TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6) Read Online Free PDF Page A

said, desperately trying not to inhale the odour of rotting meat.
    ‘You all right in there?’ It was
     Rashim’s voice.
    ‘Fine!’ called out Liam.
     ‘Don’t come in just yet! It’s messy!’ He looked down at the
     clone, still curled defensively in a ball, its head in Sal’s lap. Eyes slowly
     opened, grey. Wide. Curious and vaguely alarmed.
    Liam leaned over it and offered the clone a
     smile and a little wave. ‘Hello there!’
    Its mouth flexed open and closed several times,
     dribbling the gunk being ejected from its lungs.
    ‘Ughhh.’ Sal eased the
     clone’s head off her lap and on to the floor. ‘I’m soaked in this
pinchudda
.’
    Liam wasn’t listening. ‘Hello?
     You OK?’ he cooed down at the clone. Now she was out of the mist of swirling
     salmon-coloured soup, he could see the female unit clearly enough. The creature’s
     hairless head made it hard to judge her precise age. Her face looked both old and young
     at the same time.
    He reached down, lifted her by the shoulders
     till she was sitting up, produced a towel and wrapped it round her. ‘There you
     go.’
    Sal tutted, jet-black hair plastered against
     her face by the cooling, gelatinous protein soup. ‘Oh, I
     see … 
she
gets the towel, does she?’
    Rashim sat cross-legged before the rack of
     circuitry of the displacement machine, SpongeBubba looking over his shoulder on one side
     and Bob over the other.
    ‘Incredible,’ he whispered.
     ‘The design is quite … quite brilliant. Look at that, Bubba, see?
     He’s sidestepped the feedback oscillation completely.’
    ‘I see it, skippa!’
    He turned to Bob. ‘Our system’s
     field was constantly suffering distortion variables. Outside interference and internally
     generated distortion. Feedback patterns.’
    ‘Your displacement device was much
     bigger than this one, correct?’
    Rashim nodded. ‘Yes. Enormous. And
     large-scale introduces a whole new bunch of problems. But even so …’ He shook
     his head again, marvelling at the economy of the circuitry. ‘This is so
     ingeniously configured.’ A grin stretched across his thin lips.
    Roald Waldstein, you were fifty years ahead
     of anybody else
.
    ‘We should take this whole
     rack,’ he said. ‘I know a lot of these component wafers can probably be
     replaced – duplicated with present-day electronics – but I need to take some time to be
     sure I know how he’s put it all together.’
    ‘Affirmative. We will take the
     complete rack.’
    ‘What about the controlling
     software?’ Rashim looked at the row of computer cases beneath the desk. Each one
     with an ON light glowing, and the flickering LED of a busy hard drive.
     ‘I need the software shell as well. It’s as much a part of this device as
     the circuits.’
    ‘Correct.’
    Rashim shook his head. ‘Those
     computers look primeval. How the hell can they run Waldstein’s machine’s
     software?’
    ‘Networked together these computers
     are suitably powerful,’ replied Bob. ‘They do not use the original operating
     software.’
    Rashim recalled the charming old names of
     computing’s early twenty-first-century history:
Microsoft. Windows.
     Linux
. Primitive times when code was written in a digital form of pidgin English.
     Not like the elegant streams of data from his time: code written by code.
    ‘We won’t need to take these
     clunky old computers with us, will we?’
    ‘Negative. We can extract the
     machines’ hard drives.’
    Hard drives?
Then Rashim
     remembered. Data in this time used to be stored magnetically on metal disks inside
     sturdy carousels. Again, so primitive. So wasteful. Nothing like the efficiency of data
     suspended in water molecules.
    ‘Right … yes. Do you know
     how to do that, uh … 
Bob
?’
    ‘I have a theoretical understanding of
     the system architecture of these Dell computers. Also the system AI – known as
     computer-Bob – can provide detailed instructions on how todismantle
     the