Dark Genesis: The Birth of the Psi Corps by J. Gregory Keyes Read Free Book Online Page B

march them up the ridge until the drop was enough to kill them?
    He looked down at a straight drop of perhaps two hundred feet. Don’t think about it. He didn’t. He jumped. On the way down he worked on the math. On Earth, one fell about thirty-two feet per second squared. Multiply that by mass, and that told you how much force you hit the ground with. He was falling with maybe a sixth that acceleration, so it was as if he had jumped only fifty feet. With the recreational suit he probably massed two hundred pounds. He weighed less here, but the mass was all still there … He hit, flexed his legs, and rolled, just like a parachute drop. It felt just like a parachute drop, too, except with a skeleton almost twenty years older than when he had last done that. His helmet cracked against a rock, sounding a sharp note in his ear-as if someone had thumped a champagne glass. But it did not break. A light fell from above, hit the ground, bounced, creating a crazy cone in the dust his fall had kicked up, now this long, now that long, and finally it stopped, spotlighting a boulder as if it were some piece of found art or geological specimen. Cursing, he went for it. And got it. Holding it well out to one side, he turned it around, sweeping it over the ground.
    Light didn’t bleed on the Moon, of course, so he could see only just where the spotlight shone. He broadened the beam. There was Alice, slowly standing up, looking unsure. There was Hans, crumpled on the ground, one leg obviously sporting several more joints then it had had when last Lee saw him. Something in Hans’ hand made a little red spark, and Alice sprawled comically backward. Then the hand sparked at him.
    Hans was maybe ten feet away. Lee turned off the light, waited for the next silent spark of gunfire and leapt. The fall and the broken leg had made Hans as weak as a kitten. Lee got the gun away and shot him. Dumb bastard. In his mining suit, he probably massed four hundred pounds, and he had jumped after Lee. People always thought they were supermen in low-g. Alice was thrashing, trying to get a patch over the hole in her suit. Hans had hit her in the arm. As Lee approached, her movements grew more feeble. In the light, he could see her face clearly-she couldn’t see his at all. She might not even know it was him. He considered. Her nose was starting to bleed. She looked desperate , angry, young. And she knew something she shouldn’t know. He hesitated an instant longer, as her eyes rolled back. Sighing, he bent, finished patching her suit, and then went to Hans to get his air supply.
    To his surprise, he found that Hans was still alive, big finger jammed into the bullet wound, blood frozen around it like a gasket. He looked up wildly at the light, lips moving , either cursing or begging. Lee detached the cylinders and opened the suit to space. He turned away rather than watch the rather messy thing that happened to Hans then. After that, he moved as if in a dream just like before, when the dome cracked. He walked until he found one of the big mining tractors, drove it to the pod where he thought Piotr and Greta were, and using the vehicle’s plasma torch, blew a hole in the pod’s side. A gale came rushing out, and when it had slowed enough, he went in, found Greta struggling toward a pressure suit, and shot her. Piotr was bleeding from his eyes and mouth, but Lee dragged him into the air lock and pressurized it. The telepath sat, blinking away sanguine tears, shivering uncontrollably.
    “Now,” Lee said, using the suit PA. “You and I are gonna have a little chat. If you give me an answer I don’t like, the air lock door goes open. Capische?” The telepath nodded. and they spoke. After a time, Lee got an answer he didn’t like.
    “Thank you for saving my life,” Alice Kimbrell said. Her face was bruised from shattered capillaries, but she managed a weak smile.
    “Joint effort,” he said. “Once you proved to me that the big fellow wasn’t a