Crossover by Joel Shepherd Read Free Book Online Page B

fixed tightly across the forehead. Once expressive blue eyes were blank and unmoving. Eyelids still. Her lips were pale, held slightly apart, as if frozen at the beginnings of a word, or a sentence. From a corner of her mouth hung a thin strand of saliva.
    "... absolutely incredible sophistication," one of the whitecoats was saying to the man with the shoulder-length dark hair. His voice was a hushed murmur in the morgue-like silence broken only by the beeping machines. Screen light reflected off the viewing windows, rapid scrawls of numerical data chasing infinity. "It'd take our biomechanics industries another hundred years to match this level of sophistication."
    "I know." The dark-haired man stroked his chin, gazing intently at his monitor. "It makes you wonder."
    "Sure does. Hell, I've seen Skins before, but this is something else. The neural integration is just..." He let out a small whistle and shook his head. "Absolutely mind-blowing. Seamless growth interface. There's no telling where the neurology leaves off and the technology begins. She processes datalink information like you or I process a punch in the arm — it's all reflex. More than that, if you or I had to process all the sensory input she receives we'd go mad. But she seems very stable."
    "Don't call it she," the dark-haired man said, still watching his monitor. Screen light scrolled across lean, handsome features. The eyes were watching. Cold.
    "Force of habit." Ran a hand through short clipped hair. "How long do we have?"
    "Long enough." The other man nodded. Cords and cables roamed across the floor. A central screen projected accumulation graphics. Levels rose. The database grew. "Just keep working. No protests when they get here — we'll look after you."
    Another nod, though less assured. "With any luck, we'll get a couple of hours." The dark-haired man's lips drew together in a thin line.
    "Not the CSA. I'd give you ninety minutes." The second man went back to his work, looking grim. The dark-haired man merely watched his monitor, calculating. If he was worried, it did not show.
    What remained of the woman named Cassandra Kresnov merely stared at the floor, hearing nothing. The thin strand of saliva broke, falling unnoticed to the floor. Her eyes registered no response.
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    Forty-three minutes later, SWAT Lieutenant Vanessa Rice crashed explosively through the main doorway as the doors went flying across the room, propelled by an armoured kick.
    "CSA!" she yelled over her helmet speakers, advancing fast with weapon levelled. "Don't move!" One of the startled whitecoats in the decorous office ran for an electronics bank — Vanessa twitched her gun to taser and nailed him with a vicious burst of blue light. The man went down screaming. More shouts and confusion as she ducked through office doors into the surgery proper, more doors and windows splintering as the rest of SWAT Four crashed in, yells of "CSA!" splitting the air, then howls of protest.
    "What the hell do you think you're doing!" a bearded whitecoat shrieked at her as she stormed into the central office, several of her people barging through adjoining doors. "You can't just come in here and terrorise people ..." He got right into her way, and Vanessa threw him one-handed across the room — propelled by suit armour he crashed and rolled, nearly hitting the wall.
    "I said don't fucking move!" she yelled at the continuing commotion of whitecoats about their banks of hastily erected electronics, and around the gear beyond the transparent wall to the side, which appeared to be an operating theatre. They stopped their fiddling reluctantly ... one woman kept working and Vanessa shot her too in a convulsive burst of blue light and flailing limbs. "Are you morons hard of hearing?"
    As her people grabbed those still standing and thrust them ungently against the walls, wickedly dark, fast armour amid helpless, stunned technicians, Vanessa strode into the theatre, weapon levelled at the several techs