Red Lightning Read Online Free Page A

"home," Mars is home, whether they like it or not. If they like it, they can be perfectly happy here with just the reasonable exercise that their doctors recommend, though a lot of them admit that they're homesick.
    For the rest of us, it's a choice we have to make. Some people say it's easy, no big deal, but they're wrong. I've been here since I was five. Mars is home to me. But I have some memories of Earth, I've been back four times, and for many decades to come, Earth is going to be the place. You know what I mean?
    The place. The place where it's happenin', dude, as Dad would say.
    The place where most of the interesting people are. The place where the new stuff comes from. Sure, we've got our music here, some fairly good groups. The Red Brigade had a few tunes that scored some heavy downloads – you say "Red Brigade" and most English-speaking kids on Earth would know who you're talking about – but most of them aren't much more than pressurized garage bands.
    All the other cool stuff comes from the Blue Planet, too. For a while there kids on Earth were wearing stereos that had been designed on Mars, but other than that, the things people are wearing come from where they've always come from: Los Angeles, Tokyo, St. Petersburg, Shanghai, Bombay. The cool places.
    If you're interested in history, like I am, most of it's on Earth. We've got exactly one real historic spot on Mars: the Red Thunder landing site, where they built a replica of the ship. Everybody goes there to get their picture taken. All the earlier robot landers were gathered up and put in the museum to prevent vandalism.
    So what are you going to do? It's a documented fact: Every year you stay on Mars makes it harder and harder to ever return to Earth. Well, harder to return and lead anything like a normal life.
    So that awful day I was doing what I have done two hours per day for most of my life. Working out. There's two places to do that. There's a gym at school, and one beneath the hotel where me and my sister, Elizabeth, and other hotel workers and their children do our sweating, in the basement, beneath the big gym with a view where the Earthie guests are encouraged to exercise and usually don't. I seldom go there. It's no fun watching a little Earthie girl press twenty pounds more than you can. I'd finished my hundred with my right arm and was up to fifty or so with my left.
    I'm not one to wear my stereo when I work out. No special reason, I just don't like to, and neither does Elizabeth. So I was on the chin bar with my eyes bare naked, as we say, when I saw something I'd only seen a couple of times before. Everybody in the gym stopped what they were doing and stared off into cyberspace.
    "Uh-oh," I said. Beside me, Elizabeth paused with her chin just over the bar and glanced at me.
    "What?"
    I gestured with my head, and we both dropped to the mat and scrambled for our gym bags. I got out my brand-new MBC V-Crafter 2030 stereo with the cool gold-tinted bug-eye lenses and the black-and-gold Burroughs school colors tiger-stripe pattern on the wings. While I was doing that I heard a few people gasping. Somebody assassinated? A spaceship crash? A blowout? I put them on and ticked the flashing red News icon. A window opened in the middle distance, the stereo effect making it seem to hang motionless over the running track. In the center of the window was a view of Planet Earth, hanging there like a blue agate with swirls of white.
    Only there was something wrong with it. Somebody had made a fine white scratch mark on it, straight as a jet contrail, right over the Atlantic Ocean.
    Only... the scratch extended out to the northeast, right to the edge of the window. A rocket launch?
    Then I realized that if I could see the scratch from that distance – and the window superscript said this picture was from a camera on the moon – it had to be a big scratch.
    You can't see the pyramids from the moon. You can't see the Great Wall of China, no matter what they