Free Blonde Bombshell by Tom Holt Page A

defence network. Hardly surprising. A high priority for the grid’s designers would be concealing it from orbital observation, to make sure it couldn’t simply be knocked out with a few judicious disrupter bolts. As far as Mark Twain could tell, they’d hidden it real good.
    Hence his plan: to establish himself as a brilliantly innovative systems designer, to get himself hired by the defence authorities and assigned to the grid programme. Once installed, he’d have no trouble finding out what to shoot at, and that’d be that. It was simple and straightforward, and he could see no possible way in which it could fail. He was, after all, Ostar-made, loaded with Ostar systems technology which made the best the Dirters had look like notched sticks. A few trivial scraps of advanced tech would have him acclaimed as a computer genius. The military would inevitably recruit him. Easy as that.
    Yes, but. There remained the matter of the grid, now revealed to be potentially even more sophisticated than originally assumed. To have stopped the Mark One, the Dirters must have had some form of superior technology. That no trace of it was visible anywhere was beside the point. Clearly, advanced, better-than-Ostar tech existed and was a closely guarded monopoly of the military. The unsettling question was, therefore; would he be good enough for the military to want him? Suddenly he wasn’t quite so sure about that.
    Doubt: an organic-life-form-specific emotion. Apparently it came bundled with the hardware he was now inhabiting. He glanced down and noticed that his hands were clenched together, much as the religious Dirter’s had been. He didn’t know if his lips had been moving too.
    The door opened; the female came out, cuddling her document carrier in her arms (a scan revealed that one of the catches had malfunctioned) and the religious man went in, leaving Twain alone with the music lover. He reinforced the blocks to keep the music out of his head, and considered his options.
    He reminded himself that the interview was for a job with a civilian corporation, a bank, not with the military; accordingly, the relevant technology level should be primitive, and he’d stroll through. The competition— He brought himself up short. His sequence of thought had been The competition are all just Dirters, and I’m Ostar. But that wasn’t a good way to think about it. For the time being he was a Dirter too, albeit an incomparably superior one. Also, given the barbaric nature of this society, it was possible that other factors beside raw intellect might be taken into account by the interviewers. Personality. Whether or not they liked him. Stuff like that.
    He checked to make sure the music guy was still engrossed in his headset, then ventured a smile. It hurt. The contortions required to lift the corners of the mouth while keeping the upper lip level put a considerable strain on the cheek muscles, which in turn put pressure on nerve centres around the eyes. Presumably Dirters were used to it, having practised since infancy, but this was Twain’s first time. Would it be necessary, he wondered, to maintain this facial arrangement through the whole interview, or would it be all right if he relaxed after, say, the first ten minutes?
    Smiling. Cross-reference with cultural database, under Classical Literature. Large number of references. When you’re smiling, when you’re smiling, the whole world smiles with you. Mid-twentieth-century vernacular lieder; presumably an exaggeration, or at least he hoped it was. It takes thirty-seven muscles to frown but only three to smile. Twentieth/twenty-first-century folk wisdom, North American continent. A downright lie.
    He had no firm data to go on, but his level-9 artificial intuition told him that the quality of his smile probably wasn’t going to be enough to get him the job. In that case, it’d be better to rely on his known strengths. He made a few preparations and tried to relax. It wasn’t easy. The