Fear the Future (The Fear Saga Book 3) Read Online Free PDF Page A

‘EAHL.’
    Neal smiled.
    Neal: ‘yes, mynd, i would like to see that very much.’
    The packet expanded suddenly and overwhelmed Neal, but he was ready for it, and even starting to enjoy the drug-like rush of Mynd’s ‘data packets.’ Suddenly he was above Deception Island once again.
    Whereas before the island had been as clandestine as such a thing could be, the great harbor at its center was now a hub of activity. The USS Truman was even now pulling into the big bay to take its place as the center of operations for the district. But it was only one of seven big ships in the harbor. The rest were cargo ships, laden with raw materials to feed the gaping maw that dominated the small peninsula jutting into the several-mile-wide crater.
    The first of the massive Dome’s creations was long since airborne, its first mission the stuff of future legend, its power providing the backbone to Neal’s newfound military body. But its second creation was coming online now, and it was, in many ways, even more impressive than the first. Less spectacular, perhaps, but still the stuff of dreams only a few years ago.
    It was spiderlike, and it would be the first of four such behemoths. Whereas the Skalm had been singular in purpose, the EAHL would be versatile; where the Skalm had been a scythe, the EAHL would be a fist, as capable of thumping as it was of grasping. It would carry us back to the stars, and it would do so on six great plumes of fusion fire surrounding its central cargo arms.
    It was not an attractive beast, indeed it was ugly at an instinctual level, making your skin crawl when viewed from a distance. The six great engines that surrounded its center could pretty much lift any weight that the team chose to laden it with. But the central mass of the ship had a network of spindly arms lining its underside, like so many insect-like claws and fangs, ready to grasp and hold whatever cargo it was tasked with delivering.
    It was fully eighty meters across, a scale that was difficult to grasp as it was wheeled on a great gantry from the Dome’s open mouth. Had Neal wanted it to, it could have straddled one of the cargo ships in the bay, grasped it, and lifted it clean out of the water, such was its power.
    But it had no such mission. Its first payload was already waiting for it, being unloaded from the hold of one such ship to be grasped in the EAHL’s claws and taken straight up, into space.
    Neal: ‘i see the cable is ready. that is very good. very good indeed.’
    He made a mental note to thank Madeline for her team’s hard work there, and without comment Minnie took the instruction, rippling it outward to Neal’s various assistants and secretaries to be added to his to-do list and then his schedule.
    But his attention remained on the EAHL, and Mynd sensed this and took him inward, to its still dormant engines, waiting to be given life. This was not the unhinged and irrational Skalm, and it would not take Birgit’s level of technical genius to jumpstart this beast, but they were still waiting for their second stringer, as it were, to get up to speed before she attempted to turn the key on the EAHL.
    Neal: ‘¿how is moira doing, is she feeling more comfortable now?’
    Neal spoke of Moira Banks, the Canadian wunderkind they had found among Birgit’s graduate student roster. A protégé and a prodigy, even if she was yet to feel as comfortable with the second moniker as Neal and William were in applying it to her.
    Mynd:
    His acquiescence was unspoken, a permission given from directly within him, and in a moment he was at their virtual sides. William, embodied in the ether as he was now in life as well, in an avatar; and Moira, only twenty-seven but wise beyond her years, an old soul, her avatar imbued with all the reticence she felt toward the task she had found herself lumbered with.
    Moira: ‘neal! wow! hi! still