Free Adiamante by L. E. Modesitt Jr. Page B

high-arched docking/ unloading area. “Welcome, Ecktor.” Her hair was as dark as the nielle of my new cloak. Her smile was warm, and she looked like a frail elf of ancient times, a frailness that concealed the power behind the appearance, the solidity of a shield. I almost laughed at my antique metaphors, but I preferred them to more modern ones.
    â€œThank you. I hope I won’t disrupt your efforts.”

    â€œI’m glad you came.” A wry half-smile crossed her face. “Not all Coordinators have taken their duties personally enough to inspect an ell station.”
    â€œCall it my intuit background. I can’t factor in what I haven’t seen and felt.”
    â€œYou haven’t been here before?” asked Elanstan as we took the main corridor toward the center of the station’s mid-level.
    â€œNot under these circumstances. I’ve done stand-down maintenance, but it’s not the same thing. Power makes a difference, and that’s something people don’t understand.” As we passed the first set of side corridors, dark and unused, I slowed, sensing the energy that flowed in and thought the solidity of the nickel-iron above and around us, tied into the underspace in minute filaments. “Where’s Rhetoral?”
    â€œHe’s in the center. I feel better if one of us is there.” She shrugged her thin shoulders. “We’ve had the basic system fully up for only three days. The remotes still aren’t operating on Delta and Kappa. Rhetoral just got back from putting Gamma on line.” She turned to Lieza, then refocused her black eyes on me.
    I grinned at the pilot. “You can tag along, or do whatever else you want to do. I’m just poking and prodding.”
    â€œSleep sounds good to me,” Lieza admitted. “In this line, you take it when you can get it.”
    â€œYou know where everything is,” said Elanstan, “better than I do.”
    â€œLet me have a few minutes’ notice, Coordinator. That’s all.” Lieza gestured down the glowstrip-lit passage. “We’re going the same direction.”
    According to the schematics, Ell Control had been laid out on three levels—upper, mid, and lower—that sliced through the middle of the asteroid. The locks were on mid-level, on what corresponded roughly to the “equator,” although the asteroid was shaped more like a loaf of
bread, and the locks were where the heels would have been.
    Every twenty meters, or so it seemed, we passed a door—occasionally sealed hatches, but usually just doors. I couldn’t sense net-based operations behind the doors, but if the records were correct, Ell Control had once been the central operations focus for the starfleets of the Rebuilt Hegemony, and had hummed with activity. Those years were long, long past.
    We slipped down the corridor in gentle and near-effortless movements, our lightened steps whisper-echoing on the hard permaplast that coated the smoothed metallic ore beneath. The walls were similarly coated, and our words echoed as well as our steps, almost like ghosts of a far-distant past.
    I tried not to move too quickly. Weight might be twenty percent of normal, but mass and inertia remained, and trying to stop in low gee had broken all too many limbs throughout the history of satellite installations. Plastic-coated nickel-iron remained hard in low gee.
    â€œAre they still cybs?” asked Elanstan. Her voice sounded preternaturally loud in the silence, and she lowered it as she added, “The way the legends say?”
    I shrugged and, not being quite reaccustomed to low gee, nearly lost my balance and careened toward the corridor wall.
    â€œCareful,” warned Lieza with a touch of concern in her voice.
    â€œHard to say,” I answered as I straightened. “I have this feeling that they aren’t going to see much besides what they want to see.”
    â€œOh … that could