The Machine Awakes by Adam Christopher Page B

New Orem tourists and with artificially raised prices to match their comparatively rich clientele.
    It was sickening, the people of New Orem content to patronize the markets while turning a blind eye to the plight of Salt City itself. But tonight, of course, those markets would be closed, the citizens of the Fleet capital held under curfew.
    But here, farther in, deep enough for outsiders to never reach, were the real night markets of Salt City. Here there was more on sale than overpriced knick-knacks and badly cooked street food.
    In the heart of Salt City, you could buy almost anything, from art—smuggled, crumbling artifacts from the ruins of South America—to people, likewise smuggled, likewise crumbling. To passage off planet. Even to weaponry, stolen from the Fleet, serial numbers etched off and fire control CPUs hacked with a buggy, pirate OS. Like the sniper rifle in Cait’s pack, she supposed, with its glitching computer. She’d collected it from the pre-arranged hiding place, in a difficult-to-reach water conduit below one of Salt City’s main thoroughfares. She’d been impressed that they’d gotten her almost exactly the same kind of rifle she had trained with in the Academy. The weapon appeared to be new, as well. They must have hit a weapons dump to steal it.
    Of course. The gun.
    Cait listened to the sounds of the market as she ran an idea around her mind.
    Her plan was to hit the rendezvous right on time and demand some answers, trusting her training and her talent to keep her alive. Even as she thought of the plan again, she felt the nerves return. It sounded simple—too simple. She was walking into the unknown, and she knew it, and she wasn’t even able to reach out to her brother’s mind anymore.
    But he was out there. He was alive. He had to be alive. This is what she was doing it for.
    And there was a chance, a slim one perhaps, that her employers weren’t behind the Admiral’s assassination. Perhaps all they knew was that the Fleet Admiral was dead—proof enough that Cait had fulfilled the task assigned to her.
    Perhaps to get the answers she wanted, she needed to walk into the rendezvous like nothing was wrong. Like everything had gone according to plan.
    She needed to bluff. And to bluff, she needed a little bit of evidence.
    The alley was dark and smelly, the ground wet not from the recent rain but with something thick and sticky oozing from the garbage stacked high at the far end of the narrow passage. Cait headed toward it and crouched down on the other side, the fetid heap of refuse providing ample cover. Then she slid her backpack off and began taking the pieces of the sniper rifle out. In less than a minute, the gun was assembled and ready.
    Hoping that the death of the Fleet Admiral was all that mattered, hoping—perhaps foolishly, perhaps not, there was no time to second-guess herself now—that her employers were just as much in the dark as she was, Cait raised the sniper on her hip, pointing it at a sharp angle toward the sky, and pulled the trigger.
    There was no flash. For a sniper, detection meant death, so the gun released only a muffled crack as the invisible energy bolt flew skyward. Despite just a row of buildings separating Cait from the night market, no one would have heard the shot.
    Cait lowered the weapon, relieved that the gun had worked, glitching OS and all. Shielding the display with her hand, Cait thumbed a control on the top of the weapon. The gun had been fired—and now there was the log to prove it. More than that, for once the glitching OS would be to her advantage, the log’s scrambled timestamp making it impossible to pinpoint the last time the weapon had been used. Now, if they checked the gun, they’d think she had been the one who had downed the Fleet Admiral. All according to the plan.
    Cait found herself smiling as she pulled the weapon to pieces and slid them into the compartments in her