Free The Sunborn by Gregory Benford Page B

of. Instead, she paced and her mind spun and she could not even make any conversation longer than a few sentences.
    Earthside sent probing questions. Julia had gotten used to having minor incidents blown up into media fodder, but this was real and she wasn’t having any, thank you. The time delay was tens of minutes in this part of the orbital cycle, a season when Julia and Viktor avoided talking with Earth at all. One never quite got over the need to get some response back. And the solar storm was blowing gouts of plasma, flooding some of their links with static. The sun was going through rough weather, spewing out big, noisy torrents.
    Julia sent terse messages to Viktor’s relatives, none of them close any longer, and hers as well. Then Axelrod got on the big screen.
    “What was he doing?” Axelrod asked after the usual extending of concern.
    “Sending pulsed electrical currents into an iron seam,” she began, and tried to explain, but she was not in the mood.
    So she signed off. As if waiting for a cue, Praknor appeared. The woman seemed to have a talent for showing up as something of far greater importance was about to happen—the expedition planning, the descent itself, and now this.
    Julia kept her face frozen while Praknor voiced the same sentiments as Axelrod, and then said, “Assuming Viktor recovers—”
    “Assuming?”
    A two-second pause, then: “Of course, he’s going to be fine, but I meant—”
    “What?”
    “—that it underscores the concerns we all have Earthside—”
    “You’re on Mars.”
    “—that you’ve been risking yourselves here for decades, for an entire generation, in fact—”
    “We live here.”
    “—of course, and this just underlines the extent of the unknowns, so many unknowns, and—”
    “Unknowns are why we’re here.”
    “—that you both are so famous now, that any possible injury to you gets big news coverage, doubts about the entire program, causes Consortium stock to plunge—”
    Julia snorted sardonically.
    “—and such oscillations in profitability are just not in tune with a structurally modern multiworld corporation—”
    “The only one, actually.”
    “—that you both, when you’ve really had time to consider the issue in full, should consider giving up this risky life and—”
    Julia gave her a long moment, but nothing more came out. “And?”
    “Mr. Axelrod really needs you on the moon.”
    “Why?”
    “Because it’s a lot safer. And there are a lot of doubts about the whole Lunar Enterprises profile. Having big names in charge—”
    “We’re not CEOs. We’re explorers.”
    “—will shore up public confidence in that entire arm of the business.”
    Julia let a few seconds trickle away. People respond differently under pressure, and—“You just gave away your whole agenda, right?”
    Praknor looked suddenly stunned. “Yes. You needed to know. And in a high-stress time like this, you deserve to have all the cards on the table.”
    Julia let herself down easily into a chair. “This is some kind of new management technique, right?”
    Praknor betrayed a morsel of uncertainty, her lips working. “There’s a big nuke on its way. Axelrod wants you on it on the return trip.”
    “What?”
    “You wanted to know. The spacecraft just barely made the orbital window to get here.”
    “And we don’t know?”
    “It’s corporate confidential.”
    “But not an utter state secret, because you—”
    “Mr. Axelrod instructed me to broach—”
    “Julia?” Vaquabal was at her elbow.
    Julia spun toward him, shoving Praknor away. “How—”
    “He is fine. Awake now.”
    Julia turned back to Praknor, eyes flashing, breath fuming. “We’re going to goddamn well live forever, y’know.”
    Viktor didn’t want to dwell on the accident. “Just another data point,” he said. “Goal is to look for pattern.”
    “Um,” she said. He already had a laptop and was fooling around with the magnetic data. She said nothing about Praknor, just