Empery

Empery Read Free Page A

Book: Empery Read Free
Author: Michael P. Kube-McDowell
Tags: Science-Fiction
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painting her trip as an adventure and turning her hoped-for reunion with Janell into a girlish fantasy. Someone who met the ship would know Janell, or know someone who did. Or perhaps Janell would even be there waiting, having found out somehow that she was coming—
    But Unity was no outer world to which ships came calling only four or five times in a year, and where traditions of hospitality dictated each be received with high ceremony. Moraji was just another inbound packet, and the bewildered Ba’ar woman aboard her just another visitor. The harried-looking guest liaison who herded all the non-USS passengers through the terminal seemed far more interested in rushing them through processing than in welcoming them individually. After passing her identity and solvency checks, Wyrena was set free to fend for herself.
    Despite having spent most of the last three days inbound planning what she would do, the next hours were better forgotten: it was the bustle and confusion of M-Center again, only worse. Her first act was to commandeer the first free comnode she saw. Facing an unfamiliar technology, she gratefully and hopefully accepted the unit’s patient prompts.
    Then came the first surprise. On Ba’ar Tell no one who owned a talkwire ever left it unattended; etiquette demanded that someone answer every call. But Janell was “Page Offline—Message Only.”
    “Where is she?” Wyrena asked plaintively. “When will she be back?” But however humanlike the voice, she was talking with a machine, not a sympathetic house retainer. “The address is UC-R-S100. No other data is available,” the com node advised her. “Would you like to leave a message?”
    Wyrena did not want Janell to hear the news that way, from a frozen voice caught in an electronic trap. She would wait until she could witness the reaction she could not predict.
    “No message,” she said.
    “Thank you,” the voice said sweetly.
    Wyrena spent two hours wandering the lower levels of Unity in search for R-S100 before the forlorn expression etched into her face prompted another woman in the same lift to take pity on her. It was then she learned that she was looking in the wrong place. UC-R-S100 was an address not at Unity but at a satellite station trailing Unity in orbit by a few thousand klicks. U SS- C entral, R esource Wing, S uite 100 .
    Wyrena’s benefactor helped her find the commuter node and get a seat on the twice-hourly UC shuttle. But then she was alone again. The canisterlike shuttle was claustrophobic, the view of the Earth from its window-simulating displays vertiginous, and the forty-minute flight almost unendurable.
    When the shuttle finally docked, she followed the other passengers onto a spiral escalator. Three upward rotations later it delivered her into the middle of a towering atrium large enough to enclose the eight-story Councilary Hall in Famax. Dazzled by the architectural wonder surrounding her, several minutes passed before she noted the five great corridors corresponding to the Center’s five spokes and the USS’s five branches: Transport, Survey, Resource, Defense, and Operations. With tentative steps she crossed the atrium to the Resource wing and started down the central corridor.
    Inside was a lift node, with its ranks of doors and electronic Directory. Beyond, a security station barred the way down the corridor. Beyond that, Wyrena saw a glass-walled waiting room where a woman sat working, a man sat waiting, and three office doors stood closed. The glass wall bore a perplexing legend:
    SUITE 100
OFFICE OF THE DIRECTOR
USS-RESOURCE
    Janell had been head of the USS office on Ba’ar Tell, but the circumstances under which she had left—could she be working for a Comité now?
    Confused, Wyrena summoned up her courage and stepped up to the security station. “I need to see Janell Sujata—”
    “Show your card.”
    Wyrena did, hopefully.
    The officer barely glanced at it. “Not cleared. Have an

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