Huff had known that there was at least one more of the w wastrels hiding behind the air conditioning unit and took his time. Hunting requires many things, patience being one of them.There, finally, some movement. Light spilled from above. Not much, but enough. A head, the glint of an eye, and a little bit of nose.Huff applied the pressure gradually, caressed the trigger, and felt the butt kick his shoulder. The bullet left the muzzle at more than eight hundred fifty feet per second, entered through Curtis' eye, and left through the back of his head. The parson would approve.* * *Smoke belched outward, the doors burst open, and a pair of concussion grenades sailed through the opening. They flashed and went bang. Machine gun fire hosed the interior.Marco and Sparrow charged through the entry, jumped a couple of bodies, saw movement and fired at it.A security officer threw out her arms, crashed into an interior window, and shattered the gla

The streams Sam hoped to find were smaller than that, more like threads - thin, almost insubstantial fibers that wound themselves in and around the big stuff, and went along for the ride. That was were the input from millions of "dumb" sensors flowed, where reports from the maintenance robots stuttered along, and where the quarry might be mentioned.The better part of five minutes passed as the robot clung to its electronic perch, Jyro paced back and forth, and the Hoon talked along themselves.Then, just as one of the Hoon's long, wormlike virus hunters flashed past, braked, and rerouted itself back upstream, Sam "heard" what it had been waiting for.Assuming the reports were true, it sounded as if one of the general purpose units had not only assaulted a lesser entity, but confiscated one of its tools.Sam wanted to learn more, and could have learned more, except that the hunter unit had looped through a side circuit, entered the upstream flow, and was on its w

The bedroom was big and ornate. Dimly seen pieces of off-white furniture lurked in the gloom. A single bar of sunlight slipped between the drapes, crossed the carpet, and pointed to the bed.It was a large, well rumpled affair - with plenty of room for three. Governor Sandral Usmos gloried in her nakedness, in the way the two lovers sought to please her, and thought about sex. Or was it power?The male was one of Sandral's aides, he stationed himself between her legs. The girl who was barely out of her early twenties, guided him to the target.Sandral took the man in, selected the rhythm she wanted, and took pleasure from the now.The girl was everywhere, touching, caressing, and fondling.Sandral wasn't sure which she enjoyed the most, the physical pleasure or the knowledge that she had power over them. Somehow the knowledge that the male labored between her thighs because he wanted a promotion added to her pleasure rather than detracting from it.The

The Shem ships dropped out of hyper and swam through the darkness of space. There were planets, six of them, all worthy of investigation. Scouts were dispatched, probes were launched, and samples were taken. The Hoon was busy, very busy, but nowhere near capacity. The Artificial Intelligence had time to make backup copies of itself, plunder the newly discovered star system, and run the fleet, all without missing a beat. The AI also reserved some of it's processing capacity for small, unexpected anomalies, especially those that were interesting and potentially dangerous. This one took the form of a request for information from a unit that didn't need it - a highly unusual occurrence that set off alarms. Curious as to why a machine would do something like that, the Hoon assigned a tiny fraction of itself to the investigation and waited to see what would happen. The first question the robot wanted an answer to was rather basic. "Who created t

The Terminator's wardroom was empty for the moment, which allowed Sophie to slip inside and admire the breathtaking view. The planet Byron hung huge against the blackness of space. With the exception of the poles, most of its surface was brown. It had very little water, and what there was flowed deep below the surface through veins in the volcanic rock. And it was there, protected from the sun's wicked rays, that the great worms spun their gossamer cocoons, "sang" their epic love songs, and manufactured their optically switched computers for which they were so justifiably famous. Among the businesses that went together to comprise Doug Douglas Enterprises was a well known "glass house", as chip based computer companies were known. That being the case, Sophie had gone to some lengths to educate herself where related technologies were concerned. Rather than create conventional computers, in which electrons follow pathways etched into tiny silicon chips