Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4) Read Online Free Page A

next to the dome. That was reassuring, illogically, since he felt that if they came for the cargo crates they would have to find him, too.
    Chances were he’d only be here for a few days, a week or two at most.
    A week or two was beginning to look like a very long time. The possibility of being stranded here alone for three months was just terrifying. And what if nobody ever did come back to check? If this was a four-man five-month dome, presumably, he could last for twenty months here on his own, perhaps longer.
    He had a vision of himself as a haggard, bearded, long-haired castaway, starving to death. Perhaps, in another two hundred years or so, another ship would come here and find him, mummified, sitting right there on the couch.
    Realising that he was giving himself the horrors, Jermane gave himself a little shake, turned away resolutely from the window and turned the holoscreen on, just to have some noise and the illusion of company.
    He didn’t turn the holoscreen off again for the whole time he was there, keeping it on even when he went to bed. Sometimes he even put music on at the same time, the holovision playing in the lounge while he had music playing in the kitchen. It felt quite homely, that, as if there might be a family around him.
    There was, however, absolutely nothing homely about that dome. No pictures, no ornaments, it was even more impersonal than a budget hotel room.
    And it was not long, just hours, before the Thing started, with the ice.
    To begin with, he found it beautiful. Planet-rise was, indeed, spectacular, and as he stood there with a mug of coffee watching it he actually felt for a little while as if he could enjoy this. He felt suddenly bold, adventurous, seeing something that perhaps no human being had ever witnessed before. This system had been visited by a mining survey ship a couple of hundred years before, so it was already long since officially claimed as League territory. Their survey had been brief, however, and it was unlikely that any of them would have bothered to land on this unimportant moon. He might well, indeed, be the first human being ever to see this planet-rise.
    The gas giant rose rapidly over the horizon and was very soon filling the sky, a glorious pale blue cloudy orb with a glitter of delicate rings. Even more beautiful was the transformation of the lunar landscape. As the planet-light flooded the scene, it revealed that that odd shimmer on the ridge was actually a thin crisp of ice crystals. They could not be water ice, of course, he knew that, but Andi had said there was a tenuous methane atmosphere which might crystallize out and thaw in the lunar day-night cycle. It could be quite pretty, she’d said, and she was right, it was. Jermane looked out over the sugar-frosted ridge, bathed in that cool blue light, and thought that it was very pretty indeed. And then, as the warmth of the planet light raised the temperature just sufficiently for the ice to thaw, it began to evaporate.
    Jermane remembered from school science that when ice turned directly from solid to vapour it was said to ‘sublime’. Never had a word seemed more appropriate. It did not melt to liquid, but rose from the surface in delicate wisps that faded away as the planet-light increased. They didn’t curl or move as they would have on a planet with a denser atmosphere, just hung there like translucent ghosts, and vanished.
    Jermane wished, later, that he hadn’t thought that about ghosts. The first time he saw them he thought they were exquisite – the whole thing, the subliming ice, the dark rocks, the gas giant filling the sky, filled him with a sense of awe.
    He would, he discovered, enjoy that spectacle two or three times a day. The moon he was on rotated in six and three quarter hours. Planet-rise was a fraction later every time, with the ‘days’ growing a little shorter, but that was only a matter of minutes and did not seem important. Planet-set around four hours later was quite