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up-to-date. But sometimes..."
Yeah?"
"Don't talk. Just follow me and look stupid. You can do that okay,
right?"
"Sure. I'll just imitate you."
TERRA:
OFFICE OF THE CONFED CHAIRMAN
Half Moon felt sweat run stinging into her eyes as she stared across
the desk at Tabitha Endicott. "I brought you here .. ." she began.
Then she shook her head. For some reason her hair felt heavy as old
thread, dangling lifelessly from the top of her skull. It was an odd
feeling, a self-aware sensitivity, as if her body had taken on the
persistent presence of a bad tooth. A vast surge of greasy disgust
rankled her, at what the exigencies of high office had done to her. At
what she'd let be done. Once she'd been a woman, but now she was ...
what?
"ITie hell with that," she went on. "I'm going to show you something.
Tell me what you make of it."
The room abruptly darkened, the better to focus on the holoscreen that
suddenly appeared. The picture flickered slightly and had the faintest
of grainy overtones, as if it had not been intended for broadcast.
The two women watched the few moments it took for the tape to run.
"That's Jim," Tabitha said flatly. "What--"
"Wait," Serena replied. She ran the tape again.
"Where is he? He looks older. And so tired... Serena, what is this?
Where did you get that tape?"
The chairman brought the lights back up. Tabitha looked tired too, she
thought. Worried and worn down. She'd let her hair grow longer and
didn't look as if she was taking good care of it. It lay flat against
her free skull, lank and somehow colorless.
"I'm told it was shot on Alba, the home planet itself. Jim is Tabitha
twined her fingers together into a nervous is on Alba? But how--you
told me Alba is blockaded. going in or out."
Serena closed her eyes. She had no intention of telling how she'd
gotten the tape. How she had been viewing private hooked by interface
into the state systems. How suddenly had gone dark and a voice out of
nowhere said, "I am Outs/tier.":
What had followed had been, she had always believed, cally impossible.
Her best systems experts, later, had been to discover how her private
interface, the most highly and guarded in the entire Confederation,
could have. breached. They squinched their eyes and sighed and wrungi
hands and said it must have been some sort of neural convultion on her
part. And they'd stared at her out of the their eyes as if she were
somehow crumbling, as if her mind no longer be trusted.
But she had the tape. She didn't know what it meant, what it showed:
Jim Endicott standing with a group of aliens before a landscape of
impossible crystal towers.
"I'm told this scene took place three days ago. That the is the Great
Hall of the Pra'Loch. The conclusion is obvious Mun Alter has Jim. But
he hasn't informed me of that. can't. Maybe he can't punch a message
through the But somehow I doubt it."
"It was a mistake to let him go," Tabitha said mistake. That Korkal
talked me into it. Everything fast... I blame myself."
Serena shook her head impatiently. "What's done is made mistakes, too.
The question is what kind of leverage fred here? We have to get Jim
back to Terra. Without don't have any chance of making the mind arrays
workl i without them we're just another helpless backwater planet. one
difference: the Hunzza suspect something valuable is Without the Alban
squadron guarding us, they'll simply and do whatever they want."
"There's an Alban fleet watching Sol System?" "Yes. For the past few
weeks. Hith sent them." "Are they guarding us or imprisoning us?"
"Quite frankly, Tabitha, it doesn't make a hell of a lot ence at this
point. I delivered an ultimatum to the
back. Give us Jim Endicott, or we won't allow you to use mind
arrays. He has Jim, but he hasn't made any move to z. I'm not sure
what that means. But I'm afraid it doesn't can anything good--for Jim,
or for Terra."
"Serena, I'll be frank, too. I know I should worry about Terra, but
it's too big. I'm worried about my boy. I want him back here. Did
you see him? How tired and worn-out he looked? He used to be such a
happy boy. None of what's happened has been his fault, though he
blames himself for a lot of it. Too much of it. All he wanted was to
go to the Academy, become a pilot. That's all..."
The chairman's agate eyes narrowed. The Academy?. The Solis
Academy?"
Tabitha nodded. "It was his application, with his genome, that started
everything. But how could he know?. I told you the story... and in
the end they rejected him. Because he couldn't provide his father's
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