Resurgence Read Online Free PDF Page A

her absolute master and allowed herself to be led around with a collar and leash. Nenda bullied and blustered. Sometimes he even carried a whip. However, Darya had direct proof that the master/slave relationship was more complex than it seemed. She had been on board Nenda's ship, the Have-It-All . Nenda's private quarters were opulent, even by the standards of a rich world like Sentinel Gate. But Kallik's were just as large, and just as well-furnished. The little Hymenopt even had her own additional private area, equipped with powerful computers and scientific instruments.
    Kallik squeezed past Atvar H'sial, whose great body was blocking Louis Nenda, and came scuttling over to Darya. The Hymenopt and J'merlia exchanged a brief burst of clicks and whistles, then Kallik said, "Greetings. With your arrival we will perhaps begin to receive some explanation for our presence."
    It was an embarrassment to Darya that J'merlia and Kallik, whom she had thought mindless pets when she first met them, could pick up languages with such ease. In the time that it had taken Darya to comprehend a few basic Hymenopt clicks, Kallik had achieved fluency in half a dozen human languages.
    Darya shook her head. "You won't get explanations from me. I have no idea why I was summoned."
    "Master Nenda says that it is a meeting which involves the Builders, and Builder artifacts."
    "So I was told. But the Builders vanished from the spiral arm more than three million years ago, and now all their artifacts are gone, too."
    "You sure of that?" Louis Nenda must have done an end run on Atvar H'sial, moving round the back of the row of seats. He had appeared now on Darya's right-hand side.
    "Sure as anyone can be." Darya quietly pushed his hand away from her shoulder. "The Artifact Research Institute is the clearinghouse for all activities or information concerning the Builders or Builder artifacts. I examine the data bases every day, personally. Absolutely nothing new has come in for the past few months—not for years, in fact."
    "But they put the heat on you to come here?"
    "I suppose they did. I felt that I was given no choice."
    "Same for me, same for At. Makes no sense at all. I mean, she's an expert on the Builders, and so is Kallik. So are you. But me, if you bet on what I know about the Builders, you'd lose your ass and hat."
    "You were involved in the disappearance of the artifacts, starting with Summertide on Dobelle and ending at Labyrinth, out by Jerome's World."
    "Sure I was, but that's all history. I don't remember more than half of what happened, even though I was right in the middle of it. I'm tellin' you, something big has to be brewing."
    "Based on a gut feeling, or do you have evidence?"
    "Mostly gut. But when your guts have rumbled with danger as often as mine have, you get to trust 'em. And yeah, I do have one bit of evidence. When the word came to us, me an' At an' Kallik an' J'merlia an' . . . another person, we were on Xerarchos, in what you might call the Lesser Armpit of Zardalu Communion territory. It's a long way from there to here, so I called Miranda and said we'd need financial help to pay for the cost of the Bose transitions."
    As usual, Louis Nenda's clothes were crumpled and his eyes were bloodshot and his battered face needed a shave. And as usual, there was an intensity in the way he looked at Darya that both pleased and disturbed her.
    She glanced away from him and said, "It was reasonable to ask for help if you were short of funds. I assume that they gave some to you?"
    "Yeah. But that's not the point. As it happens, me an' Atvar have had a good year or two an' we're rolling in money. We sort of try to disguise that, of course, but you can't hide everything. A simple credit check would have shown we didn't need no help. And when I made my request, I deliberately sky-highed what I said we'd need. I do mean sky-highed, too, because I wanted to see if I could learn anything from their reply."
    Darya found she was looking