The A.I. War, Book One: The Big Boost (Tales of the Continuing Time) Read Online Free

dim glow far gentler than during the day; Trent could not see the entryway he needed clearly, and his jump was half guesswork. He tumbled in mid-air, broken ribs grinding together, like an acrobat, like a SpaceFarer, like a Belter, and touched the soft landing pad at the Third Level entryway feet first, absorbing the energy of his jump perfectly.
    It was only the fifth or sixth time in the two years he’d lived there that he’d gotten that leap right.
    He glanced back and up and all four PKF Elite flew out of the First Level entryway, out into the drop shaft, in their ebony combat suits, weapons at ready. Trent did not know if they’d seen him; he grabbed the edge of the Third Level entryway and pulled himself through, manually dogging the emergency airlock behind him.
    Third Level, Corridor C: Corridor C belonged to Trent.
    He’d purchased it from the CityState, made it home, and now he had a chance. There was a limit to what Gandhi CityState was willing to tolerate from “Gus Allen” – even with pressure from the SpaceFarers’ Collective, which provided Gandhi CityState with military protection from the Unification – but with the Collective’s help Trent had pushed them to that limit. For most of the last decade, Trent’s bounty had been the highest in the System; it had climbed from five thousand Credits in August of 2069 to ten million Credits today, in January of 2080. And in all that time, only a few bounty hunters had even gotten close to Trent. Trent had learned not merely to take precautions, but levels of precautions –
    – most of them directed at the Peace Keeping Force’s Elite cyborgs. The Elite were stronger and faster and much tougher than ordinary humans, with senses that spanned the electromagnetic spectrum. Their eyes were lenses, their ears mechanisms. In early Elite the skin had been toughened into a rigid mask; in later models, their skin, though superficially the skin of a normal human, still would not burn beneath a cutting laser. Direct vacuum would hurt ; but it would not kill an Elite if the Elite could reach air again before suffocating. Transform viruses sped their neural reactions by a factor of three, up from a mere forty percent improvement in earlier Elite. Early models of PKF Elite had required that their power sources be replaced every six months; modern Elite were good for up to five years. Carbon-ceramic filaments were woven throughout their bodies, around the joints and ligaments, supporting the internal organs, the heart and lungs and organs of the abdominal cavity, allowing PKF Elite to withstand acceleration that would kill an ordinary human, or even a genie such as Trent.
    They boasted an optical secondary nerve network that was thousands of times faster than the clumsy neuro-chemical nerve nets humans were born with, controlled by a combat computer implanted at the base of the Elite’s skull. Their index fingers sported small-weapons-caliber lasers – the ultimate in point-and-shoot.
    One flaw in Elite design had gone unnoticed for over thirty years until the TriCentennial rebellion. All PKF Elite, through 2076, had been produced with a superconducting mesh buried immediately beneath the skin. Given the caliber of energy weapons available in the 2040s, when the Elite were designed, the decision had made sense. Shooting an Elite with an energy weapon, a laser or maser, might make him warm, as the superconducting mesh spread the heat across the surface of the Elite’s body, but was unlikely to kill him –
    In 2076, during the rebellion in Occupied America, three hundred and forty-seven PKF Elite had died beneath the beams of rebel x-lasers, slightly detuned so that the lasers would not cut well, and pumped up to burn the rifle’s power supply out in four or five shots. The superconducting meshes had done their jobs, distributing the huge blasts of heat across the body of the Elite; the rebels had fried Elite like bacon.
    FOR MOST OF the last two years Trent had