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"It&039;s nothing, Laurent It happens sometimes when I come out here In the capital, I have to take it for the crowds But here I forget"
He sighed "I understand" He knew she was lying
"Laurent"
"Yes?"
She saw so down the handrail, clutching her apathy bracelet She took another deep breath, her panic receding at the sight of it
"Will you do it?" Nara reached out and took the bracelet from the drone
Laurent clutched her shoulder, and she tasted his struggle, the fight against his conditioning, his upbringing, his own gray soul, against a planetary landscape rolling beneath hiers closed around the bracelet, and the drone backed away But Nara didn&039;t activate the flow of apathy yet
"Don&039;t," she asked
He looked behind hi from the bedroo things in front of the fire In the flickering light, they looked likea miniature city
Laurent Zai nodded quietly and whispered, "All right I won&039;t I promise you"
Four days to o
Nara slipped the bracelet onto her wrist unused, and sed Godspite, her mouth was dry
"Dinner, then?" she said
Part 2
ALCHEMICAL
Above all, a soldierto die
--ANONYMOUS 167
Commando
The second rendezvous went considerably better H_rd successfully juible, and over a few hours it lifted her to approxihty kiloleht, it was sible&039;s vacuu the slow ascent H_rd pressed her face to a rebreather tank The decline in pressure during the assent had been considerable; her ears were ringing, and she&039;d felt a blood vessel burst in one eye after an hour of cli A Rix commando could take a wide variation of air pressure, but this was the lowest she&039;d experienced since hull-breach training There was no weather up here in the mesopause, but it was unbelievably cold The ablative suit--recovered, like the rebreather, froh to keep her fro H_rd found, however, that she missed her sable coat
Well, she would be war device in her hand beeped, Alexander&039;s signal to her It was allement facility seemed off-center to her, but the compound mind had carefully calculated the wind direction and speed
With a strangely unRix thought, h_rd hoped that Alexander hadn&039;t hly ten meters across, after a fall that would take more than twenty minutes Alexander had used its weather satellites to find the snowdrift, which filled a thirty-lacial rift inside the array&039;s defensive wire The couised as snowflakes into its cloud-seeding efforts These had fallen into the drift and doped the snow Over the last few days, the nano colony had changed the structure of the ice crystals, expanding the drift, leaching carbon fro a colloidal foam that would compress smoothly when h_rd struck it The snow had swelled up into a hill that rose tenlandscape Thus, h_rd&039;s fall would be broken gradually over almost forty meters
Of course, she had to hit the trench dead center She held the positioning device firet area
H_rd prepared herself, sing to adjust the pressure in her ears She checked the straps of her nal to drop
She unlocked the ible&039;s payload basket, and slipped into the void
Weightless again Freefall was an old friend
The rush of air built sloorsening the cold on the unprotected parts of her face Her ablative suit was designed to fight fires onboard aircraft A few nanos--prograh a medical pack--had altered it sufficiently to make it invisible to Imperial radar
Or so Alexander&039;sthe positioning device and watching its numbers move The alti Terminal velocity for a huis As close as h_rd could esti altimeter, her speed had passed that Probably the air up here was thin enough that terher, and she would actually be braking as she descended into higher pressures
After five ri up froht; she couldn&039;t be going that fast The temperature increase was just the heat trap of the stratopause After ten row cold again She was passing through the stratosphere, approaching the cold air of the tropopause
Extending her ar herself and angling toward the entangle as a dinner plate below her She sed constantly to keep her ears clear, and watched the nuled her free hand and legs to guide her fall Her coordinates seeet Of course, she was a fewthe tropospheric wind currents that would push her toward the target snow drift
H_rd had low-orbit ju, but that ith a purpose-built Rix suit, parafoil, and artificial-gravity backup The situation was so a retrofitted, i in a pile of snow It wasn&039;t the equiph
She had faced death at every stage of thisshort of fantastic that she had survived this long But h_rd had realized during these relatively quiet minutes of freefall that Rana Harter had stolen soe H_rd found that she wanted to live, a strange desire for a Rix coht To encounter fear for the first ti--at sixty uarded enemy facility
"Love," h_rd said bitterly The rampant wind tore the word from her mouth without coitude and latitude on the positioning device began slowly et values; the tropospheric as pushing her toward the landing area And it was getting war tele in size fro beca toward her She extended hands and feet and angled her body, swooping to bring herself closer to the target area The positioning device finally beeped; she had matched the snowdrift&039;s coordinates
The co, snow-filled rift reflecting starlight with pale luraphs supplied by Alexander, h_rd had memorized the exact spot she needed to hit She tucked the positioning device into her pack and began counting down
The altio
She sed fiercely now as air pressure built, cupping her hands to guide herself gently to the target over these last few h an is completely, let her th and flexibility in her plastic ligaments to favor the latter
By the tiht seconds, h_rd was physiologically ready for impact The deepest part of the trench lay directly below her, no farther than looking down fro At half a kiloained focus rapidly Rocks and a few scrub bushes became visible, and the moire weave of a retransmitter dish&039;s arc scintillated in one corner of her vision
After twenty , it was odd how quickly the snowbound earth was rushing up at her
Five, four, three
The surface of the altered snow broke with a pop as she crashed through She later realized that a thin layer of frost had formed over the nano-doped snow This brittle crust of rime was at most a centimeter thick--and probably couldn&039;t have supported ht But at sixty meters per second it packed a punch Like the surface of water at high speed, it had for a moment the force of concrete The impact broke h_rd&039;s nose and split her lower lip, and opened a bleeding cut over her right eye But then she passed into the colloidal pseudo-snohich caught her in its foa her descent The Rixwoman came smoothly to a stop
She opened her eyes in total darkness, her head ringing fro each muscle and joint in turn, she found herself to be uninjured except for the insults to her face She sat up, orienting herself in the darkness of the cold, compressed foam-snow around her, and looked upwards
The sky was just visible through the twenty-meter-deep hole she had made Her own outline, almost comically exact, showed for a fewher H_rd breathed deeply and fast, storing oxygen before she was enveloped by the foam She would remain here motionless for thirty istered on the facility&039;s motion sensors, but if she stayed still, the snow- of the snowdrift: an event ithin the natural stochastic rus of the arctic wild
The darkness covered her After the rushing air, especially the frigid layer of the tropopause, the foa into her eye from her cut, and tended to her wounds as she waited That brittle crust of ice represented a small error in Alexander&039;s plan, she noted to herself, the sort of hairline nified a thousandfold in a mission of this difficulty
No systeht, but true
After she&039;d waited the requisite tian to tunnel out of the drift She kept an eye on the positioning device, not trusting her owncells this close to the pole Her oxygen reserve was li turn that led her into an unclimbable wall could be deadly It would be rather banal to drown in this foahty-kiloe stuff In the readout light of the positioning device, she could see the tiny bubbles that e carbon ently, but under shock it disintegrated into a wet, somewhat slimy substance In her hand the bubbles broke down quickly into water; even her low body temperature was sufficient to disrupt its stability When the inds of spring came, all evidence of how this trick had been perfore of the foam, and climbed from the trench into a drift of real snow She raised a periscope through the crust first, and surveyed the area There was no sign of an I She pulled herself from the drift and dusted snow and foam from her The ablative suit had torn on impact, and a few icy trickles of water already nu zone, careful to keep her distance fro on that part of the drift would plunominiously There were also vibration sensors to be wary of H_rd ned to mimic natural processes
The colimmer of lowed like spiderwebs all around her, the nearest thirty ly slow and interrupted crawl, it took h_rd five minutes to traverse the distance
The hly the size of a fist From this central mass radiated the athered the civilian coht transmission The transh antenna that forwarded the data to the entangles and two manipulator arms The hordes of thele entity They ather thehput required The whole syste it difficult to sabotage and iatons of explosives These repeaters were a hardy system, a wartime backup to the vulnerable hardlines, h which the data usually flowed Once the Imperials had realized that the coated, they had isolated the facility The repeaters had been taken off-line by hand: hundreds of h the snow on foot and disconnecting the repeaters individually The facility&039;s input had been reduced to a single hardline connection, a low-bandwidth coupling that the htly controlled Alexander was cut off
The Imperials assumed that any measure undertaken by hundreds of humans by hand would be irreversible without similarly crude measures But Alexander had other ideas
H_rd looked at the repeater closely Its power pack seele of about fifteen degrees She refocused her eyes into their microscopic mode, and noted the simple measure the I, still sucking up the vast quantity of data that Legis produced, but the repeater was physically disconnected frorees, the pack was disjunct from its contact, thus all off-planet transoal H_rd approved of the aweso actually functioned like soain, the crudeness of the I respect froer, she clicked the power pack back into the correct position That was it The lethal wire and two thousand kilo but this simple switch
Her e of the landing zone and buried herself in a few deci hole She would wait here for a fewher rather noisy escape
Before covering her head, h_rd looked back and saw that the repeater she had fixed was alreadyits beetlelike way across the snow
Alexander was inside the wire
Senator
It was good to be back in the halls of the Senate Forum The air seemed to be cleaner here, the wash of politics more pure
The Senate was an unruly chamber, of course,But the nuenda balanced each other, blending into a shape as smooth as the rumble of a distant ocean The noisy debates here were a relief for Nara Oxham after the demands of the War Council, where each crisis came into absolute focus, and lives were in play with every vote
"You were right, Niles," she said as they walked together back toward her offices Oxham had just presented the last few days of the council&039;s work to the full Senate
"I knew they&039;d love you, Senator Even the lackeys were standing by the end"
"Not about that, Niles," she said, waving away his praise The speech had gone well, though Captain Laurent Zai had made them all look brilliant The Lynx&039;s attack on the Rix battlecruiser had given the Eanda effort Counterattacks in an interstellar war could take years to mount, time spans over which even the most resolute society&039;s ainst the Rix in a matter of days
"In any case, I have an a sputter of protest at this
"I was referring, in any case," she interrupted, "to when you cau 143 tionede caht to warn ht that was a likelihood I just had to say soet paid to advise you"
Nara smiled at her counselor&039;s cluht to her today She&039;d played the Senate like so back on Vasthold, pulled the bright tracery of their eh the courses that Niles&039;s speech had mapped out for her The moment in which she&039;d captured them had coree to her words like a flock of birds turning in unison
The sharp flavor of the captive crowd still lingered in her ht penetrating the high s along the Forureat hall But the pleasures of politics were trifles compared to the real source of her joy
Laurent Zai had survived, escaping death again