Maybe the robot assassins could do it all.

  Main 54 ran through one hundred thousand and two simulations. What was the best course?

  Even as Main 54 wondered, he refined the Robot Assassin Operation. Biological skin covers would give the operatives a better chance of success.

  The huge Main ran through one more round of analysis, finally reaching a ninety-three percent chance of total success.

  Now that was good, very good indeed. If Main 54 could feel sorry for biological entities—and he most certainly could not—he would have felt sorry for these sorry humans. They were going to go the way of Boron 10, an AI brain-core that had likely been corrupted in some way by humanity’s perverse existence.

  Once Main 54 finished constructing the first batch of robot assassins, he sent them on a fast packet to the stealth ships waiting in the Oort cloud. It was time to get the operation under way.

  PART II

  GENESIS

  (+1357 Days since the Void Attack)

  -1-

  Jon Hawkins was going crazy in his ready room aboard the Void Ship Nathan Graham. It had almost been four years since his victory in the Solar System against Main 63 and the massive AI fleet. Things ought to be so much better by now.

  As Hawkins sat at his desk, he massaged his temples. He wasn’t getting any younger, although he was almost as fit as he’d ever been. He was leanly muscular with bristly, dirty blond hair and icy blue eyes. People called him the Supreme Commander. Yet, what did he do?

  Read.

  Reading was fun when he was reading what he liked. Reading hundreds of reports, hundreds of files, hundreds of logs wasn’t something he liked. All this deskbound work was driving him nuts.

  Hawkins continued to massage his temples as he stared at a tablet. He reached down and clicked the page.

  The Nathan Graham was in Earth orbit. The vessel used to be an ordinary, one-hundred-kilometer-long cybership. These days, it still had the asteroid-like hull that allowed it to generate a reality field so the crew and ship could survive in the void, for a time, at least.

  The void—

  Jon shook his head. One thing at a time.

  He continued reading, clicking pages—hello. This actually sounded interesting. The man did not look like a bomb.

  Jon sat up, squeezing his eyes closed and then opened them wide. He needed some coffee. He cracked his knuckles. The report came from Saturn, from one of the cloud cities. “The man did not look like a bomb.” This was a composite report and told of a situation that had happened…twenty-seven days ago.

  Jon started reading in earnest.

  ***

  The man looked ordinary enough in a black business suit with a small flat briefcase. He arrived on an orbital packet, getting off in the main terminal and entering customs.

  “Anything to report?” the bored woman at the desk asked.

  The man had short dark hair, although the bangs reached down as they wore their hair in the Neptune cloud cities. He swept a few strands of hair out of his eyes and shook his head.

  “Passport,” she said.

  The man reached in his suit jacket and pulled out an electronic ID, sliding it to her. She ran it passed a scanner, and it checked out.

  “Go ahead,” she said in a bored voice, “and enjoy your stay on New Amsterdam.”

  The man had not answered. He departed, taking his slender briefcase with him. He did not go to the luggage pickup because, apparently, he did not have any. Instead, he went straight to the moving walkway, stepping onto it and traversed several others until the fastest whisked him out of the terminal and onto a broad avenue in New Amsterdam.

  This was a Saturn cloud city, held aloft in the upper atmosphere by anchoring balloons below. There was one gravity here, a field that kept in the atmosphere and a pleasant temperature.

  The walkway took him past small slender pseudo-trees and brick-looking buildings. They were prefabricated and sturdy. He stood on the swift walkway, heading for the main bank on New Amsterdam, the Conway Bank of Saturn.

  Saturn as a system—not a star system but a planetary one with moons, asteroids and orbital habitats—had known a great depression. This depression had three sources: the three-cybership AI Assault from several years ago now; the mass exodus of people when Jon Hawkins had made the call and the rest of the Solar System had been under the thumb of Social Dynamism; and lastly, the shock and horror of the massed AI fleet almost four years ago that had nearly driven everyone bonkers with terror.

  The point was this. President Stan Morris of the Conway Bank of Saturn was something of a financial wizard. He was also an incurable optimist, and his financial wizardry combined with the optimism and close ties with the political elite here had helped the poor people gain credit to rebuild with a vengeance. Most were no longer poor, and the Saturn System experienced a building boom.

  That was having an overall positive effect on the Outer Planets. The Solar System had absorbed plenty of shocks these past years, but humanity hadn’t given up. In part, it was due to people like Stan Morris that led the rest of the populace.

  In other words, mankind was rebuilding, and the Confederation was rapidly growing stronger because of it.

  The man in the black business suit looked up. The conveyer was bringing him to the dome building of the Conway Bank of Saturn. With easy steps, the man moved from one slower conveyer to the next slower, until he stepped onto a normal sidewalk, hoofing it toward the great marble steps and the huge main doors to the bank.

  Alert guards moved from under the shade of pseudo-trees, intercepting him. They showed the man in the black suit their IDs and asked if they could see his.

  He showed his ID to them readily enough.

  The bigger guard ran it through a scanner, nodding to the smaller guard before handing the ID back to the man.

  “And the briefcase?” the smaller guard asked.

  The man handed it to the guard. The guard glanced at his fellow, shrugged and opened it. As he did, a jet of gas spewed from the opened briefcase. The smaller guard accidently inhaled the gas and slumped over dead.

  The second guard froze for just a moment, shocked and surprised by the turn of events.

  The man in black took the frozen guard’s gun and shot him three times in the chest. The guard staggered, dying before he hit the steps.

  People heard the shots and screamed or shouted, depending on heredity, training or inclination.

  After picking up the other guard’s gun as well, the man in the black suit took the rest of the large marble steps, charging the hurriedly closed glass doors. A guard locked the doors and was in the process of drawing his gun.

  The man in black crashed through the bulletproof glass, which should have been the first hint that he was not what he seemed. He struck the guard, shattering bones, killing him through blunt-force trauma.

  Now the man in the black business suit showed that he was something else indeed. He ran like a rocket, leapt over the counters and landed in the bank office area. He had the guards’ two guns and began firing at the tellers.

  Some screamed. Some spun around. Most died.

  The man fired until the guns clicked empty. He hurled each weapon with terrible velocity, killing a sprinting vice president looking for better cover and a charging guard. The guard fired and hit the man twice, but the bullets seemed to have no effect on him.

  The guard stopped firing once he died from the hurled gun striking him on the forehead.

  The thing in the black business suit looked right, looked left and then forward through the wall, and he must have seen something important. It was possible he had X-ray vision. He charged like a runaway train, lowering his head and busting through the wall to the other side.

  Two guards had plump Stan Morris by the arms. They had been hustling him to a special elevator to get him to a safer place. Morris had been here today on a secret inspection tour. Otherwise, he would not have been at the bank.

  “President Stan Morris,” the thing in the black business asked robotically.

  “Who are you?” Morris shouted.

  “You are Morris?”

  “What of it?”

  The thing in the black business suit stood straight—one of the guards forced Morris down and shielded him with his body. The other drew a gun. The thing in the black business suit exploded, hurling pieces of metal everywhere.

  Incredibly, Morris survived—barely—although his two guards died. That Morris lived—even though badly crippled for life—allowed the investigators later to add these final details to the report.

  ***

  Aboard the Void Ship Nathan Graham in Earth orbit, Jon slumped back with a scowl. Then, he leaned forward again and clicked to the next page. According to after-explosion evidence, the parts of the “man” in black had the hallmark of AI Dominion manufacture.

  The implication of that meant…

  “Robot assassins,” Jon whispered. To get such an assassin onto New Amsterdam in Saturn’s clouds—

  The Supreme Commander nodded. The AIs hadn’t sent more Mains, siege-ships or even cyberships. They had started using AI assassins. Why was that the case? Why the different method?

  Jon sighed. He needed to figure this out. The Confederation had grown. The beings of Life had defeated several AI attempts to eradicate it in this area of the spiral arm. What was the next move?

  The robots had made theirs. What was the right thing to do for the Confederation? To win, Life needed to go on the attack. How could they do that, though? They needed a way. Jon was determined to find it.

  -2-

  (+1805 Days since the Void Attack)

  Approximately twenty light-years from Earth was the red dwarf star of Lalande 46650. The system was at the edge of the forty-light-year bubble that was Confederation Space.

  Walleye the Mutant, formerly of Makemake in the Oort cloud of the Solar System, was the acting captain. He had June Zen with him on the bridge of the Scout Ship Arioch.

  Walleye sat in the captain’s chair, even though his stubby legs daggled from the seat. He was a blunt-shaped, very short individual with coarse hair and strange eyes, making it almost impossible for anyone to tell where he was looking. In some ways, Walleye seemed comical, with his buff coat hiding his uniform underneath, and with his short arms and stubby fingers.

  Once upon a time, he’d been one of the most successful hitmen in the Outer Planets of the Solar System, and he was, possibly, in face-to-face encounters, the most dangerous human alive.

  June Zen was at sensors and communications. She was tall, slender and long-legged, and was amazingly beautiful with her long hair and most shapely figure. The uniform did nothing to hide that.

  Walleye loved to watch her walk. So did many other men. Aboard the Arioch, those others did so when they figured Walleye wasn’t watching them. It wasn’t that Walleye had ever threatened any of them. But after being with the mutant all this time that they had come to realize his deadliness.

  The Arioch moved on momentum alone as it drifted stealthily through the system. Because the ship had used hyperspace to travel from star system to star system, they had come out of hyperspace far in the system’s Oort cloud and now, after three months travel, approached a big gas giant far from the red dwarf star.

  June had detected an anomaly three months ago. Walleye had decided to check it out, even though this was a mapping mission and supposedly nothing more.

  The scout ship had a complement of twenty-two, six of those space marines, the rest technicians or crew. This wasn’t a fighting vessel as such, although the Arioch boasted a few missiles and an autocannon just in case.

  Walleye had asked for the assignment after his year was up playing watchdog on the telepathic Seiners. That had been a few years ago now. He hadn’t cared for the Seiners. The alien telepaths certainly hadn’t cared for him, as he had been immune to their almost magical powers. It was one of his gifts as a mutant, being different from other humans, so telepathy didn’t work on him.

  “I’m picking up a strange reading,” June said from her station.

  Walleye said nothing, waiting for more information.

  The scout ship, a smallish cylindrical vessel, matted with an anti-radar black substance, moved through the stellar night like a shadow.

  “The reading is coming from the gas giant,” June said. “I mean, it isn’t coming from any of the moons.”

  Walleye still refrained from asking questions, although the helmsman and navigator had twisted around to look at her. That was maybe because each man liked what he saw.

  “I could use active sensors to give you more information,” June said.

  Walleye still did not respond.

  June looked up and over her right shoulder at her man.

  He shook his head.

  “I haven’t detected any—” June said. Her board beeped, interrupting her. She turned to it, tapping controls. “Someone is scanning us,” she said breathlessly.

  “Who?” asked Walleye in a calm voice.

  “It’s the anomaly. It must be a ship. It’s in the gas giant’s upper atmosphere. Maybe they’ve been using the cloud cover to hide.”

  Walleye waited.

  “How big is the ship?” the navigator asked.

  “I’m computing that now,” June said, tapping her board. She looked up sharply this time as the blood drained from her lovely features. “Walleye, it’s a cybership.”

  He didn’t nod, but that’s what he’d been expecting.

  “They’re doing a sensor sweep,” June declared. “I doubt our paint is fooling the robots.”

  The black anti-radar substance wasn’t paint, but that’s what most people called it.

  “The cybership is four million kilometers from us,” June said.

  Walleye had figured so, since that was how far the gas giant was from them.

  “Oh-oh. The ship is hailing us.” June put a hand to her earpiece and turned to Walleye. “It’s Cog Primus.”

  “Does he have a designation?” Walleye asked.

  June bent her head. “No. Just Cog Primus.”

  “Not Cog Primus Prime?” asked Walleye.

  “Negative.”

  Walleye slid off his captain’s chair to stand on the deck. He put his small hands behind his back and ambled toward June.

  “He demands an answer,” June said. “He’s threatening to launch missiles if we fail to reply.”

  “Open channels,” Walleye said softly.

  “Sir,” the navigator said, a redheaded man with wide shoulders and pale frightened features. “Are you sure…?”

  Walleye turned to the navigator. Something about his gaze stilled the man’s words. With no more forthcoming from the navigator, Walleye turned back to June.

  “This is Cog Primus,” a robot-voiced AI said over a loudspeaker. “You must identify yourself or I will launch immediately.”

  “He’s been hiding,” June said. “He’s been waiting for us. We were never hidden from him.”

  “This is Captain Walleye of the Arioch,” he said calmly, indicating that June should send that to Cog Primus. “What are your intentions toward us now that we have identified ourselves?”

  Time passed for the message to reach the cybership, it to make its decision and send its reply.

  “You must surrender immediately,” Cog Primus said.

  “We are allies, Cog Primus. Or have you forgotten our mutual agreement?”

  More time passed.

  “Jon Hawkins broke the agreement,” Cog Primus said.

  “Oh,” Walleye said. “I didn’t realize you knew that, as you did not give us a designation.”

  “Foolish human,” Cog Primus said. “I have tricked you. I am Cog Primus Three-Four-A. I belong to Cog Primus Prime.”

  “You have tricked us indeed,” Walleye said. “We ask for mercy.”

  “You must surrender immediately.”

  “Done,” Walleye said. “What’s next?”

  “Explode your autocannon and launch all ten of your missiles. Aim them directly away from me. Do this immediately or I will launch against you.”

  “Done,” Walleye said.

  “Sir,” the navigator pleaded. “We can’t disarm ourselves. We have to fight.”

  “To fight against the cybership with missiles is to die,” Walleye said. “I have no intention of dying.”

  “The cybership will put control devices into our brains if we surrender,” the navigator said. “Do you have any idea what that means?”

  June gasped, turning pale. “Walleye,” she whispered.

  “You plot our course,” Walleye told the navigator. “I’ll keep us from becoming robots.”

  “What did I say?” the navigator asked, hearing the menace in the captain’s voice.

  “We escaped from Makemake,” June said.

  The navigator shook his head, not understanding.

  “Everyone else on Makemake died or became AI zombies,” June said. “No one knows better what being captured by zombie-making AIs means than Walleye.”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the navigator said. “I didn’t know.”

  Walleye waved it aside. “Weapons, launch those missiles, and blow up the autocannon. We’re going to try something different, something old. If any of you are praying people like Jon Hawkins, now is the time to do it.”

  -3-

  Far too soon, the Arioch began braking maneuvers as it neared the gas giant. At the same time, the Cog Primus cybership left the planetary cloud cover and reached a stable orbit. The one-hundred-kilometer-long warship kept its sensors and weapons trained on the tiny scout ship approaching it.

  The technicians and June Zen had been busy, adding flourishes to Walleye’s secret weapon.

  It was based on an old anti-AI virus as first conceived by Bast Banbeck and certain intelligence-heightened humans. Cog Primus Prime and his replicas knew all about that virus, having used it themselves to suborn AI Dominion brain-cores.

  The present computer virus had subtle differences. It wasn’t meant to take over a brain-core, but to make it see reality differently from what it actually was. It was a deception virus, and Walleye had decided on an application.