Hotshot

Начало книги

You do understand: It has to be your choice.

They never stopped telling me I was free to back out. They told me while they were still wrangling asteroids out past Mars; told me again as they chewed through those rocks like steel termites, bored out caverns and tunnels, layered in forests and holds and life- support systems rated for a longer operational lifespan than the sun itself. They really laid it on after that L4 fiasco, when the singularity got loose during testing. Not a whisper of cancelling the project—even though the magic upon which the hole thing rested had just eaten half the factory floor and a quarter of the propulsion team—but in the wake of that tragedy UNDA seemed to think it especially important to remind us of the exits.

It's your decision. No one can make it for you.

I laughed in their faces, once I was old enough to understand the irony. I'd been trained and tweaked for the mission since before I'd even been born, they'd groomed my parents as carefully as they were grooming me. Thirty years before I was even conceived, I was already bound for the stars. I was built to want them; I didn't know any other way to be.

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