Dirk Pitt, you are the man responsible for the disaster at Orion Lake, said Qin Shang, speaking to the photograph as though Pitt were standing in the room before him. Then one night in '50 I got drunk and offered my resignation and that was the end of my career. I always reckoned I might be a good soldier, but the whiskey made sure I never was. Fact is, twenty years later I was still no more than a captain, and I knew I wasn't going to rise any higher than a captain, and I wasn't ever going to kill anything more dangerous to the Republic than a Comanche or a Mexican. Swynyard extended a pistollike finger at Starbuck and made a clicking noise of affirmation.Forty-sixth out of forty-six. I couldn't help it and I could see that he was about to laugh, too. She heard it, and I saw the pain in her expression. And there was a pain in my flesh, by no means unbearable, but something which I would have healed by the Mother, if I had found her there. And I knew that something must have befallen our Mother, something had caused this Great Fire, and that only those in the temple would know what it was. Because they had spoken of the sun and of our burning. Why did I go back to Alexandria after this terrible loss? she asked wearily.Because the temple blood drinkers had told me that the Mother was the Queen of all. Sometimes Gerolaman would invite her into his office to have an informal chat and discuss her opinions about this or that student. She was pleasant enough to everyone, even those she genuinely liked, but she kept those preferences to herself. She ignored overheard insinuations that she was cold, aloof, too haughty, conceited, stuck-up. She often dropped in when it came to the troubleshooting: She liked matching wits with the other students but she never permitted herself to become too friendly with any of them. Over the next four years, other courses were given by Gerolaman at Altair which the Rowan was not specifically required to attend. And so they ran, heads down or averted whenever they passed through a pool of light, Miller cursing feelingly and often at the unaccustomed exercise. Not that they were in any desperate hurry for themselves, but nothing could have been more conspicuous-and suspicious-than the sight of a couple of men walking calmly along in the middle of all that urgent activity. Mallory and Miller ran too, once or twice through groups of men milling round the tailboard of a truck. Everywhere there was complete confusion-a bustling purposeful confusion as one would expect with the seasoned troops of the Alpenkorps, but confusion nevertheless, with much shouting of orders, blowing of whistles, starting of truck engines, sergeants running to and fro chivvying their men into marching order or into the waiting transports.
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