The Road of Danger-ARC Read Online Free PDF

end.”
    “Perhaps Hogg and I could arrange a taste test,” said Tovera, the first words she had spoken since she arrived beside Hogg. “I’m sure there’s paint stripper we could requisition from Squadron Stores. Or—”
    She paused. Tovera was short, slim and colorless, a less memorable person to look at than even her mistress.
    “—perhaps I could get it by killing the supply clerk and everyone else in the warehouse.”
    Hogg guffawed. “Spoiled for choice, aren’t we?” he said.
    Daniel grinned also, but Adele noticed that the humor had taken a moment to replace a perfectly blank expression. Tovera was an intelligent sociopath. She had neither conscience nor emotions, but a strong sense of self-preservation made up for those absences.
    Tovera had learned to make jokes by studying how normal human beings created humor. Similarly, she functioned in society generally by copying the behavior of those whose judgment she trusted.
    Tovera trusted Adele. If Adele told her to slaughter everyone in a warehouse—or anywhere else—the only question Tovera might ask was whether her mistress had any preference for the method she used.
    “I’m sure,” Adele said in the present silence, “that if I do ask Tovera to wipe out a nursery school, I’ll have a very good reason for it.”
    The men laughed, and Tovera smiled smiled with appreciation.
    Hogg thrust the steering yoke hard to the left, sliding neatly between the tail and nose of a pair of heavy trucks in the oncoming lane. Adele blinked. A stranger might have thought that it was a skilled though dangerous maneuver; she had enough experience of Hogg’s driving to know that he’d simply ignored other traffic.
    They had pulled onto the quay separating the last two slips—31 and 32—in the Kronstadt Naval Basin. They sped past a squadron repair ship—which was undergoing repair herself; all twelve of her High Drive motors were lined up beside her on the concrete—and pulled to a halt beside the corvette—and sometimes private yacht— Princess Cecile .
    “Welcome home, boys and girls!” Hogg said. He gestured toward the ship with the air of a conjurer.
    The Sissie lay on her side like a fat, twelve-hundred tonne cigar. Within the corvette had five decks parallel to her axis; the bridge was on A—the topmost—Level in the bow, and the Battle Direction Center with its parallel controls and personnel was at the stern end of the corridor.
    At present the dorsal turret, near the bow with two 4-inch plasma cannon, was raised to provide more internal volume. The ventral turret, offset toward the stern, was under water and therefore out of sight.
    Adele put her personal data unit away and got out. Instead of going to the catwalk immediately, she stood for a moment looking toward the Princess Cecile over the car’s roof.
    Adele had first seen the corvette cruising slowly above Kostroma City, launching skyrockets and Roman candles from her open hatches as part of the Founder’s Day festivities. Then the vessel was merely an object: large, noisy, and unpleasantly bright to look at. Adele now knew that to save spectators’ eyesight, the Sissie ’s thruster nozzles had been flared to reduce the intensity of her plasma exhaust, but at the time the light had seemed to stab through her slitted eyelids.
    Since then, Adele had spent almost as much time on or about the corvette as she had away from it. With Daniel as captain, they had fought battleships, entered enemy bases, and travelled to the edges of the human universe.
    At various times the ship’s rigging had been burned off; it had lost the outriggers on which it floated following a water landing; and portions of its hull had been melted, dented, or holed. After each battle the rebuilt Princess Cecile had arisen as solid as before, ready to take her captain and crew to the next crisis.
    Hogg was joking, but the Princess Cecile really was more of a home than Adele had ever had on land.
    “Hey Six?” called Power