Primary Inversion (Saga of the Skolian Empire) Paperback by Catherine Asaro

jacket. He pulled me down with him on the bed, lying on his back as
he wrapped his arms around me.
    “I can send my Notification of Intent tonight over the Net,”
he said. “I’ll give my resignation when we get back to Headquarters City.”
    Notification of Intent. It was so odd to hear it from Rex.
But his timing made sense. After our rest here we would return to Headquarters
to pick up orders for our next mission. Rex had waited until he knew we would
no longer be going into combat together. I could love him now. I never had to
send him into battle again.
    A beep came from the console by the bed. “Damn,” Rex muttered.
He stretched his arm across the bed and touched the Respond panel on the
console. “What?”
    Helda’s voice came out of the speaker. “Ya, Rex. You
know where is Soz?”
    “I’m right here,” I said. “We’ll meet you at my room.”
    Both Helda and Taas were waiting outside my door when we
arrived. Helda gave me an odd look. I couldn’t tell what she picked up, but she
must have sensed something. It had all changed. I would never see Rex in the
same way again.
    The pager by my door showed a dark-haired woman standing on
the rocky shore of an island. She stood looking out at me, a quiver full of
arrows strapped on her back and a beautiful curving bow in her hand.
    I put my finger against the waves that lapped up on the
beach below the woman. A flash of light came from inside the pager as a laser
played over my finger. It only took an instant for it to produce an
interference pattern from the ridges of my fingerprint and correlate it with
the one made by the inn’s computer. Then my door swung open.
    After the sensual ambience in Rex’s room, mine felt much too
cool. The walls were a polished blue-green ceramic, with frothy accents as if
waves played across them. The computer console was built into a rolltop desk by
the bed. Its horizontal surface was a hologram screen and the vertical section
supported the console controls. The labels on the controls were in six
languages, including Skolian.
    I sat down at the console and touched the panel marked with
the picture of a doorway. “Access my guest account. Then connect me to the
Skol-Net.”
    “Hello, Primary Valdoria.” The computer spoke in Skolian. “Homer
here. Welcome to the Aegean Inn. I am pleased to access your account.” After a
pause it said, “I’m setting up the Skol-Net link now. Please excuse the delay.”
    “Hoy, that’s a polite computer,” Helda said.
    I smiled. Allied computers tended to be friendlier than
nodes on the Skol-Net, Skolia’s massive computer network. We had chosen this
hotel because it equipped its consoles with psiphons, which few Allied
establishments bothered to do. I opened a cubicle in the desk and took the
psiphon out of its cradle. It was a simple model, no more than a transparent,
double-tipped prong connected to the console by a thread.
    When I clicked the prong into the socket on the inside of my
wrist, my arm tingled. I knew, logically, that those tingles weren’t real. But
every time I plugged in a psiphon I imagined I felt them.
    The words attempting
connection appeared on a small screen set into the desk.
    “Looks like it’s working,” Taas said.
    “So far.” The fact that Homer responded to the psiphon with
written instead of verbal replies made me doubt the Allieds had spent much time
setting it up.
    I rubbed my hand up and down my arm, a habit I had picked up
years ago. Many Jagernauts did it. My thoughts of the biomech web in my body
worried at my mind like an animal caught in a trap. The web had four parts:
fiberoptic threads; sockets in my wrists, spine, neck and ankles; the spinal
node; and bio-electrodes.
    The fiberoptics had been bioengineered into my body. Homer
sent signals to one tip of the psiphon, which passed them to a thread in my
wrist. From there, they traveled along threads to my brain or spinal node.
Nano-sized electrodes in my brain cells translated the l’s