Mary Rosenblum - Horizons.pdf - Mary Rosenblum - widez2

Contents

ONE .4

TWO ..19

THREE .36

FOUR ..51

FIVE .68

SIX ..82

SEVEN ..95

EIGHT .115

NINE .130

TEN ..134

ELEVEN ..146

TWELVE .159

THIRTEEN ..169

FOURTEEN ..174

FIFTEEN ..189

SIXTEEN ..203

SEVENTEEN ..219

EIGHTEEN ..234

NINETEEN ..239

TWENTY ..254

TWENTY-ONE .261

TWENTY-TWO ..274

TWENTY-THREE .286

TWENTY-FOUR ..297

TWENTY-FIVE .301

ONE

AHNI HUANG SHUT HER EYES AS THE SHUTTLE FROM THE Elevator matched spin with the

main port of New York Up. Grief distracted you, could get you killed. The Platforms were alien terytory

to her. She didn’t know the rules. The chairs swiveled as her limbs grew heavier, giving Ahni a vivid

moment of nausea before up and down settled into place. Didn’t help that down had been up a moment

ago. She drew a slow breath, dropping briefly into Pause until her heartbeat slowed and her biochemistry

stabilized. You could control mammalian stress reactions, but like grief, you couldn’t entirely banish them.

Please remain seated until docking is completed, the cool androgynous voice murmured.

All through the cylindrical cabin, seat-webs clicked and retracted and the clone-similar business

passengers plus a couple of overdressed tourists smoothed wrinkles from their singlesuits and pulled bags

from the storage bins beneath their seats. Ahni scanned the faces, senses heightened to the max now,

watching for the telltale slide of an eye, the subtle edge in body language that would mark a hit or a tail.

Her brother’s assassins would expect her father to come for vengeance, but they would also be looking

for any member of the Huang Family. Two natives on board. Their too-slender, almost fragile build gave

them away. She watched them covertly as she pretended to fiddle with her bag.

Anticipation, resignation, fatigue, boredom. . . As a Class Nine empath, and a sensitive one, she was

sure they weren’t acting.

So far so good. Ahni levered herself from the padded acceleration recliner, her stomach happy with the

eighty percent Earthnormal gravity of the rotating can’s outer shell. She stretched, aware of the muscles

cording on her small, lithe frame, wanting to go out and run for about six miles to work out the kinks from

the long Elevator trip. They had a jogging path here in New York Up, but it required a Level Three

tourist pass and she wasn’t staying in that kind of hotel. She slung her slightly scuffed business brief over

her shoulder, looking like your basic mid-level Assist running the boss’s errands from the planetside

business headquarters. She adjusted her body language to reflect mild boredom tinted with a bit of worry

and slipped between a man with a polished gym physique and a lanky woman with natural Mediterranean

genes—probably Turkey or Crete, Ahni guessed— and a taut driven face. Still on full alert, Ahni shuffled

down the narrow aisle and out into Customs and Immigration.

It wasn’t much more than a wide corridor with a desk and gate barring it a dozen meters from the

docking lock. Just enough space for a shuttle-load of bodies. No uniforms, no stun guns, but Ahni’s skin

crawled with the knowledge that a half dozen beams and fields were probing every square centimeter of

her skin and body cavities. Up ahead, a man with unselected Han features jolted to a halt, a look of

surprise on his face that transitioned through annoyance to resignation. His com link, an earring that

looked like a natural diamond, had just informed him that Security wanted to talk to him. With a small

shrug, he turned and headed toward a panel that had slid silently open in the wall. A couple of people

looked at him curiously. Ahni shrugged. He was innocent of anything, or thought he was. But according

to Jira, the family’s information synthesist, China’s Dragon Home was squabbling with New York Up

over tariffs. With his face, he wasn’t going to get where he was going on time.

The man in front of her passed through the gate. Ahni stepped forward at the agent’s nod, keeping her

bored/apprehensive body language carefully in place, and adding a mental layer of worry about the

LaGuardia account and the discrepancies in the inventory database, couldn’t wait to get this mess

untangled and get back to terra firma. . . Empaths made good money working for Security.

She stood on the painted footprints so that the security scanner could check all her vitals against her ID

chip. They’d match. The ID chip she had paid so much for was top quality.

“Haarevort, Jessica, from the Free State of Singapore, Pan Malaysia Compact, on business with East

Asia Biologicals, threeday visa,” the cold-faced woman intoned, her eyes on the screen in front of her.

“Customs declaration?”

“Nothing.” Ahni gave her the absentminded and impatient smile of the “small Family” member, the

seasoned businesswoman running minor Singapore Family errands that the database assured the

Immigration agent that she was. She held the brief to the scanner, and it chimed in agreement that the

luggage seal had been placed at the Palembang Elevator station and hadn’t been tampered with.

That had cost nearly as much as her ID chip.

The agent looked up to nod her through, the hint of a flaccid sag to her muscles suggesting that she lived

high up toward the axle of the orbital, not down here in the highG outer layers of the rotating can that was

NYUp. For a second her eyes flickered as she focused on Ahni’s face, and a small flare of indecision

made her hesitate.

Ahni’s face was not Dutch Indonesian at all, but rather showed an unselected mix of Taiwan aboriginal,

Han Chinese, and Polynesian genes in the planes of her face and tint of her skin. When she wore her hair

long, it had a reddish cast in the sun, and a faint wave to the thick, unruly mass.

The woman gave the slightest of shrugs and waved her through, although her indecision still tainted the

air like a whiff of perspiration. Too bad. Ahni put tired unconcern into her posture as she hoisted her bag

to her shoulder. If someone asked, this woman might remember her. Not good.

She was here to kill. The World Council had granted the Taiwan Families Right of Reply.

Still in business mode, Ahni followed the stream of passengers through the last meters of Immigration

and out into the Arrival Hall. She closed her eyes, murmuring her access code to her im¬planted link.

The screen lining her eyelids offered her a glowing map of the corridors opening into the Arrival Hall. The

route to her Level Four hotel room glowed a neon blue, the others green. Fourth Level-close enough to

the outer skin to have some gravity, far enough in to fit with her low-level errand-runner persona. She

headed toward the elevator. Out here, on Level One, where all the tourist and business traffic came and

went, the corridors were spa¬cious, lined with shops offering trinkets - fragile crystals grown in microG,

asteroid fragments set in precious metals, spidersilk cloth¬ing, food, euphorics, VR and flesh

entertainment. Tourists strolled along, business travelers hurried somewhere. The thin-looking na¬tives all

wore service uniforms down here at this level. They weren't curious, nor were they particularly friendly. A

lounge with a vast window offered stars and a huge, blue-green slice of Mother Earth. Ahni halted in

spite of herself.

She had never been off -planet.

Mary Rosenblum - Horizons.pdf

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: