Arthur C. Clarke - Venus Prime 04 by The Medusa Encounter

Author:The Medusa Encounter
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-12-12T20:55:03+00:00

Far down in the deep valleys the night birds called and a million tiny frogs sang to the moon. The light of the full moon was flooding the room through the lace curtains.

It wasn’t morning and she wasn’t in the sanatorium in Colorado, she was in Holly Singh’s house in India, and the air was cold enough that she could see her breath in the moonlight. The sound she heard wasn’t a Snark, it was Singh’s little two-seat Dragonfly, its tiny fusion-electric engine so silent that all she could hear was the whiffle of the blades—and it wasn’t approaching, it was taking off.

Sparta raised her head to the corner of the window and peered out over the sloping lawn. Her right eye fixed on the Dragonfly, already half a kilometer away, as it climbed against a backdrop of moonshadowed peaks, and she zeroed in until the image of the cockpit filled her field of vision. The angle was bad; she was looking from behind, and could see only the pilot’s left shoulder and arm, but the infrared image processed by Sparta’s visual cortex was bright as day. The pilot was a woman—Singh, or someone who closely resembled her.

Something in Sparta was not reassured. Was it really Singh in the helicopter? And where was she going in the middle of the night?

Sparta expelled her breath in a short sigh, an angry spasm almost like a snarl, and abruptly she sprang to her feet. For a moment she was exposed to anyone who might be watching her window, but she was defiant. She crossed to the closet where she’d hung her few clothes and slipped on a closefitting black polycanvas jump suit, then pulled soft black hightops onto her small feet. She returned to the window, this time silently, invisibly.

She disarmed the telltale she’d set on the glass. In the night air the wooden sash had contracted; it came up easily, scraping softly against the frame.

She slipped outside and closed the window behind her. She scampered across the gently sloping roof. At the corner of the veranda she tested the strength of the gutter, then hooked her hands into it, rolled forward and hung from the roof, her feet a meter from the ground. She dropped silently into a bed of decorative Irish moss.

The moonlight through the trees created a blue and black mosaic, but to Sparta’s infrared-sensitive eye the ground itself glowed in shades of dull red, the grass and bushes and bare earth giving back the sun’s heat in varying degree. She walked quickly along the paths that led to the sanatorium.

She paused once, at the sight of a ghostly white shape moving in the dark cedar branches, but it was only an egret that had sought safety for the night aboveground.

She came to the sanatorium. Four low brick buildings with wide metal roofs formed a compound; in the center of the courtyard stood a gnarled old chestnut. Two of the buildings, facing each other, were dormitories, their individual rooms opening onto verandas.

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