Read Online Adiamante by L. E. Modesitt Jr. - Free Book Online Page A

had expected. That bothered me, because it meant Arielle had made it to be used and worn. She was dead serious about my wearing it as a sort of badge of office. I trusted her comprehensive and calculated logic, but it underscored the nature of the Coordinator as not only leader but target.
    I reached the residential bloc just before the ground shuttles arrived and had barely gathered the cloak back around me when out of the first ground shuttle stepped a dozen or more of the marcybs, their dark green dress uniforms crisp, matching dark green berets in place. None wore heavy jackets, just dress blouses that could scarcely have broken the wind, but the chill did not seem to bother them. Their eyes, no matter what color, were flat, like mechanical scanners that missed nothing.
    None bore visible weapons, but each carried a large and long kit bag that could and probably did conceal complete ground combat kits. I had few doubts that additional equipment would arrive with each Vereal Union lander.
    Studying each marcyb as he or she emerged was Majer Henslom, cold green eyes flicking from one figure to the next, occasionally nodding. The entire process was silent, and I could sense that a portable netlink had already been established in the housing bloc to supplement the personal short-range net capability of the belt units the marcybs wore.
    They formed up in rows, by squads or whatever their organizational units were called, each with the nearest corner of a kit bag precisely fifteen millimeters from the toe of each marcyb’s right boot. In front of the group, silent, stood Majer Henslom, waiting.
    The other majer—Ysslop—waited by the doors to the residential bloc. Her eyes—I realized Ysslop was female—were colder than the intermittent swirls of snow. That I
hadn’t sensed her sex the first time I had encountered her indicated to me exactly how alien the cybs really were, or at least some of them were.
    On the short side avenue—Frensic—a couple with a single child between them watched as the first group of marcybs walked briskly into the building. The woman shook her head, and the man looked at the cybs. All the cybs were short-haired, whether men or women, all with eyes that saw and did not see.
    The draff couple shivered, and I understood why. Cold were the cybs, colder by far than the supercooled mechcybs that ran our own Old Earth, colder than the heart of an antique supercon line or deep space beyond the Oort. And hot was their hatred—hot as the gaze of a kaliram—and their scarcely concealed desire to wreak vengeance upon Old Earth.
    Yet what could I do, under the power paradigms? We had retained the ability to apply force, but applying it in anticipation against the cyb-ships would be costly. More important, it would invalidate the Construct.
    Then, I reflected with a twisted smile, allowing our destruction would also invalidate the Construct.
    Another group of marcybs stiffened, then peeled off, and began to file into the residence bloc, their measured steps automatically transforming the building into a staging barrack.
    I glanced back at the couple who had crossed Frensic and were walking slowly across the park toward the Statue of the Unknown, their breath trailing them like white fog. The dark-haired boy between them turned his head and glanced back toward the uniformed cybs, but his mother tugged on his hand, and he finally looked away.
    The figure on the red stone pedestal could have been anyone. The sculptor had caught the agony of a soul caught in mindblaze and fire. I always had thought of the statue as the “unknown draff,” and most demis did, but a
good percentage of demis had died in the mindblazes, as well as cybs and draffs.
    As another file of marcybs straightened, I swirled the niellen cloak back enough to reveal the red lining and walked through the irregular snow flurries to Majer Henslom.
    He nodded, brusquely, as I stopped a good meter from him.
    I