Crossover Read Online Free PDF

boomed, a deep, guttural rumbling that echoed strangely off the buildings. Huddled under their umbrellas, people looked up. A couple of teenage girls laughed and chattered, hurrying on to where the pedestrian cover made a sheltered walk, safe from the rain save for the occasional driving gust.
    Up ahead, a man and woman hurried from cover to a waiting aircab, clambering quickly inside as the doors swung closed — then a building whine, clear and loud above the rush and hiss of the road traffic, and the lights along the pedestrian walk flashed red. People stopped behind the yellow lines, watching as the aircab lifted smoothly away from the cross-striped landing zone and into the air. Sandy stopped too, feeling the familiar static charge prickling at her hair, like pins and needles, then fading as the engine note changed and the aircab accelerated up and away, and the pedestrians walked on again. The next cab in line rolled forward, and the next behind it, rain spilling and beading on slanted windscreens.
    In the air above, through the water-stained glass of the ped-cover, Sandy could see the next one coming in to land, taking up the final place in the queue, and the lights at that end began to flash yellow. She had a clear sense of the descending aircab's landing frequency, talking simple, directional binary, up and down the scale as she stepped back quickly to clear the next yellow line. An interesting binary, though, she thought as she walked. A different basic notation from most machine languages. It stood out very clearly.
    Thunder crackled, high pitched and racing haphazardly across the sky, then plummeting to a deep, booming rumble that shook the air for several long, ponderous seconds. She fancied she could smell it in the air, that warm ozone-smell of a thunderstorm, alive with energy. Behind her, the aircab settled to the ground with a whining thrum of engines.
    Again she sensed the binary tone. Reflexively she broke the signal down as she walked, segmenting it into parts. Visualised the odd branches off the third-phase interactive modulators, and the compressed storage segments that they serviced ... She sidestepped through the oncoming traffic beneath the long ped-cover, seeing her way without really looking, eyes distant and unfocused. Yes, that was a high band, big meg carrier. It had levels that she could not penetrate, as brief as her reception had been. Probably it was the lightning. Interesting.
    She sensed it twice more on the lightrail train, a faintly ghosting presence against the background traffic. The carriages hummed smoothly past rain-wet streets and the occasional flashing light of an intersection. From her seat by the window, she saw several more lightning flashes, gleaming brightly off the tower windows. Above the train's electric whine could be heard the faint, suggestive rumblings of thunder.
    It failed to stop the air traffic though, she noted with an upward glance out of the window. Aircars moved in smooth, curving lines among the towers, obscured briefly by a passing flurry of wet greenery, then visible again. Tower glass reflected an overcast grey, grim and silent beneath the darkening sky.
    "Not much of a day, is it?" the woman sitting beside her said, peering past into the bleak, grey light. Sandy mentally disconnected herself from the net connections she hadn't even realised she'd been using, and smiled.
    "I like the lightning," she said. "It makes a day interesting."
    The woman gave her a thoughtful look. "That's one way of putting it." And was silent.
    Content that there would be no further conversation for the time being, Sandy re-established her connections. Frequency input involved necessarily less interactivity than a direct linkup, but it served the purposes of a basic search. As before, she went straight to her records. All was in order. No new visitors. She wondered idly how long it would be before one of her interviews resulted in a job offer. And wandered down one of those