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lot of people die.
Would it be, asked the other lieutenant Merdyk, if Gate and stellar
travel were cheaper?
Maybe not, I replied, but we d have a lot more Ardees and even more people
dying.
But they could choose their own way of living, suggested Conyr.
The people who ended up in control could, Merdyk countered.
That s not much different from the Federal Union, observed Tsao.
You re saying that we re no different from the Ardees? asked Conyr.
In basic terms, is any system? asked Tsao. Someone has to be in control
enough to set the rules, anyway. The only questions are who, how many, and how
they obtain and hold power.
There s a great deal of difference between an empire ruled by an emperor and
the Federal Union, I pointed out, but they both meet your basic definition.
I don t think I d want to live in an empire.
Even if you were the emperor? asked Tsao with a smile.
I wouldn t want to be looking over my shoulder all the time, wondering who
wanted to kill me and take over.
That s true in any position of power began Merdyk, abruptly breaking off as
her eyes went to the mess door, where another major entered.
You hear the latest? asked the newcomer, looking at Tsao.
Tsao shook her head.
The Ardees managed to duplicate the ancient nukes & dropped one from a
flitter on the orbital liftway and the other on the FU admin building in
Kayport. Sent a message saying that they had more, and demanding that the FU
leave Boreal.
I winced. We all did.
They re dead meat, murmured Conyr under his breath.
None of us disagreed, but no one felt much like talking after that, and I
eventually caught one of the cargo shuttles back to the Newton.
Chapter 38
Raven: Vallura, 459 N.E.
Page 93
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
I took my glider home, thinking more on the way. That didn t help much; so
when I got back to my dwelling, I checked all my incomings, except there
weren t any, or rather none that made any sense. There were two that came
through blank, as if they had been cut off right at the address protocol. I
frowned. It looked like a censorship program the crude kind used to keep
children from sending replies to certain addresses. Then, maybe some youngster
had just mistransferred a popular address or he or she had wanted to send a
comment on one of my edart pieces, and edartists weren t on the family
approved list. Then, perhaps someone was blocking, or trying to block
communications to me.
That led me into another systems check, but I couldn t find anything within my
own equipment and routines. That meant the cutoff was at the sender s level.
Whatever it had been & there wasn t much that I could do.
I was beginning to feel that way about too many matters. There was nothing
definite anywhere, except the attempts on me and the strange details about
Elysa. Someone had tried to kill me, and the thing was, she could have and
hadn t. There was no record of her existence. She could have killed me on
Kharl s veranda with a filament knife or something more lethal. I hadn t
been paying attention that way.
She hadn t killed me. And the laseflash hadn t been designed to kill me. But
the wall and the monoclone had been. The key was the scent & and Elysa. I d
smelled the same odor twice with Elysa and just after the laseflash. She d
left the hint of a trail & not much of one, but a hint. And as soon as I
picked up on it, someone had tried to kill me.
Was that it? Or coincidence? Two groups of people trying to hurt or remove me
simultaneously? Because of the OneCys-UniComm conflict? I d looked into that,
and found even less than about Elysa just that a group of wealthy and
influential individuals belonged to an organization that wanted management
improvements and held stock in OneCys and that some of them had resources
enough to arrange my permanent departure. But none of that was proof, or even
added up to motive. All I had was Elysa.
Did I really want to try again? Did I just want to wait for the next attempt?
Without a good feeling about either choice, I spent some time on work that
would do something besides deplete my credit reserves. I d actually finished
Elen Jerdyn s project for NetSpin. Her combo slot wasn t the problem, from
what I could tell. The programming was. There s a difference between catering
to popular taste for whatever niche market and caricaturing it.
Explaining why the programming was a caricature was another thing, but I d
managed without being too blunt. Then, I d gone back to work on the package
from Fylin Ngaio and NetStrait. His problem was almost the opposite. The last
thing he wanted to do was talk down to an audience that prided itself on being
above the masses. The program was a drama, and the dialogue was fine. So were
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