The feed cut to the moderator, who smiled and shook his head at the leathery one. That slaughter began all of this, and profiting from it makes us all complicit.” The criminals and monsters at Protogen and MaoKwik released this weapon on a population of innocents. “We cannot allow ourselves to forget that this was built from mass murder. Tree,” the old, leathery looking coyo beside her said. Within the next ten or fifteen years, we’re going to start seeing the applications of what we’ve learned from watching the protomolecule, and it will-” But the last two years have given us some of the most interesting and exciting breakthroughs in materials technology since the wheel. ![]() “We don’t understand it yet, and we may not for decades. She wasn’t as thick as an Earther, but she didn’t belong to the Belt either. Néo had spent a lot of time in the past months watching the newsfeeds about the Ring, and so far, he liked her the best. “The thing people have to remember is that the Ring isn’t magical,” the Martian woman said. You could lounge around in the warehouse party and drink whatever you wanted and talk however you wanted and drape your hand on Evita Jung’s right tit and she wouldn’t even move it off.Īnd just like that, Néo, who hadn’t ever cared about anything very much, developed an ambition. And then when you got back, everyone knew who you were. It was illegal as hell, and somebody was taking the bets. Whole thing got tracked by a double-encrypted black net as hard to break as anything that the Loca Greiga or Golden Bough had on offer. Then figure out how to get back without getting dead. The trick was to plot it so that the burn – and the best only ever used one burn – would put the ship through a gravity assist, suck up the velocity of a planet or moon, and head out as deep as the push would take them. Without an Epstein, torch drive burned pellets too fast to get anyone anywhere. Then it was all about plotting the trajectory. Didn’t need to be much more than a torch drive, a crash couch, and enough air and water to get the job done. Went like this: Some coyo put together a boat. He’d met Silvestari Campos and he’d heard of slingshotting. He’d figured out afterward that she’d brought him because Mila Sana, a horse-faced Martian girl a little younger than him had a thing, and they all thought it was funny to watch the ugly Inner girl padding around after the half-breed, but by then he didn’t care. Silvestari Campos back,” she said, her hip cocked, her mouth soft as a pillow and her lips shining. When he said it, it was like he was putting on someone else’s jacket. He had as much right to the cosmopolitan slang of the belt as she had, but it sounded natural on her. ![]() He’d grown up in the massive city in space that was Ceres station just the way she had, but his father had the low, squat frame that marked him as an Earther. “Hoy,” he’d said, trying to act cool and calm. “Esá, unokabátya,” she said, smiling and shrugging with one hand. His heart was going three times standard before he opened the door. Now here she was, and the place to himself. He’d had dreams about what she’d look like with her clothes off. He’d had a thing for Evita since the first time he saw her. They had the same long, thin bodies, but she was from there. She was two years older, and his mother’s sister’s kid. When the system announced someone waiting at the door, he’d figured it was school security busting him for being truant. He’d been hanging at his family hole, his mother gone to work at the water treatment plant, his father at a meeting with the grid maintenance group that he oversaw, and Néo had stayed home, cutting school for the fourth time in a month. That was three years ago, just before his fifteenth birthday. ![]() His cousin Evita had been the one who introduced him to the underground society of slingshots. And not run into anything, but that part was in los manos de Dios. He hadn’t flown this far just to have some kind of accidental blip alert the flotillas that he was coming.įifty hours – less than that – and the only thing he had to do was not be seen. His broadcast and tightbeam transmitters were both shut off, and he’d slagged the transponder even before he’d painted the name on her hull. The blanket he’d wrapped himself in, corners tucked into his restraints so it wouldn’t float away, wasn’t even powered. ![]() The only light in the cockpit came from the backsplash of the display terminals. He still had passive monitors, but no active sensors. Everything he could turn off, he’d turned off. The only water that was left to drink was half a liter of recycled piss that had already gone through him more times than he could count. After almost three months, there were maybe fifty hours left before he made history. Manéo Jung-Espinoza – Néo to his friends back on Ceres station – huddled in the cockpit of the little ship he’d christened the Y Que.
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