Peacekeepers (1988) Read Online Free PDF

communicator, its hair-thin wire whirring faintly.
    "Okay, Robert, I'm on my way. Seems like a damned odd night for a crisis, if you ask me."
    Robbie's voice was dead serious. "We don't make 'em. we just stop 'em from blowing up. Get your little butt down here, sweetie, double quick."
    Kelly skated to the dark and empty pavilion, grumbling to herself all the way. My twenty-second birthday tomorrow, she groused silently. Think they know? Think they care? But underneath the cynical veneer she hoped desperately that they did know and did care. Especially Robert.
    The base was less than a mile from the pavilion, a clump of low buildings on the site of the old experimental farm.
    Kelly rode her electric bike along the bumpy road, man-tall banks of snow on either side, the towers of Ottawa glistening and winking in the distance, brilliant with their holiday decorations.
    Past the wire fence of the perimeter and directly into the big open doors of the main entrance she rode, paying scant attention to the motto engraved above it. Locking the bike in the rack just inside the entrance, she nodded hello to the two guards lounging by the electric heater inside their booth, perfunctorily waved her identification badge at them, then clumped in her winter boots down the ramp toward the underground monitoring center.
    If there's a friggin' crisis, she thought, the dumb guards sure don't show it.
    In the locker room Kelly stripped off her bulging coat and the boots. She wore the sky-blue uniform of the Peacekeepers beneath it. The silver bars on her shoulders proclaimed her to be a junior lieutenant. A silver stylized T, shaped like an extended, almost mechanical hand, was clipped to her high collar; it identified her as a teleoperator.
    Helluva night to make me come in to work, she complained to herself as she changed into her blue-gray duty fatigues. There are plenty of others who could fill in this shift. Why do they always pick on me? And why can't they make this damned cave warm enough to work in?
    But then two more operators clumped in, silent and grim-faced. The men nodded to Kelly; she nodded back.
    Shivering slightly against the damp chill, Kelly briefly debated bringing her coat with her into the monitoring center, then decided against it. As she pushed the door to the hall open, another three people in fatigues were hurrying past, down the cold concrete corridor toward the center: two women and a man. One of the women was still zipping her cuffs as she rushed by.
    Robbie was outwardly cheerful: a six-three Adonis with a smile that could melt tungsten steel. His uniforms, even his fatigues, fitted him like a second skin. He wore the four-pointed star of a captain on his shoulders.
    "Sorry to roust you, tonight of all nights," he said, treating her to his smile. "We've got a bit of a mess shaping up. Angel Star."
    If anyone else called her anything but her last name, Kelly bristled. But she let handsome Robert get away with his pet name for her.
    "What's going on?" she asked.
    She saw that all ten monitoring consoles were occupied and working, ten men and women sitting in deeply padded chairs, headsets clamped over their ears, eyes riveted to the banks of display screens curving around them, fingers playing ceaselessly over the keyboards in front of them.
    Tension sizzled in the air. The room felt hot and crowded, sweaty. Images from the display screens provided the only light, flickering like flames from a fireplace, throwing nervous, jittering shadows against the bare concrete walls.
    Several of the pilots were lounging in the chairs off to one side, trying to look relaxed even though they knew they might be called to action at any moment. Robert was in charge of this shift, sitting in the communicator's high chair above and behind the monitors. Standing her tallest, Kelly was virtually at eye level with him.
    "What isn't going on?" Robbie replied. "You'd think tonight of all nights everybody'd be at home with their families."
    He