“I don’t have ice water in my veins. I just know how far away those explosions are, so I’m not going to worry about them right now.”

“How far away are they?”

“About five klicks. The docks, where the duke’s forces are trying to bury a contingent of the rebels under shattered cargo containers. It probably won’t work. Most of the rebels are long gone from there, moving to occupy strategic resources. You and I are going in the other direction anyway.”

“We are?”

“Yes. Dad sent me to collect you.”

“Why?”

“One, because there’s a war on, and although I don’t expect that shelling is going to get any closer, there’s no guarantee the university, including your graduate housing, isn’t going to be on fire by the time the sun sets today.”

“That bad,” Marce said.

Vrenna nodded. “Yup. You may not remember this, but the house has a watch set on it by the Imperial Marines. If a rebel comes within a klick of it they’re likely to be vaporized from space. That makes it the safest place on the surface of the planet right now.”

“Did Dad tell that to the duke?”

“You know, I think he might have skipped mentioning that to him.”

Marce grinned again at that.

“Two, Dad wants to show you something.”

“What is it?”

“Data.”

“Anytime you want to be less ambiguous, Vren, that’d be great.”

“He said you would know what it was, and that it wouldn’t be something we’d talk about out loud in public.”

“Oh,” Marce said.

“Yup.”

Another crummp.

“That sounded closer,” Marce said.

“It wasn’t. But we should leave anyway. We wait any longer, someone might take it into their heads to start taking potshots at the skimmer.”

* * *

Someone took a potshot at the skimmer anyway, several times during the flight.

“Go faster,” Marce urged his sister.

“Anytime you want to fly a skimmer just over the city rooftops, without crashing into some random chimney, you let me know,” she replied.

In lieu of bothering his sister further, Marce looked out the skimmer bubble at the streets of Opole. Most of the residential streets were untouched, with only a few glimpses of people carrying things out to their cars, as if packing for a move. The main streets, however, were clogged with cars, and several were jammed to a standstill.

That took effort; Marce suspected some drivers had disabled autodrive to take control of their cars directly, either in a panic or because they suspected the government was somehow going to disable their movement. The end result either way was that these newly independent cars were messing things up for everyone else.

And every now and again, Marce would see columns of soldiers moving along the streets, armored vehicles among them, off to secure and/or liberate one strategic element of the city or another.