Galactic Empires Read Online Free PDF Page B

flog Colliac Fak’s bloody software to. We’re covering every H-congruous planet in the galaxy with concrete; building little nests with a window we can look at the neighboring squalid skyscraper with. Yeah, we’re a really progressive species, us humans.
    So I got the next train to Wessex. Standard class coach, and I just managed to grab a seat next to a window. Beat some woman to it, who looked real pissed at me when I slipped in ahead of her. Gotta learn, lady. Survival of the fittest on this route. Every route, every day.
    The Wessex station made its Sydney cousin look small. Three big passenger terminals with gold and scarlet roofs curving high over twenty platforms apiece; you could probably fit my apartment skyscraper inside one of them. And a marshaling yard that sprawled over fifteen square miles, a giant zoo of cybernetic machines and warehouses.
    I had to switch terminals for the train out to Ormal-that’s a five-minute trip on a pedwalk-then I had to find the right platform. The insert that provides my virtual vision has interface problems now, so the guidance icons I was picking up from the station management array were blurred. Nearly misread the damn thing. Finished up on platform 11B waiting with a big crowd for the train. These people weren’t so stressed and desperate as the ones back in Sydney. More prosperous types, with suits a lot more expensive than mine. They had neat little leather designer arrays edged in gold or platinum tucked into the top pockets. You could see their fingers flicking about minutely as they shunted icons around their high-rez virtual vision. I even saw a few of those new OCtattoos, the ones that light up, tracing colorful lines across their skin. One woman had green and blue spirals on her cheeks.
    The carriage wasn’t so crowded, so I got a seat by a window again. I guess most of my fellow travelers were up in first class. Trip to Ormal was a simple eight minutes. We rolled out from the end of the platform and across the marshaling yard. I could see the row of wormhole generators up ahead like a metallic cliff, bloody huge great rectangular buildings side by side with a wormhole gateway at the end, like the mouth of an old-fashioned train tunnel. Only these had light shining out of them: alien suns spreading a multitude of subtle shades across the rusting jumble of the marshaling yard.
    Our train headed straight for a pink-tinged hole, and I felt the tingle of the pressure curtain across my skin as we passed through. Then we were rolling along a couple of miles of track surrounded by open countryside with strange bulbous gray and white trees before we reached the CST planetary station.
    Harwood’s Hill, the capital, was small, barely half a million people. But it was beautiful, one of those places that had banned combustion engines. It was spread across a big slope that rose up out of a freshwater sea, with green spaces outnumbering buildings five to one. If I could afford it, I’d probably move there. You knew this world was making an effort to get things right. But it cost to grab a chunk of a dormitory planet for the upper middle classes. For Christ’s sake, real estate here was more expensive than back on Earth.
    My train had arrived late evening. I took a taxi out to the airport, using the company card. Even the taxi cost more than the return train fare. I watched the yachts out on the lake, trying not to be all sour and envious. There must have been hundreds coming into port, their sails all lit up by the sinking sun. Didn’t anyone in this city work?
    The flight to Essendyne was another three hours. At the other end, the airport was little more than a flat patch of grass with a strip of enzyme-bonded concrete down the middle, like it was left over from an experimental road building project.
    Essendyne itself was a little town of stylish houses at the end of a valley. The surrounding mountains were impressive, too. In winter, they have over a meter of snow. It is