Bastion Saturn by C. Chase Harwood Read Free Book Online Page A

off my list of dumb shit I don’t want to do ever again.” He looked deep into the doctor’s big brown eyes and tried his sultriest voice. “Caleb, just call me Caleb.” Saanvi blinked at the sudden intimacy, then Caleb quickly shifted his focus to Jennifer. “Your suit smells good. I’m going to reek of you when I get out of here.” Jennifer raised a doubtful eyebrow and felt David’s hand rest on her arm protectively. Caleb smiled broadly at all of them. “See you guys in a week.” Then to Jennifer almost conspiratorially, “Wake me first.”
    Saanvi lowered the small pump action inhaler to his free nostril. “One shot, Caleb.”
    He flared his nostril and inhaled as she gave it a squeeze. By the count of 2 he was out cold.
     
    After Jennifer strapped the last and now (hopefully) hibernating Saanvi to the wall, the first thing she did was strip. Her elastoware came off as if it had some kind of paste injected into the fibers, and she almost gagged at the layer of dead skin flakes that had accumulated on the garment. The tag on the collar promised that the fabric was self-cleaning. She, like most people, accepted the idea of nanos in nearly every part of her world (as long as they were outside the body). Clearly, she had overwhelmed the little buggers.
    With everyone else in a dead coma, she felt perfectly within her rights to use some of their precious water in the sponge shower. When she was done, she couldn’t remember the last time that she had felt so fresh. Not since her days on Earth. She did a couple of floating cartwheels past her strapped-in comrades, then paused to frown at her breasts. She loved her breasts. With the full 1 G of Earth, they were the perfect pouting B+ with small round nipples that sat up and said hello with confidence. In zero G and lesser gravities, they pointed straight out like a couple of cones. She smoothed them down attempting to mush them into the shape she loved. It was a pointless effort. God forbid she get in front of a mirror and confront the puffiness and fatigue . Again, without gravity, her sculpted cheekbones looked padded with unrestrained flesh. She knew she was being picky, but vanity was vanity. She had long ago accepted the trait as part of who she was.
    She contemplated the week ahead alone. Really alone. She hadn’t experienced that either since leaving Earth. Every day on Dione had been about building— a new life, a way of life. Her mind flashed on the image of her precious domed farm erupting up and away from her, and she felt tears clouding her vision. Without gravity, she had to rub them off and flick them away. The little spheres of salty water swirled in the air currents caused by her flicking, and she dabbed her eyes with a paper-thin towel.
    She remained naked rather than putting the disgusting oversized elastoware back on. That could wait until the last minute. She’d been watching a movie when Dione was hit. Having voted against the merger, she’d had no interest in meeting the Wang Fat people face-to-face. In her scramble to pull on her exosuit, she hadn’t bothered to take off her entertainment glasses. The device contained every book, motion picture, game, and various other entertainments known on Earth. The movie was still paused where she had left off on her last attempt to watch it. It was a dumb movie, so she canceled it. The glasses were designed to give her choices based on past use, but she wasn’t in the mood for her own taste. She could also choose to have a random selection served up to her, but that didn’t appeal, either. She took them off and lowered the light in the cabin so she could stare out the portal.
    Saturn was such a massive planet that even though Jennifer was millions of kilometers away from it, she felt like the thing was closing in on her. Scale in this place took a whole lot to get used to. An orange light lit up on the pilot’s panel and a message flashed that they were now outside of Saturn’s magnetosphere.