Metaplanetary: A Novel of Interplanetary Civil War by Tony Daniel

Author:Tony Daniel [Daniel, Tony]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Tags: Science Fiction, Fantasy
ISBN: 9780061051425
Google: Gr_HQgAACAAJ
Amazon: 006105142X
Goodreads: 3770500
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2001-04-09T12:00:00+00:00

PART TWO

NITROGEN RAIN

* * *

One

The Borrasca

A Memoir

by Lebedev, Wing Commander, Left Front

Introduction and Apology

Although a full recounting of my role in the recent hostilities is what I am about here, I would be remiss if I did not fill in a few details as to my own background and some general facts about cloudships. Most people have never met a cloudship, after all, and you cannot communicate with them by the normal channels of the merci. Especially in the period before the war, cloudships, rightly or wrongly, considered themselves a breed apart, and there were those in our number who made arguments to the point that we were a different species than other human beings, and that we were as far above Homo sapiens as Homo sapiens was above Australopithecus. I was not among these who made such an argument, but I must admit to a certain aloof attitude toward anything having to do with the solar system inside of the orbit of Pluto.

You see, I had gotten out of there, and I had no intention of ever going back before the war began. In fact, if you had told me that I would not only return to the solar system, but be part of the attack on the Met, I would have laughed in your face (that is, provided you were not a cloudship without an aspect, in which case you would not have had a face to begin with).

I was born on Earth, in old Russia, in 2376. The less said about my early years, the better. I came from wealth—old Moscow Mafia money, now washed by a few generations, it was claimed—and my first thirty years were, as they once said in America, nothing to write home about. In fact, I did not write home for a period of fifteen e-years, except to keep my banker (and so my father; they were the same person) informed of my current whereabouts so that he could send my regular checks. This period of debauchery could not last, and did not. I remember waking up one noontime in a London gutter. (I have since tried to discover which one. I believe it was somewhere on Shaftesbury Avenue in the Central District, but as to the exact drainage slough, my memory, understandably, fails me.) I lay in that gutter, surrounded by rotting city detritus, with the hot sun upon my pate and my head on fire—that is, with a hangover, and not literally—as sometimes happens, I’m told, with the new bioactive drugs. I had on no clothes, and had contracted a most violent case of sunburn. What’s more, I was the object of considerable attention from several of the passersby, who were by no means entirely respectable characters themselves. I got me to a flophouse, but it was a long, excruciatingly painful, and humiliating journey, let me tell you. And I lay there for near two weeks, recuperating, my skin peeling off as if I were a eucalyptus tree.

It was during

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