Ventus by Karl Schroeder

Karl Schroeder / Ventus / Page 565
overwhelmed. From Ventus, Diadem remained a tiny mottled
white disk; had the Winds left their aluminum and titanium
structures unpainted, the disk would have shone like the sun, or
like the jeweled tiara for which it was named.
The sphere of incandescence on the telescope images
obliterated several square kilometers of moon-city. It had also
This appeared as a dopplered radar image, just a tiny smear.
The ship had not even bothered to report its existence to the
crew until it changed heading under its own power.
Fourteen hours later they had drawn next to the limp
figure of a woman hanging like an abandoned doll in the velvet
black of space. The swans were rising from Diadem, their
music strange and threatening. The woman was gently brought
on board, and bundled straight to the operating theatre, for
what everyone expected would be a routine post-mortem. In
the course of the operation, which Axel attended, several things
came to light:
The woman bore an astonishing resemblance to
Calandria May.
Indeed, nothing could.
She was still alive.
freefall, grabbed a tow line that soon deposited him at the littleused
to him, but he ignored her.
The patient hung like a crucified angel at the focus of a
bank of deity-class equipment. Most of the equipment was
dark; the patient was not a god after all. She was a robot,
merely masked by sophisticated but commonly known screens.
She was not, it seemed, a product of Wind technology.