The Machinery of Light Read Online Free PDF Page A

need to be.
    Deeper.
    The man eyes the car around him. Nobody is above the rank of colonel. The man’s only a major, but he’s got pull that goes a little beyond that. Yet right now he’s in the same boat as the rest of them—just Russian officers trying to make their luck go a little further, just soldiers all too glad they got assigned to this train and not the one behind it. There’s nothing back there now. The def-grids are crumbling. American hypersonic missiles are starting to smack into bases in the steppe above them. The train accelerates still further.
    I s something wrong?” says Sarmax.
    “I’m fine,” says Spencer.
    “No you’re not.”
    “No?”
    “You just felt something grab at your mind, right?”
    Spencer blinks. “You too, huh?”
    “How much did you feel?” asks Sarmax.
    “Just the hint of something.”
    “Could you see who?”
    “No idea.”
    Not that he has much experience with stuff this weird. He was hooked up to the Manilishi during the run-in, via some kind oftelepathy that was enabled surgically and had something to do with his zone interfaces. He has no idea as to the exact procedure—has no idea as to what this is really all about. Which is why he’s getting so desperate for some answers.
    “You and Lynx and Carson,” he says.
    “What about us?” replies Sarmax.
    “You guys could only
sense
one another. You couldn’t read one anothers’ thoughts.”
    “Is that a statement or a question?”
    “Just answer it.”
    “Told you already: only ones who could do that were the
real
Rain. Not us pipsqueak prototypes. The three of us were just modified flesh, Spencer—just the goddamn
precursors
. The main team, they were the ones who had it all together.”
    “Except they didn’t,” says Spencer.
    “Not without the Manilishi, no.”
    “She was supposed to be the linchpin of the whole thing.”
    “She still
is
the linchpin.”
    “Even though the Rain are finished?”
    “You really think so?”
    “I thought Haskell wiped them all—”
    “All,
nothing
. Riddle me this, moron: if the Rain are finished, what the fuck was that yanking on our goddamn brains?”
    “I was assuming it was Haskell.”
    Sarmax looks at him strangely. “Could you tell if it was female?”
    “No,” says Spencer.
    “You couldn’t tell anything at all?”
    “What are you getting at?”
    “I’m trying to figure out who it was.”
    Spencer regards Sarmax curiously. “Right. I keep forgetting you
knew
them.”
    “Trained them, sure.” Sarmax shifts the subject. “Look, there’s more than meets the eye here. I was a wet-ops specialist of twenty years when they put me out for forty-eight hours and woke me upwith the news that I was the new breed. I asked what the fuck that meant. They said, you’ll see. And they were right. You just
act
. You make all the right choices, and you know that the other members of the team are making theirs—you just
know
it. And when you strike, you don’t hesitate. And
everybody
hesitates. Even if they don’t know it. Even for a fraction of a second. But not when you’re Rain. You get the shot off quicker, and you never miss. You—”
    “Carson told me something—”
    “Carson told
you
something?”
    “On the way back to Earth. He said the Rain are more than just killers. They’re takeover artists.”
    “Sure. Would have thought that was obvious by now.”
    “He said it was an instinct for them.”
    “Sure. We were taught to seek heights. We
sense
heights.”
    “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
    “Not sure I can explain. Call it intuition.”
    “Lot of it running around these days,” says Spencer.
    “If you’re talking about the Manilishi, you can forget it. She’s on a whole different level, man. She hacks the light fantastic so hard she’s forced them to invent whole new classifications of razor ability. I’ve got a feeling that if she’d ever been plugged into the rest of the Rain, we’d be dealing with a lot more than mind