Read Steal Across the Sky for Free Online

ourselves.
    3. This website demonstrates formidable technology. It apparently joined the Web without human agency and has resisted all attempts to remove, block, modify, or hack into it—and trust me on this, the best computer minds on Earth have tried. We
know
.
    4. A website reaches those people who are most computer-literate—the young—whom the Atoners apparently wanted to reach. Everyone “accepted” so far has been under thirty. Space is usually considered a game for the young, educated, and intelligent. Nothing like knowing your target audience.
    5. The website
works
. Millions of “applications” have been filled out and sent.
     
    As the entire planet waits to see who else is accepted—and whether any means really is provided to take them to the moon, let alone to other planets and back—one fact emerges about the Atoners: Madison Avenue could take lessons from them. Their sales approach is logical, attention getting, and effective.
    Except, perhaps, for one thing—we still don’t have any idea what they’re selling.

 
     
6: CAM
     
     
    CAM CHECKED ON THE SHUTTLE displays to be sure that no soldiers lurked just outside, ready to rush in the second she opened the door. They couldn’t hurt her, of course, but they might have done all sorts of damage to the inside of the shuttle. Or maybe not—this was Atoner property, after all. And a rush by some soldiers would at least liven things up. Cam was really sick of twenty-three-hour shifts in a six-foot-diameter round box with nothing to do but talk to Soledad, whom she’d never gotten along with all that well in the first place. Lucca didn’t know how lucky he was, broken leg and euthanasia whackos and all.
    Who would have guessed witnessing for aliens, on an alien planet, could be so
boring
?
    Well, maybe today would be the day. Cam checked her equipment, activated her personal shield, and opened the shuttle door, blinking in the bright hot sunlight. Two men walked toward her from the dirt walls that circled the shuttle a hundred yards away.
    Well, this was more like it!
    One was a soldier, deeply sunburned like all of them, in short blue skirt, breastplate, and helmet. For an insane moment Cam wondered, not for the first time, what they wore under those skirts. Then she snapped herself into Witness mode, relaxing her body posture to look unthreatening, smiling so hard that her face felt like it might crack, trying to note everything at once.
    The soldier had short dark brown hair and, like most of the Kularians she’d seen, light-colored eyes. Muscular arms, swirls of blue paint on forearms and cheeks, the same height as she, neither young nor old. The other wore a longer skirt of coarse brown cloth with very worn sandals.No body paint. He was much older, with straggling untended gray hair and deeply lined face. He stank and he limped. Clearly not another soldier, so what was he? He seemed too poorly dressed to be an official ambassador or a ruler or anything like that.
    The translator needed samples of native language, so Cam couldn’t respond to whatever he was calling to her. But when the two reached her and stopped, she was startled by the old man’s eyes. Deep blue, they were speckled with silver, like muted stars in an evening sky. Cam knew she wasn’t particularly sensitive to other people’s moods; she’d been told it often enough by friends and family. But
these
eyes—although they watched her with sharp intelligence, they struck her as the bleakest things she had ever seen.
    The old man, getting no response, sensibly stopped his torrent of words. He touched his chest and said, “Rem Aveo.”
    Cam repeated it, touched herself, and said, “Cam O’Kane.” How could she keep him talking? Maybe by asking for more words. She reached out to pluck at his tunic and ask for its name; immediately the soldier stepped between them, a wicked dagger in his hand, and scowled. A bodyguard?
    “Sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt him. Is this your