Read Online SpaceCorp by Ejner Fulsang - Free Book Online

skill in it… not the way I do it anyway.”
    A moment passed in silence. “Look, I don’t have a lot of stuff—being a yo-yo and all. I could move what little I have into your place. You know—change my address.”
    He smiled, then frowned. “What if they wanted to draft you to be on the crew? Maybe be captain?”
    “Captains come up through the crew ranks, Logan. You don’t go from yo-yo to captain.”
    “Okay, but what if they offered it to you? I could put in a good word… I know some people. They might like the idea of someone like you skippering a whole new class of space station.”
    “Make up your mind. Do you want me to move in with you or be a space station captain?”
    “I want you to be happy with your decision,” Mack said. “I’d talk to the right people if you wanted me to.”
    “I don’t want you to.”
    “I know some people, Monica. I have some pull around here.”
    “I know you do, Logan, but don’t.” She turned her head toward the sunset. The fading light gave her Mediterranean skin a nice golden glow. She reached behind her head and undid the giant knot she’d worn her thick black hair in all day. She combed it out with her fingers and arranged it to cascade down in front of her right shoulder. A breaker whumped on the beach below. “I’m old, Logan.”
    “Thirty-one? Get serious!”
    “That’s old for a woman in this business.”
    “There are women older than you up there.”
    “I know. They love space and so do I. They made a conscious choice to stay up there till they rem out, or if they fudge their dosimeter records, they sometimes stay longer than they should, and then they get to face the big C down here on the ground. I don’t want to be like them. I mean I got eggs on ice just like every other woman up there.”
    “You want to have children?”
    “Yeah… you okay with that?”
    “Yeah… of course,” Mack said. “What I meant was you shouldn’t have to worry about… well, you know.”
    “ Deformities . You can say it. But it’s not my eggs I’m worrying about. It’s the rest of me. I need all my organs intact if I’m going to carry a healthy baby to term.”
    Mack didn’t say anything.
    “So anyway,” Monica said. “I want to have my high adventure, then come back down here and be an old lady someday… bounce little astronauts on my knee and tell them about how I helped us get to the stars… Pretty corny, huh?”
    He smiled. “You up for meeting my folks this weekend?”
    That weekend
    Mack’s parent’s house in Agoura, California
    They’d left Friday after work, he on his restored Harley, she on some kind of tricked out Japanese 6-cylinder crotch-rocket. He thrilled to the throaty ‘potato-potato’ sound that came from his Harley’s big V-twin at idle. When she rolled on the throttle, only dogs could hear it. You could only tell her engine was running by the warpage in local space-time that made everything blurry. He hadn’t known she could ride, but now that he did, it seemed only logical that she would ride a race bike. She was big on full-face helmets and skin-tight leathers that made her ass look like the Eighth Wonder of the World. He spent the whole trip following as close behind as he dared, motivated by fantasies that were as unstoppable as they were unseemly. Maybe something new tonight. She might go for it.
    They’d gotten in after midnight. The house had gone to bed hours ago. The front door to the gatehouse had a note taped to the door and cryptic instructions in his mother’s handwriting to look for the key under the same damn flower pot they’d been using for twenty-five years.
    Inside, the room was fresh and cool since his mother had the staff leave the windows open. There were clean towels on the bed and there was a fruit and cheese basket on the coffee table. Next to it was a pair of glasses and an ice bucket with a bottle of the local Chardonnay. His mother had stuck a note in the fruit basket. She grabbed it before he