Страница 156 из 189
Be
"The bottom wing is out of brew, Be
"Ask Gonle, Papa. She promised she'd cover whatever is needed." He looked around, caught a glimpse of Fong down a tu
Be
After a moment's chat he drifted away from the table, to the next, and the next, all the time keeping track of the overall service situation. Even with Gonle and Papa both on duty, they were just barely keeping their helpers coordinated.
"She's here, Be
"She came!" he replied. "I'll meet her at the front table!" He drifted in from the tables, toward the central cavity. All six cardinal points had customer wings. The Podmaster had allowed, encouraged, them to knock out walls and consume the volume that had been meeting rooms. The parlor was now the biggest single space on the temp. Except for the Lake Park, it was the biggest single living space at L1. Today, almost three-quarters of all the Emergents and Qeng Ho were on-Watch simultaneously, the climax of the rushed preparations for the Spider Rescue. And for a short time before the final push, virtually everyone was here at Be
The central core of the parlor was an icosahedron of display devices, a tent of their best remaining video wallpaper. It was primitive and warmly communal at the same time. From all directions, his customers would look inward at the shared views. Be
"Qiwi! Please, sit and be welcome!" He flipped over the table to float beside her.
Qiwi Lisolet smiled hesitantly back at Be
"Yes we are! We're so glad you could come. You can give us the inside view of what's going on." A goodwill ambassador from the Podmaster. And Qiwi looked the part. No pressure-coveralls for Qiwi today. She wore a lacey dress that floated in soft swirls as she moved. Even at the Lake Park open house she hadn't looked so beautiful.
Qiwi sat hesitantly at the table. Be
After a moment, Qiwi took the wand. Her other hand held tight to the kitten. The creature wriggled its wings into a more comfortable position, but didn't otherwise complain. For years Qiwi had been the most popular of the Podmaster's i
She looked up after a moment, a little of the old smile on her face. "Yes, I can run the show. Tomas showed me how." She loosened her grip on the kitten and patted his hand. "Don't worry, Be
She played with the wand, and the display core of the parlor flared into a
The display core was sorting itself into multiple views: Qiwi's face, Arachna as seen from theInvisible Hand, Podmaster Nau working at his lodge at North Paw, schematics of theHand' s orbit and the military configuration of the various Spider nations.
"As you know, our old friend Victory Smith has just arrived in Southland. In a few moments she'll be at their parliament, and we'll have a treat none of us have experienced before—a direct human-camera view from the ground. Finally, after all these years, we'll be seeing firsthand." On the big center display, Qiwi's face opened into a smile. "Think of it as a taste of things to come, the begi
"But before we get to that point, you know we have a war to prevent, and our presence finally to reveal." She looked down at the displays, and her voiced hesitated, as if she were suddenly struck by the enormity of what they were attempting. "We have pla
"So, watch for now. Soon we will be very busy."
FIFTY-TWO
Oddly enough, Rachner Thract retained his rank of colonel, not that former colleagues would trust him to scrape out their latrines. General Smith had treated him gently. They couldn'tprove he was a traitor, and apparently she was unwilling to use extreme interrogation on him. So Colonel Rachner Thract, formerly of the u
It had been four days since that terrible meeting at Lands Command, but Thract had seen his disgrace building for almost a year. When it finally overcame him...it had been such a relief, except for the unhappy detail that he survived it, a living ghost.
Old-time officers, especially Tiefers, would decapitate themselves after such ignominy. Rachner Thract was one-half Tiefer, but he hadn't cut off his head with a weighted blade. Instead, he'd numbed his brain with five straight days of fizz, chewing his way round and round the Calorica Strip.An idiot right to the end. Calorica was the only place in the world where it was too warm to lapse into fizz coma.
So he'd heard the reports that someone—Smith, it had to be Smith—was flying to Southmost, was trying to recover something of what Thract had lost. As the hours counted down toward Smith's arrival at Southmost, Rachner had eased off on the fizz. He sat staring at the news feeds in the public houses. Sat and prayed that somehow Victory Smith could succeed where Thract's life effort had failed. But he knew that she would fail. No one believed him, and even Rachner Thract didn't know the how and why. But he was sure: There was something backing up the Kindred. Even the Kindred didn't know about it, but it was there, twisting every one of the Accord's technical advantages back on itself.