Halo: First Strike Read Online Free PDF

flying toward Vancouver moved through the clouds like great
    cold water fish.
     
    Gonzales got a quick view of a square where white and yellow
    searchlights played across a concrete landscape, and a gangling
    assemblage of pipe and wire stepped crab-wise as it sprayed a
    brick wall:  a graffiti robot, a machine built and set loose to
    scrawl messages to the world at large.  Gonzales could only read 
    GENT OF CHAN
     
    With a sigh from its turbines, the limo slowed to exit into
    North Seattle Airtrack, then turned into the private field access
    road.  A wire gate opened in front of them as it received the
    codes the limo sent.  Near the SenTrax hangar waited a swing-wing
    exactly like the one that had taken Gonzales from Pagan to
    Bangkok.  Gonzales climbed into the plane, placed his bag and the
    memex's shock-cases into the plane's baggage locker, seated
    himself, and pulled his shoulder harness tight.
     
    The swing-wing rose into clouds and fog.  After a while, the
    blank whiteness out the windows and steady noise of the swing-
    wing's engines lulled Gonzales into a light sleep that lasted
    until the ascending scream of engine noise told him they were
    landing.
     
    As the plane tilted, Gonzales saw the blue sheet of Lake
    Tahoe stretching away to the south, then a patch of green lawn on
    the water's edge that grew bigger as the swing-wing made its final
     
    pproach to Traynor's estate.
     
    >From his six years' work with Internal Affairs, the past two
    as independent auditor, Gonzales knew quite a bit about Frederick
    Lewis Traynor, his boss.  Traynor had wealth sufficient for even
    the most extravagant tastesit was his family's, and he had known
    nothing elsebut power whose smallest touch could shape lives,
    imprint stone, that he longed for.  From his position as head of
    Internal Affairs, one of SenTrax's most powerful divisions, he
    plotted ascent to the SenTrax Board; he wanted to be one of the
    twenty people who had moved beyond negotiation and compromise,
    whose desires were reality, whims action.
     
    In fact, Traynor had already achieved a level of eminence
    that is privileged, when it wishes, not to exist. His house and
    land occupied a chunk of the North Shore of Lake Tahoe where there
    had once been two casino-hotels and a section of state highway. 
    The hotels had been demolished, the highway diverted.  The grounds
    were now surrounded by a four-meter high fence of slatted black
    steelalarmed, hot-wired, and robot-patrolled.  The estate showed
    on no map or record of purchase, ownership or taxation; neither
    did the man himself.
     
    When Gonzales stepped out of the plane onto a great expanse
    of green lawn, Traynor waited to meet him.  He was short and
    pudgy, and his skin was pale.  His sparse hair lay limp in dark
    curls on his skull.  On his feet were soft black slippers, and he
    wore an embroidered silk robegreen and blue and white and red,
    with rearing dragons across back and front.  He thought of himself
    as Byroniceccentric and interesting, afflicted by geniusbut to
    Gonzales and many others he appeared simply petulant and self-
    indulgent.
     
    Traynor stretched his arms wide and said, "Mikhail," giving
    the name three syllables, saying it right, then took Gonzales in a
    brief hug.  Traynor then stood back and looked at him and said,
    "You don't look too bad."
     
    "Is that why you brought me here, to look at me?"
     
    Traynor shrugged.  "For that, maybe, and to talk to you about
    your next job.  Besides, I like you."
     
    Gonzales supposed that Traynor did like him, in his peculiar
    boss's and rich man's way.  Particularly, he seemed to like the
    fact that Gonzales wasn't awed by the outward and visible
    manifestations of his money and power.
     
    "Good breeding," Traynor had said to him once.  "That's your
    secret:  patrician and plebian blood mixed."  Mikhail
    Mikhailovitch Gonzales was of mixed blood indeed; among others,
    Russian Jews and Hispanics from Los Angeles on his