"Relieve Third. You'll stand his shifts in addition to your own."
Second WatchMaster swallowed. "Grace, WarAvocat."
"Get going," WarAvocat told Third. "Don't embarrass me."
The Twist Masters loosed their unpredictable vortices. The furies ripped across space and clawed at the atmosphere of P. Jaksonica 3, scrawling fire upon the skies of that world, birthing auroras that would persist for days.
They rattled and scaled and scarred the falling pod but they did not stop it. At three thousand meters the krekelen bailed out. At twenty-five hundred, Canon garrison took the pod under fire.
They reported the illegal destroyed.
In Hall of the Watchers they knew better. Track followed the krekelen to the surface and into the city.
— 4 —
Gloom was a fourth presence there with the three Immunes. Midnight said, "I don't want to go out there now. The Darkness has become the tyrant of the night."
Turtle replied, "Then don't go. Unless you have to dance tonight? Amber Soul and I could see you to the lift."
Midnight was a cloud dancer, engineered for that and exotic erotic usage in House Banat-Marath. Her owner of record, a House Director's whelp on wanderjahr, had become bored with his pretty toy and had discarded her, without documentation, her only assets those designed into her fragile body.
She had survived.
"No. Not tonight. There's little demand for me now."
"Funny. I'd think just the opposite. Eat, drink, and make merry. Maybe trouble will go away."
Midnight lived in the High City usually, drifting from sponsor to sponsor. If she fell out of fashion there, she worked the merchant baronets of UpTown, who strove to emulate the decadence of their overlords. But DownTown was her spiritual home, as it was for all the outcast, the discarded, the ignored, the ordinary, and the abhorred. Princes of lost and vanquished races languished there, hip by thigh with pimps and murderers and worse.