve had a team of archaeologists at Cydonia for the last six months, did you know?” I shook my head, and she said, “They’ve been studying the ruins and transmitting their findings to Maria Mitchell Observatory. They’ve found what they think was an observatory.”
    “So?”
    “So, the instrumentation’s not pointing out; it’s pointing in, toward the inner planets.”
    “Toward Prometheus?”
    “Tori Agoot thinks so, and he’s not exactly a virgin in the good-seeing business.” She fiddled with her glass, still half full of her first beer. “Three months ago they sent us a message that they think they’ve found what might be a projector of some kind.”
    My voice was unintentionally sharp. “A weapon?”
    She nodded. “Could be. And they think it’s pointed in the same general direction as the observatory.”
    Along with a mesmerizing, often paralyzing gray stare, Helen had a voice with the seductive qualities of all the Lorelei put together. I’d seen Alliance senators tremble, Patrolmen quail, and career bureaucrats throw open the doors to the treasury under the influence of that voice. In the thirty-two years I’d known Helen, since we’d been roommates at Stanford, overseer and slave on Luna, and tyrant and worker bee on Terranova, that voice had lured me onto the rocks more times than I cared to remember, certainly more times than I would ever admit.
    I studied her over the rim of my glass. She could have been lying through her teeth, propounding another outrageous hoax to spur exploration ever onward and outward. On the other hand, she could have been telling the absolute, unvarnished truth. With Helen you never knew. I didn’t really care one way or the other.
    “I don’t want to go poking around a bunch of dusty old ruins, Helen, always supposing there actually is anything there to connect Cydonia with Prometheus, which I seriously doubt. Let somebody else do it, somebody who knows what to look for—an anthropologist, more archaeologists, somebody like that. Mother would jump at the chance— ask her.”
    Helen focused on the one point in my diatribe she could legitimately
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