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refused to talk about the war because he hadn t been there.
Breakfast tomorrow? Griffith asked.
Yeah. Sure.
Here? Nine o clock?
Good.
Griffith slid out of the booth and gave a wave that looked almost
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Williams, Walter Jon - Voice of the Whirlwind like a salute. See you
tomorrow, he said, and walked away.
Steward glanced after him, looking carefully at the back of
Griffith s receding head.
At the base of Griffith s skull Steward could see the implant socket under the
short hair, and he felt satisfaction at the certainty that this was the
original Griffith, not a clone. The implant socket was an Icehawk thing,
enabling a soldier to interface with his weapons, transport, and environment
suit. A
lot of people carried them, but a salesman for a software company wouldn t
need one: He d be able to demonstrate his wares with a headset, not needing
the extra fraction of a second the socket would provide. So Griffith still had
the interface socket, that and the implant threads that jacked his reflexes
and programmed them with martial arts and small-unit tactics.
Steward watched Griffith as the man left. He could feel a high, his nerves
stirring, connections being made in his head. Griffith was a pathway to
something else, something he wanted. Griffith was going to lead him to his
Alpha.
However long he thought about it, things kept coming back to the Powers.
They d inhabited the planets where the Artifact War was fought; their return
had ended the war. In the pictures
Steward had seen, they hadn t seemed at all attractive. Yet
Griffith loved them; perhaps there was a reason for it. Steward
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Williams, Walter Jon - Voice of the Whirlwind accessed the library and read
everything he could find. Though there was more than there had been in the
hospital library, there still wasn t much that wasn t speculation. It was as
Page 25
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if people who had met them preferred not to say anything concrete.
Powers was a translation of the aliens name for themselves.
Their own language was a combination of clicks and singsong mutterings that
often dipped into the subsonic range: No human had ever come close to
translating it in anything approaching its full idiom.
The Powers had inhabited Sheol and a number of other planets that humanity had
discovered, then abandoned them. After a thousand years the Powers came back
and found humanity warring in their ruins. They had not yet explained why they
had left, why they had come back. They d merely announced that a vast area of
the sky, an eighty-six-degree cone expanding from its entering point at Ross
986, was now off-limits to human exploration. Presumably that was where the
Powers lived, or where they wished humanity to think they lived. Humanity,
eager for trade and knowledge, fearful of the consequences of being thought
unfriendly, was happy to oblige.
The Powers were vaguely centauroid, four-legged, two-armed.
Their lower bodies were about the size of a small pony, their upper bodies
slightly smaller than the human. The proportions of their bodies did not in
any other way resemble ponies or humans: Their legs were too short, too
powerful, with spreading, clawed ostrich toes, while their upper arms were too
stalklike to
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Williams, Walter Jon - Voice of the Whirlwind be reminiscent of anything on
Earth. Their heads were a flat, boneless muscular protrusion, with a large
single nostril on top and a pair of eyes, armored like a lizard s, that could
be twisted so as to cover the entire horizon, or focused forward or back for
binocular vision. Their brains were in their chests, with a secondary brain in
the middle of the back. There was a combination mouth/voicebox/nostril between
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