Crow had done such things, suggesting that maybe he should leave his office. Those who had encouraged him the most had been arrested. It made me sad to think that my people now lived in fear of their government. I’d done my best to write a simple document full of diced-up powers and responsibilities. Mostly it listed what the government could not do. Time would tell if humanity would adhere to it. At least, I’d given them a chance.

  When I wrapped up the speech, I thanked them and praised them all unstintingly. I told them our world had won the war against the machines, and it was all due to their superhuman efforts. In short, I gave them the pep-speech of their lives.

  That part they ate up. Politicians love nothing more than getting credit for positive events. By the time I left the stage, I received a standing ovation. Perhaps it was the first real one I’d ever gotten. It sounded different, somehow, with cheering and whistling sprinkled in. There was actual enthusiasm in their voices.

  Not everyone was happy, of course. Some people had invested a lot in my status. Jasmine was among those people. When I went backstage, I found that she’d vanished without leaving a message. I called her, but she didn’t answer.

  I was hurt, but I couldn’t afford to give in to my emotions now. I needed to get the transfer of power worked out. Parliament had to decide who their newly-elected head of state would be and exactly what powers that person would have.

  After several weeks of wrangling, we had a document based upon my original that I felt was pretty solid. Individual freedoms were stipulated. Voting practices, division of powers and the like were hammered out.

  Would they stick to it? Time would tell.

  During all those long days, I never heard from Jasmine. That hurt me more than anything else, but I never let it show.

  * * *

  My farm was a wreck. It had been looted and partially burned. I had credits enough to fix it up and transform it into a palace, but I resisted that urge.

  Sometimes, working with your hands is the best therapy. A single nanotized man can do the work of a dozen normal people. The only machine I had to help me was my father’s old tractor. I decided to use it rather than plowing the fields by hand. I didn’t want my few visitors and neighbors gawking any more than they already did.

  Spring turned into summer, and in the Central Valley, that means it gets hot. The sun bronzed my skin and, despite my modifications, I was left sweating and breathing hard when it was a hundred degrees and as still as a desert outside.

  I grew crops and rebuilt my house. The new version was better than before, and as most of the neighboring farms had been abandoned, I legally bought extra land from the banks and soon had a nice agricultural business going. I gave in, buying more big machines even though they reminded me of Macros without brainboxes.

  On the first of July I was driving my tractor in the cornfields. I’d used a combine to gather the springtime crop a few days earlier, and was replanting and fertilizing again. One of California’s secrets was the long growing season. With hard work and a bit of luck, you could get two or three crops from a field before winter set in.

  Something caught my eye as I tooled along, bumping over the furrows and breathing dust. It was the glint of something shiny.

  I stopped the tractor and craned my neck. Was that an extra car in the driveway? Something colorful next to my drab pickup?

  I suspected right away it was a news reporter. The car looked too fancy to be local. It probably flew—all the new models did. Grumbling, I put my machine back into gear and kept plowing. The fellow would just have to wait until I was done. If I steered off-course now, I’d mess up the furrows.

  About an hour later I returned to the barn and parked. Surprisingly, the car was still in the drive. It was a shiny new model with airfoils on the back and skids under the chassis. A rich man’s air-car, just as I’d suspected.

  I walked up to the window, already in a sour mood. I didn’t like to be pestered. For the first month or two I’d lived out here, they’d come almost every day. All the online magazines and vid shows wanted an exclusive interview. They rarely got it, not even when they’d sent a beautiful girl with a flashy smile—well, sometimes they’d gotten it then.

  The driver got out when she saw me. She was on the other side of the car, standing with her door open and leaning on the roof with one elbow. Her face trembled a bit, and I sensed she was trying to smile. Her smile failed, and she looked ashamed instead.

  It was Jasmine.

  Her dark hair had lengthened, and the hot breezes lifted her locks until they wrapped around her face and streamed over her shoulder. She pushed strands out of her eyes and finally spoke.

  “Hello, Kyle.”

  “Hello. Welcome to my humble farm.”

  She looked around. “You love it out here, don’t you?”

  I leaned on the other side of her car, and we stared across the roof at one another.

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s home to me.”

  There was a pause in the conversation. I didn’t speak up because I felt no urge to make things easier on her. She’d ignored me for months. It was up to her to tell me whatever it was she wanted to say.

  “I’m sorry,” she said finally in a small voice. “I shouldn’t have left you like that.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I stood there, looking tough but not angry. I was past being angry about it.

  Jasmine opened the back door of her car and pulled something out into the dying afternoon sun. I couldn’t see what she was holding at first, but when she turned to me, she was holding up my baby.

  My tough-guy look vanished. I’d lost count of the months, I guess. She’d come to term and delivered. She hadn’t even called to tell me about it, and I’d been avoiding the news nets.

  “I delivered him last night,” she said. “When I saw his face, he looked so much like you—I felt awful.”

  I stared at the kid. His eyes were closed, and to me he looked pretty much like all babies had looked throughout time.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Wow, he does look just like me. What a perfect, beautiful baby!”

  She beamed. “I had to come find you,” she said.

  What could I do after that? I invited her in, and I served up drinks.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “What have you got?”

  “Uh—beer, orange juice and iced tea. That’s about it.”

  She laughed and asked for the tea.

  I took the opportunity to check her out while she was downing the glass I’d given her. For a normal woman, delivering a first baby would have been a big deal physically. But Jasmine’s body was full of self-repair systems. Her body had returned more or less to normal within hours. Her eyes looked a little tired, but that might have been from the long flight out here.

  We talked, and I poked uncertainly at the new kid. He seemed to sleep most of the time.

  “What’s his name?” I asked her.

  “I haven’t named him yet. I wanted you to help me with that.”

  I gave her a blank look. She proceeded to spam me with names, most of which sounded pretentious to me. We finally went with Cody. I’d always liked that name.

  The hours went by quietly as they tend to do on a farm. I wasn’t the kind who ran the screens all day, watching net casts. I’d been relishing the peaceful sigh of the winds for months.

  When it got dark, I honestly thought she was going to get back into her car and go home. But she didn’t. We talked instead about why she’d left and what she’d been doing with her family back in India. She’d resigned her commission from Star Force, too, in order to take care of the new kid.

  “Uh,” I said at about midnight. “I’m turning in. You want to stay the night? I’ve got several empty bedrooms.”

  She looked shy. “All right.”

  I had to kick a cat off the bed in what had once been Jake’s room. I threw on some fresh sheets and then I came to a sudden realization: where was the baby going to sleep?

  I climbed up into the attic and began rummaging around. I recalled that we’d once had—

  “Found it!” I called down, pulling a dusty basinet from the attic.

  Jasmine was at the bottom of the ladder. “You don’t have to worry about it. He can sleep in his car seat. See? He’s out already.”

  “Nah, let the kid stretch out flat.”

  We cleaned it and set it up, and it gave me a little pang to see her put Cody to bed in that basket. It was white and had a few scorch marks on it from the Nano ships—my place had partly burned down when they’d first invaded—but it was serviceable.

  “All my kids slept in that thing,” I said. “All three of them now.”

  For some reason, seeing a new baby in the house brought back a flood of memories. Even the hot smell of the little guy seemed familiar. I had to swallow a few times and went downstairs to get a beer. When I came back up, I was surprised to see Jasmine rolling the basinet out of Jake’s room and into mine.

  “Um,” I said, looking confused. “I know you want him to get acquainted with me and all that, but he’s going to need feeding in the night you know…”

  She shook her head and laughed at me. “Don’t play the idiot. What do you want me to do? Beg?”

  “Um…no.”

  I honestly didn’t figure it out until she stood next to my bed and began undressing. At last, daylight shone into my dusty brain.

  “Oh,” I said. “You’re sleeping in here, too.”

  “We all are,” she said, coming close to me. “Is that okay with you?”

  “Yes,” I heard myself saying.

  “I never want to leave your bed again, Kyle.”

  I had her in my arms. She was partly undressed, and her body felt very good up against mine. I hadn’t had any other girlfriends since she’d left me, and after all our talk during the day, I’d figured out she hadn’t met anyone, either.

  “Well then,” I said, “we’ll have to get married.”

  It just came out of my mouth. I hadn’t planned it or anything. Maybe my brain didn’t always work right, but I’m a guy who goes by his gut instincts. I felt now was the time, and the move was the right one.

  Jasmine smiled. “I thought you were never going to ask.”

  That was it. No getting down on one knee. No ring. No parental permission—we were both over thirty, after all, and we already had a kid. We were suddenly engaged, just like that.

  I reflected later as we lay in the hot room together, that ours had never been a traditional relationship. We hadn’t had time for all that. Maybe now we would.

  That night I hardly slept. It wasn’t just the kid’s fault, either.

  I kept staring out the windows at the stars. There wasn’t much in the way of urban glare outside. The population of California, like the rest of the planet, had been cut in half. The cities were quieter, more subdued.

  The people hadn’t all died, and there was a massive migration going on, but the countryside was still dark and empty.

  I watched the stars out my window, knowing that’s where so many had gone. Those balloon-ships I’d built had carried away the first wave of a hundred million or so. After that, they’d come back for more. People were writing and calling home to tell relatives to join them on fresh worlds without radiation poisoning, burning seas and the like. Old Earth was emptying out and becoming quieter.

  I watched the lights in the warm summer sky. The stars were bigger and brighter than they’d ever been in my memory.

  I couldn’t help but wonder what else was out there. There were a billion stars in our galaxy and a billion galaxies beyond ours. We’d only scratched the tip of the iceberg.

  Before dawn, as Jasmine awoke for yet another feeding—that kid was always hungry—I told myself that I probably had years before anything else came out of the skies at us. After all, we’d not been bothered for a long time before the Nanos first showed up.

  Sure, the Ancients might come looking for the Earthman who’d dared to build his own little ring. But that might take another thousand years or more to happen. With any luck, I wouldn’t be around then to worry about it.

  The End

  What follows is the beginning of Book #10, OUTCAST

  To purchase the entirety of the tenth book in the series, search for OUTCAST on your eBook Seller's website, or go to BVLarson.com

  OUTCAST

  (Star Force Series #10)

  by

  B. V. Larson and David Vandyke

  -1-

  My name is Cody Riggs, and I’m the son of a legend—which totally sucks most of the time.

  My dad had made a lot of enemies in his day. During the long years of the Macro War he’d marshaled Earth’s forces and commanded them through countless battles. Star Force had fought the machine invaders in space, in Earth’s skies, over land and even under the sea. Billions of humans had died and large swaths of our planet had been poisoned. Afterward, my father had ruled all of Earth as an Emperor for a brief time. Most people have subsequently formed a good opinion of the part my father played in those days—but not everyone. In the angry minds of many grieving souls, my family came straight from the fires of Hell.

  As I grew up, adults who had the misfortune of being put in charge of me often said I had an “attitudinal problem.” They claimed I wouldn't listen to authority. They called me rebellious and stubborn. But I never saw it that way. I’ve always been naturally curious and preferred to do things my own way. Individuality is its own reward.

  I think they focused on me because of the family name. Anything I did was scrutinized more than it would’ve been for a normal kid. Like I said, it kind of sucked growing up in my dad’s shadow.

  If there was one thing that was cool about having Kyle Riggs as my dad, it had to be the opportunity to meet interesting people. Probably the most interesting of them all was a weird robot named Marvin. He was an eccentric metal creature my dad had built a long time ago—no, that’s not quite right. Marvin had pretty much assembled himself from the very beginning.

  I was a kid when I first met him, about eight years old. The first thing Marvin did was make a big deal about how I was a genetic combination of my parents in appearance, I had skinny arms, tan skin, big eyes and dark hair that was cut short.

  Marvin had come to stay with us for a few days in September, and although he wanted to live in our house, and I’d even offered to share my room with him, Jasmine, my mom, wouldn’t allow it. She pointed her finger sternly toward the barn, and Marvin had slunk away on coiling tentacles.

  Marvin was strange that way. Being sent to the barn was insulting to him. He didn’t even like being called a robot. He preferred to be thought of as a full-fledged person—an artificial person to be sure, but a person and a citizen of the Federation nonetheless.

  To me, he wasn’t anything like a normal human—which was good because that would have been boring. He was an extremely intelligent, strange, electromechanical creature, and I found him fascinating. He’d been on humanity’s side in most of Earth’s battles and in many cases he’d caused us to win. It was well-documented that Marvin had saved our collective butts on more than one occasion throughout history. But it was equally true that he’d nearly triggered our extinction on less happy days. As I said, an interesting guy.

  Marvin’s one and only visit to my family farm lasted about two weeks. He spent most of that time in the barn he’d been assigned to, but he came out now and then to wander around the property.

  One crisp fall morning as I left the house and walked toward the school bus stop, I noticed Marvin going for one of his seemingly aimless walks. Suddenly, he returned to the barn and entered, moving quickly. Not thinking much of it, I kept heading toward the school bus.

  Many years later, I can still see the events that followed in my mind…

  The bus had pulled up and was idling, waiting for me to board. The vehicle hovered there not ten inches from the ground. It was maybe a hundred feet ahead of me, with the wavering bluish light of an energy field flickering underneath it. The idling repellers caused swirling eddies of dust to form. Funny, how some visuals stick with you years later.

  The waiting door of the bus was so close—but not close enough.

  I heard the first ripping explosion. A fraction of a second later I felt a surge of heat wash against my back. It was like being too close to a fireplace when it flared up behind you.

  I took a look back—I couldn’t help it. A blazing plume of orange fire shot up into the sky. The barn was gone. In its place was an inferno. What I remember best were the flaming chickens. Like cotton balls soaked in gasoline, they ran around the yard aimlessly—living fireballs with churning feet.

  I started to run toward the road. The flames surged behind me, flaring bright. Then a secondary blast—bigger than the first—knocked me flat. When I opened my eyes a second or two later, my eyelashes and eyebrows were gone. I thought this must be what it was like to be breathed upon by a dragon.

  I tried to get up and run to the road, but the bus had roared away to save the rest of the children. I threw myself down again and crawled toward the road. My dad had taught me that. When the shit really hits the fan, son, he’d always said, get low and crawl on your belly.

  Looking back at the raging fire that had engulfed the barn, I spotted Marvin. He wormed his way out of the flames, his tentacles smoking. I could tell he was alive, but damaged.

  Determinedly, I kept crawling toward the road. There was a ditch out there alongside the pavement. I could roll into that and find shelter in case things went from bad to worse.

  Before I reached the ditch, something gripped me and lifted me up. I hissed and struggled, thinking it was Marvin and expecting to be branded by those white-hot tentacles of his. Instead, it was my mom. She wasn’t happy, and she carried me at an amazing pace toward the house before she finally put me down.

  “I’m okay, Mom,” I kept repeating, but it was as if she couldn’t even hear me.

  “That damned robot,” I heard her say, along with a lot of bad words. “We should have scrapped him years ago.”

 

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