Read Lesser Gods for Free Online

bits of frozen ice.
    I kicked my probe’s thruster to head in closer to my designated chunk of ice and rock. Then I eased on the braking rocket to match the asteroid’s speed. Gently, gently, I warned myself as I extended my/probe’s clawed hand. I didn’t want to be docked for the cost of another bent claw. I was paid well, but not that well.
    I eased the claw forward and after a few false starts, I grasped the lump of gold and ice. Then I hit the “auto load” button in front of my android self and the claw smoothly inserted the stone into the probe’s interior storage compartment without my help. I focused my attention on my secondary targets, and jetted toward the nearest one.
    Abruptly my eyes glowed brightly and then went pitch black. “Hey!” I yelled. “I’ve lost my —”
    I didn’t say more, because the cursing and shouting over the intercom let me know that the others were experiencing the same problem. Swearing under my breath, I pulled out of the probe into my android self, and saw that the probe’s view screen was dead.
    I glanced out the port, but the intense light was almost blinding. For a moment I tried to regain control of my probe. But I could tell from the limpness in my probe claw that the connection had been lost. My hand felt as if it was rolling out of control. I was unsure what to do and finally switched back out of the probe once more so my claw again became my hand. Or, more correctly, the hand of my mechanical body far out in space — though it seemed I was there rather than back on Earth.
    “Abandon your probes,” the foreman ordered. “Everyone stay in your cubicles. The captain’s trying to take us out of this. We’re keeping you in your remote bodies for the time being so you can stow yourselves in your crypts if we get free.”
    All I heard was “out of this” and “if we get free.” Out of what? I wondered.
    The light was bright enough that we might have been inside Venus’s orbit looking toward the Sun instead of almost to Jupiter.
    I craned my head around, squinting as I tried to discover the light source. Finally I quit, the glare from the metal trim on my port making the light unbearably bright.
    The engines of our ship rumbled ominously and I felt a chill, even though it was impossible for the body I occupied to feel any such thing. The hyperdrives continued powering, whipped to a feverish pitch unlike any I’d heard during my last four missions on the ship .
    How much more could the engines take without melting down? I wondered. I didn’t know the first thing about the engines that powered the ship, but the noise coming through the bulkhead didn’t sound safe to my untrained ear.
    “What the hell’s going on?” Sam yelled over the intercom.
    “Evasive maneuvers,” the foreman replied. “Everyone sit tight and shut up. We need to keep the comm channel clear. Just in case.”
    I tightened the straps holding me in place, uncomfortably aware that we sat in the nose of the craft with only a few inches of glass between us and nothingness. Miles — light days — of nothingness, I thought, gazing toward the brightly shining porthole. Even though my eyes had had time to adjust, the light was still so intense that it was painful to look at it.
    “Thirty seconds to impact,” the foreman warned.
    Impact? I thought.
    “All emergency hatches are to remain sealed,” the captain’s voice announced.
    The intercom erupted in chaos as miners demanded to know what was headed toward them while others swore. I wondered what would happen if our mechanical bodies were destroyed while we were still connected to them via our quantum entanglement machine.
    We’d been told it was perfectly safe.
    But I’d never trusted a corporation to tell the truth, and I had a feeling we weren’t nearly as safe as we had been told.
    “Three seconds ‘til impact,” the captain warned.
    Two…
    One.
    The ship shuddered. There was a massive rending of metal and plastic, with the