Communication to Earth was getting each time worse. Greedy Tsiolkov, they could at least have given me a decent transcom and paid for some extra bandwith. Cool, took me two hours to upload all the stuff.

"He buddy watcha doing there, dloading pr0n?". Chien only answered with a text message "Official transmission going on, plz STFU and wait". Very nice from her, liked this girl from the first moment I saw her. I felt a real deep love for her, as deep as she could get in the Mariana Trench and with a granite stone chained to her neck. She didn't hide her disgust to me either... Nor did the rest of the Tsiolkov employees in the Mars relay. Nothing personal, just Tsiolkov's brandmarked style.

I remembered the far away shores of Venus, full of turists in colorful shirts, children screaming and crying and making all kind of the most insidious and irritating noises a human brain can bear. Busy workers, angry Bottrans employees and functionaries. And over all the stench of the sulphuric gases, those remaining from the cheap and fast terraformation process and those re-injected by the the local industry.

Oh, but I still had plenty of time till my contract with
Tsiolkov expired. The wage was low and the conditions an armed robbery, but I got a free ticket to the frontier; the forgotten lands of the Itani and the Serco, far away from the main routes and protected from the earthlings by the high cost of the hyperwarp jump for living beings. And it's good so, it's the way things shall stay. Here I'm free to move, to breath, to live and to die far away from the crowded shores of Venus.