Arthur C. Clarke's Venus Prime 4 by Preuss Paul & Clarke Arthur

Author:Preuss, Paul & Clarke, Arthur [Preuss, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Fiction - Science Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Interplanetary voyages, Fiction, Science Fiction, Science Fiction - General, General, Non-Classifiable
ISBN: 9780743412858
Publisher: ipicturebooks
Published: 2010-01-12T16:00:00+00:00

XIV

Sparta awoke in a high-ceilinged room, gleaming white from centuries of accumulated enamel. Its tall windows were hung with lace and fitted with panes of imperfect glass whose pinhole bubbles refocused the sun into golden liquid galaxies. She didn’t know where she was. . . .

She was eighteen years old, a prisoner in a sanatorium, half drunk on the random return of her memory, on the assault of her exaggerated senses. Her heart was pounding and her throat ached with the need to scream, for she could hear the beating wings of the approaching Snark, bringing the assassin.

Sparta rolled out of the bed and slid across the polished wooden floor on her belly, tucking herself naked against the wall below the window sill. She listened. . . .

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 moon-shadowed 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.

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