Hell's Foundations Quiver by David Weber Page B

passenger and Aivah had insisted upon being accompanied by Sandaria Ghatfryd, who’d been her personal maid for the last two decades. At first, he’d been surprised by the anxiety that seemed to indicate, but that lasted for only a very few minutes after the two women had joined him in the service alley behind Madam Pahrsahn’s luxurious townhouse.
    Sandaria was a good two inches shorter than Aivah, with mousy brown hair, a swarthy complexion, and an even more pronounced epicanthic fold than most Safeholdians, courtesy of her Harchongese mother. Merlin knew she’d been with Aivah for at least twenty years; what he hadn’t known (until Aivah explained there in the alley) was that she’d actually been with her ever since Nynian Rychtair’s convent days. In fact, Sandaria Ghatfryd had been a novitiate at the same time, and today she was a senior member of the Sisters of Saint Kohdy, not to mention Aivah’s second-in-command … and closest confidante.
    Sandaria, unlike Aivah, had evinced a little nervousness when they emerged from the city via one of Aivah’s discreet routes and she discovered that she and Aivah would be aboard separate skimmers. She’d handled the silent appearance of the craft remarkably calmly; it was clearly the separation that concerned her. Unfortunately, except for the armored personnel carriers—and the full-sized assault shuttles—in Nimue’s Cave, they were the only passenger vehicles available. The assault shuttles were about the size of an old pre-space jumbo jet, and hiding something that size in proximity to Siddar City would have been … a nontrivial challenge even with Federation technology. The APCs were smaller and more readily concealable than assault shuttles, but they were also much slower. Even on counter-grav, they were uncompromisingly subsonic, capable of only about five hundred miles per hour, and Merlin preferred to have a supersonic dash capability in hand, just in case. And while the far smaller air lorries were easier to conceal, they’d been designed to transport cargo . It had never occurred to anyone they might find themselves shuttling people back and forth from Nimue’s Cave in job lots. Now that the possibility had suggested itself to them, Owl’s remotes were busy converting two of those lorries into air buses at this very moment, but the process would require another day or so, and no one had wanted to wait the extra time.
    Besides, the second recon skimmer had let him bring along a second pilot.
    â€œHow much longer will it take, Merlin?” Aivah asked now, and he looked down into the small display which connected him to the rear cockpit.
    Aivah looked back out of it at him as if she’d been using coms all her life. She’d operated the controls he’d demonstrated to her with equal facility and confidence, and a smile tugged at the corners of his lips as he reflected on why she’d needed only a single demonstration.
    Yet another mystery solved , he thought dryly. No wonder the SNARCs and I never caught her decoding anything. She never needed to! And I do feel a little better about her remembering details of Ahbraim and Merlin to match against each other. “I have a very good memory,” indeed!
    The rare gene group which produced true eidetic memory had been discovered (many skeptics had argued that “invented” was a better verb) in the mid-twenty-first century, and gengineering it into children had been something of a fad for the next fifty years. It had been far less damaging than some of those fads had proven before the whole field of human genetic design was brought under rigorous control, but with the development of direct neural interfacing and the cloud storage of memories, everyone had effective eidetic memory. Interest in the ability had waned, and far fewer parents had opted to build it into their offspring. Nonetheless, it had remained far more common