Текст книги "Cyteen "
Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh
Жанр:
Научная фантастика
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Текущая страница: 61 (всего у книги 61 страниц)
But it was sera's safety in question, and he had only a second's compunction.
Catlin had less.
The front doors were in ruins, the smoke still pouring out when Ari climbed off the bus; and Florian and Catlin both came out under the portico to meet her.
"Denys is dead," Florian told her first off. "I'm sorry, sera. It was a set-up."
"What about Seely?"
"Dead," Catlin said.
Ari walked up onto the porch and looked into the hall. Bodies lay scattered in the dim emergency lights, under a lowering canopy of smoke. She had known that place since childhood. It did not look real to her.
Denys gone. . . .
She looked back at Florian and Catlin. Catlin's expression was clear-eyed and cool. It was Florian who looked worried. Florian, who had a gash running blood down his temple and another on his cheek, not mentioning what he had had from Novgorod.
She did not ask. Not anywhere near witnesses.
xvii
The Reseune corporate jet touched smoothly, braked, and swung into a brisk roll toward the terminal and Decon—always a special treatment of plane and passengers, when a flight came in from overseas.
"It's going to take a while," Justin said, hand on Grant's shoulder; and they might have gone to sit down, then, in the comfort of the VIP and press room. But he watched it roll up to the safeway; watched the windows after it had come to rest. He could make out shadows moving inside, nothing more.
But one of them was Jordan and another was Paul.
Everything's all right,he had said, when RESEUNE ONEhad let him speak to the incoming plane, when Grant was on the way down from the hill and Reseune was stirring to heal its wounds. Don't worry. Yanni Schwartz is the new Reseune Administrator. Welcome home.
Heworried. He watched out the window mostly, while Decon did its work, hosing down the plane in foam. He and Grant exchanged stories in distracted bits and pieces, what they had known, and when, and what they had been in a position to pick up.
He worried until the doors opened and gave up two tired travelers.
After which they had the lounge to themselves, Ari had said, for as long as they wanted; and the sole surviving bus waiting out under the portico, to get them back up the hill.
