Jo Clayton Shadow of the Warmaster (v1.0)

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.And I didn t want to be anywhere around when it turnedover. Look, I said. It s a random-ized circuit and not all that easy tocounterprogram.Not like pulling a few wires on hope and a prayer.I ve setthe thing to blow in half an hour.If he gets here in a minute or two, maybehe can do something; if he s later than that, no way.We take our chances,that s all we can do.He didn t like it, but he was no more into suicide than I was, so he noddedand we took off for the tubegate.19I dropped the tug into orbit a quadrant away from the Warmaster and waitedthere.Adelaar glanced at her chron. Two minutes, she said.The ship hung motionless in the center of the screen.The Hanifa was standingbehind me again, I could feel her hot breath on my neck.When I looked around,I was almost nose to nose with her, but she wasn t noticing anything but theWarmaster.The rest of them were pretty much the same.Hungry.The Warmaster trembled.A shine spread over her, then localized at thedrivers.She moved.Slowly at first.Ponderously.She began picking up speed,an-gling away from Tairanna.As soon as she got wound up, it was like shevanished, collapsing to a pinpoint and then to nothing. Well, I said. She son her way.Horgul in two hours.Good-bye, battleship. What about the torp? How do we know if it blew?That was Jamber Fausse; he was a man to keep his teeth in an idea until itsquealed. We don t, I said. Unless she turns up again.Then we know itdidn t.Back off, everyone.Show s over.We re going down.Parnalee had slowed to a fast walk by the time he passed through the next tolast hatch.He felt the sudden liveliness in the ship as she began to move.Hestopped, flattened his hand hard against the wall.He could not have describedthe difference he felt in her, but he knew what was happening, she was on herway to the sun.He smiled.So they thought.Let them think it, fools.Hestarted moving again, an unhurried trot.He passed through the last hatch,glanced at his chron, smiled again.He d made better time than he d expected.Only half an hour.He sighed with pleasure as he thought about stripping downand letting the fresher scrub him clean again, about stretching out on thefur, a hot meal on the console beside him and another bottle of brandy whilehe waited for the Dark Sister to come alive and take over the ship.He saw thedoor, open like he d left it, hurried toward it.He stopped just inside, his way barred by the dolly and the torp; for a crazymoment he thought he was hallucinating, then that the Bright Sister hadsomehow developed a mechanical TP facility and flipped his torp back to him,then he knew that the woman had done it, the bitch had found his hiding place,she d found the Dark Sister, no matter that it was impossi-ble for her to findthe Dark Sister, and she d left this joke to greet him.Furious and afraid hetook a step toward it; disarm it, he thought, I ve got to disarm it.It blew in his face.He knew an instant of intolerable brightness, ofintolerable frustration and rage.Then nothing.XIV1.Time-span:11 Days (local) after the meeting on Gerbek Island to theevening of the day called Lift-Off.At the Mines.When Karrel Goza left Zaraiz Memeli at the Mines, the boy was on fire withexcitement, but it didn t take him long to discover he d been dumped there tokeep him out of trouble while the adults did whatever it was they were goingto do.He was furious and hurting, betrayed again by someone who claimed hisPage 175ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.htmltrust.He poked about, sticking his nose into anything that showed theslightest promise of breaking the tedium.In the middle of his second weekthere, early one morning before the sun was all the way up, he pulled a rottenboard off a window at the back of the convict bar-racks, wriggled through thenarrow space and dropped onto the floor of a holding cell.The silver sphere came bounding at him, squawling its warning, attacking whenthat warning was ignored.He was startled but not frightened.He jumped, swerved, dived, played with it,laughed as he whipped about, elastic as an eel, too fast for the sphere tocatch him.N Ceegh heard him laughing, took a look.The sphere stopped chasing Zaraiz and began chat-ting with him, then itbrought him into the workshop.After a terse welcome, N Ceegh went back to mak-ing the operant parts of oneof the stunners he was assembling for the hit on the Warmaster.Zaraiz sat onthe stool next to him and watched him work, fasci-nated by the delicacy andprecision of his fingers, by the magnifier he was wearing, the microscopicpoints on most of his tools.Despite his involvement in the Green Slimes andhis ability to dominate the other middlers, he was a solitary boy; he knew thepleasures and value of silence.He asked nothing, volunteered nothing, spokeonly to answer the Pa ao s questions and kept his mouth shut at other times,not wanting to distract N Ceegh at a crucial moment.After a while N Ceegh lethim polish and fit together cases for the stunners.The boy immersed himself in what he was doing, glowing with pride each timethe Pa ao looked a part over and set it down without comment, showing that hethought it was finished, that he saw nothing there that needed fixing.Withthe resilience of the child he still was, Zaraiz gave his trust again, thistime to the Pa ao, gave it because N Ceegh was a master crafts-man and hewanted very much to be like him, because N Ceegh was wholly alien, wasphysically and spiritu-ally Other.He gave his trust and a tentativeaffection.N Ceegh recognized this in his silent way and gave back what he was given.When they took the Pa ao, Bolodo s minions were clumsy and let themselves beseen.To cover them-selves they ashed the village where they found him,killing all his kin, blood to the third degree, killing his mates and hischildren, most of all killing the boychild who was his craft-heir.His specieswas monogamous for life, patrilocal and powerfully bonded to the family andthe family Place [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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