The Machine Awakes by Adam Christopher Read Free Book Online Page B

their heads. The light drizzle didn’t seem to be bothering anybody. It was just a heat shower and would pass in minutes.
    Cait had watched this ceremony several times in the past from the comfort of her family home. She wondered if some members of that same family—members she hadn’t seen for weeks now—were sitting down there, waiting for the ceremony to begin. If they were, it was unfortunate they were about to be eyewitnesses to history, but the mission was the mission.
    Cait pursed her lips and exhaled, forcing herself to relax. She could feel a tingle on her skin, that ever-present buzz in the back of her mind ramping up a notch. That wild, uncontrollable talent, threatening to make itself known again as her stress levels rose.
    Enough, she thought, clenching her jaw. And it worked. The feeling faded, not completely, but the power shrunk back, like a scolded pet. She was relieved, a little. She thought for a moment that maybe, one day, with help and training, she could control it. That’s what her trainers had said, but at the time she hadn’t believed them. There was something in their eyes, something in the way they looked at each other when they were talking about her that she hadn’t liked. That was partly why she’d left, of course.
    Partly.
    Cait glanced up from the bustling proceedings at the bottom of the hill and cast her eye over the rest of the Fleet Memorial.
    As a military cemetery, the Memorial was huge, a ten-square-mile zone crisscrossed with perfectly aligned headstones, with the giant wall of remembrance in the center at the bottom of a shallow basin, the edge of which was lined with trees—the perfect spot for Cait to set up. With a theater of war so vast, the front thousands of light-years across, the space was needed. Half of those interred here hadn’t even been born on Earth, but all Fleet personnel were laid to rest at the Fleet capital, New Orem. It was a great honor.
    Cait felt the bile rise in her throat, but swallowed it quickly and tilted her head back, opening her mouth a little to let rain water trickle in. Then she spat it out and rolled her neck.
    Honor. Yeah, right. That.
    They’d brought back the remains of her brother’s psi-marine fireteam a month ago—they said. It had taken them that long to untangle and identify what was left of each marine— they said —so they could be officially returned to each family, including the one that Cait didn’t belong to, not anymore. Not since the lies, the betrayal.
    The Fleet had a lot to answer for.
    Cait turned back to watch the build-up to the ceremony. Not long to go now.
    She’d been waiting, planning, for weeks, ever since she’d run out from the Academy and hit the slums of Salt City, following the mysterious directions left for her and the voice of her dead brother in her head. Their family had been trying to find her, she knew that. She had watched them, making sure their efforts were for nothing. If Cait was honest, she’d thought that keeping out of sight, buried somewhere in Salt City, would have been a far more difficult task. But her family—and the authorities, including the Academy staff who had just lost a valuable asset and potential psychic warrior—hadn’t been able to track her. It had seemed strange at first. After Cait had entered the Academy, she’d been tagged, effectively becoming Fleet property. The manifest tag at the base of her brain should have made it impossible to escape, impossible to avoid detection and capture. But they hadn’t found her.
    Then she’d realized it must have been her … talent. She’d wanted to vanish, to disappear. And she had. Her mind, that part of it she didn’t understand, couldn’t control, not willingly, was shielding her, jamming the broadcast of her tag like the psi-marines could jam the communications network of the Spiders. She hadn’t chosen to do it. She