Shadow of Victory - eARC Read Online Free Page A

excited chatter of more than a hundred kids.
    The high school teacher sat directly behind the airbus driver. As one of the four chaperones attached to the tour group, she had the luxury of an empty seat beside her at the moment, since her seatmate, Roman Sowiński, was currently somewhere back along the crowded central aisle attempting to quell some of that chatter. His mission reminded Lukrecja of an Old Earth king named Canute, and he was welcome to it.
    Lukrecja’s real job would start once they got the bus on the ground, and she felt more than a little trepidation as she contemplated it. All the kids on the tour were good kids, but they’d also been born and raised in the Projects. They were about to have the chance to peer, however briefly, through a window into the sort of opulent lifestyle they and their parents could scarcely even imagine. And it was going to be up to her to make sure they behaved themselves while they did that peering.
    The good news was that any kid from the Projects understood on an almost cellular level that there were different sorts of rules for different sorts of people. They knew the families of the Oligarchia came from a world totally unlike their own, and they also knew there were…consequences to arousing an oligarcha’s ire. She could depend on them to be on their very best behavior. The problem was that the rules of behavior they’d been taught might not be adequate for today’s expedition.
    Oh, stop worrying! she told herself, looking over her shoulder and smiling as she saw Edyta Sowczyk’s head bent over the chessboard between her and Karolina Kreft. They were two of the brightest spots in her teacher’s life, and she knew both of them—especially Edyta—could scarcely wait. In a sense, both of them had grown up in the spaceport’s shadow, since their parents worked—when they could find work—for the Stowarzyszenie Eksporterów Owoców Morza, which dominated the spaceport’s business. Then again, that was true one way or another of a lot of people in the Projects.
    “Not much farther, Ms. Wolińska,” Andrzej Bicukowski, the airbus driver said, raising his own voice but never looking away from his HUD, “but there’s a traffic jam in the regular approach lanes.” He tapped the earbug tied into the Lądowisko Air Traffic net. “Sounds like a pair of air lorries tangled, and then a limo ran into them. ATC’s closed down the South Approach to a single lane. Don’t imagine anybody’s moving very fast along it, either, and this beast is a bit big to be threading any needles, so I’ve filed a diversion from our original route. It’ll bring us in from the east side of the port, over the SEOM warehouses along the river.” He grimaced. “It’s less scenic, but it’ll get your kids on the ground a lot quicker.”
    “Quicker is good,” Lukrecja said with feeling, as the background chatter reached a new decibel level. “Quicker is very good.”
    Bicukowski chuckled and the airbus turned into one of the tertiary approach lanes along the outer ring route.
    * * *
    “What the fuck does that idiot think he’s doing?” Wiktoria Lewandowska growled.
    She stood in the Stowarzyszenie Eksporterów Owoców Morza’s main shipping and traffic control room glowering over one of the duty controller’s shoulders at the display. The orange icon moving across it showed no transponder code. That was true for quite a few of the icons on his display at the moment, probably because the air traffic crews and their computers were still trying to sort out the confusion of the worst midair collision in the last five or ten years. It wasn’t too surprising their systems were hiccupping, given the fact that a badly damaged air taxi had spun out of the fireball and impacted directly atop an automated air traffic relay station. But none of the other blank icons were intruding on her airspace. Oh, sure, the route along which it was headed was technically in a public transit lane, but it cut