Datasets:
BlinAI
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Testo

Dataset card Data Studio Files
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"Sonic boom," Jonny said promptly. He'd cut in his auditory enhancers halfway through the sound and caught the distinctive whine of Troft thrusters beneath t...
"Oh." The pencil resumed its movement.
Standing up, Jonny stepped to the window and looked out. The apartment was six stories up, but even so there wasn't much of a view. Cranach was a tall city, ...
"See anything?" Danice asked from the table.
Jonny shook his head. "Blue sky, skyrisers-and a little girl who's not doing her homework," he added, turning back to give her a mock glare.
Danice grinned, the very childlike expression not touching the more adult seriousness in her eyes. Jonny had often wondered how much she knew of her parents'...
He didn't know. But if she didn't need a distraction from what was happening out there, he certainly did. Seating himself beside her again, he gave his mind ...
It was nearly three hours later before the click of a key in a lock came from the outer door. Jonny, his hands automatically curled into fingertip laser firi...
He was across the room before Danice's mother was two steps inside the door, taking her unbandaged left arm from her husband's tired-looking grip. "What got ...
"Hornet," Marja Tolan said, her voice heavy with pain-killers. Two of the civilians brushed Jonny aside and got to work with the apartment's bulky medical ki...
"Locked in on the click of her popcorn gun's firing mechanism, we think," Marja's husband Kem added tiredly from the table and Jonny's former chair. Fatigued...
Jonny nodded grimly. Popcorn guns had hitherto been remarkably safe weapons to use, as such things went. Their tiny inertially guided missiles emitted no rad...
Jonny looked at Cally Halloran, raised his eyebrows in a question so common now that he didn't even need to vocalize it. And Halloran understood. "We won't k...
"For all the good the damn things have done so far," Imel Deutsch growled. Stalking to a window, he stood there facing out, his hands clasped in a rigid para...
The room was suddenly quiet. Stomach churning, Jonny looked back at Halloran. "What happened?"
"Cobra casualty," Halloran sighed. "One of MacDonald's team, we think, though visibility was pretty poor. The people who were supposed to be guarding one of ...
Jonny nodded, feeling an echo of the bitterness Deutsch was almost visibly radiating . . . of the bitterness he himself had nearly choked on twice since thei...
Deutsch, born and raised on Adirondack, hadn't gotten over it at all.
"Any idea of casualties generally?" Jonny asked Halloran.
"Low, I think, except for the Cobra," the other said. Jonny winced at the unspoken implication-more common lately than he liked-that Cobra lives were intrins...
"No idea," Jonny shook his head. "Nothing's come in on the pulse receiver from off-world confirming it."
"It'd be just like those phrijpushers to put a last-minute hold in the drop without telling us."
Jonny shrugged, turned back to the people working on Marja's arm. "How's it look?"
"Typical hornet injury," one of them said. "Lots of superficial damage, but it'll all heal okay. She's out of action for a while, though."
And for that time, at least, Danice would have one parent out of the immediate fray.
If that mattered. Jonny had already seen far too many uninvolved civilians lying dead in the middle of cross fires.
The next few minutes were quiet ones. The two civilians finished with Marja's arm and left, taking the group's small supply of combat equipment with them for...
In the first few months, Jonny reflected, they might have done just that. But after three years most of the words had already been said, most of the plans al...
For now, the gestures merely indicated fatigue. "Tomorrow," Jonny reminded them of the next high-level tactical meeting as they headed for the door and their...
Halloran nodded. Deutsch merely twitched a corner of his lip.
And another wonderful day on Adirondack was drawing to a close. If the wall can stand it, Jonny repeated to himself, so can I.
* * *
The three people seated at the table looked very much like everyone else in Cranach these days: tired, vaguely dirty, and more than a little scared. It was h...
It was even harder, in the face of Cobra and civilian casualties, to admit that they really were reasonably good at their jobs.
"The first news is that, despite some crossed signals, the latest Cobra drop was successful," Borg Weissmann told the silent Central Sector underground team ...
"How many did we get?" someone sitting against the side wall asked.
"Cranach's share is thirty: six new teams," Weissmann said. "Most of those will go to North Sector to replace those that got lost in the airstrip attack a mo...
Jonny glanced at Deutsch, saw the other grimace at the memory. Their team hadn't been involved in that one at all, but details like that didn't appear to aff...
"We'll also be getting one of the teams here," Weissmann continued. "Ama's already made arrangements for their living quarters, identity backgrounds, and all...
"In other words, a raid." The tone of Halloran's voice made it clear it wasn't a question.
Weissmann hesitated, then nodded. "I know you don't like to run operations so closely together, but I think it's something we ought to do."
" 'We'?" Deutsch spoke up from his usual corner seat. "You mean 'you,' don't you?"
Weissmann licked his lips, a brief flicker of tongue that advertised his discomfort. Deutsch had once been a sort of social buffer zone between the Cobras an...
"Not carrying your part is what got another Cobra killed yesterday," Deutsch said quietly. "Maybe we'd better do this one ourselves."
Ama Nunki shifted in her seat. "You, of all people, should know better than to expect too much from us, Imel. This is Adirondack, not Earth or Centauri-we ha...
"What do you call the past three years-?" Deutsch began hotly.
"On the other hand," Jonny interjected, "Imel may be right on this one. We want a short, tight punch that'll make the Trofts drop door-to-door searches lower...
Weissmann visibly let out a breath, and Jonny felt an easing of tension throughout the room. More and more lately he seemed to be taking Deutsch's old peacek...
"I guess I have to agree with Jonny," Halloran said. "I presume you have some suggestions as to what might be ripe for picking?"
Weissmann turned to Jakob Dane, the third person at the table. "We've come up with four reasonable targets," Dane said. "Of course, we were thinking there'd ...