“Oh, hell,” she muttered, “this has taken much too long. I’ve got to get back to the office. There’s so much to be done.”
Stepping forward, her daughter took her by one arm and her husband by the other. “Sorry, Lauren,” Jack told her firmly. “Like it or not, you’re taking the rest of the day off.”
For the first time in a long while, the chief of Commonwealth Authority on the full T Class V world known as Fluva found herself overruled.
Seated before the instrument panel of his salvaged and fully refurbished skimmer, Shadrach Hasselemoga contemplated the immensity of southern Viisiiviisii spread out before him. Hard rain ran in serpentine rivulets down the sides of the compact craft, kept clear of the front of the transparent canopy by a strong static charge. One readout was off by a tenth of a total, and he loudly cursed the unknown tech who had been charged with putting it back in proper working order.
Idiots! Morons! Fools and imbeciles, he was surrounded by nothing but. Add to that the need to have to deal with bloated, goggle-eyed two-trunks and smelly, oafish big-ears and it was a wonder he managed to keep a civil tongue in his head. He hated the cursed rain that hardly ever stopped; the turbid, mucky water that receded for only a few weeks out of the year; all the things that crawled and leapt and soared and hopped, that spit and bit and snapped and stung. It was a miserable, wretched dung ball of a world, and it was his misfortune to be stuck on it trying to eke out a living.