We've been in Poland and the Czech Republic for the last couple of five-days, and intranet connectivity hasn't been great. I think there was a hardware component to the problem at our hotel in Poland, which was otherwise very, very nice, and we've been having problems falling on and off of the Wi-Fi here in Prague. I think we finally have the problem, so here's your belated snippet.
We'll be leaving here tomorrow morning at 8:50 (Tuesday) and getting home at 00:02 Wednesday, so don't expect to hear anything else from us for at least a couple of days after that.
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If he’d ever entertained any doubts on that subject, the SNARC imagery of the Army of God’s outposts would have put them to rest. Very few of those half-frozen men, shivering in inadequate clothing as they crouched around fires in whatever structures they’d found or whatever huts they’d been able to piece together, had any interest in going anywhere else. Nor would they survive if their shelters were destroyed, Green Valley reflected, his expression bleak under the two layers of snow mask — what would have been called balaclavas back on Old Earth — and the ski goggles he and every other man in the column wore. Freezing to death was a very unpleasant way to die, and the baron took no pleasure in the thought of inflicting that particular death even on his enemies.
Which wouldn’t stop him from doing it for a moment.
.V.
Two Recon Skimmers,
Above East Haven,
and
Nimue’s Cave,
The Mountains of Light,
The Temple Lands.
“I never imagined clouds could look so beautiful from above,” Aivah Pahrsahn said softly. She sat in the recon skimmer’s rear seat, turned to the left to look down from the rear canopy over its wingtip as it banked, and the moon shining down through the thin, cold atmosphere turned the clouds’ summits into shining silver and their gulfs into bottomless ebon canyons far below. “I always knew God was an artist, but this . . . .”
She shook her head, and Merlin smiled as he gazed out through his own canopy. They’d come two thousand miles from Siddar City in a little over three hours; they should reach their destination in the Mountains of Light in another hour and a half. He’d been a bit surprised by how calmly Aivah had taken the materialization of not one but two recon skimmers out of the snowy dark, but however calm she’d been, her sense of wonder had been obvious. If she’d felt any trepidation at climbing the access ladder into the needle-nosed, swept wing skimmer, she’d concealed it admirably, and her enjoyment of the trip so far reminded Merlin irresistibly of Cayleb Ahrmahk’s first flight.
He leveled the skimmer as he completed the turn, and glanced out over his starboard wing to where an identical skimmer kept meticulous station upon him. He hadn’t initially anticipated needing both of them, but each could carry only a single extra passenger and Aivah had insisted upon being accompanied by Sandaria Ghatfryd, who’d been her personal maid for the last two decades. At first, he’d been surprised by the anxiety that seemed to indicate, but that lasted for only a very few minutes after the two women had joined him in the service alley behind Madam Pahrsahn’s luxurious townhouse.
Sandaria was a good two inches shorter than Aivah, with mousy brown hair, a swarthy complexion, and an even more pronounced epicanthic fold than most Safeholdians, courtesy of her Harchongese mother. Merlin knew she’d been with Aivah for at least twenty years; what he hadn’t known (until Aivah explained there in the alley) was that she’d actually been with her ever since Nynian Rychtair’s convent days. In fact, Sandaria Ghatfryd had been a novitiate at the same time, and today she was a senior member of the Sisters of Saint Kohdy, not to mention Aivah’s second in command . . . and closest confidante.
Sandaria, unlike Aivah, had evinced a little nervousness when they emerged from the city via one of Aivah’s discreet routes and she discovered that she and Aivah would be aboard separate skimmers. She’d handled the silent appearance of the craft remarkably calmly; it was clearly the separation that concerned her. Unfortunately, except for the armored personnel carriers — and the full-sized assault shuttles — in Nimue’s Cave, they were the only passenger vehicles available. The assault shuttles were about the size of an old pre-space jumbo jet, and hiding something that size in proximity to Siddar City would have been . . . a nontrivial challenge even with Federation technology. The APCs were smaller and more readily concealable than assault shuttles, but they were also much slower. Even on counter-grav, they were uncompromisingly subsonic, capable of only about five hundred miles per hour, and Merlin preferred to have a supersonic dash capability in hand, just in case. And while the far smaller air lorries were easier to conceal, they’d been designed to transport cargo. It had never occurred to anyone they might find themselves shuttling people back and forth from Nimue’s Cave in job lots. Now that the possibility had suggested itself to them, Owl’s remotes were busy converting two of those lorries into air buses at this very moment, but the process would require another day or so, and no one had wanted to wait the extra time.
Besides, the second recon skimmer had let him bring along a second pilot.
“How much longer will it take, Merlin?” Aivah asked now, and he looked down into the small display which connected him to the rear cockpit.
Aivah looked back out of it at him as if she’d been using coms all her life. She’d operated the controls he’d demonstrated to her with equal facility and confidence, and a smile tugged at the corners of his lips as he reflected on why she’d needed only a single demonstration.
Yet another mystery solved, he thought dryly. No wonder the SNARCs and I never caught her decoding anything. She never needed to! And I do feel a little better about her remembering details of Ahbraim and Merlin to match against each other. “I have a very good memory,” indeed!
The rare gene group which produced true eidetic memory had been discovered (many skeptics had argued that “invented” was a better verb) in the mid twenty-first century, and gengineering it into children had been something of a fad for the next fifty years. It had been far less damaging than some of those fads had proven before the whole field of human genetic design was brought under rigorous control, but with the development of direct neural interfacing and the cloud storage of memories, everyone had effective eidetic memory. Interest in the ability had waned, and far fewer parents had opted to build it into their offspring. Nonetheless, it had remained far more common than it had been among earlier generations and it still cropped up occasionally — not often, but more frequently than on pre-space Old Earth — on Safehold.
Nynian Rychtair had it. She’d never needed to consult her codebooks when she wrote or read a message because she carried them — all of them — in her head. Merlin and Owl had always known she smuggled a voluminous correspondence back and forth across the Border States, despite the war, but so far as they’d been able to tell, all of it was fairly innocuous: correspondence with the business managers she’d left behind, letters to some of the young women who had worked for Anzhelyk Phonda for so long, or messages from refugees to family and friends left behind, for example. They’d been unable to keep track of all of that correspondence once it flowed into Zion or other major Temple Land cities, and since they’d “known” none of it had been eoncoded — and that Aivah was on their side, at least for now — they hadn’t actually tried all that hard, given all the other charges on Owl’s surveillance ability.
