The A.I. Gene (The A.I. Series Book 2) Read online

  June was long-legged, with curvy hips and nice breasts. She had long brunette hair and features too many men noticed. Others had often told her she was stunning. She was hot, and she knew it.

  It was an ace card combined with smarts and even better training. Unfortunately, she lived among two-legged wolves, philistines with brutish appetites. The men on Makemake cared little for the finer things in life. They all vied for power in whatever ways they could, and that turned her ace into a liability.

  Makemake was on the edge of the space frontier, a place for the bold, the adventurous and the quick-rich crowd. Whatever civilized veneer remained in the people out here was generally reserved for negotiations over scientific and highly technological concepts and devices. Such men as these had big appetites. They might leer at her, lust to take off her clothes and hump her, but they would seldom let that interfere with their greater desire for financial gain and climbing the power ladder.

  The women of Makemake were little better, bartering their bodies, brains and loyalty for the highest rank they could get, or attach themselves to.

  June Zen was different because her predecessors had come into the Kuiper Belt for markedly different reasons. They hadn’t lusted for revenge or driven themselves with endless work to get enough so they could go back and fix their lot in Neptunian society.

  June’s grandfather, Dr. Maximus Zen, had joined the exodus to the Kuiper Belt Frontier because he’d believed this was humanity’s future.

  June peered at her screen more closely. This was odd. There appeared to be workers flying from a hauler in orbit. Why would they do that? The workers would have had to don space-flight suits. She studied the images. Could this be right? The workers—she counted eleven of them—moved toward different orbital vessels. Was this some kind of surprise party?

  Her fingernails clicked against a screen as she pulled up a manifest. The hauler—Get Bent—was from Dannenberg 7. Okay. Maybe that made sense then. The mine on the icy planetesimal belonged to the Evans Clan. They’d become powerful the last few years, always doing something arrogant. Maybe it would be better if she forgot about this. Maybe this had something to do with Luxor Evans’s anticipated takeover.

  June frowned. She seemed to recall a report about Dannenberg 7. It had something to do—

  The main hatch slid up, breaking June’s concentration.

  Big Bob sauntered into the main orbital-control chamber. He wore baggy pants because he had tree-trunk thighs, and a baggy tunic that strained to cover his huge gut and powerful shoulders. Bob seemed to lack a neck. He made up for that with an almost square head with a frizz of black hair circling the middle area. Bob was supposed to have pure Ukrainian blood from Old Earth, but who even knew what that was supposed to mean? He was carrying a holder with four steaming cups of mojo.

  For all his mass, Big Bob had piggy eyes in a puffy face. He smiled, showing peg-like teeth, all of them evenly spaced from each other.

  Some said that Big Bob looked retarded. Firstly, no one said that to his face. Secondly, it was flat false. Big Bob acted like a boor, but he was crazy cunning when it came to bullying others and when it came to conforming to those with greater power.

  “Mojo,” Bob said, “nice and hot like you like it.” He stared at June, walking over to her and holding out the carton.

  June knew he believed himself sly and humorous. The other two station operators laughed. The male operator gave her a wink. The woman raised her eyebrows three times in a suggestive manner, as if June should do it with Bob.

  June lifted a cup from the carton, turning back to her board. She eased the lid back, blowing on the black mojo, enjoying the strong aroma. Big Bob might be a pig, but he knew his mojo.

  June finally recognized the total silence in the chamber. She ignored it at first. It made her back squirm, but she wasn’t going to turn around if she didn’t have to.

  The woman coughed discretely.

  June focused on her sensor board.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Big Bob growled.

  June knew she had to face him. She swiveled on her chair and smiled sweetly at him.

  Bob scowled thunderously. It made him look even stupider than he normally did. “Can’t you even say ‘Thanks?’”

  “Thanks,” June said. She began turning back to her board.

  Bob laid a meaty paw on her left shoulder.

  June had been dreading his touch.

  His thick fingers dug into her flesh. He was strong, and he was letting her know it. “I’ve had enough of your attitude.”

  Almost in a daze because this frightened her, June picked up her mojo, faced him, and flinched in pain as he applied agonizing strength. She’d intended to hurl the steaming mojo in his face. He must have realized that and beaten her to the punch.

  The black liquid poured onto the floor as she twisted at the pain. Finally, he released her.

  June looked up, ready to tell him off.

  The heat in his piggy eyes stilled the retort in her throat. If she told him off, here in his office, he was going to hit her. June saw that, and she realized he would hit hard, probably in the face, and maybe hard enough to break facial bones.

  “I done your friend a huge favor letting you work for her,” Bob snarled. “You may have a nice ass, great tits, too, but that don’t mean squat here. You want to keep your friend’s job, you tell me here and now.”

  June wanted to get up and run. A flickering glance at the other two showed them studiously scrutinizing their screens. She looked up at Bob.

  He still glowered, but something else shined in his eyes. He was starting to enjoy this.

  June wanted to hurl insults at him. She wanted to grab a crank-bat and bash him in the face. Even as she envisioned doing that, she realized the bat would likely bounce off his face, just making him raping mad.

  “One…” Bob counted.

  June realized he was giving her to three.

  “Two…”

  In that moment, June also realized that she had no recourse. She had her regular data analyst job. It was barely enough to keep her quarters and her grandfather’s cryogenic unit going. She needed the credits from this gig. She also lacked a protecting clan. Her grandfather was her sole relation on Makemake, and he was literally frozen stiff in a cryo unit.

  “Three…” Bob said, his eyes shining with growing rage.

  “I want her—” June’s tongue seemed to twist over itself. “I want her to have her job when she’s better.”

  “Yeah?”

  June nodded, dreading what was coming next.

  “Oh,” Bob said, playing into it now. “Well… What are you willing to do to keep your friend’s job?”

  The man at the sensor station snickered lewdly.

  “Be more thankful,” June said.

  Bob stared at her.

  “Uh…work harder,” June added.

  “Okay…” Bob said. “That’s the right direction. Work hard. Yeah, you have to work hard to make me like you. How you going to work hard enough to do that, though?”

  June stared at him. She realized his rage was gone, replaced by bullying. This brute could sniff weakness like a chem-sniffer.

  “Where do you live?” June asked quietly.

  Big Bob smiled, showing off the peg-teeth that made him seem like an idiot.

  “You want to come over tonight?” he asked.

  June nodded as her stomach curdled. She was going to have to start carrying a weapon. She could never come back here. Maybe she’d talk to Walleye about a hit, see how many credits it would take for him to kill Bob.

  “Yeah,” Bob said, with laugher in his voice. “Come to my place, baby. Wear what you’re wearing now, but don’t wear anything underneath it. You understand?”

  “Yes, Bob,” June said, deciding she was going to see Walleye as soon as she left work.

  -2-

  “What? Are you crazy? You want me to kill Big Bob the Sensor King. That’s what this is about?”

 
; June Zen nodded meekly.

  Walleye was a mutant. That’s what everyone said, anyway. He wasn’t a good kind of mutant, either. He had strange eyes, so you could never tell where he was looking. That freaked out a lot of people. It was freaking out June right now.

  They met in an underground cubby near the catapult launch system. The system hurled ore into orbit for the giant furnaces up there. Most of the construction went into a huge spaceship, a special warship with many new weapons systems.

  The majority of the colonists on Makemake came from the Neptune Grav System. They had run out here for one reason or another. Many others on the Kuiper Belt Frontier had run from Saturn and Uranus, too. Those running from the Jupiter System had gone to other Outer Planetary Systems, still believing someone would stop the Solar League. Few people believed that anymore. The Neptune System was the last holdout, and there was strange news from there—or there had been strange news. Now, nothing came out of the Neptune Grav System.

  Rumor had it that Makemake had a Neptunian moneyman behind it. That’s why this outpost had more modern equipment than anywhere else in the Kuiper Belt. The moneyman planned a great surprise: a fleet of giant warships to back whatever he had as a long-term goal.

  “Big Bob is connected to Luxor Evans,” Walleye told her.

  “So…?”

  Walleye stretched out his stumpy legs, his work boots barely reaching the low table in his office. “I hit Bob, Evans buys a hit on me. End of story.”

  “Why does Evans have to know you did it?”

  “Luscious, you’re sure slow for a girl trying to hire the deadliest man on Makemake.”

  June wanted to smile. Walleye did not look deadly. He was too small with his stunted legs and arms. He was five foot one on his best day, maybe five two if he wore high-heeled boots.

  “Whatever you’re thinking, you’re wrong,” Walleye told her. “I’m deadly like a scorpion. You know what that is?”

  June shook her head.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Walleye said. “Trust me.”

  “Big Bob could crush you,” June blurted.

  Walleye looked up at the low ceiling. As he did, the chamber rumbled and began shaking. The noise increased and so did the shaking. Suddenly, the shaking and rattling quit.

  “And another catapult load launches into space,” Walleye said, looking at her. “You know how long I’ve been listening to that?”

  June shook her head.

  Abruptly, Walleye jerked his work boots off the table. He sat up, putting his stumpy hands between his knees.

  “Don’t you know people are predicting the end of everything?” the little assassin asked.

  “You mean the videos out of Neptune?”

  Walleye laughed, shaking his head. “Course I mean that. Everyone’s talking about it, but not you, sweetie. You’re a data analyst. Haven’t you analyzed what that all means?”

  She stared at him.

  “Course, maybe you haven’t seen what I’ve…acquired. Maybe Big Bob hasn’t seen this yet, either, or maybe he has.”

  “You’ve lost me.”

  Walleye seemed to be staring at her, but she couldn’t tell for sure. Maybe she’d made a mistake coming here.

  “I just had a bad idea,” Walleye said. “It’s positively evil. But it might account for why the catapult launches have increased by two hundred percent. It might give me a clue as to the hurry up there.”

  “There are more haulers coming in lately,” June said. She recalled Big Bob telling her about that her first day in the orbital-station office.

  “The catapult launches increased a month after the original video,” Walleye said quietly. “Luscious, I’d like you to look at this. See what you think.”

  “What about Big Bob?”

  “Forget about him—at least, for now. I might have stumbled onto something bigger. Are you interested?”

  June had a hard time reading the assassin. She wondered if maybe others had a hard time, too. Maybe that was part of his deadliness. He looked like a rabbit but struck like a viper. His mutant freakishness acted like cover for him.

  “Walleye, I already have enough trouble with Big Bob. Who am I going to get to take care of you trying to bed me?”

  “You’re mighty fine, Miss Zen, but you’re too tall for me. You don’t have worry about me pawing you.”

  “Do I have your word on that?”

  “I just gave it,” Walleye said curtly.

  June nodded as some of the fear went out of her. She had a flat needler taped to the small of her back. She had a feeling Walleye already knew that, and had already decided what to do if she tried to draw it.

  The dwarfish man moved a flat screen so they could both look at it. He typed a bit, and a super-bright object appeared. It was like a star, only bigger, and it moved too fast across the starry background.

  “I’ve never seen anything like that,” she said.

  “This was taken, oh, seven months ago. You can’t tell, but some think this thing is four or five times the size of a Premier-class battleship.”

  June shrugged. She had no idea what that meant.

  “That’s the latest Solar League battleship—they’re over a kilometer long.”

  June studied the bright image. “You’re telling me that’s a ship…four kilometers long?”

  “Yup.”

  “Who makes spaceships that big?”

  “I dunno. Aliens.”

  June shuddered with dread. “Aliens? You think that bright light is thrust from an alien vessel?”

  “You’re the data analyst, not me.”

  “But…”

  “Notice,” Walleye said, as he typed on the pad. “The trajectory of the ship would take it to the Neptune System.”

  June thought about that. “Where was the ship when this vid was taken?”

  “It was just leaving the inner Oort cloud,” Walleye said.

  June blinked at him as her stomach tightened. “When was this taken again?”

  “Seven months ago, just like I said.”

  “Leaving the Oort cloud, as in twenty thousand or more AUs from Neptune?”

  “That’s right.”

  “No. Do you realize how fast it would have to have been traveling to reach Neptune from the Oort cloud like you’re suggesting?”

  Walleye nodded slowly, as he said, “Aliens.”

  June couldn’t stop blinking as she tried to speak. The hollow feeling in her stomach had gotten worse.

  “I take it you saw the war footage at Neptune…six and a half months ago?” Walleye asked.

  It was all June could do to nod.

  “And the aftermath,” Walleye said, “when something weird hit the victorious Solar League fleet?”

  “But…”

  Walleye reached over, patting one of her clenched hands.

  “Aliens?” June whispered. “You think aliens are in the Solar System?”

  “Luscious, I’ve had a worse thought than that. It’s partly why you’re here.”

  “Please, Walleye, I don’t like talking about this. It’s creepy.”

  “Do you have a key to your friend’s cubicle?”

  “I do. But she’s under quarantine.”

  “Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

  “About what?” June asked.

  “About what she might have seen on her long-range sensors,” Walleye said softly. “The orbital station controls some advanced sensing equipment. I think it’s time you and I paid your friend a visit, ask her what she’s seen, ask her if that’s why she’s in quarantine.”

  June’s mouth dropped open. What had she gotten herself into? She glanced at the blazing image on the screen. If that was a vid shot of an alien ship…and others knew about this…

  “Okay,” June whispered. “Let’s do it.”

  -3-

  The Kuiper Belt was like any frontier in man’s past. In many ways, it was like the Greek exploration of the early period when they and the Phoenicians colonized the best area
s along the Mediterranean coast. It was also akin to the American Wild West. Instead of plains, Indians and covered wagons, it had vacuums, spaceships and comets, with the occasional dwarf planet thrown in.

  The stellar vagabonds staked claims, first at the bigger, metallic bodies and later elsewhere. Law was closer to the surface, enforced by will, guns and sometimes by signed compacts.

  June and Walleye belonged to a group known as cryoarchs. They were a rough lot, driven by greed, sustained by technology and living on hope.

  June Zen’s grandfather, Maximus Zen, was one of the cryoarch founders. In reality, Maximus Zen was June’s great, great grandfather. Maximus Zen and Leticia Evans had propounded a countervailing theory regarding humanity’s destiny.

  Most people lived day-to-day. Those that did regard the future mostly concerned themselves with solid pension plans. Among those, the vast majority waited until older age before even that really concerned them.

  Maximus Zen had worried about the human race. Would it survive the Solar System? He had finally decided that it would, but only if man began colonizing other star systems. Unfortunately, as far as Maximus knew, there was no such thing as a Faster than Light Drive. Thus, humanity would have to do its colonizing the hard way.

  People could use sleeper ships, freezing themselves in cryo units as the automated vessel traveled the distance. They could use generational vessels, the original colonists dying off long before the massive vessel reached a new star system. Their great, great grandchildren would do that. Those in-between would live entirely shipboard lives.

  Maximus believed each of those systems had serious flaws. He had a different way. The Kuiper Belt, and more importantly, the Oort cloud, would be the answer. People would not rush to another star system, but hop by slow degrees. They would travel from a dwarf planet, to a comet, to another comet, maybe another dwarf planet—and by that time, they would have reached the farthest end of the outer Oort cloud. They would be two light-years from the Sun by that point.

  As the people kept slowly hopping from comet to dirty asteroid, they would enter the edge of a new star system and slowly reverse the process. Eventually, the descendants would build colonies on new major planets or on their moons, the light coming from a completely different star.