The Sixth Traveler: A Novel by Kevin M. Faulkner

Author:Kevin M. Faulkner [Faulkner, Kevin M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Galactina Press
Published: 2021-01-24T07:00:00+00:00

“Nice. A fitting name.”

As the phaeton went dark, I reflexively looked over at Kepler, then my two security guards. I couldn’t think about Sneshia now, and didn’t want to, just too much to do before Beijing.

* * *

“I hope you don’t feel pressured by all of this,” I said to Venka, “but I think it will be a good thing.” We were on one of the new superliners flying at 20,000 meters above the earth toward China.

He smiled as he looked ahead, then turned to me. “You are not pressuring me. You are encouraging me,” he whispered, trying not to wake Nithia, who lay asleep next to him. These days they spend more time together. Sweetly, they were rarely apart. “I will be delighted to meet Dr. Hu. She is a visionary, and her research is provocative.”

I was thinking that we’d have to coach him not to be so kind to Dr. Hu if he became a witness in the ICIP action, if it came to that.

“I guess there could be a feeling that you showed her up. Though the more I read about it, I get a feeling that people in China have a longer view of the whole thing.”

“I think so. Chinese have a way of seeing the big picture, and patience for the future.”

“Then I’m not very Chinese.” Though I am mixed—my mother was Caucasian—I looked a lot like my father, a second-generation immigrant from Singapore. Given that, people identified me as East Asian growing up.

“You definitely are an all-American woman.”

Venka shut his eyes and napped. I was not sleepy at all, as I turned to the news on my lytfascia. After a few minutes of reading, I received a message from my firm. There had been a raid and brief fighting between rogue Vainakh forces and Russian forces in Astrakhan, an ancient city on the Volga River delta at the Caspian Sea. They apparently thought that Sneshia was among the dead. Large quantities of enriched uranium were recovered from mining operations by the Vainakh in the Caucasus. Indeed, in the following days, the story was on the news. I wondered if it could be true.

* * *

“A resolution is eminent, thanks to me—oh, I mean, Dr. Venkalaswaran,” I said, jokingly praising myself to Dorothy, the firm’s senior paralegal. And in fact, I was feeling confident that day, even cocky. I was back in my office in San Diego to pick up memory chips. Even in the late twenty-first century with the convenience of dekked memory cells, attorneys insisted on using hard chips to back things up for security.

“Good, now you can stop all this traveling and bring that boyfriend of yours around the office more,” Dorothy said.

“What?” I mocked.

A combination of the emotions I felt in Bengaluru combined with the excitement of touring China with Venka left me feeling high. In those days I felt more confident than I had ever had before in my life. A weight somehow lifted from my shoulders. I was for real.

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.