A Princess of the Aerie by John Barnes Read Free Book Online Page B

Triangle One, or by any of a dozen other malphs … well, chances are they’ll just kill
     me and pick through my liver at leisure, but they might speck that the sliver might be booby-trapped or that I might have
     some value as a hostage. If there’s no sliver, they’ve got no reason at all to keep me alive—and at least one thing they’re
     going to be toktru precessed about. So no matter how you look at it, I’m better off with that sliver.”
    She shuddered. “I hate the idea of anyone cutting into your body. Or anybody’s body. If you left it up to me we’d all spend
     our three hundred and fifty years eating and making art, dancing and telling jokes, and fucking. Especially fucking.” She
     kissed him just at the base of the sternum, feeling and savoring his skin with her full, soft lips. Her hand gently pressed
     his thighs apart. The tip of one finger brushed gently up and down until it found the singing-on place to flick, quickly and
     lightly. “If only Shadow on the Frost hadn’t rescued you—if he’d known about the sliver—”
    “But he didn’t know,” Jak said, squirming from her airy touch, “and he’s Rubahy. Honor-bound to protect an oath-friend. Shadow’s
     honor and loyalty make Duj’s look mild by comparison.”
    “And by comparison to Dujy, you and I have none at all,” she whispered. “Don’t you love that?” Before he could answer, her
     tongue was deep in his mouth.

C HAPTER 4
Outranked By a Toaster
    S wift as death itself, the Republic of the Hive battlesphere
Up Yours
shot through the dark between the worlds, toward the Aerie, just half a day away. Though
Up Yours
was two kilometers in diameter, with the volume of a medium-sized mountain, it was nearly invisible in war mode. Nothing
     protruded above the spongy black vacuum gel armor. Trillions of microfiberoptics carried starlight from each point on the
     ship to a distribution of millions of points on the other side, so that it did not occlude stars for any observer farther
     away than about a thousand kilometers (which the ship itself traveled in less than five seconds). Radar that entered the snarl
     of tunnels in its absorbent surface never emerged again to reveal its position; perfect insulation left its heat traces apparently
     as cold as the dark between the stars, and if necessary
Up Yours
could store all waste heat inside for more than a year. No exhaust of mass or energy betrayed the battlesphere’s position;
     the ship ran ballistic after each brief eight-g burst of acceleration from its quarkjets, in an almost straight line, much
     faster than solar escape velocity, to its destination, where it matched orbits with a similar burst.
    Within five minutes of thrust shutdown, the vacuum gel armor regrew over everything, and the ship vanished from all but the
     most sophisticated and subtle detectors. It could be spotted, sometimes, barely, by faint radar bounce back (if it was nearly
     on top of you), by a probe with a sensitive gravimeter (if the probe happened to pass close enough), by the scintillation
     of starlight passing through it (which lasted only a fraction of a second), or when it crossed the disk of a planet in a telescope
     (which, in most of interplanetary space, would happen about one ten-thousandth of one percent of the time). In battle, its
     quark-soup exhaust itself jammed many detection systems. Otherwise, in war mode, the ship was invisible.
    Up Yours
ran in war mode most of the time, for the solar system swarmed with enemies of the Hive, and battle-spheres—the pride of
     the Spatial—were prime targets. Beneath her self-healing foam of vacuum gel, practically her whole surface was either thrust
     nozzles or weapons.
    Yet though a battlesphere was the most concentrated collection of destructive force ever to carry a crew, and though the solar
     system was always at war, their presence inspired no fear. The Aerie’s seventeen arms were each long enough to reach across
     the Pacific Ocean,