"John Ringo - Sister Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ringo John)

And it was a good solid vanish. One moment, sister. Next moment, air. Cally had enough experience of
holograms to be pretty sure she'd been dealing with a real human. There had been a faint smell of
perfume, something extremely light. Her nose was tweaked high enough that she'd caught a faint odor of
body as well. Not funk, just the smell any human gave off. Traces of heat, a breath. Michelle had been
standing right in front of her and now was not. Cally waved her hand across the space for a moment then
shrugged. She didn't have time for this.


She lifted the code keys out and put them carefully into her purse, replacing them in the drawer with the
identical-looking but worthless decoys. Each single-use key, when plugged into a nannite generator,
would trigger it to make enough fresh nannites to fill an Indowy journeyman's Sohon tank. Among the
Darhel, they were the diamonds of currency.


Manufacturedvery carefully by the Tchpht, with multiple redundant levels of control to ensure that the
makers could not self-replicate and did indeed self-destruct precisely on schedule, the nannite generators
were the underpinning of virtually all Galactic technology. The use-once key codes that safely activated
those generators were obtained from the Tchpht by the Darhel and traded amongst themselves and to the
Indowy for all the necessities and luxuries that comprised the Galactic economy. They were too useful to
be allowed to sit idle for long, but they were the ultimate basis of both the Indowy craftsman's wage and
the FedCred.


Darhel actuaries had been in business for a thousand years by the time humans were counting cattle on
tally sticks. They knew to a fraction the worth of code keys and where the nannites were flowing
throughout the entire galactic economy.
They weren't used to being robbed.


Cally suppressed the temptation to hum as she pressed the button on the inside of the door to close it.
The fancy lock probably had recorded that it had been accessed with a manufacturing code, but that just
added to the mystery for the Darhel. She lifted the edge of a cushion and kicked the empty gas grenade
shell underneath. She wanted it found, just not right away.


I don't know what the hell to think about all that. I'll think about it after I'm out. First things first.
She hurried to the door as one of the Indowy began to twitch.They'll be awake any second now. She
glanced at her watch again. She'd made up time on being able to just close the drawer instead of
reassemble it. Thank God.


After letting herself out of the Darhel's suite, getting out was a simple matter of taking the elevator to the
second floor and schmoozing her way through the party. As with a lot of places, there was a lot more
effort put into keeping unauthorized people from getting in, than keeping people from getting out.


The party was the kind of glittering affair that had been attended by national-level movers and shakers
back in the twentieth century. It would have had diplomats, politicians, major league bureaucrats, and the
occasional celebrity or industrialist. This party still had movers and shakers, but while some of the