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exploration and fortification. Tunnel rats went crawling and worming. Burning
thought again of the Discards and again decided that they were too prone to
react with all-out lethality.
Countertech teams began sweeping for antipersonnel systems. Hatch servos that
would have let Hall seal the Exts in belowdecks were among the first things to
be disabled. If the captain knew about it or about the surveillance cams and
A/V pickups they had deactivated, he chose not to come down to protest.
One backwater space became the interim command post, with communications,
tactical displays, and field computers set up and carefully shielded. The Exts
were especially vigilant about their comps, extreme cyberphobes even in a
cyberphobic age. Telecom sappers tapped into the ship's lines and accessed the
planetary TechPlex.
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Thanks to an anonymous source in Sword of Damocles, all the news show emcees
were referring to the Exts as "the Growlers." That aside, the coverage was
almost unsettlingly positive. The drumbeat was building for follow-up coverage
at the Lyceum ball, which was also claiming a lot of screen time.
Burning couldn't help but be impressed by the sprawling grandeur of the milky
palace the narrators invariably referred to as "the fabulous Empyraeum."
They picked up word of Trinity's silence as well. Burning didn't know what to
make of it and saw that the Periapts didn't, either. If the Perries got
jittery about the Roke, it might make them more cordial toward the Exts.
The scouts and scroungers began to filter back with reports, along with
mementos. Flammable substances, power tools, and an infinitude of means and
materials for improvised weapons were available everywhere. The hangar deck
was devoid of aircraft, but the ship contained modest stores of conventional
aviation fuels as well as Liquid oxygen and slush hydrogen. The power plant
and other sensitive areas had demonstrated surprisingly good security. Still,
there were plenty of ways to exfiltrate the ship quietly, including the
desalination intake and a lockout in the science sponson, though how to do so
in great numbers and where to go remained moot.
Estimates of the SWATHship's company numbered fewer than six hundred souls,
including the Science Side, though the ship obviously had been built to
accommodate four times as many. Automatics let her function, but she was only
a facade of a real naval command.
As on the Damocles, the more certain Burning felt that he could take the ship
if necessary, the more emphatic was the feeling that he should not do anything
of the kind. If the bars around the Exts were not very strong, conceivably
that was because the Exts were not prisoners.
Chapter
Twenty-Seven
In the starboard sponson, with its Science Side maze of labs, berthing spaces,
and support facilities, Raoul Zinsser sat at a sorting table in a tightly
restrained fit of resentment while news of Trinity, the Exts, and Aquamarine
played in the background. Mocked by a smelly, self-mutilating slut, he
thought. And laughed at he was certain of it by her vampiric beast children.
He would even the score with Ghost inevitably. And his sexual and social
tutelage was exactly what she needed. As his pulse rate normalized somewhat
and he considered the pleasant prospect of a tamed and more tractable Ghost,
he reached out idly to toy with a scale model of the device he had been
refining and testing aboard Matsya for the better part of two months.
Pitfall, he'd christened it until he came up with a name that had a more
dynamic ring. The device was a major facet of his effort to soar back to glory
and professional preeminence, riding the wave of LAW's current preoccupation
with tether technology, skyhooks, and space elevators.
Useful technology, Pitfall would be an important tool on Periapt, but even
more so on Hierophant or Illyria. He had originally pinned much of his hope on
its importance to an AlphaLAW mission to Aquamarine, but with the Hierarchate
so adamant against a return voyage and the Scepter team's findings subjected
to such merciless
Unless, of course, Claude Mason's unexpected appearance on the Matsya would
have an impact on LAW's decision regarding Aquamarine&
With the scale model in one hand, he brought the nearest terminal on-line to
access the civilian news menus, and seconds later he was gazing at
Administrator Mason's electroshock-pale face framed against Allgrave Burning's
battlesuit.
" we must return to Aquamarine," Mason was saying. "Only the Oceanic knows& "
He watched the whole loop twice before taking the terminal off-line. He was
staring at the scale model and thinking once more about Aquamarine when
footfalls and loud griping in the passageway heralded the return of his grad
students and teaching assistants. Shortly, the hatch opened and bare feet
sounded on the floor behind him.
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When he turned to the sound, Freya Eulenspiegel was peeling off her sweatband
and bikini bottoms, leaving her naked except for a wristband dive-data
computer.
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