Free The Stone Dogs by S.M. Stirling Page B

at a thousand meters and began a slow descent, the ducted-fan engines turning down for lift. They had been slow getting away; the eight-month academic year was ending, and the Baiae landing fields had been crowded. Of course, an aircar like this could be driven by road and take off from any convenient open space, but serfs operated machinery by the book. Her hands itched to take the controls; this was all fly-by-wire, you couldn't redline it, the computers wouldn't let you…
    "Just yo' parents to home?" Veronica asked, turning her head and resting it on Muriel's shoulder.
    "Mmm-hm," Yolande replied. "Edwina and Dionysia both turned eighteen last year; they in Third Airborne, stationed near Shanghai. John would've been out, but they picked him fo'
    officer's trainin'." That meant an extra year's active service beyond the usual three, or possibly more. "He might be back on leave soon, though… Ma said her cousin Alicia's up from the south; she's in textiles, Shahnapur. Just got divorced, up here restin'-like. May move up."
    The sound of the fans altered as they came to a halt a hundred meters up and lowered with a smooth elevator sensation.
    "Oooo, woof, nice," Mandy said from her right, as their descent gave a slow panorama of Claestum manor. "I like it when they use the old things."
    There were admiring murmurs as the aircar extended its wheels with a cling- chung , and Yolande felt a warm glow of pride like sun on bare skin. They had landed at the southern entrance of the main building, where the road widened into a small plaza after its winding journey up from the Quarters and through the gardens. Ahead was the house complex, and the tall oaks and chestnuts that crowned the hill and tumbled down the northern slope.
    It is pretty, she thought, trying to look at it as a stranger might. Her parents had laid out the Great House in the shape of a U along the south-facing slope, with its apex open to the woods at the crest. Both flanks were old Tuscan work from the pre-War town, each ending in a tower; weathered red tiles and sienna-colored stone overgrown with flowering vines. The newer buildings knitted them together, and the southern end of the U
    was closed by a curved block in classic Draka style; two stories of ferroconcrete sheathed in jade-green African marble. Fluted pillars of white Carrara ran from the veranda past the second-story gallery to end in golden acanthus leaves at the roof, and the windows behind were etched glass and silver.
    "Oh, it's all right," Yolande said casually, as the gullwing doors of the aircar soughed open. She put a hand on the rim of the passenger compartment and vaulted out.
    Home , she thought, swallowing. It smells like home . Green, after the filtered pressurized atmosphere of the aircraft; the mildly warm fresh-green scent of a Tuscan spring. Odors of stone, dust, flowers, water from the two fountains that flanked the wrought-iron gates into the central courtyard. The piazza of checkered brick beneath her feet was where she had learned to ride a bicycle, the trees flanking it were ones she had watched grow. Her parents had been waiting beneath the gate, out of reach of the miniature duststorm an aircar made in landing.
    They came forward as their daughter's friends clambered out of the Meercat. Yolande swallowed again and drew herself up calmly, cleared her throat.

    "Hello, mother, father," she said. One of the housegirls behind the Landholders was coming forward with a curtsy, bearing a courtesy tray with a carafe and glasses. Yolande smiled with a flush of pleasure. There would be a formal greeting; her parents were treating her friends as adults, not casually as children.
    "Service to the State," her father said. He was a stocky man and rather short for a Draka, no more than 175 centimeters, dressed in planter's working clothes: boots and loose chamois trousers, cotton shirt and gunbelt, and a broad-brimmed hat in one hand. Hazel eyes, and gray streaks through seal-brown hair and