Shadow Creatures Read Online Free PDF Page B

fashionable than the chinos you always wear. I can’t say what the walking will be like, but you’ll look fine.’
    ‘The walking will look perfectly natural,’ her mother added. ‘It may take a little time to get used to them, a little practice in private, but nobody who doesn’t already
know will be able to tell.’
    Silence fell across the room as they all looked at Calum. He just stared into the box as if it contained all the secrets of the future – which, Gecko considered, it did. At least for
Calum.
    ‘All right,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ll give it a go.’ He glanced at Gillian Livingstone. ‘How do we do this? Do you want me to try them on now? I warn you, if
I’ve got to take my trousers off I’m not going to do it in public.’
    ‘There’s a process to go through,’ Gillian replied, ‘and we can’t do it here. It has to be done at Robledo Mountains Technology. They have to calibrate the headband
sensors quite carefully to pick up what the brain is doing.’
    Gecko pointed at the sticker on the side of the case. ‘But they are in Las Cruces, New Mexico. That is in America, I think.’
    Gillian raised a hand to reassure him. ‘They have a facility in Hampshire, near Farnborough. Calum can go down there some time in the next few days and they will spend a few hours fitting
the bionic legs to him, making sure he’s comfortable and then tracking what his brainwaves look like whenever he’s thinking about various movements of his own legs. I’m told
it’s a very simple process.’
    Calum nodded. ‘OK. I’ll do it.’
    ‘Wonderful. I’ll get the people at Robledo to get in touch. Which reminds me – do you still have that robot – ARLENE?’
    Calum nodded. ‘It’s downstairs in the warehouse area. Rhino dropped it off when he and the others returned from Georgia.’
    ‘That’s fine. It was Robledo that originally developed it before it was passed across to the US army at the Aberdeen Proving Ground. They asked me if you could bring it back when you
go across to them. I think they want to download the logs from the robot’s memory core and assess its performance. There’s some invaluable data in there on real-life conditions, they
think.’
    ‘Logs?’ Calum said carefully. He glanced across at Gecko.
    ‘Geographical locations, speeds across terrain, how bumpy the ground was – that kind of thing. It will tell them a lot about how the robot coped with everything you asked it to
do.’
    Gecko checked that Gillian wasn’t looking his way, and then quickly shook his head. He already knew what Calum was thinking. The robot’s memory logs contained the exact location of
the Almasti village, and Calum didn’t want anyone else knowing where the last Neanderthals were living.
    Gecko glanced across at Natalie. She was looking worried, but he suspected it was for a different reason. She clearly hadn’t told her mother that she had been kidnapped by mercenary
representatives of Nemor Incorporated and had only been rescued when she climbed on to ARLENE’s back and raced across the Georgian foothills to safety.
    ‘That sounds fine,’ Calum said casually. ‘I’ll get Tara to give it a quick once-over before Robledo take it back, just to make sure it’s in good
condition.’
    And just to make sure that the robot’s memory is wiped of any GPS coordinates before it gets handed across
, Gecko thought with a smile. He nodded briefly to Calum. If Calum
wasn’t around, he would make sure that Tara knew what to do.
    ‘I should be going. Things to do; people to see. Natalie – you’ll be OK here for a while, won’t you? I’ll see you back at the hotel later.’ She turned, as if
she was about to head to the door, and then turned back. ‘Oh, I nearly forgot,’ she said casually, ‘I need to ask you about that DNA sample that Natalie and the others picked up
for you in Georgia. Have you decided what to do with it yet?’
    Calum looked over to Gecko again and raised an