Blade of Tyshalle by Matthew Woodring Stover

Author:Matthew Woodring Stover
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780345516398
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2008-12-08T16:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

THE STORY TRICKLED onto the nets in exactly the kind of dribs and drabs most likely to keep the cauldron of public prurience at a rolling boil. First the fire at the Curioseum, and the suggestion of sabotage and arson by a shadowy group of eco-terrorists, the Green Knights; then came the Where is Caine? stories, as a source within MicroNet confirmed that Hari Michaelson’s Mantrak anklet had vanished from the satellite position grid and the courts had presumptively seized his house and all his assets.

The investigation of the Green Knights led the CID to one Administrator Kerry Voorhees, the head of Biocontainment for the San Francisco Studio. Professional Voorhees was unavailable for comment—but a few of her associates in Biocontainment were extensively interviewed, and they spoke of certain behavioral changes that seemed to have begun with Voorhees’ “friendship” with Shanna Leighton. When CID searched Administrator Voorhees’ Oakland apartment, coded documents relating to the Green Knights were found in her desk’s datacore, as was a journal that suggested her relationship with Shanna Leighton went somewhat beyond friendship.

The real fury began when a reliable source within the Studio leaked clips from the security records of the Curioseum fire, when the public learned how close the world had come to losing Caine forever—and when an enterprising reporter uncovered the enlightening fact that the Studio had bought Michaelson’s house and the rights to his Adventures back from the civic treasury.

The mystery of Michaelson’s disappearance now took on massive conspiratorial overtones, with rumors of secret missions and Studio-sponsored death squads. Had the Studio killed him? There was, for the space of twenty-four hours, a rumor that Michaelson had been seen entering a backstreet cosmetic surgery clinic in Kabul; was he truly on the run, or had the Studio sent him undercover to strike back at the eco-terrorists? And what, in all this, was the connection to the HRVP outbreak on Overworld, and the—by now popularly confirmed—homosexual love affair between Pallas Ril and the terrorist Kerry Voorhees?

After two days, the partially decomposed body of Administrator Voorhees was found floating in the Bay; in the datacore of her palmpad was a full confession. She had dusted supplies waiting for transshipment to the Transdeian mining colony with test samples of several different HRVP strains. This was done, her obviously unbalanced account claimed, to draw public attention to the dangers of Earth exploitation of Overworld resources.

She had made this recording in the depths of guilt and the agony of having been betrayed, when she realized that her lover, Shanna Leighton—her mentor, her idol—had deceived her. Entertainer Leighton had never intended to halt the outbreak; she instead had sworn to go to Overworld and, as Pallas Ril, carry on the fight against any who would harm the natural world—against any who would till the earth for crops to feed a family, against any who would so much as gather fallen wood for a fire.

Kerry Voorhees could not live with having done the unthinkable. And the unthinkable had been done—as

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