Starbound by Joe Haldeman Read Free Book Online

Every area had to be sterilized after we passed through—from Mars side through the air lock to the hub, then down the extension tube to where the Space Elevator was waiting. It took three trips, awkward in zero gee, especially for our spook pals, who didn’t have a lot of experience. Finding handholds when your hands are full.
    It wasn’t too hard to say good-bye to Little Mars, as much time as I’d spent there. It was actual Mars, the Mars colony, that felt like home. Florida was a distant memory. Another world.
    We spent four and a half days in the Space Elevator, first at zero gee, but with increasing gravity as we moved out to the end of the Elevator’s tether.
    About halfway, I started feeling heavy and depressed. For years, I’d been used to exercising an hour or more a day in Earth gravity, but it was always a relief to get back to Mars- normal. I’d get used to it in time. But it felt like carrying around a knapsack full of rocks, permanently attached.
    There wasn’t much to see of ad Astra as we approached, but we didn’t expect anything dramatic. A big flat white box with a shuttle rocket attached. The rocket would maneuver us into rendezvous with the iceberg, then shut down till we got to Wolf, where it would be a landing craft. If the Others let us land.
    Going from the Elevator into ad Astra was simple. They coupled automatically, and we walked through two air locks into our new home.
    It was stunning. It was huge, at least to my eyes. The line of sight was about fifty meters, over the gym and swimming pool and hydroponics garden. I had trouble focusing that far away, and it made me grin.
    Namir, Elza, and Dustin were not smiling. By Earth standards, this was not a big place to be locked up in for a large part of your life. The rest of your life, perhaps.
    We stacked our boxes and suitcases there by the air lock, next to the life-support/recycling station, and sent the Space Elevator back down, to pick up our Martians. We went off together to explore.
    The hydroponics garden was technically a luxury. There was enough dehydrated food in storage to keep us alive for twenty boring years, and plenty of oxygen from electrolysis. But fresh fruit and vegetables would mean more than just variety in the diet. The routines of growing, harvesting, propagation, and recycling had helped keep us sane in Mars, where we had fifteen times as many people, and more than fifteen times as much living space. Plus the chance to take a walk outdoors, which on ad Astra would be a short walk. Then light-years long. Eternity.
    Everything was in a sort of early-spring mode, still a month or more from the earliest harvest. Grape tomatoes and spring onions, from a first look. They smelled so good—nostalgia not for Earth, where I never gardened, but for the Martian garden, where I’d worked a couple of hours a week.
    The central space was larger than all the rest put together. There was a padded track for jogging or running around its hundred- meter perimeter. On the “southern” end of it (we decided to call the control room “north”) there was a small Japanese- style hot bath and a narrow rectangular swimming pool, which could maintain a decent current to swim against.
    South of that were the exercise and VR machines, similar to what we had in Little Mars, with a relatively large lavatory and an actual shower, and the infirmary, with an optimistic single bed. The lavatory had a zero- gee toilet exactly like the one on the Space Elevator, for the few days we’d be weightless.
    Farthest south was the large and rather forbidding Life- Support/ Recycling area, a bright room full of machines. Every metal surface was inscribed with maintenance instructions, I supposed in case the computer system failed. So we could stay alive until we died.
    That was an interesting prospect if something did go wrong, and we went merrily blasting away for years, leaving Wolf 25 far behind. Paul said that if we just kept going in a straight line,