Deception Well (The Nanotech Succession Book 2) Read Online Free PDF Page A

behind his neck. He brought a strange, cool-metal taste to Lot’s sensory tears. “You know it wasn’t meant to go this way. We didn’t guess Jupiter had so many people.” He said this regretfully, as if he might have done things differently had he known. Lot wondered. He couldn’t find any taste of shame.
    “We should have guessed,” Clemantine said. “Dammit, Kona, we should have seen it coming.”
    Kona . Lot silently repeated the name. Kona . The dark man to whom it belonged glared at the carnage.
    “At least get more crews down here,” the civilian woman said as she watched the remote bees continue to hunt among the bodies. Her long black hair was loosely bound, hanging in filamentous curves against her cheeks. Earrings glistened in the shadows behind her finely sculpted jaw. She didn’t look like a frontline trooper, and Lot wondered why she was here. “We need to sort this carnage through. These people can be restored.”
    Clemantine lifted off her helmet. “Yulyssa, we don’t have more crews. Security’s fully occupied with the refugees, so all dead and critically wounded are to be routed to cold storage.”
    “For how long?”
    Kona answered that: “Yulyssa, we just don’t know.”
    Lot blinked, trying to make sense of this. He’d heard of cold storage. In his fixed memory he carried a map of Nesseleth that showed vast banks of cold-storage units at her core. He’d never been to that part of the ship, but he knew the facilities were supposed to be used for emergency shelter, not medical repair.
    Now another trooper moved forward. He looked confused; the point of his bead rifle dipped toward the floor. “I can’t believe it’s come to this,” he muttered. “I just can’t believe it.” He pushed his visor up, looking from Clemantine to Kona, and then to Yulyssa. “Were they all insane? What kind of stupid sots would follow a madman like that anyway?”
    “Maybe a stupid sot like you,” Yulyssa said gently as she put her hand on his arm. “If you’d ever met Jupiter, you’d understand.”
    “Uh-uh.” The trooper shook his head, his expression adamant. “This whole thing’s crazy.”
    Yulyssa sighed. “David, have you ever been in love?”
    He frowned. “Well, sure.”
    “No. I mean really in love. You’d-die-for-her in love?”
    David looked suddenly wary. “That’s kind of dramatic, isn’t it?”
    “Passionate. Yes. Irrationally passionate. That’s how Jupiter could make you feel. The scariest part was, you’d like it.”
    “Not me.”
    “Even you,” she insisted. “Deep down, we all want to give into that kind of crazy faith. To be part of something bigger than ourselves; something that’ll outlast us. It’s a need inside us all.”
    But the trooper wasn’t buying it. “Huh. You can get that from a patch. I’m using a patch right now so I don’t puke my guts out.”
    Yulyssa’s lip trembled slightly as she admitted, “So am I.”
    “It’s all chemistry,” Kona growled.
    Yulyssa glanced at the remote bee that still hovered near her. “And does that matter?”
    “Yes it matters!” Kona’s deep voice seemed to expand to fill the corridor. “Jupiter was beguiling people, and he must have been using psychoactive viruses to do it.”
    Clemantine said, “I think it’s more complicated than that.”
    Yulyssa nodded agreement. She turned again to David. “You’re very young. You don’t remember Jupiter from before, and the people who do—” She looked significantly at Kona “—don’t like to talk about it. But you should know that he once lived in Silk without city authority being aware of him. He persuaded hundreds of citizens to keep his presence secret, despite the possibility that he carried a Chenzeme plague. He assembled a society around himself the way you might assemble your morning wardrobe. I’m talking about our people, David. The very same people you’ll pass on the walks today. Maybe even your mother or father. And not one of them