Lost in Transmission
Chapter One
no quiet today
"Hold on tight," Radmer says, too late to do any good. The first air
pocket comes and goes like a kick on the guts. Whump!
Radmer is old enough more than old enough to remember the fiery slam
and tumble of entering a planetary atmosphere from orbit. The howl
of plasma, the glow of radiators ... Piercing the atmosphere of
Lune is nothing like that. For one thing, he's coming in under four
kps, so there is heat but not fire. For another thing his vehicle is
not some graceful, gull-winged shuttle, but a crude sphere of brass,
navigated by eyeball and sextant and steered with charges of dinite
explosive. Inertial stability comes, in theory, from a gyroscope
made of a potter's wheel, but Radmer has been too busy steering to
kick the thing and wind it up. Beyond the bootside porthole, he can
see the world of Lune spinning crazily.
The Squozen Moon: a world crushed and greened and left to its own
devices, still in orbit around the pinpoint collapsar of Murdered
Earth. Lune is so much smaller than a real planet. More delicate,
more precious, and yet the largest by far the largest of the
habitable worlds still ... read full excerpt from Lost in Transmission ebook
