Julie E. Czerneda - Web Shifters 02 - Changing Vision

VIP免费

2024-12-19 0 0 950.76KB 275 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

background-1--2--3--4--5--6--7--8--9--a--b--c--d--e--f--g--clear-

color -1--2--3--4--5--6--7--8--9-

CHANGING VISION

Webshifters 2

Julie E. Czerned

Contents

Elsewhere

Chapter 1: Office Morning;

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

Chapter 2: Office Afternoon

Chapter 3: Cliff's Edge Night

Elsewhere

Chapter 4: Cliff's Edge Night;

Elsewhere

Chapter 5: Restaurant Morning

Chapter 6: Conservatory Afternoon

Chapter 7: Starship Night

Elsewhere

Chapter 8: Starship Afternoon;

Elsewhere

Chapter 9 : School Morning;

Elsewhere

Chapter 10: School Afternoon

Chapter 11: School Night;

Elsewhere

Chapter 12: School Morning;

Elsewhere

Chapter 13: School Afternoon

Elsewhere

Chapter 14: School Night;

Elsewhere

Chapter 15: Freighter Night;

Elsewhere

Chapter 16: Starship Morning;

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

Elsewhere

Chapter 17: Warship Morning

Elsewhere

Chapter 18: Galley Morning

Elsewhere

Chapter 19: Galley Afternoon;

Elsewhere

Chapter 20: Warship Night

Elsewhere

Chapter 21: Flight Deck Night

Elsewhere

Chapter 22: Chartroom Night

Elsewhere

Chapter 23: Brig Night;

Elsewhere

Chapter 24: Flight Deck Morning; Shuttle Afternoon

Elsewhere

Chapter 25: Freighter Morning

Elsewhere

Chapter 26: Hold Night;

Elsewhere

Chapter 27: Tank Afternoon

Elsewhere

Chapter 28: Tank Night

Elsewhere

Chapter 29: Hydroponics Morning

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

Elsewhere

Chapter 30: Hydroponics Afternoon

Elsewhere

Chapter 31: Hold Morning;

Elsewhere

Chapter 32: Station Afternoon

Elsewhere

Chapter 33: Festival Afternoon;

Elsewhere

Chapter 34: Gallery Night

Elsewhere

Chapter 35: Subbasement Night

Elsewhere

Chapter 36: 'Digger Night

Elsewhere

Chapter 37: Shipcity Morning

Elsewhere

Chapter 38: Seaside Afternoon;

Elsewhere

Chapter 39: Shuttle Night;

Elsewhere

Chapter 40: Lounge Morning

Elsewhere

Chapter 41: Asteroid Afternoon

Elsewhere

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

Chapter 42: Asteroid Afternoon

Elsewhere

Chapter 43: Asteroid Night

Elsewhere

Chapter 44: Asteroid Midnight

Elsewhere

Chapter 45: Asteroid Morning

Elsewhere

Chapter 46: Asteroid Afternoon

Elsewhere

Chapter 47: Med Room Afternoon

Elsewhere

Chapter 48: Storeroom Afternoon;

Elsewhere

Chapter 49: Hydroponics Afternoon

Elsewhere

Chapter 50: Office Morning;

Elsewhere

Chapter 51: Warehouse Afternoon

Elsewhere

Chapter 52: Cliff's Edge Night

Elsewhere

Julie E. Czerneda

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

CHANGING VISION

Web Shifters 2

One human knew what she truly was—but those who suspected were determined to destroy her!

***

CAUGHT IN A WEB OF HER OWN MAKING—

Esen-alit-Quar had violated the First Rule of her species when she revealed her existence to a human

named Paul Ragem. And though both Paul and Esen had survived, others of Esen's Web had not been so

fortunate. Es could hardly believe that fifty years had passed since the terrifying events which had nearly

cost her her life and which had forced Paul to give up everything a human treasured—family, friends,

even his own identity—to protect the secret of her continued survival. In that time they had built a new

life together out on the Fringe. They had a successful export company, friends and associates.

Esen, now known as Esolesy Ki and wearing the form of a Lishcyn—a species rare enough in the

Commonwealth and never seen in the Fringe—was perfectly content to remain on the world of Minas

XII, leaving it to Paul to travel the starways on company business. Meanwhile she used their vast

information resources to search for any signs that others of her kind had found their galaxy.

What neither Es nor Paul could foresee was that a simple "vacation" trip would plunge the two of them

into the heart of a diplomatic nightmare—and threaten to expose both Es and Paul to the hunters who

had never been convinced of their destruction…

ISBN 0-88677-904-9

The Finest in DAW Science Fiction

from JULIE E. CZERNEDA:

Web Shifters:

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

BEHOLDER'S EYE (#1)

CHANGING VISION (#2)

The Trade Pact Universe:

A THOUSAND WORDS FOR STRANGER (#1)

TIES OF POWER (#2)

http://www.czerneda.com

Julie E. Czerneda

CHANGING VISION

DAW BOOKS, INC.

DONALD A. WOLLHEIM, FOUNDER

375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

ELIZABETH R. WOLLHEIM

SHEILA E. GILBERT

PUBLISHERS

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

Cover art by Luis Royo.

DAW Book Collectors No. 1160.

DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Putnam Inc.

All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly

coincidental.

First Printing, August 2000

DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED

U.S. PAT. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

—MARCA REGISTRADA.

HECHO EN U.S.A

PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

For Jennifer Lynn Czerneda

This has been the hardest one yet to write, which seems only fair. It was an impossible task from the

start. I can't possibly distill the love and pride I feel for you into mere words. I've tried several times and

failed. Perhaps if I had an immense and lovely lake into which I could toss diamonds… or some way to

coat the near side of the Moon with sapphires… or… you can see my problem. The canvas isn't

remotely big enough.

So I'll just tell you this, Princess: your Dad and I knew you were something special from the moment you

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

opened your wise blue eyes. You've grown into a spectacular woman: bright, loving, and marvelously

brave. May you have joy and adventures as well as warm, comfy moments—and remember, the way

home is through our hearts.

Mom

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Book four. The most fun yet! I'd need a lot more room to respond to all the kindnesses done to me this

year, but I'll do my best.

Thank you, Sheila Gilbert, for your extraordinary efforts to read manuscript during the millennium

rollover, despite house construction and visitors. You caught all my lazy and shy spots, improving this

story immensely. A special thanks to my alpha reader, Roxanne BB Hubbard, for thoughtful edits and

thumping at the right moments.

I'd like to thank the original Lefebvre, Chase, and Sandner for kindly letting me use their names, brave

souls. I promised no maiming, but, for the record, your fictional characters have nothing to do with the

real you (except any nice bits).

I must single out a particular bunch for their wonderful support and encouragement this past year: my

newsgroup. If I'd known all these talented and interesting folks would be there, I'd have jumped in

sooner. While I can't possibly fit you all, I'd like to thank Janet BF Chase, Annette Griessman, Jason

FFTS Simcoe, Kim McLean, Beverley Meincke, Matt & Karen Cecile, Nicole Hare, Ruth Stuart,

Samuel Paik, Iris Peace, David Brukman, Lara Herrera, Liz Bennefeld, Michael Picray, Tim Bowie, Don

Bassie, and Alan Mietlowski. And Anne Bishop, who drops in to kindly share the fun and herself.

My sincere thanks to all those who were so very excited for me during my run at the Campbell Award,

including James Van Pelt, Nalo Hopkinson, Cindy Huckle, and Lyn McConchie.

My thanks to everyone at DAW Books, especially Sean, Debra, and Amy. I'm very happy to finally

acknowledge the most able and thoughtful work of Paula Greenberg, who copy-edits all of my

manuscripts, alien names and all. And Luis, you keep getting better. Wow!

Thanks, Jennifer and Scott. Your encouragement and interest makes this a joy for me. (Not to mention

your skill at sneaking into my office to see if I'm really working.)

And thank you, Roger. For what this time? For everything.

Elsewhere

^»

"FIFTY years."

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

A drop of sweat coalesced on the bald head of the Human standing at the end of the long table, a drop

large enough to create its own runnel over his forehead, hesitate in a bushy eyebrow, then push through

to land in one eye. The Human blinked involuntarily, but remained stiffly at attention, as if pinned in place

by the glare of the lights aimed his way. "You don't appreciate the circumstances, sir. There are…"

"Fifty years without a trace, without a sign, without proof, Project Leader Kearn." Out of the shadows,

fingernails drummed a staccato on the table, a seven-part rhythm oddly disturbing to those accustomed to

a different number of fingers per hand. "Five decades in which this monster of yours—this evil

incarnate—hasn't shown itself. In which you've been unable to convince any of our predecessors that the

only one in existence didn't die that day." There was a pause as the fingers opened a file. "No one here

denies your scholarly accomplishments, Project Leader Kearn. Your research into, ah, yes, into the

commonalities of the folklore concerning such creatures—among what I find a frankly astonishing number

of species and cultures—has added greatly to our understanding of one another. You are to be

commended." The file was snapped closed. "But even you must admit actually hunting for this Esen

Monster is a criminal waste of time and resources."

"It's just a matter of time, Horn Slatth," the Human named Lionel Kearn offered numbly, finding it hard to

control his wild impatience. It was Her fault he was embarrassed like this over and over again; Her fault

he had to constantly remind these bureaucrats and their lackeys of the danger posed by such utter

alienness.

It was Her fault he'd lost his first and only command fifty years ago.

"I'll bring you the evidence," Kearn continued, fighting the tendency of his voice to develop a whining

note. Sector Commissioner Slatth, as most Niderons, tended to a regrettable aggression when faced with

weakness of any sort—even this smooth and sophisticated diplomat had inflated his nostril hood in

instinctive threat several times during Kearn's briefing. And the others here—three Humans, the bagful of

Rands spilling off a chair, and a doleful pile of crystal at the end of the table he was supposed to believe

was the representative from Picco's Moon—well, none of them were any better. They'd lost patience

with him and with his quest even more quickly than the last set.

As he'd done many times before, Kearn consoled himself with the fact that his meandering through

Commonwealth space brought him into differing jurisdictions quite regularly, insuring a fresh stream of

politicians and the chance to continue his work.

It also meant the same old arguments and resisting the same skepticism. "You've admitted my research

has been extensive. I've found shapeshifter legends and horror stories everywhere. There must be more

than one creature. And the Esen Monster can't hide what She is," Kearn insisted firmly. "Not forever."

"Forever isn't an issue, Kearn," Slatth almost hissed. "Your funding and career lasting to this particular

year's end is. Do we understand one another?"

The pause following Slatth's words lengthened as Kearn fumbled for some meaningful rebuttal. Before

he could speak, one of the other Humans from the meeting took advantage of his hesitation. "For all of

this," the committee member from Inhaven poked a stylo dismissively at the huge stack of plas disks and

other reports Kearn had willingly supplied. "For all of this, Project Leader, I remain unconvinced you are

correct in attributing the events you witnessed to some biological entity. How could such a being exist

outside of fairy tales? Is it not more likely your so-called monster was a Kraal device: some new weapon

tech being tested? You know how paranoid they can be about their military secrets. I've heard rumors of

a so-called 'Nightstalker' device—a terrifying biological weapon the five major family clans abandoned as

too dangerous, although I believe the term they used was 'inelegant.' Isn't this device more likely than

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

background-1--2--3--4--5--6--7--8--9--a--b--c--d--e--f--g--clear-color-1--2--3--4--5--6--7--8--9- CHANGINGVISIONWebshifters2ByJulieE.CzernedContentsElsewhereChapter1:OfficeMorning;GeneratedbyABCAmberLITConverter,http://www.processtext.com/abclit.htmlChapter2:OfficeAfternoonChapter3:Cliff'sEdgeNightE...

展开>> 收起<<

Julie E. Czerneda - Web Shifters 02 - Changing Vision.pdf

共275页,预览55页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Julie E. Czerneda - Web Shifters 02 - Changing Vision

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: