"Smith, E E Doc - d'Alembert 8 - Eclipsing Binaries" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith E. E. Doc)

her-particularly men. Even among Earth's decadent elite, she had been notorious as one
of the more promiscuous members. Gastonia had been a hardship for her. Even though
Lady A had arranged for her to stay at the command house rather than in the village with
the other condemned traitors and Boros still could not understand why she'd been so
favored-there had been no men except the guards, and they were an unimaginative
group at best. Occasionally she had kidnaped men from the village for her pleasure. Of
course, since only a few people in the village were allowed to know about the house's
existence, she couldn't let the kidnaped men return, and had been forced to have them
killed after a while. Still, Gastonia had provided her with some of life's simple pleasures.

But now she was being sent to an automated battle station; with no companionship
except robots and computers. It seemed she was merely trading one exile for another.

She was quite careful, though, not to let her disappointment show on her face. She'd
already experienced Lady A's anger once, and she wasn't about to risk it a second time.
She merely said, in as neutral a voice as she could muster, "What's my assignment?"

"Your orders will be waiting for you there when you arrive; that way, if anything should
happen to you en route you can't give away the plan. You'll travel in a special ship that
will allow you to dock with the battle station. That is the only ship the station will allow to
approach it; any others will be before they can get close. The station can defend itself
automatically; you'll be perfectly safe once you get there."

Tanya Boros left Lady A's office feeling scarcely better than when she'd entered.

Weeks later, many parsecs away on the planet Arcta in Sector Twenty-Nine, a call came
into SOTE's planetary headquarters. Its priority coding was Class Six, "critical," so it
received instant attention from Colonel Patrick Hein, the officer in charge. Even if it had
been coded as Class One, however, Hein would have paid attention-for the call came
from two agents who identified themselves only as Wombat and Periwinkle.

Those two codenames commanded instant respect within the Service of the Empire, for
it was known they were the organization's best undercover agents. Only a handful of
people in the upper echelons knew their true identities, but everyone in the Service knew
those two agents were to be obeyed. Their investigations were key to the security of the
Empire, and they had to have utmost cooperation at the local levels if they were to be
efficient.

The call came in via an official Service scrambler, so Hein got on the vidicom and spoke
directly. "What can I do for you'?" he asked.

There was no visual image coming from the sender, but that was only to be expected;
these agents would want to keep their identities hidden. "How many people do you have
here on Arcta?" a man's voice asked.

"There are nine currently available, myself included." "I'm not talking about `currently
available.' I mean total, if you pull everyone off current duty for a special assignment.
How many?"

Hein barely hesitated. "Fourteen, but some of them are on pretty important missions . . ."