Fade Away and Radiate Read Free Page B

AlphaZed3?”
    She sighed and leaned back against the
cot, feeling the heat of his arm all along her side, even though
they didn't touch. “I don't know how I ended up here, really,” she
said, wrenching herself away from the tangled mess of her thoughts
to look at him, in the flesh, next to her. “But making this planet
habitable means big money for FortuneCorp,” she said.
    “ You wanna to know how I
found you out here? I knew you and Roberto worked for FortuneCorp,
first off. And that aside from all your science, you love growing
things. So I thought to myself – ‘Self, what would a scientist who
loves growing things do for FortuneCorp?’ Grow new worlds, of
course. After that, I hacked into the employee database of
off-world employees and I was hot on your trail.”
    Annie’s dinner congealed into a hard,
cold pit in her stomach. “Nice little felony you committed there,
Murph. And don't you realize they have a whole Sheriff's division
at FortuneCorp that'll trace your virtual tracks and hunt you down
in the meatworld?”
    Billy's smile got small and quiet and
dangerous. “It was worth it, Annie. I found out who killed Roberto
in the database, too – the information was right in his dossier. In
yours.”
    The silence thundered between
them.
    “ Don't worry about me. I
have my ways of getting in and out of virtual space alive. My
contacts. My brothers.”
    Annie nodded at him, numb to her bones.
“So you know who killed him.”
    “ You want to
know.”
    “ I'm not so sure. What can I
do about it, even if I do know?”
    Billy didn't answer her. Instead, he
guzzled the rest of his own protein gel and crushed the titanium
can between his fingers. He kept crushing it into a tiny cube, as
Annie watched.
    “ Once I found out where you
were and who killed Roberto, I had to find you,” he
said.
    “ So here I am, you found
me,” she said, a little waver in her voice. “Growing this ball of
ice into something habitable.”
    Billy turned his head to look at the
flimsy synthwood door to the hut, and Annie knew he could look
right through it with his modified eyes. “That Bowman eco-drive is
incredible. No other worldcorp has technology anything like it, not
yet anyway. You grew a whole world.”
    “ Well, a few hundred square
meters worth. But we have to make it more than a few kliks wide for
a colony to settle here and get to work. The precious metals frozen
inside the ice are worth trillions. Once it's habitable, we can
extract that ore and conquer the whole quadrant. We can use this as
a regional base.”
    She still spoke of “we,” what she and
FortuneCorp could do together. It was a habit she had, maybe a bad
one, but she wanted to belong to something – anything that was
bigger than her and her fears.
    Billy kept staring at the door, and
didn’t look away even when Annie dared to touch his shoulder. When
he didn’t respond to her, she squinted at the door as if she could
see through it too, through sheer orneriness.
    Nope.
    Before she could say anything, Billy
whispered directly into her mind:
    What’s that?
    Those two little words sparked the
shakes in her, from deep inside, working out to the tips of her
fingers, to the ends of her hair. For two reasons.
    One, Billy spoke directly into her
mind. How did he do that? She wasn’t genmod in any way. Not even
Roberto could do it, whisper into her soul. And he had
tried.
    So, what just happened?
    The other reason was that Billy seemed
to have seen something lurking in the jungle she’d grown, outside
the perimeter of her research hut. But she hadn’t introduced any
fauna to her flora, not yet.
    So, what the bloody hell was out
there?
    Billy must have picked up on her fear,
for he rose silently to his feet, and put her behind him. He took a
blaster out of his boot (so that was where it was) and walked to
the door, step by soundless step.
    Once he reached the frame, he motioned
Annie back, and she decided not to argue. Before she could take
cover behind