Empress of Eternity by L. E. Modesitt Page A

ice-sport—in red.
    Walking deliberately, he made his way along the empty platform toward the second car.
    “The train will be leaving in fifteen minutes, sir,” came the words from overhead as he stepped from the platform through the open portal into the car, a conveyance whose interior walls were brushed pewter with silvered fixtures and a piled carpet of sea green. The faintest scent of evergreen infused the air.
    He moved forward until he reached his compartment and slid the recessed pewter-finished door open. The high-backed couch, upholstered in a green two shades darker than the carpet, could have seated two comfortably and three less so. The small corner desk held a built in wall screen capable of interfacing with any dataport. There was a faux-window, displaying a view of the Reserve as seen from the west side of Daelmar. The view would shift once the train got under way, showing what passengers would have seen had they been conveyed on the surface.
    Maertyn set his shoulder bag on the end of the couch farthest from the compartment door, then sat down. He wouldn’t have been surprised if he had the only occupied private compartment on the train—at least until Brathym, the first stop of five on the way to the capital. There would be a handful of Reserve workers or officers in the seats of the first compartment, although most of them would depart at Brathym, where most of them had dwellings.
    He turned back to the compartment door, then slid it shut. After a moment, he pressed the lock bar. He glanced to the corner desk. That could wait, although he did need to go over his presentation to the internal ministry council. Instead, he sat down in the middle of the couch, trying not to think about Maarlyna as he waited for the train to depart.

11
    20 Quad 2471 R.E.
    Eltyn virtie-scanned the MetSat images of the massive storm headed westward, well to the north and east of the MCC. Enhancements displayed points of violent weather across much of the midsection of Primia. He couldn’t do much about that, and he turned his attention to that area of the continent to the southeast and below the MCC. While the canal did have a moderating effect, the massive northern low pressure was still causing a wind shift to the south. All the indicators were that another sandstorm was already beginning to form and would sweep toward the canal station.
    He thought to pulse Faelyna, but refrained. She was running the last set of tests on the equipment necessary for her approach(9). As she’d predicted, the polariton generator/imager had arrived on fourday, and the two of them had set to work reassembling and testing the equipment piece by piece. Even with both of them working, it had taken more than a week before the PG/I was ready to test, and another three days after that before the entire assembly was ready for its initialization.
    He had the sense, backed by probability calculations, that they were running out of time before their TechOversight project came to the attention of someone at Ruche Meteorology, if the overseers at RucheControl didn’t ferret it out sooner. How long would that be? Days? Or a few weeks? The project was designed to discover ways to use the station to mitigate climate warming. It was something to benefit the entire Ruche. Yet it had been turned down ten years earlier as too “individualistic,” and it had taken TechOversight years to change the approach and wait for MetCom personnel to change before recrafting it.
    He continued to scan the continental met-data, and the alternative weather projections ranked by probabilities, hoping that it wouldn’t be too long before Faelyna finished the last set of initialization checks.
    Interrogative estimated formation of sandstorm, duration, and intensity? The query came over the geosat monitor chief’s link, but without the petulant intensity of Laembah. The duty monitor was likely making the request for the chief.
    Margin of error for estimates at this point in