Free Solaris Rising 2 by Ian Whates

hand twitch.
    Clutching a sobbing Claire and Jenny, I waited for him to look back.
    And waited.
    All Martin had to do was turn, look at us, maybe raise a hand, possibly smile. That was all he had to do to prove he cared.
    Not much.
    He reached the stairs.
    He climbed the stairs.
    And I realised that the only option for me was to look away. So I did. I lowered my head. Turned my gaze aside. Concentrated on a spot on the tarmac to my left.
    So that I would never have to know.
    Because who wants posterity to deny them? Who can bear, not simply to be forgotten, but to be unacknowledged? Unrecognised? Dismissed as irrelevant by their most precious possession?
    Seeing Martin go off to live was a kind of death.
     
     
    K EEP ’EM COMING , Cloud Crowd! This is Johnny Nimbus, on the air, in the ether, wireless and tireless, your sentient social network, up all hours and hungry for chat. The shuttles are airborne, the pigeons are eagles, and the stars await, while down here we’ve got terminal cancer of the planet and the lights are going out one by one. So talk. Talk to each other. Talk to me. Tell my silicon soul your innermost secrets. I’m all heart and all ears. My hard drive is wide open to you, my memory stands at a petabyte and counting, and I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying right here to be your confidant and best friend to the end. To the very bitter end.

FEAST AND FAMINE
     
    ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY
     
    Adrian Tchaikovsky was born in Lincolnshire, studied and trained in Reading and now lives in Leeds. He is known for the Shadows of the Apt fantasy series starting with Empire in Black and Gold and currently up to Book 8, The Air War . His hobbies include medieval combat, and tabletop, live and online role-playing. More information and short stories can be found at www.shadowsoftheapt.com
     
     
    “M OTHER, P RODIGAL, CONFIRM crew and cargo secured, ready to depart. Telemetry incoming. Initial course mapped, confirm check on our exit solution. Prodigal out.”
    (eleven minute pause)
    “Prodigal, Mother. Telemetry confirmed flight path clear. Come on in. Mother out.”
    (eleven minute pause)
    “Mother, Prodigal. Commencing countdown, separation from Oregon in one minute.
    “Twenty seconds.
    “Ten... nine...”
     
     
    C OUNTING DOWN TO oblivion, the final transmission of Doctor Astrid Veighl, as she patiently numbered the last seconds of her crew’s lives down to zero. And then she died.
    There was a general conspiracy, back at Mother, to pretend that there might just be a radio glitch. Even as we made our approach towards her last known location – a course plotted to more decimal places than even God normally bothers with – there was a vacuous suggestion that Veighl would have passed us in the night, would reach Mother any moment now , and our four day investigatory flight would turn out just to be a criminal waste of fuel and resources.
    After the abrupt cessation of any transmission from Veighl a swift decision had been made to send us out after her. ‘Swift’ meant a seven-hour prep for departure: that a returning, radio-mute Veighl would have arrived at Mother long before we reached her take-off point was the sort of maths that needed no computer. It was a subject that neither we nor Mother touched on when we checked in, as though to point it out would be to look in the box and kill a cat that we all knew was stone dead already.
    Syrenka, to whose song everything danced, was an ugly green-purple bruise to starboard as we came in: a gas giant with twenty-one variously barren moons and enough of a debris ring to suggest the demise of at least five more. And in that ring, a secret, like the oyster’s pearl.
    The computers back at Mother, our own Onboard, and Pelovska’s Expert System, had all put their heads together at our launch to plot out the sort of four-dimensional map that no unaugmented human mind could conceive of, so that when we kicked off from Mother on our fact-finder (nobody had ever said