Burning the Ice

1
Singing the Icebrine Blues
 
 
That morning before breakfast Manda stopped by her work chamber to check her marine-waldos’ night’s work.
The chamber was an ugly, rock-hewn room with poor lighting and a thatch floor. In the room’s center, a device that looked like a hiker’s daypack hung from a wire web suspended below the rough ceiling. Already decked out in her livesuit and -hood, Manda slipped the livepack on and plugged its leads into her yoke. Her liveface appeared before her as she did so, rendered on her retinas by lasers in the specs set into her livemask. Glamour filled the room, a glowing sphere that defined her projection pod. A host of 3-D icons appeared: shiny, translucent satellites locked in Manda-static orbit.
First Manda touched her communications-cube, and it expanded into a thicket of geometric shapes. With economical movements, she checked her mail and messages, then folded the commcube up and called up her marine-waldo data. It blossomed around her in glistening bouquets and thickets of numbers, charts, and graphic landscapes, and she began to sort through it all. Her handcrafted f ... read full excerpt from Burning the Ice ebook