Nerve Center by Jim DeFelice, Dale Brown Read Free Book Online Page B

good.
    “Let me ask you a question,” said Dog, pulling up suddenly and putting his hand out in front of Jennifer.
    His hand caught the soft looseness of her chest. In the dim light he saw surprise in her eyes.
    “ANTARES,” said Dog, dropping his hand awkwardly. “What do you—tell me what you think about it.”
    “What do you mean?” Her voice was thin and low, out of breath.
    Dog leaned his body forward and fell back into an easy jog. “Your opinion on it.”
    “It was never my project per se,” said Gleason, quickly catching up. “Bio-cyber connections aren’t my thing.”
    “What about Nerve Center?”
    “Some thing. It’s part of ANTARES. It is ANTARES. No one here spoke of them separately.”
    “You say that like you don’t like it.”
    “No. Not at all. I mean, eventually fluid organic interfaces will be part of the mix. It’s inevitable. You’ve heard about the experiments that have brought sight to people with certain types of blindness.”
    “Sure.”
    She picked up the pace. Dog felt himself starting to strain now to keep up. Gleason’s words came almost in staccato, pushed out with her breaths.
    “That sort of thing—of course it’s not as advanced as AN-TARES. Well, ANTARES is a different model altogether technically.”
    Her voice either trailed off or her words were swallowed in a hard breath of air. Dog waited for her to continue or explain, but she didn’t.
    “Can ANTARES work?” They were really running now; Bastian had to struggle to get the words out.
    “It did.”
    “For the Flighthawks?”
    “Of course.”
    They took a turn to follow the fence. One of the security team’s black SUVs approached slowly on its rounds. Dog waved, then realized he was falling behind. He tried lengthening his stride, pushing to catch up.
    The fence tucked to the left up a very slight rise. Bastian’s quarters were down a short road to the right. He goaded his legs to give him one last burst, but barely caught her as he reached the intersection. He slowed, walking, warming down; Jennifer circled back.           
    “It does work, Colonel. No question about it,” she said, trotting backward in front of him as he walked, catching his breath. “Major Stockard already passed the first set of protocols and controlled one of the Phantoms using the Flight-hawk protocols.”
    “You have—” His breath caught. He stopped and leaned down, hands on hips. “You have reservations.”
    “Not about the concept. I’m not an expert,” she added.
    “You’ve worked on the gateway translation computers and you know as much about AI and computers as anyone on the base, including Rubeo.”
    “ANTARES isn’t a computer. That’s the difference.”
    She trotted back and forth, a colt eager to get on with her workout. Her body swayed—even in thick warm-up gear, she was beautiful. If he hadn’t been so exhausted from that sprint at the end, he might have grabbed her to him.
    Thank God for exhaustion then. She was just a kid, the age of his daughter.
    Ouch.
    “I’m not an expert,” she insisted. ‘The program was ready for the Flighthawks when it was shelved. Phase One testing with a Phantom was completed about a month before Major Stockard’s accident. Nerve Center would have been the next step. We rewrote some of the hooks into the flight-control computers and tested them. We dropped some of the code in C3 covering simultaneous flights for memory space, but with some of the changes we’ve made recently I doubt it would be a problem loading them back in.”
    “How long?”
    “How long are they?”
    “How long to load them back in?”
    Jennifer shrugged. “Not long, if it’s a priority.”
    “It may be.”
    “Your call.”
    Her whole manner toward him had changed. Damn his clumsiness for grabbing her chest. Damn—he could kick himself for being such a klutz.
    “You don’t like ANTARES, do you?” he said.
    She started trotting away, resuming her workout. “Not my area of