Deception Well (The Nanotech Succession Book 2) Read Free Page A

any hint of dark temper, but he uncovered only a quiet anticipation. “I don’t understand,” Lot said softly. “The Communion’s here, and you said the Communion ended the war.”
    Jupiter smiled. His hand rested lightly on Lot’s shoulder. “Peace wasn’t made overnight.” He pointed to the green-blue living world under its nebular veil, and the view zoomed in, sending the edge of the image rocketing off into the walls. “What was fashioned here required millennia to accomplish, and millions of years to refine.”
    Lot studied the planet, wondering what Jupiter wanted him to see. There was the gossamer thread of the space elevator, built by human settlers only a few hundred years before. He could make out the swelling of its anchoring mass some fifty-five thousand miles beyond the surface of the world. And low on the elevator, just above the main mass of the planetary atmosphere, a tiny bump that contained the city of Silk.
    Except for the anchoring point of the elevator, the world itself revealed no evidence of technological life-forms, though the continents and seas were reputed to teem with living things—a biological mélange comprising many different genetic systems, including the coding structure of the insidious plagues left behind by the ancient regime.
    Chenzeme plagues could be found on seemingly pristine planets, in the tails of comets, in the dust among stars. They were a constant hazard to great ships that mined almost all their raw materials from unknown sources. Jupiter had almost died when one such plague destroyed Nesseleth’s original crew. That had been a long time ago, maybe over a hundred years. Jupiter had been the only survivor and it had been the Well that healed him.
    Lot’s gaze shifted, to a point some fifteen thousand miles beyond the swollen end of the elevator. There, circling the Well in an independent orbit, was a silver torus the size of a small moon. Lot pointed to it. “That ring is a weapon,” he said. “Will the Silkens use it against us?”
    Jupiter scowled, and Lot felt his heart quail. He looked down at his hands, while Jupiter’s soft menace bedded itself in his sensory tears. “The Chenzeme war isn’t over. We all carry the seeds of destruction within us. Boys grasp for weapons as soon as they have learned to make a fist. The war erupts again.”
    Lot felt a hot flush burning in his cheeks. It was true. The weapon had beguiled him. He knew it to be a swan burster, an artifact of the ancient war. Swan meant something like darkness. Swan was the direction in which the looming silhouettes of molecular clouds occluded the star fields of the Orion Arm. It was the direction from which the Chenzeme had come. Had it been functional, the ring would have had the capacity to destroy all the life-forms of the Well . . . and deep down Lot had wanted to see that happen, just for a moment, to see what such a thing might be like, how it might feel.
    “What is the proper name of this world?” Jupiter asked, still with that edge in his voice.
    Lot swallowed hard. He wanted so much to please Jupiter. In the great ship’s records the world was called Deception Well. But Jupiter spoke of it as—
    “ The Communion ,” Lot whispered.
    Jupiter nodded, though he did not seem pleased, as if he knew Lot always thought of it by its other name. “Within the Communion all life is sacred,” he said, his voice soft, so Lot held his breath to catch every word. “No species is sacrificed to the greed of another. Within the Communion we will learn the ways of cooperation and peaceful coexistence, just as the Chenzeme were forced to learn. We will forget our yearning for weapons, and for power. We will become part of a greater whole that has endured despite the lingering evil of the ancient war for over thirty million years.”
    “We will be safe,” Lot whispered.
    Jupiter nodded. “We will be home.”
    H E WOKE TO A SENSE OF DIRE FEAR. I T SEEPED through his sensory tears and into his