TigerEgern

Corral. Not gravel. Corral, crushed into gravel-sized lumps. M nodded to herself. Old man Donahue knew not only how to make money, but also how to spend it. Harvesting corral was as banned and as illegal as blowing up entire inhabited planets. Give or take a scrap or two. Re-purposing existing corral was also illegal. It had to be released into the habitat it came from. Mostly as a sign of penance. The mansion was one of the oldest on the planet, but built after the ban. A disputable slip of paper provided the Donahue family a fig leaf of decency. Just one of many ways the family demonstrated, that the law is only the law until you bend it till it breaks. She parked the car behind the mansion. Her rank and position did not provide her with the status that would make the use of the main entrance acceptable. Unlike her boss, and the chairman and the vice chair of the board. If this had been the late Roman republic, the Donahues would have been a leading family of the great Patrician

Operative 17 carefully packed the unused parts of the aid kit back into the box. Sarah had burst open her stitches when she fought off the ghost in her nightmare. The tell-tale bloodstains on the wall, the mattress, the pillow, and the floor told of a brutal fight and a lost battle. The lacerations told another tale. One that offered Operative 17 some consolation and a touch of hope: the wounds were already closing. The stitches were not even sixteen hours old, but the healing was already well on its way. The compromised and somewhat severed radial nerve had already sealed up the epineurium, and Sarah showed no signs of impaired motor functions of any of the twelve muscles ennervated by the radial nerve, and the capillaries had sealed before the suture had pierced the skin. Sarah had, in plain words, healed at a rapid pace. She was pregnant, and her unborn child would dispatch stem cells to repair injuries to speed up recovery, but the pace was . . . unnatural. Operative 17 had to

"And behold: the unsaid prayers were answered, the silenced tongues sang of better days to come, and from the smallest of seeds grew a new world tree."

Kiss her Kiss her not Kiss her Kiss her not I kiss her Whether the petals Tell me to Or not.

"One-more-step-one-more-step..." Sarah hissed. Her feet flew up the endless stairs of the tower crane. One step at a time. Right foot-left-foot-right-foot-left-foot in endless succession. The crane had a service height of three hundred meters. The hook and anchor block were four meters in total, and the rails the crane ran on were two and a half meters below the ground level of the freight rail line, and the steps were each sixteen centimeters tall, and there was a small ladder leading from the base of the titanic rolling wheels on which the crane ran. A total of three hundred and four meters of stairs had to be traversed. Child's game next to the towering one thousand meters cranes. They didn't see much use, though. Very few ground-to-orbit lift offs took place, and positioning booster rockets to lifting rockets were just about the only use the thousand meters cranes saw. Most lifts to low orbit or geostationary orbit were performed by the space elevators. Should the need arise

"Nice day for a bit of feather care, eh?" "Nice day, indeed." "How is the old missis?" "Splendid. She had her feathers anted yesterday." "Let her take a day off, eh? Everyone needs a bit of away-time from the old nest." "Absolutely. She had her claws polished, too." "Luxury." "Well earned, I might add." "Hear, hear." "And your missis?" "Ooh, she's going tomorrow. She's looking forward to it, too." "Who wouldn't? Say, have you been oiling your beak?" "Just a bit of feather wax. Don't mind looking dapper for the missis." "Dandy. Feather wax is underrated." "And how are your eggs coming along?" "Ooh, quite promising. And yours? I heard you have five of them?" "They seem to come along splendidly. And the little old missis laid an extra, this year." "The caterpillars are out and about this year. We thought of an extra egg, too. Four is an even number, though." "Look after the math, and the math looks after you, eh?" "Absolutely. Say hello to your missis, eh?" "Thank you, I shall. And the