Socket 3 - The Legend of Socket Greeny Read Online Free Page A

didn’t know you’d arrived.”
    “Nice place.”
    She pushed her cropped hair behind her ear
where it didn’t stay. The same haircut she always had, but now with
kinky strands of gray. She took a deep breath and stretched. “The
view is fantastic.”
    We remained quiet, listening to the ocean
speak. We did that often, just sit together without speaking.
    “I see you’re taking leave in a few days,”
she said.
    “Chute’s award ceremony.” I looked over my
shoulder. “She’s Tagghet’s Most Valuable Player, you know.”
    “Streeter going to be there?”
    “He better be. Chute will skin him if he’s
not.”
    “I just thought with his new girlfriend, he
might get… distracted.”
    Streeter found new love, a girl just as smart
but twice as pretty. He should just propose now.
    “You’re coming back to the Garrison
tomorrow?” I asked.
    “No.” She slowly got up and stood next to me
at the railing. She was thousands of miles away, but I sensed her
exhaustion as if she was right next to me. “California is
aggressively pursuing a Paladin-sponsored education/conference
center, but they need funding. It would be a great outreach for our
integration program, but there’s a lot of opposition from the
government. Lots of suspicion.”
    “Who can blame them?”
    “Yes, well, I need to convince them our
policy of secrecy is a thing of the past and we’re genuinely
interested in sharing our knowledge.”
    “They’re not buying it?”
    “They haven’t seen what we have to offer. Our
advancements in health care alone will convince them.” She drank
from a water bottle and patted my hand. Her palm was warm and soft.
“By the way, your Orphan program is doing quite well.”
    I hated that name, but the Displaced Youth
Program wasn’t catching on.
    We talked about how many more kids we were
planning to take on, how we could expand the program to the rest of
the training facilities and, of course, get the word to the public
on what a great job we were doing. I hated public relations, that
was Mother’s job. Everything we did, she had to find a way to tell
the public. Television even started carrying the Paladin Network, a
twenty-four hour news station that exclusively covered us. She was
a weekly regular.
    “I’m scheduled for my wormhole trip in about
a week.”
    “Everyone does it,” she said. “You
nervous?”
    “I’m not doing jumping-jacks.” I drummed a
short rhythm on the railing, watching waves crash below.
    “I can’t do anything to get you out of it, if
that’s what you’re thinking,” Mother said.
    “No, that’s not it at all. I’m just wondering
why I need to go. Clearly there’s a million things here I can be
doing. I can’t imagine why I’d ever be sent off-planet, so what’s
the point?”
    “You sound nervous.”
    I glanced at her. She was serious. Then I
realized, she was right. I was resisting some nervous tension
inside me. Why was I being like this? It was just a trip, get it
over with and be done with it and move on. Stop being a baby. But
even acknowledging that feeling didn’t make it go away.
    “Look, I’m not nervous,” I said, laughing
nervously. “Okay, I’m nervous.”
    She laughed, too. I told her what I was
feeling and she listened without responding. Maybe there was a good
reason I was hesitant, I just didn’t understand it yet. My gut
feelings were often on the mark.
    “I don’t know.” I spit over the railing and
watched it disappear in the swirling wind. “Maybe it’s as simple as
not wanting to go through that wormhole.”
    “It’s not comfortable.”
    “It feels like your spleen is getting
squeezed out your ass, I’m told.”
    She grunted, pushed her short brown hair
behind her ear. She’d never been off-planet, but she’d heard the
stories. No one enjoyed the ride. No one.
    A cruise ship moved from the left, the deck
dotted with brightly dressed vacationers. I wondered if the
party-goers were looking back at the shore.
    “I read your