Patchwerk - Softcover

Tallerman, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0765387778 ISBN 13: 9780765387776

Verlag: Tor.com, 2016

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David Tallerman is the author of the Tales of Easie Damasco fantasy trilogy, the graphic novel Endangered Weapon B and around a hundred short stories, comic and film scripts.

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Patchwerk

By David Tallerman, Lee Harris

Tom Doherty Associates

Copyright © 2016 David Tallerman
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-7653-8777-6

Contents

Title Page, 
Dedication, 
Begin Reading, 
About the Author, 
Also by David Tallerman, 
Newsletter Sign-up, 
Copyright Page, 

CHAPTER 1

The TransContinental was packed, as always.

As Dran Florrian turned away from the observation window, a young man in a logoed coverall, sour with the odour of three-day-old sweat, brushed too close — and for a moment Florrian saw, vivid against the deep black of his skin, the pink of gills at his throat, pulsing voraciously. A popular mod these days amongst the worst-off: the man would be paid a small incentive for the work his reconfigured respiratory system did in filtering the blackened atmosphere below.

In here, however, in mid-leap above the smog layer, the air was relatively clear, the gills' incessant palpitation without purpose. Florrian knew — as the man surely did not — that the blood-poisoning his modifications were inflicting hour by hour would kill their owner long before his tiny government stipend ever amounted to anything. The incentive was a small, wheedling fix, when what was needed was the vast, the drastic, the world-defining.

An alarm trilled in Florrian's ear — and though he'd been expecting it, he still started. The young man eyed him curiously, and Florrian wondered if he was an agent, as anyone on the TransCon could be and one in every twenty surely were. He forced calm, gave the young man a carefully measured smile that said, Nothing I'm doing is any of your business. The young man turned away, and after quick consideration, pushed deeper into the TransCon's lounge, elbowing past a woman with tightly bound grey hair above engineer's epaulettes, who looked at him with hatred. The press closed behind him and he was gone.

Florrian took the measure of the lounge once more, his gaze drifting over the moulded plastic of the benches, cramped with bodies pressed so close that they appeared to overlap. Looking back over his shoulder, he gave one last glance to the protruding bulge of the observation window, the TransCon's only slight concession to form over function. Before he started moving he singled out one head, turned somewhat away from him, a woman with bronzed skin and lustrous black hair cut above the ears. He gave a half nod, as though in greeting, and sidled towards her.

Only at the last moment did he veer aside. His true objective was a door marked NO ENTRY in heavy block case, recessed discreetly from the public space. It was unguarded; but unguarded did not mean the same as unwatched, and neither implied that it wasn't alarmed. Florrian considered the back of his hand, the small diamond of discoloration nestled just beneath the skin. He had his doubts about the crack on his Ident Plant. Necessity had narrowed his contacts to only the most shadowy and disreputable — and in the end, to a man whose name he'd never asked or been offered.

"What will my new identity be?" Florrian had asked. "What does it say?"

The old hacker barely glanced up from his work. "You don't need to know."

"What if they stop me?"

"If they stop you it's already over." The old man's eyes drifted to Florrian's right forearm, crinkled, refocused, as though they were seeing for an instant through skin and sinew — as for all Florrian knew they were. "You've got something there, don't you? They stop you, do for yourself quick ... or else they'll do you slow."

Florrian knew what would happen to him if he was caught. No crime

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Tor.com
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0765387778
• ISBN 13: 9780765387776
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Anzahl der Seiten: 138
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar