McCollum - GIBRALTAR STARS by Michael McCollum Read Free Book Online Page B

green.
    “It’s been so long since I was outside, I forgot to squint.”
    His chuckle echoed in her earphones. “Everyone I bring out here says the same thing. Surprising what human beings can get used to, isn’t it? We were cooped up in steel cages for the full year we spent getting here, then we burrowed our way into this moon and exchanged our cages for caves. Living in vacuum, we forget what it feels like to have the wind and rain blow on our face, to smell air that hasn’t been through the scrubbers a thousand times, or the joy of just lying in the sun.”
    “This is definitely the wrong profession for a nature person,” Lisa agreed, “or a claustrophobe.”
    “How’s your vision?”
    “A few purple spots, but I can see again.”
    “Then just follow that path to your left, the one marked by the little triangular red flags. We ran out of yellow bricks.”
    The two of them started walking in the awkward way one does when encompassed in a pressurized balloon with a diving bell strapped to their shoulders.
    It had been a week since the meeting in Admiral Landon’s office. Instead of the three weeks decompression between missions that regulations recommended, she and Mark had taken three days. At least, she had taken three days before reporting to her new assignment. The ship to which the Admiral had assigned Mark was off somewhere on a spying mission and wasn’t scheduled back for anywhere from ten days to a month. Where sniffing out the enemy was concerned, schedules were highly flexible.
    If there was anything Mark had learned in four years of marriage, it was not to be out having fun while his wife was working. Women resent that, he’d learned, no matter how well deserved the fun might be. So, on the fourth morning after their return from Broan Space, he reported along with Lisa to the warren of offices occupied by the stargate research team and offered to assist until his ship showed up. They had both been given a half hour briefing on the effort to develop human stargates, with an emphasis on the extreme need to cut transit times between Hideout and Earth — as though anyone who had made the trip three times needed any such explanation!
    After Dr. Niels Svenson, the project director, finished his hurried briefing, he handed them a record cube filled with technical data and dry scientific reports and sent them to an empty cubicle to review the project details. The Rykands shared a workscreen for two days, scanning until their eyes felt like boiled onions. Late on the second day, a burly man stopped by and introduced himself as Tom Blanchard.  He announced that he would be taking them one at a time on a tour of the stargate. Lisa’s tour was scheduled for the following morning, Mark’s for the day after.
    The path Lisa and Blanchard followed led up a rise, past a flat spot where vacuum tractors were parked. The small, powerful machines had been bright yellow when loaded aboard the freighters in Sol System. Now each machine was coated with Sutton’s dust, and was gray-brown in color, with only an occasional hint of the original bright hue. Even the windows, supposedly kept clean by electrostatic repulsers, looked as if they had recently been in a Sahara sandstorm.
    Beyond the tractors, a series of towers marked the ridgeline of the low hill they were climbing. Each tower was topped with a directional antenna that pointed skyward. There appeared to be no pattern to the arrangement, although they all seemed to be altering their direction in synchronization with the moon’s rotation.
    When she reached the top of the hill, there was bowl-shaped depression beyond. She paused, a little out of breath despite the low gravity.
    “There she is, Lieutenant,” Blanchard said, pointing. “What do you think of her?”
    “Big,” Lisa responded.
    Spread out before her, its surface partially eclipsed by scaffolding, was a ring of silver metal with intricate patterns etched into its surface. Unlike the tractors they