Regeneration Read Online Free Page A

what they were doing, and had not been surprised to discover that he had a gift for constructing perfectly pitched responses to slightly hysterical objections, or for inserting the right tone to turn some misinformed debate around. The cranial band might block his telepathy, but it could not take away what telepathy had taught him about people.
    Now he seeded a few reassuring links into streams where environmental impact was being discussed, read an anxious post about the economic consequences of tidal energy for biomass agriculture and tagged it for follow-up, and rolled his eyes at a rambling screed warning of a secret gillung plot for world domination before reposting with an ironic comment that cast the whole thing as an exercise in bad comedy.
    Immediate matters dealt with, he stretched, looked around and let himself wonder what vid files could have been troubling enough to bring his mother down here on such short notice—and with Eve. Something Agwé had shot? But in that case, surely he’d have been the first to know?
    It struck him that the project office, like the basin outside, was quieter than usual. Pilan was not the only engineer missing, and there was nothing in the schedule to explain their absence—could they all be out in the estuary? Why? Surely all the work out there was done?
    He called the infographic up on his own screen and examined it in detail, frowning. The amber tint he had noticed earlier was for turbine efficiency, but he was certain it had been entirely green last week—in fact, for several weeks now. He scrolled back through thetimeline, increasingly puzzled. Sure enough, there it was: a sharp drop in one array in the wee hours of the morning, only now starting to come back toward normal.
    Something had happened overnight. His mother’s visit was no coincidence. He briefly considered contacting her first, then pulled up message mode on the band and sent to Agwé.
    Are you in the estuary? What’s going on?
    There was a delay of more than a minute, and the slight sense of distortion in the band response that told him she was underwater.
    Can’t talk. Below with repair team. Explain when I see you.
    He stared at the message, baffled, and unable to leave it at that. The picture of Pilan in his utility vest was suddenly sharp in his mind.
    What repair team? What’s happened?
    And then, suddenly fearful of the answer,
    Is everybody all right?
    The response came back more quickly this time.
    Everyone OK. Turbines damaged, not sure how. Array shifted, blades warped.
    A pause.
    We’ll head back soon.
    A longer pause.
    I don’t think it was an accident.
    *
    “It definitely wasn’t an accident,” Gaela said to Sharon Varsi as they kept an eye on their children playing on the quayside downriver from Sinkat. “I’m sure of it. I saw the trace.”
    Sharon chewed her lip thoughtfully. “Walk me through it again. Could there have been a malfunction? Some program gremlin they haven’t caught yet?”
    “That’s what they thought at first, because of the way the turbines shut down. The vids showed a whole row just turning aside to the current, one after the other after the other. There’s a protective subroutine that can shut an array down and collapse the blades if the flow gets really turbulent, in a bad storm or something.”
    “So either the shutdown was triggered accidentally, or there really was turbulence.”
    “There was. They’re running diagnostics on the system, just to be thorough, but we already know what happened; I could see it on the security vids. It shows up in ultraviolet.”
    She paused and glanced around, checking on Eve, blinked into infrared for a moment and found her heat signature as she crouched behind a recycling bin. Sharon’s elder son, Misha, two years younger than Eve but already more than a head taller, was creeping up from behind. “It was a focused jet of water, very sudden and quite large.” Gaela spread her arms wide to demonstrate. “It was strong