Read A Company of Heroes Book Four: The Scientist for Free Online

overbite making her smile radiantly toothy. Her hair was mahogany, a helmet of corroded iron, counterpointed by a porcelain coloring that ranged from the palest, most translucent tints in her skin to the most luminous hues in her hair, in short, if Rykkla was a work in oils she was a study in watercolor. Her complexion was like a pitcher of cream into which a single drop of blood has fallen. But where Rykkla was as graceful in everything she did as a heron in flight, Bronwyn was as awkward and clumsy as one on land.
    The good eye of an agéd gardener, weeding the flower beds on the far side of the pond, was caught by the figure of the princess, backlit by the brilliant sun, her pale yellow dress transformed into an illuminated nimbus, a lambent vapor that surrounded the bifurcated silhouette of the slim, swaying body, much like a bar of white-hot iron might be swathed in swirling, incandescent gasses. The gardener, who had long ago believed himself beyond the age for such yearnings, swallowed hard against the sudden, unfamiliar, long-forgotten lump that rose in his throat, the stirring of his few unexpectedly surviving, nearly-atrophied hormones. He watched, unmoving, almost unbreathing, as Bronwyn turned and with long, lazy strides drifted back toward the Academy, her rhythmic figure sleepily undulating like the prayerful cobra. The gardener retired his tools and went home early that day, not certain if he were happier or unhappier than he had been in a very long time, but his once cozy little hovel had never before looked so hollow and lonely.

    The shed where the life compartment was being constructed was a barn-like structure with a completely open and unobstructed interior. The capsule itself sat in the middle of the vast expanse of wooden floor, surrounded by a confused welter of shop tools, benches and construction materials, to say nothing of two or three dozen workmen and technicians. Its squat, domed shape stood several feet higher than Bronwyn’s head, while the hexagonal power unit that would eventually be attached to its lower part was separately under construction to one side.
    Where the main rocket was hexagonal in cross-section, the life compartment had a circular base; all of its curves were designed, the professor had explained, to withstand the pressure of its internal atmosphere once it reached the vacuum of outer space. The upper third of the dome was pierced by a ring of small circular deadlights and midway down the side was a larger circular manhole that would eventually be plugged by a substantial semipermanent hatchcover. Beneath was a second smaller manhole that would allow ingress and egress once in an airless environment.
    When she stepped through the wide doorway of the hangar, open against the rising heat of the day, she was greeted by the shop foreman, an engineer named Petro Zirconis. Perhaps of all the scientists at the Academy, Zirconis was the most passionate about the imminent launch of the giant rocket; he devoted himself to its construction with the zealousness normally devoted by the faithful to the erection of a temple, which perhaps he was and it was. A small, compactly-built man, with a large nose and popeyes and a nervous, distracted air, as though he were perpetually afraid he was missing the gist of some joke, he welcomed Bronwyn with earnestness and a quick, tentative half-chuckle, just in case her reply might have been a funny one.
    “It looks nearly finished, Petro,” she said.
    “It is, Princess, it is,” he replied in a hushed tone. “The Work is almost complete.”
    “Wittenoom will be ready to launch in just a week or so, I think, judging from how well things seem to be going.”
    “Yes, yes,” Zirconis muttered, already disinterested in the conversation. He drifted away from the girl and resumed his interrupted work which, at the moment, was the discussion of some complex point or another with one of the engineering draftsmen, who had a sheaf of rolled-up paper