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."Money," he said bluntly."Somebody got paid off.""Ah." Thai gazed at the young cavalryman speculatively, then folded and turnedhis attention fully toRoger."That's why you explained in our first game that the next time youcaught me cheating in your favor, you could no longer play.""Right," the prince said."It's a really strange concept, but it's all aboutplaying fair with your own side.If you don't, since we're all interconnected, you inevitably pock yourself.""But what about what Sergeant Major Kosutic says?" Honal asked, scooping inthe pot without ever showing his hole cards, since everyone had folded ratherthan stay in the game."Ah," Roger said, pulling out a strip of bisti."That's a bit different, you see.The Boman aren't our side.And in thatcase, 'if you ain't cheating, you ain't trying.' "* * *Despreaux slid into the spider hole and nodded to Kileti."Tell them we've found their main base," she whispered.The small hole was on a slight elevation, twenty-five kilometers northeast ofDiaspra.It was crowded and close with four Marines and the gear for two more.The team from First Squad was one of three sent out to find the main enemyconcentration, and Despreaux was pretty sure she knew why she was here.Since her pissing match with Roger back in Ran Tai, Kosutic and Pahner hadbeen going out of their ways to keep her separated from the prince.Since shewas a squad leader, that meant keeping her squad separated from the prince.And in this case, it meant putting them out on the sharp end.all becauseHis Highness was a stuck up, aristocratic prick.She pulled out a leather pouch and dumped out the bleeding head of akillerpillar."It nearly got me," she said while her quick fingers extracted the valuablepoison glands and dropped them into a plastic bottle.Both the neurotoxin andthe flesh-dissolver were much sought after by the local apothecaries.Harvesting the bounty of the forests was one of the ways the individualPage 67 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.htmltroopers made their drinking money, so patrols had become a privilege ratherthan a task.PFC Sealdin picked up his own translucent bottle and shook it."One of the mamas came by a few hours ago," he told her cheerfully.Thevampire moths had stopped being a danger as soon as the Marines learned tosleep in their sealed personal shelters, but withthe invention of a sticky trap, they'd become another source of funds.Theanesthetic they produced was one of the most effective available for theMardukans.PFC Kileti picked up a plug and jacked it into his helmet com.The microscopicwire attached to the plug ran out of the chameleon cover over their hole andup a nearby tree, from the top of which a small transmitter sent short,directional burst transmissions and bounced them off of the micro meteors thatskipped into the atmosphere on a regular basis.Report complete, the PFC sent a command to his toot, and nodded at the teamleader."On the way," he said, and the leader, St.John (J.), nodded."Okay, Macek and Bebi are going to keep an eye on them for now.We'll switchout tomorrow.In the meantime," he continued, digging into his rucksack andpulling out a strip of jerky, "we wait."CHAPTER ELEVEN"You know," Roger said as he hurried from one meeting to another, "they saythat the waiting is the hardest part.Does 'waiting' include the preparation,too?""Yes, it does, Your Highness," Pahner replied, matching his rapid stride."You'd do better to quit playing cards all night."They were passing through one of the outer sections of the vast palace/templecomplex, down a cobbled walkway the size of a small street but unoccupiedexcept for themselves.The low wall to their right looked out over one of thecity's innumerable canals, and beyond that to the eastern fields.This sectionused a pumped-out dry canal as a flood preventative, instead of the morenormal dikes or walls, and there was a clear view of the vista of fields andtrees leading to the purple mountains in the distance.A few farmers could be seen moving in the closer fields with a protectiveescort of Northerner cavalry."Ah, it's not slowing me down," Roger said."I don't sleep much.It used todrive the teachers at boarding school nuts.I'd be up in the middle of thenight, trying to get other kids to play with me.""You spent a fair amount of time in your cabin aboard theDeGlopper," Pahner noted dryly."Yeah, well," Roger said with a grin, "I was sulking, not sleeping.Bigdifference."They reached the end of the path and started to ascend a series of steps thatstretched up and to the left around the central hill.Although the steps werequite shallow for the locals, they were anything but for the far shorterhumans, but by now Roger and Pahner had grown accustomed to that, and theprince admired the palace architecture yet again while they climbed.Like mostMardukan structures, the city had started out atop a hill, but over time ithad sprawled down to the flatlands, and the Diasprans, as water worshipers,had taken a different approach to the regular flooding to which all of Mardukwas prone.Their technique was to work with the water, accepting andcontrolling it with strategically placed channels, holding pools, and canalsrather than fighting it with unbroken lines of dikes.Oh, there weredikes some of them more massive than any others the humans had yet seen butthey were placed more to divert water into other channels than to stand like afortress in its path.Only the truly criticalPage 68 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.htmlareas of the city and the areas most vulnerable to flooding had the sort ofimpervious barriers other cities routinely erected, although Diaspra's wereconstructed on a far vaster scale where they existed at all.That relative sparseness of the dikes and coffer dams which served otherMardukan city-states as a sort of additional set of fortified outworks hadalmost been the Diasprans' downfall when the Boman assault arrived.Fortunately, they'd been able to slow the initial rush of the barbarians byselectively flooding their fields and occasionally artificially inducing flashfloods to catch groups of raiders.In the meantime, the priesthood, accustomed as it was to large-scale publicworks, had organized vast labor gangs to link the dikes and canals whichalready existed into one continuous defensive circuit.It wasn't perfect, but the walls, dikes, and canals had combined to stop thebarbarians' second, more concerted rush.It was in the interval after that second assault, when the Wespar hadwithdrawn to lick their wounds and prepare for a third attempt, that thehumans had arrived.And that was also when the barbarians had cut the mostprominent and religiously important public work of the entire city-state: theDiaspraAqueduct [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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."Money," he said bluntly."Somebody got paid off.""Ah." Thai gazed at the young cavalryman speculatively, then folded and turnedhis attention fully toRoger."That's why you explained in our first game that the next time youcaught me cheating in your favor, you could no longer play.""Right," the prince said."It's a really strange concept, but it's all aboutplaying fair with your own side.If you don't, since we're all interconnected, you inevitably pock yourself.""But what about what Sergeant Major Kosutic says?" Honal asked, scooping inthe pot without ever showing his hole cards, since everyone had folded ratherthan stay in the game."Ah," Roger said, pulling out a strip of bisti."That's a bit different, you see.The Boman aren't our side.And in thatcase, 'if you ain't cheating, you ain't trying.' "* * *Despreaux slid into the spider hole and nodded to Kileti."Tell them we've found their main base," she whispered.The small hole was on a slight elevation, twenty-five kilometers northeast ofDiaspra.It was crowded and close with four Marines and the gear for two more.The team from First Squad was one of three sent out to find the main enemyconcentration, and Despreaux was pretty sure she knew why she was here.Since her pissing match with Roger back in Ran Tai, Kosutic and Pahner hadbeen going out of their ways to keep her separated from the prince.Since shewas a squad leader, that meant keeping her squad separated from the prince.And in this case, it meant putting them out on the sharp end.all becauseHis Highness was a stuck up, aristocratic prick.She pulled out a leather pouch and dumped out the bleeding head of akillerpillar."It nearly got me," she said while her quick fingers extracted the valuablepoison glands and dropped them into a plastic bottle.Both the neurotoxin andthe flesh-dissolver were much sought after by the local apothecaries.Harvesting the bounty of the forests was one of the ways the individualPage 67 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.htmltroopers made their drinking money, so patrols had become a privilege ratherthan a task.PFC Sealdin picked up his own translucent bottle and shook it."One of the mamas came by a few hours ago," he told her cheerfully.Thevampire moths had stopped being a danger as soon as the Marines learned tosleep in their sealed personal shelters, but withthe invention of a sticky trap, they'd become another source of funds.Theanesthetic they produced was one of the most effective available for theMardukans.PFC Kileti picked up a plug and jacked it into his helmet com.The microscopicwire attached to the plug ran out of the chameleon cover over their hole andup a nearby tree, from the top of which a small transmitter sent short,directional burst transmissions and bounced them off of the micro meteors thatskipped into the atmosphere on a regular basis.Report complete, the PFC sent a command to his toot, and nodded at the teamleader."On the way," he said, and the leader, St.John (J.), nodded."Okay, Macek and Bebi are going to keep an eye on them for now.We'll switchout tomorrow.In the meantime," he continued, digging into his rucksack andpulling out a strip of jerky, "we wait."CHAPTER ELEVEN"You know," Roger said as he hurried from one meeting to another, "they saythat the waiting is the hardest part.Does 'waiting' include the preparation,too?""Yes, it does, Your Highness," Pahner replied, matching his rapid stride."You'd do better to quit playing cards all night."They were passing through one of the outer sections of the vast palace/templecomplex, down a cobbled walkway the size of a small street but unoccupiedexcept for themselves.The low wall to their right looked out over one of thecity's innumerable canals, and beyond that to the eastern fields.This sectionused a pumped-out dry canal as a flood preventative, instead of the morenormal dikes or walls, and there was a clear view of the vista of fields andtrees leading to the purple mountains in the distance.A few farmers could be seen moving in the closer fields with a protectiveescort of Northerner cavalry."Ah, it's not slowing me down," Roger said."I don't sleep much.It used todrive the teachers at boarding school nuts.I'd be up in the middle of thenight, trying to get other kids to play with me.""You spent a fair amount of time in your cabin aboard theDeGlopper," Pahner noted dryly."Yeah, well," Roger said with a grin, "I was sulking, not sleeping.Bigdifference."They reached the end of the path and started to ascend a series of steps thatstretched up and to the left around the central hill.Although the steps werequite shallow for the locals, they were anything but for the far shorterhumans, but by now Roger and Pahner had grown accustomed to that, and theprince admired the palace architecture yet again while they climbed.Like mostMardukan structures, the city had started out atop a hill, but over time ithad sprawled down to the flatlands, and the Diasprans, as water worshipers,had taken a different approach to the regular flooding to which all of Mardukwas prone.Their technique was to work with the water, accepting andcontrolling it with strategically placed channels, holding pools, and canalsrather than fighting it with unbroken lines of dikes.Oh, there weredikes some of them more massive than any others the humans had yet seen butthey were placed more to divert water into other channels than to stand like afortress in its path.Only the truly criticalPage 68 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.htmlareas of the city and the areas most vulnerable to flooding had the sort ofimpervious barriers other cities routinely erected, although Diaspra's wereconstructed on a far vaster scale where they existed at all.That relative sparseness of the dikes and coffer dams which served otherMardukan city-states as a sort of additional set of fortified outworks hadalmost been the Diasprans' downfall when the Boman assault arrived.Fortunately, they'd been able to slow the initial rush of the barbarians byselectively flooding their fields and occasionally artificially inducing flashfloods to catch groups of raiders.In the meantime, the priesthood, accustomed as it was to large-scale publicworks, had organized vast labor gangs to link the dikes and canals whichalready existed into one continuous defensive circuit.It wasn't perfect, but the walls, dikes, and canals had combined to stop thebarbarians' second, more concerted rush.It was in the interval after that second assault, when the Wespar hadwithdrawn to lick their wounds and prepare for a third attempt, that thehumans had arrived.And that was also when the barbarians had cut the mostprominent and religiously important public work of the entire city-state: theDiaspraAqueduct [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]