Carnival-SA Read Online Free PDF

power enough to manufacture entire branes—objects similar to a naturally occurring four-dimensional universe—and learned finesse enough to program them. They have aspired to leave their shells and embrace immortality. Nothing they are or desire cannot be made or remade on a whim. They are beyond challenge. They no longer evolve.
    And yet Kii watches the alien curl around its cub as the cub curls around the khir, and Kii sees something new. Perhaps Kii is in need of a programming adjustment, but it is not violating Consent to wonder.
    And things that are new are things that Kii’s caste is for.

    On fourteen worlds, Vincent Katherinessen had never seen a city like Penthesilea. The limousine they’d transferred into after the lighter’s splashdown came in low, skimming over the wind-ruffled bay and the densely verdant forests that grew against the seashell walls of the ancient, alien city. The pilot was giving the emissaries the view; she brought the craft up on an arcing spiral that showed off three sides of the skyline.
    Vincent leaned against the window shamelessly and stared. The structures—if they were individual structures, given how they flowed and merged together, like tall colonies of some sea animal with calcified exoskeletons—were earth-shades and jewel-shades, reflecting a dark oily iridescence like black opal or treated titanium. Vincent wondered if they were solar. The colors were suggestive, but could be decorative—though he couldn’t think of a human culture that would choose that color scheme or the chaotic, almost fractal architecture that put him in mind of something arranged by colony insects, Ur-hornets or Old Earth termites.
    No one really knew. As the OECC had reconstructed from its incomplete access to New Amazonian records, Penthesilea looked more or less as it had when the New Amazonians arrived—the only evidence of nonhuman intelligence that had been found on any explored world. There were four other cities, each miraculously undamaged and thrumming after centuries of abandonment, each apparently designed by an intelligence with little physical resemblance to humans. And each cheerfully polymorphous and ready to adapt to the needs of new occupants who, in the hard, early days of the colony, had determined convenient shelter to be the better part of caution, and who had not been proven wrong in the decades since. Arguments about their nature and design possessed the OECC scientific community and proved largely masturbatory. New Amazonia wasn’t about to allow a team in to research their construction, their design, their archaeology, or—most interesting of all to the OECC—their apparently clean and limitless power source.
    So Vincent and Michelangelo were here to steal it. And if they couldn’t steal it—
    There were always fallback options.
    Vincent glanced at his partner. Michelangelo sat passive, inward-turned, as if he were reading something on his heads-up. He wasn’t; he was aware, observing, thinking, albeit in that state where he seemed to have become just another fixture. Vincent nudged him—not physically, exactly, more a pressure of his attention—and Michelangelo turned and cleared his throat.
    Vincent gestured to the window. “Change your clothes. It’s time to go to work.”
    Michelangelo ran fingers across his watch without looking, and stilled for a moment as the foglets in his wardrobe arranged themselves into a mandarin-collared suit of more conservative cut than Vincent’s, ivory and ghost-silver, a staid complement to Vincent’s eye-catching colors. “Kill or be killed,” he murmured, his mouth barely shaping the words so neither the pilot nor the limousine would hear them. Vincent smiled. That’s what I’m afraid of.
    Michelangelo nodded, curtly, as though he had spoken.

    The first thing Kusanagi-Jones noticed as he stepped down from the limousine was that the pavement wasn’t exactly pavement. The second thing was that there were no plants, no