Read Chronicles of the Invaders 1: Conquest for Free Online Page B

but because her mother had placed great store by such occasions. With her mother no longer alive, her father maintained that he had to celebrate Syl’s birth for both of them, and each year he had done his utmost to make it a day to remember. On her tenth birthday, they had taken his private skimmer to South America, and picnicked at Machu Picchu in Peru. On her thirteenth birthday, they had traveled to Florence, and he had given her a Michelangelo cartoon saved from the destruction of Rome, for she adored art.
    But today he was too busy for her, and Syl feared that this might be setting a pattern for the future. Her eyes felt hot. She tried to hold back the tears, but one managed to escape. She brushed it away furiously. No, she would not cry, not here. Running back to her chambers, she lay down on her bed to concentrate on stemming her tears. She tried to imagine what her mother might have said to her were she still alive. She’d probably have told her that she was acting like a spoiled child, and that her father loved her but sometimes the requirements of his job meant that he could not spend as much time with her as she might wish. He would make it up to her later.
    Syl sat up and rubbed her face. On her desk, unnoticed until now, was a box tied with brightly colored ribbons: her father’s gift to her.
    “Oh!” she said aloud, childlike in anticipation as she bounded from her bed to inspect the parcel. It was heavy, so she unwrapped it where it was, exposing a plain wooden box. Inside the box, nestled in tissue, lay the bronze sculpture of a man’s hand. She recognized it immediately and gave a yelp of glee, for it was La Main , a cast of Picasso’s right hand sculpted by the artist himself. It had been part of the collection of the National Gallery of Scotland before the building was looted and burned during the unrest that initially followed the invasion. Some of the collection had been recovered, but the gallery had not been rebuilt, and paintings that had previously been housed there now adorned the walls of Edinburgh Castle. La Main , though, had been believed lost. The cast was one of a series of ten, but the whereabouts of the rest were unknown.
    Syl loved to paint, and there was something in the way that Picasso depicted the world, the way in which he made the familiar strange and new, that appealed deeply to her. She liked the idea of the hand that had created such wonders being rendered in bronze, and now she touched her fingers to it, feeling the cool metal beneath her skin. She smiled despite herself.
    There was a note with it: Art is universal. Let one great artist inspire you to become another.
    She stroked the bronze, finding on it the marks of its maker’s fingers.
    “Thank you,” she whispered.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    L ord Andrus found himself wondering what his daughter would think of his gift to her, even as his personal guards fell into step behind him. She was angry with him now, he knew, but she would not be for long, and he smiled as he thought of the pleasure she’d take in La Main .
    His smile faded as he arrived at the door of the private meeting room adjoining his offices. His guards took up position outside, and he gave them strict instructions that no one, and definitely not his daughter—not again—should be permitted to enter.
    Andrus activated his private lens, not wanting to call up a screen from the castle’s own systems. The tiny lens lay on his right eye, and enabled him to see virtual images superimposed on reality, from street names to weather information and private messages from his general staff if he was away from the castle. Lenses had first been developed for battlefield use; aided by information from drones and overhead satellites, they provided soldiers with maps, direction of enemy fire, and, most important, the enemy’s position. Now many Illyri used them the way humans had once used cell phones: they took calls through lenses, searched for information, watched