"Peter W. Prellwitz - Book 01 - Shards" - читать интересную книгу автора (Prellwitz Peter W)

I accepted. I should try to beat her in some morning just to avoid this.

"Ohaio, boss! Strong and black, just like you drink it."

"Ohaio, Janet. You do enjoy doing this to me, don't you?"

She laughed and followed me into my office. That her Japanese greeting was informal was proof that
she loved to yank my chain. I pressed my hand against the identity scanner and activated the system
interface at my drafting table. I fished Mike, my holographic interface palmtop, out of my pocket and
plugged him into the frame relay. He got busy downloading the night's reports from my team leaders
into his ten terabyte hard RAM. He also took the time to access the massive parallel processors to run
some calculations I'd given him last night. To protect against internal corruption at NATech, Senior
Project Leaders such as myself worked completely independently of the main systems, keeping all our
findings and ideas in our heads and on our powerful palmtops until final download and project
implementation. Though we ran a risk of losing critical data if I was killed and Mike was damaged, it
was even more important that NATech remain a nonpolitical, secret entity. Keeping our own projects
separate was just one of our many safeguards.

I sat on my stool and took an appreciative sip of my coffee.

"Good batch this time, Janet. Grind the beans yourself?"

"Yep. Picked 'em, too. In fact, I just flew in from Columbia ..."

"...and boy, are my arms tired,” I finished for her, and she laughed. Janet had a love of the old jokes. The
older, the better. “Uh-huh. So, what's on the list today?"

"Chris called about an hour ago. He's all hot about his team's mental input project. Guess he's moving
ahead of schedule. He's certainly acting like it.” She made a face. I put the mug down and looked at her
carefully.

"Is he bothering you again, Janet?” I asked quietly.

"Nothing I can kill him for, no. He just has extra things for me to do. All standard stuff, but it feels like
busy work.” Janet only did things that had a purpose-even fetching me coffee served the purpose of
tweaking me-and she hated with a passion doing anything that had no value. She looked at me quickly.
“Don't worry about it, boss. You trained me well, and I'll handle it the right way.

"Moving on,” she continued, trying to get back the tempo, “when Chris isn't calling, it's been Al. He's
desperate to get his hands on you. The Pisces team can't wait to start the show. I gave them some
background stuff and a few of the tidbits we've talked about. That should hold them for a couple of
hours.

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"The boss wants to see you at nine. Debbie called to tell you about an idea she had with the atmosphere