Angel of Fire by William King

Author:William King [King, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Ciencia ficción
Publisher: BernyBenuyas
Published: 2012-06-25T16:00:00+00:00

Fourteen

Rumours abounded in the Angel’s Blessing that night. The city was on the verge of open rebellion. Macharius had been wounded at the new war front. Macharius had been killed. The Death Spectres had gone off-world to deal with an ork invasion fleet. Plague had erupted on Karsk V and would be coming our way soon. We sat in the dark and drank our rotgut and tried not to pay too much attention. We were looking for distraction.

That night the girls brought a friend. She was tall, dark, and strikingly pretty with dark hair cut very short. Her name was Anna. I studied her as she sat opposite me. She seemed quiet and self-possessed and calm. She had the competence that nurses always have but she was distant.

‘She’s as new around here as you are,’ Yanis said, as if making a joke.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

Anna smiled a little coldly, I thought. ‘She means I just transferred in to St Oberon’s. I was working two levels down in the old Flat Tunnel Hospice.’

‘Might as well have come from another planet,’ said Yanis. There was some tension between the two. ‘It’s a different world down there.’

‘It’s poorer, if that’s what you mean,’ said Anna. ‘But people still need healing.’

‘I never said they didn’t.’

‘It is different down there,’ Anna said. ‘Darker, more dismal. The nobles who come to St Oberon’s have no idea what it’s like.’ She let that hang in the air, with the implication it was not just the nobles.

‘It’s always the bloody same,’ said Anton. ‘The higher up the hive you go, the snottier people get.’ That got him some nasty looks from the other nurses. Not that Anton cared. He never paid too much attention to what other people thought.

Katrina looked at the table and said, ‘Do we need to talk about this? There are other more interesting things to talk about. I’ve never been out of the hive, let alone to a different planet, neither have you, Yanis or Anna. You boys have. What was it like?’

‘Dangerous,’ said Anton. ‘The bloody places always seemed full of people who wanted to shoot us for some reason.’

Ivan gave him a dark look. ‘It’s understandable. I feel that way every time I look at you.’

‘Ha bloody ha!’

Katrina’s attempt to change the subject and the booze worked though. We spoke of the campaigns we had fought in – Jurasik, Elijah, Lucifer and the others. We did not talk about anything we were doing at present but it would not have mattered very much – if they had been spies they could have learned a lot just from the stories we told of the old times and about the battles we had fought in. It did not seem very likely that they were spies although you can never tell. Little did I know…

‘Tell me about the Angel of Fire,’ the New Boy asked.

I frowned at the way he spoke. It seemed to me that he was more interested in the Angel of Fire than he ought to have been.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.