Closing the Cosmic Eye by James Axler

Author:James Axler [Axler, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: UNKNOWN
Published: 2022-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

The yard dispatcher’s office was as hot as a kiln. What had apparently been a few sheets of plastic, possibly documents, lay on a desk and on the floor. They had half melted into the surfaces they rested on in the heat of the high-desert town. Dust lay in pink ripples on the drab synthetic floor, and occasionally skittered about like small creatures, when the breezes sneaked in through the broken windows. The room smelled of alien dust.

Ignoring the heat, Joe Weaver settled the crosshairs of his sight on the juncture of the stalklike yellow neck and slump-shouldered body of the sentry walking his post across the street that ran alongside the yard’s high concrete wall. Weaver thought of the sentry as “he,” even though he knew the Talladora, of a minor Grand Council race that made a great show of professing neutrality between Triangle and Circle, were neither wholly plant nor animal and reproduced asexually, budding out their young following direct transmission of plasm between two or more adults. Unlike some Far Arm sophonts, they did have centralized brains and certain vital organs.

Which he knew well how to reach out and touch. The Terrans’ allies had provided him plastic cards displaying rotatable 3-D images and all relevant data concerning every race that made up the Grand Council Peacekeeping Force on Sidra. He had not brought them but had simply committed them to memory through intense study the night before. He had no further need of them.

Sidra itself, Bug Mama’s lieutenant Servillon had told them, was of little intrinsic importance to the Grand Council, which ruled the Far Arm. That was why the coalition had been so active before the arrival of Bates—and almost immediately thereafter, half the battle fleets in the Far Arm. They felt they had a good chance of prying the planet out of the council’s talons, lying as it did on the galaxy’s far outer fringes.

The council’s peacekeeping force, though a trillion or so strong overall, was a sideshow, an afterthought. The major races kept it up for appearance sake, but for the most part declined to lower themselves to having anything to do with it. It was occupied, as here, with paperwork and protocol that were in fact meaningless.

Except of course to the residents of the planets on whose necks fell the burden of the Grand Council’s yoke. But no one of consequence cared about them.

“Magic Voice to Iron Man,” words came into his skull. “Everyone reports they’re in position.”

“Roger that, Magic Voice,” he subvocalized.

He snugged his short and stocky weapon’s buttplate to his shoulder, welded his cheek to the stock, took up slack on the trigger. He had dragged a table beneath the big window overlooking the satellite uplink station across the packed-dirt street. The table allowed him to prop his elbows on it for a stable firing position without actually hanging out the busted-out window himself. As long as the blue Sun didn’t glint off the object lens of his four-power scope,

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