Killswitch: A Cassandra Kresnov Novel (v1.1) by Joel Shepherd

Author:Joel Shepherd [Shepherd, Joel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pyr
Published: 2007-03-21T04:00:00+00:00

Takawashi leaned forward slightly in his chair, glass held suspended between slim, brown fingers. "Tell me, Cassandra. What was the last book that you read?"

"I'm not going to play games with you, Mr. Takawashi," Sandy said firmly. "This is not quid pro quo. This is the security of my planet."

"No games, Ms. Kresnov, I assure you," Takawashi said mildly, with a faint wave of his unoccupied hand. "What was the last book that you read?"

"A Nairobi Christmas," said Sandy. "By a Kenyan author, J. C. Odube, written two hundred years ago."

"I'm not familiar with it. What was it about?"

"In the late twenty-first century, a Kenyan-English journalist searches for his sister-in-law in Kenya, who has vanished. He discovers she had become involved in a conspiracy between competing superpower interests, involving Indian technology companies and Chinese defence contracts. It juxtaposes those trials of the late twenty-first century against the main character's own colonial heritage, and asks whether a people or a nation's future is really ever their own to decide. It won something called the Nobel Prize for Literature in its day."

"A fitting choice of topic, under today's circumstances," remarked Takawashi, with obvious intrigue ... and continued briskly before Sandy could protest as to relevance. "Do you think you would have enjoyed this book ... say, fifteen years ago? When you were but two years old?"

"No," said Sandy.

"Why not?"

"I'm not sure I was even reading at that age."

"You were," Takawashi assured her.

Sandy stared at him for a long, suspicious moment. Takawashi smiled benignly. "It's complicated," Sandy said at last. "It assumes a lot of basic knowledge on the reader's part. From twenty-first-century Earth political demographics to simple things, what it's like to live on a planet. I understand I was raised on a research station?"

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