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in the city three days earlier, rising from the purple gloom of the Entraxrln
evening to the wide glory of a Miykenns sunset in brilliant cerise. Now,
commuters who had just made the same trip swept her along with them through
the cool, crisp, cloudless morning.
She had sent her first message early last night and received its reply after
supper. She'd asked for the confirmation from the Sea House within minutes,
but hadn't waited for a reply; there was a three hour round-trip signal delay
and it was then very early morning on Golter. She doubted the Seigneur was an
early riser.
She read the two replies again, waiting on a traffic island while cars whirred
and trams clanked past. She raised her face to the sunlight, seeking the weak
warmth with a kind of hunger after the weeks in Pharpech's perpetual gloom.
The light shone down the canyon of city street, reflecting off high
glass-fronted buildings on either side, pouring onto the river of traffic and
the crowds of people. NG, soonest, she read once more, and then stuffed the
pieces of flimsy into a pocket.
`Why there?' she said to herself. Her breath smoked in front of her face. She
pulled on her gloves and fastened her jacket as the traffic stopped and she
crossed the road in the midst of the crowd.
She watched a big seaplane roar overhead; it banked above the city as it
started its approach. The plateau lake must still be ice-free. She watched the
aircraft disappear behind the buildings with an expression on her face
somewhere between wistfulness and bitterness.
Nachtel's Ghost. They wanted her to deliver the book to Nachtel's Ghost;
outwards to the limits of the system, not inwards, not towards Golter, where
the Sea House was. She walked back to the hotel, stopping and looking in shops
and displays, making sure she wasn't being followed. Her reflection, seen in
one window, had a pinched, pale look about it. She inspected her face and saw
again the message in the dust that was all that was left of the
Universal
Principles:
THINGS WILL CHANGE.
She drew her jacket tighter still, recalling the chill granite surface of her
grandfather's tomb when it had still been at Tzant, and the freezing cold of
the Ghost; the remembered fall in the remembered fall. She shivered.
16 The Ghost
Physically brave, she thought as the hired ship shuddered its way into the
thin, cold, evaporating atmosphere of
Nachtel's Ghost.
Physically brave.
She had left the others in SkyView. They would wait there until she had
finished in Nachtel's Ghost and decide where to rendezvous later. They'd had
news from Golter; all Miz's assets had been frozen while the Log-jam attempted
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to have a warrant issued for his arrest in connection with an unspecified
offence within its jurisdiction.
Miz had lawyers working on the case, and anyway had emergency funds he could
access, but not until he was actually present on Golter. Sharrow had used up
most of the rest of the contract expenses allowance chartering a private
spacecraft to take her from SkyView to Nachtel's Ghost; comm net gossip and
news reports both had it that the Huhsz were waiting at Embarkation Island,
and she'd been travelling as Ysul Demri long enough for there to be an even
chance they knew her pseudonym.
She had not been back to the Ghost since the crash-landing that had both saved
her and almost killed her. The crippled ex-excise clipper had fallen like a
meteorite through the wasted air of the small planet-moon, slowing and slewing
as it spun and wobbled and disintegrated on its long arcing plunge towards the
planet's snow-covered surface. She couldn't remember anything after she'd
shouted to Miz about wanting any crater she made being named after her. Miz
hadn't heard her, anyway.
The crash report later concluded she'd probably run out of gyro-manoeuvring
power ten kilometres up, while the craft was still travelling at over a
kilometre a second. It had started to tumble and tear itself to pieces
immediately afterwards and only luck had saved her after that. The central
section of the ship -containing the combat pressure hull, life-support systems
and central plasma power plant - had stayed relatively intact, reduced to a
jagged, roughly spherical shape that had continued to slow as it somersaulted
and shed further small pieces of wreckage like burning shrapnel through the
air.
She could recall nothing of those final minutes, and nothing of the crash
itself, as the piece of wreckage containing
her buried itself inside a snow-wave, one of the thousands migrating across
the surface of the planet's equatorial snow-fields like sand dunes across a
desert.
A crawler carrying mining supplies had been within a couple of kilometres. The
crew had found her, a few minutes before it would have been too late, crushed
and folded inside the steaming, radiation-contaminated wreckage of the ship,
buried two hundred metres under the surface of the snow-wave at the end of a
collapsed tunnel of ice and snow.
The crawler's crew had cut her out; the medics at First Cut mine had treated
the physical injuries, while specialist war-embargoed systems were brought in
from Trench City, the planet's capital, to treat the radiation sickness that
had brought her even closer to death. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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