Empery Read Free Page B

appointment?”
    “No—”
    “Would you like to request an appointment?“At that moment one of the doors inside Suite 100 opened, and three figures emerged from the room beyond. The first two Wyrena did not know, but the one trailing behind—
    “Janell!” Wyrena called out impulsively.
    Sujata peered out through the glass, her face flashing annoyance at being addressed in public by her private name. Then she saw the woman standing by the Security desk, and the annoyance evaporated.
    “Wyrena?” she exclaimed, disbelieving, and crossed the space between them with swift strides. “Wyrena!”
    They hugged fiercely for a moment, wordlessly absorbing the sensory reality of each other, relearning familiar scents and softnesses. Then the men who had come out of the office with Sujata brushed by them in leaving, and the reminder of their presence brought on a spontaneous rush of self-consciousness. She pushed Sujata away, only to have her guilty impulse confirmed when she saw the frankly curious way the man seated in the waiting area was studying them.
    Sujata caught the shamed look in her eyes and laughed.“This is Unity, not Ba’ar Tell,” she said gaily. “You don’t have to worry about offending people.”
    Pulling Wyrena close again, Sujata kissed her gently but knowingly, an unhurried, full mouthed kiss of lovers separated and reunited. Eyes closed, Wyrena forgot her guilt, and this time it was Sujata who finally broke the embrace.
    “Come on,” Sujata said, taking the younger woman’s hands. “My quarters are upstairs.”
    As they turned to go, the man who had been waiting stood.
    “Comité Sujata, I really must see you,” he said in a clear, commanding voice. “Director Wells is very eager for your reaction to the materials I left with you last month.”
    At the man’s tone Wyrena hesitated. But Sujata did not even look back. “Another time, Mr. Farlad,” she called over her shoulder. “Another time.”
    There were a half dozen items queued up on the com register for Wells’s attention: a progress report on construction of the new headquarters; a quarterly budget statement; the latest recon survey from the Sentinels; and other less urgent minutiae.
    Relegating the rest to a holding file, Wells took a few minutes to review the recon survey. It was both the most important and the most predictable item on the list. He knew before starting that there would be no real news in it; were anything unusual to happen on the Perimeter he would be notified immediately and directly by means of the tiny transceiver implanted below his right ear.
    As always, the first item in the report was the deployment update. Only eight of the ten Sentinels were on station; Muschynka and Gnivi were still in the yards at Lynx Center for general overhaul.
    I’d love to replace all five of those old survey ships , Wells thought as he read on. They were a poor bargain right from the start.
    Next came the rotation schedule for the Sentinels’ twelve-person crews. The tender Edmund Hillary was en route with relief crews for Maranit and Feghr . All the other crews were well within the stringent fatigue criteria employed on the Perimeter.
    The penultimate section dealt with the condition of the eight hundred listening buoys oriented toward the Ursa Major cluster and popularly known as the Shield. As might be expected with two Sentinels in port, the inspection schedule had slipped a bit, and an unusually high fifty-three buoys were abnominal in one parameter or another. But there was no pattern to the failures, nor any real gap in the coverage. The situation bore watching but did not justify heightened concern.
    Lastly there was a summary of the data collected by the buoys. The buoys’ receptors were capable of simultaneously and continuously monitoring everything from low-frequency radio on one end of the spectrum to microwaves at the other. The raw data was sieved in real-time against a long list of alarm triggers, then relayed via