Age of Aztec Read Online Free PDF Page B

Minière di Mongibello, a man with something to sell and every hope that Reston would buy.
    “A pleasant flight?” Addario enquired. Like everyone else in the world of non-Anahuac origin, he spoke Nahuatl fluently as a second language, but he happened to have near-perfect English as well and hoped to impress Reston with it.
    “The usual. Quick. Boring.”
    “Ah. Like making love to my wife.”
    “I wouldn’t know about that,” Reston said.
    “I should hope not, signor. Not for my sake but for yours. A miserable experience. My mistress, on the other hand... Then I would have grounds for jealousy!” He chuckled at the joke. Reston looked unamused. Oh, the English. So uptight . Addario realised he wasn’t going to break any ice with salaciousness, so changed tack. “Your first visit to our beautiful island?”
    Reston nodded.
    “If there is time, perhaps I can introduce you to our native cuisine. Rabbit in chocolate sauce, for example, and pasta alla Norma . I know this wonderful trattoria in Taormina, right by the beach, where they serve the most delicious pani cà meusa . Some say a burger made from fried spleen sounds disgusting, but believe me, when you taste it...”
    “My return flight departs at four. Just show me your operation, so I can see for myself what I might or might not be purchasing.”
    “Of course, signor.” Not just uptight – businesslike to the point of being rude. Well, that was an admirable trait, Addario supposed, if you ran as large a corporation as Reston did. No one got to earn a seven-figure annual salary by being nice. Still, would a little civility go amiss?
    The Mediterranean glittered to their left. To the right, pale against the brilliant blue sky, stood Mount Etna, growing ever closer. A plume of smoke drifted from the summit of its snow-streaked cone, a smudge of grey pastel in the air. It seemed a benign thing, that plume, given the seething subterranean turmoil that generated it. The sigh of a man whose passion for life is spent.
    Etna could rage, though, if the Great Speaker willed it. Nearly every volcano on the planet could.
    The limo wound through low fertile foothills, eventually pulling into the public car park on Etna’s eastern flank. A four-wheel drive waited to ferry Reston and Addario onward to the CCMM site. They bumped along a track grooved by truck tyres and caterpillar treads, upwards through a landscape of ash and rough clinkery rock. Here on these barren black slopes it seemed like the world was constantly being rubbed out and restarted, never finished, an eternal first draft.
    Addario pointed out the fusion plant that hunkered half a mile away in the huge depression known as the Valley of the Ox. Its domes and cooling towers wobbled like mercury in the heat haze. On the Great Speaker’s say-so, the plant could send intense bursts of energy deep into Etna’s magma chambers in order to trigger volcanic activity. This might happen at any time, contingent on His Imperial Holiness’s whim. It was rare if a volcano was not erupting somewhere on earth, spewing ash and gas into the atmosphere and keeping the thermostat on the planetary greenhouse turned up high.
    “As long as we receive the standard twenty-four hours’ notice,” said Addario, “we can pack up our equipment and be off-site with plenty of time to spare. In fact, our safety record is amazing, if I do say so myself. In the past decade we have lost only thirteen workers, and all those fatalities have been due to sudden catastrophic machinery failure or individual negligence. Not a bad statistic, and well below average for a company this size.”
    “Nothing worth obtaining comes without loss of life.”
    “Well put, signor. Indeed.”
    The four-wheel drive deposited them in the thick of CCMM’s current mining site. The obsidian lode was located not far from the Piano Caldera near the base of Etna’s summit cone – a deep seam of felsic lava that had been churned up during recent eruptions and