Read Return - Book III of the Five Worlds Trilogy for Free Online

compound. Though Benel Kran had scoured the immediate vicinity thoroughly, there were treasures to be found farther afield. And with Benel’s light soldier weapon newly configured to the size of a lunchbox, with a single elegant strap supporting it over one shoulder and a thin chrome wire ending in a pencil-thin apparatus that clipped to the middle finger of either hand, ready to activate and emit a beam of light, they were able to travel away from their base and feel protected.
    It was on one of the trips, which stretched to an overnight stay, that they lay outside their tents and watched the stars hone into view after darkness. In the distance, across the miles that stretched between the edge of the city and Sacajawea Patera, they could see the lights of the jutting jewel from near the mountain’s summit where the Eagle’s Nest was brightly lit. It looked like a spike of light.
    When Visid saw Mars rise, an hour after sunset, an angry red dot, her heart was filled with a mix of emotions.
    “Did you know there was a time, before Carter Frolich and my father terraformed Venus and slowed its rotation, when a day here was two hundred and forty-three Earth days long? We would have had to wait months just to see Mars again.”
    “Everyone knows that!” Benel said. He turned to look at her in starlight. “Something’s bothering you—what is it?”
    “He’s coming back, isn’t he?” she said, to herself as much as to Benel Kran.
    “Cornelian? Yes, he definitely has something planned. I thought it would be a long time until his light soldiers came back, but here they are again—”
    As if in answer, in the distance there was a flashing beam of light from orbit to ground, which then bled into a pencil-thin shard and then winked out. On the ground in its wake rested a glowing faraway smudge of illumination.
    “I wonder what he’s going to do,” Visid said.
    There was silence between them.
    “Whatever it is,” Visid said finally, “we have to be ready.”
    They slept then, Visid’s hand bearing the trigger mechanism of the plasma weapon, and the tiny perimeter alarms she had set giving them a good measure of security.
     
    V isid awoke early in the morning, before sunrise, and beheld a magnificent sight. As she stood and stretched, there, facing the dawn, were three massive comets, hugging the coming sun. Their tails pushed high into the dawning sky, triple beacons.
    “I had no idea …” Visid said.
    She woke Benel Kran, who bore witness with her.
    “I’ve never been out in early morning,” the physicist said in wonder. “They must be approaching perihelion, about to circle the Sun. I wonder where they’re heading when they come back around.”
    Visid stood regarding them quietly and then turned to stare off at the Eagle’s Nest, its glowing lights beginning to be subsumed by the blue-orange of daybreak.
    “We have to go see the blind man,” Visid said, turning to regard Benel Kran with certainty. “We have to go see Carter Frolich.”
     

Chapter 7
     
    A pirate again!
    Well, sort of.
    Still, it felt marvelous to Shatz Abel to be in command of a ship, and on a mission. Like a man who had been in deep freeze for too long, as indeed he had been, he felt ready to take on anyone and anything—a world, the Solar System, the Universe itself!
    His only regret was that he wouldn’t get to take on Wrath-Pei, the founder of his past misery and that of so many others. For all those years of exile on Pluto the dream of rending the former Martian senator limb from limb with his bare hands had sustained him. Indeed, there had been times when he had been drunk with vengeance when no other beverage had been available; had eaten revenge when food stores had sunk to alarming levels, before another old shuttle-craft could be salvaged. He had feasted on thoughts of what he would do to Wrath-Pei when finally he had his hands on him.
    There was no doubt in Shatz Abel’s mind that these thoughts had arisen in response to