Read Online Embedded by Dan Abnett - Free Book Online Page A

vibrantly coloured food, brightly coloured flames from stall burners, colour-dyed cloth, colourful smells in the air.
      He walked past wire baskets of brightly coloured rubber shoes at the edge of the ballast market, then more bins of cheap toys, knock-off sports caps, mops and brooms, kitchenware, each bin staked with a wire loop holding up the handwritten price card. Fashion glares hung like fruit from drying rails, their paper price tickets twitching in the wind. Men with trays like the olden-time concession girls presented celfs that came without packaging or paperwork.
      Green hiker girl was waiting for him on the front steps of her cubicle dorm. She had no room to invite him into, no space where they could sit and talk. She said she knew a place.
      She was actually wearing her green litex hiker, but he was beginning to think of her as Noma.
      "How are you?" she asked cheerfully as they walked through the market.
      "I'm wealthy," he said. She had her clutch tablet tucked into the breast of her hiker, and she kept touching it to make sure it hadn't gone anywhere.
      She took him to a ProFood outlet on the west corner of the market space. She ordered two bottles of NoCal-Cola, because they could verify the tamper seal on the caps to tell if they were refills. Falk got a fistful of napkins from a dispenser, and some straws in individual paper sleeves. She ordered some food for herself. It was a franchise place. They still had the old Bill Berry Astronut logo on the napkins, rather than the slick, modern Booster Rooster rebrand.
      They sat out of the way at a table in the back. There were sticky rings on the plastic tabletop. She offered him a bite of her food, a greaseproof cone full of what seemed to be grilled meat on skewers. He shook his head.
      "The food around here isn't actually bad," she said.
      "Neither's basejumping, but I'm not attempting that either."
      She gnawed a lump off one of the skewers.
      "I think there's a fair bit of reprocessed blurd in it, mind," she added.
      "Really selling me on basejumping," he replied.
      She grinned, chewing.
      "So what's this about?" he asked.
      "In such a hurry. Can't we just continue our conflirtation?"
      "What's this about?" he repeated.
      She took one of the napkins, wiped the tabletop, and then put her tablet down and slid it over to him. Upside down, she woke it, rotated an image, expanded it.
      "What's this?" he asked.
      "Play it. Watch."
      He let the clip run. There was about forty seconds worth. He paused when it had ended, then touched replay and watched it again.
      "Where did this come from?" he asked.
      "Friends. High places. You know."
      He glared at her. She shrugged.
      "Eighty-Six is prone to meteoritic strikes. Fact of life. Risk small, but real. That's the official line. Letts got unlucky on the bolide lottery. Oh, the humanity! Zero warning. Impact values so high, so fast, nothing tracked it, not ground-based, not orbital. Nothing. Official line, on the feeds just an hour ago. Nothing. Forget we've got, let's think, the Terminal out there on the Cape. Nothing detected it until it impacted."
      She touched replay on the clutch tablet clip again. Looking up, she met his eyes, and seemed amused to find him looking at her rather than the playback.
      "And did you know," she asked, "there are currently eight drivers geo-stationary upstairs? Eight drivers parked directly over Shaverton."
      "With their detector arrays on downsweep," said Falk.
      "Yes, to monitor cargo traffic. And that, Mr Lex Falk, is a direct lift from the array archive of the spinrad driver Manchurian ."
      The clip, heavy with informatic overlays and subsidiary data, was an orbital view of northwest Shaverton. Night. Thermal capture. A city plan with a gentle drift to it. Twenty-eight seconds in, a white-hot flare blooms in Letts.
      "No track," said Falk.
      "No track. Not even eye-invisible. Nothing on