Justice and Shadow

Excerpt

Shadow was in the hotroom sweating out cancers when the signal came in. An encysted tumor, shiny and red as a pomegranate seed, gleamed for a moment against the skin of her arm before she brushed it away. Where the tumor had emerged, the edges of the wound were already beginning to close up. In a minute the black satin of her skin was once again whole and unblemished.

She had been meditating, cut off from the Weave, but the signal overrode her preferences and plunged her back abruptly into shared dataspace. Information flooded in as sounds and sensations: the chatter of the other triples working the same section of the sail, the flutter of telemetry from Ortheia and her own bodyware. There were whispers of message traffic from members of other clades--linesmen and spindoctors and thrusters--and even the distant murmur of the passengers – grubs and ghosts in their shielded bubbles. And above it all, imperious and urgent, the voice of the Chief Sailmaker calling assembly.