The Temporal Void by Peter F. Hamilton Read Free Book Online

weapon was incredibly heavy, but then designers of the old Moscow-class warships didn’t have to worry about mass. He just managed to lever it vertical, feeling like some pre-history knight hoisting up a lance. The cylinder’s tip was barely a couple of centimetres from the cavern roof, wavering as he fought to keep it steady. There was no guarantee its ancient components would hold together if he switched it on; nor was he convinced his integral force field would withstand either a malfunction explosion or a successful discharge. But the Cat had eliminated certainty from his life, he was flying on logic and fatality now.
    He looked directly at Somonie, whose right eyelid flickered. For the second time in a day Troblum didn’t need a program to interpret a human emotion. He nodded back, and fired the ship-to-ship neutron laser.
    For Paula it really hadn’t been difficult to discover who was Troblum’s ally on Sholapur. Troblum’s clandestine money transfers had been subject to forensic accounting by an office at the Commonwealth Senate Treasury ever since Justine reported on his strangely empty hangar at Daroca spaceport. The Treasury office had quickly determined that Stubsy Florac’s accounts had been the beneficiary of a great deal of money over the years, and ANA Security had accumulated a large file on the dealer’s activities. An irritant rather than any kind of threat, Florac moved objects around the Commonwealth, which he had no legal right to do. The majority were basically harmless like Troblum’s War relics, though he did supply weapons to agitator groups. As far as ANA knew he didn’t involve himself with any Factions or their agents. Despite what he liked to imagine, Stubsy was very small-time in relation to the real political and economic subversives operating on the edges of Commonwealth society.
    So she arrived in her ship, the Alexis Denken , a day before the agreed meeting. Descended through the atmosphere in stealth mode at night, easily evading the sensor sweeps run by Ikeo’s defence system, and sank under the water twenty miles away from Florac’s villa. When she arrived just offshore, she was interested to find the wreckage of a high-performance glide-boat resting on the sand close to Florac’s charming white-sand beach. An examination by sensorbots showed it had been cut apart by a disruptor pulse. Paula guessed that she wasn’t the only one who wanted to meet the elusive Troblum. It would be difficult for a Faction to intercept calls to ANA:Governance security, but hardly impossible. And Troblum had promised to divulge what he considered important activity concerning the Accelerators. Ilanthe would inevitably send a representative to intercept him. Possibly even Marius himself. Paula would enjoy arresting him, though he would probably self-destruct before he allowed any such humiliating indignity to prevail.
    Five small passive sensor remotes slipped out of the sea to take up position on various high points around the estate, and she settled down to wait. Her piano slid out of its padded storage alcove; three hundred years old, made out of fiwood that glimmered with a soft red-brown sheen in the cabin’s subdued lighting. The instrument had been handcrafted in a workshop on Lothian by a Higher artisan who’d taken a hundred and fifty years to perfect his craft, exceeding even the quality of Earth’s legendary piano makers. Paula had commissioned it new, and the lush sound was well worth the ninety-year waiting list.
    She sat at the velvet stool, pulled the sheet music out, and once again tried to play ‘Für Elise’. Her trouble was the lack of practice time. It would be all too easy to use a music program linked with a dexterity function. But Paula wanted to be able to play the piece properly . A piano as beautiful as this one deserved that level of respect and commitment. Fingers ruled by a program would be no better than simply playing a recording.
    Curious native fish nosing