Forbidden the Stars by Valmore Daniels Read Free Book Online

terraloader. His legs had been crushed, his bones splintered into thousands of pieces.
    Reconstructive surgery and extensive physiotherapy, combined with the easy Lunar gravity of the time, had given him back the ability to walk, but with a very pronounced shuffle, and only with the aid of crutches: his awkward gait was far beyond a mere limp. Throughout elementary classes on Luna, he had been called troll, troglodyte, Quasimodo, and a horde of other unwanted appositives.
    He resented his peers, hated them.
    Popularity was too far from his grasp to even be considered a dream. Acceptance was unattainable. He was a cast-out.
    The physicians told him he could never travel to earth, the bones in his legs would shatter like toothpicks under the hard G’s of a re-entry shuttle, and walking in gravity six times that of the moon was an impossibility.
    For all purposes, he became the only orphan on Luna, since no one besides him was permitted to be stationed there for longer than a year for their own biological safety—his parents included. Yin had fended for himself reasonably well. His parents had visited once a year, but had granted the People’s Republic of China legal guardianship of him.
    Over the years, as he entered adulthood, his contact with his parents lessened to the point where Chow Yin no longer cared to accept their attempts at contact. To this day, he had no idea of their fate.
    When Luna Station installed magnagravs for artificial gravity, only Chow Yin went without the lead-lined outfits. The pressure would be too much for his crippled body.
    A lesser man would have let it get the better of him; perhaps even ended it all.
    Not Yin.
    He had turned his disadvantage to an advantage. The one thing he noticed about everybody who looked at him, especially once he reached his late teens and early twenties, was that their looks of horror and pity and revulsion were their central fixation. If he happened to be lifting their credit flecks from the folds of their coats, they did not notice, for his crippled and pathetic self was their only focus.
    At twenty-three, he had been no longer satisfied with the pickings of transients and tourists credit flecks; those sums were enough to get him by, but what he really longed for was wealth: enough wealth that people would look at him with reverence instead of revulsion.
    As the only permanent resident of Luna, Yin was more familiar with the station than anyone else was. He had converted a low-G storage bay on the bottom-most level of the station to his private quarters. With the help of a young and bored computer whiz whose parents had been stationed on Luna for a year, he erased traces of the storage bay in the main computer, changed security logs, created new access codes to keep out undesirables, and altered the entire computer system of the sector to suit Yin’s needs and desires.
    From this base, he ventured forth among the teen population of Luna. Most of them were bored and disenchanted with life on the moon, and Yin recruited them to his cause, especially targeting those with skill in computers and technology.
    Set up as a launch site to destinations beyond Earth, Luna Station, by its charter, was a cooperative venture of thirty-two country corporations. As such, no single government had absolute jurisdiction. The main computer was programmed as an administrative governor, and would enforce the policy voted upon by the station’s board of directors on Earth.
    It was only a matter of time before Yin and his cybergang cracked the computer’s defenses.
    Yin’s young protégés created a dummy file to accept instructions from Earth, run simulation reports on those initiatives, and send those dummy reports back, keeping the Earth council ignorant and happy.
    As far as things went, by the time Yin was twenty-eight he owned the moon in all but name. The wealth and power he had gathered to him rivaled that of the country corporations themselves. Every pleasure was his; every