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

trooper’s armored chest before dropping off again. When he woke up the next time, it was in Captain Antigua’s lap. She was speaking to someone in the hard-edged Silken language, something about compensation and retraining. Her voice sounded strangely empty, almost machinelike.
    He gazed up at her, staring at the fatigue lines that netted her serious face while her commanding voice echoed in his memory Go, go, go! as she ordered the first wave of troops out of the loading bay while Jupiter looked on. He jerked hard. Captain Antigua had gone down the corridor just ahead of Jupiter. Why wasn’t she in the Well?
    Her cold explanation broke off in midsentence. She looked down at him, and he could see the anger in her eyes, a deep-down fury. The scent of it started his heart racing. Reaching up, he clutched at the padded neckline of her gray armor. “Where’s Jupiter?” he asked, in the graceful, lilting language that had been the common tongue of their polyglot crew. “What happened to him? Why did you come back?”
    A soft breath hissed out between her teeth. “Those are the same questions Alta asked when we pulled her out of the tunnels. And I’ll give you the same answer. Jupiter’s dead.” She spoke in the Silken’s language, and she seemed to take a mean pleasure in saying the words. “The elevators wouldn’t run. Jupiter died in the crush at the lower terminus, and half the army with him. You saw it. Everybody down there died.”
    Lot stared at her in shock. His fingers closed even tighter over the edge of her armor. “That’s not true,” he whispered. He had looked into the elevator pit. He’d watched the black capsule descend below the city until it disappeared with distance. “You know that’s not true!” He wrenched his hand free of her armor, then spun out of her lap, fully awake now.
    Suddenly, he was conscious of other people around him. He turned slowly, to see Kona seated on a crescent-shaped sofa, surrounded by strangers. Silkens . They sat on the sofa or stood behind it with hips half-cocked on the sofa back, watching him curiously. They seemed subtly foreign, like a familiar object viewed through a slightly diffracting lens, so that the difference was elusive, but real: chins carried higher than natural, eyes that stared too long, and their scent . . . not unpleasant, but unsettling . . . .
    Behind them, a long wall glimmered deep glassy black. Lot could see a vague image in it, just beneath the surface, a woman, her lips moving in speech while dark figures shuffled slowly behind her, tired troopers, hunched in defeat. A projection wall? Tuned to minimal brightness. Despite the tenebrous quality of the image, he recognized the woman as Yulyssa, the one who’d come down the corridor with Kona. He could hear her voice faintly: “ City authority estimates casualties will run into the thousands. . . . ”
    He looked away. More glass bounded the other side of the room, this time a great, curving panel filled with points of amber and white light. An older boy leaned against it, his dark eyes coolly curious.
    “ Lot .”
    Dread settled around his shoulders as he turned to Captain Antigua. She glared at him from a seat on a sofa that faced the Silkens. “Sit down,” she ordered him, in their language, using the same cold, machinelike voice with which she’d pronounced Jupiter’s death.
    He shook his head, backing a step away. “You don’t understand. Jupiter’s alive. I saw an elevator car going down. Alta was with me, and she—”
    “You saw no such thing!” Captain Antigua barked. “And neither did Alta. I’ve talked to her, and she saw nothing. Jupiter is dead. It’s over. And if you start any rumors to the contrary that get the surviving members of the army stirred up, I will personally see you delivered into cold storage. Do you understand that, Lot?”
    She was lying . But the anger in her aura warned him not to argue. Not now.
    “Do you understand?” she repeated.
    He nodded