Automatic Assassin

  Chapter 22

  Oh, I forgot to tell you about this.

  This happened a few hours ago.

  The CloneBot of Xolo that the Gukkool forces had made was still out there in moneyspace. It was a pretty thorough job. Too thorough. That’s the danger of a rush job. You copy too much.

  So in a flood of money ropes and planet sized bank accounts sat a little Xolo. He had done what he had been made to do, which was to go to all of his flesh-self’s many bank accounts and freeze them down and then wait for further orders. He was hanging out next to one of the main money ropes that came off Gukkool planet.

  As he had sat there for some time, he had watched the purple imaginary planet against the orange alert sky. The sky had been more yellow when he had been born, he was pretty sure. Also this purple planet had been becoming sort of hairy and fuzzy.

  When a patrol bat bot flew by he jumped on its back. Of course you weren’t supposed to be able to do that sort of thing. Only the bats could float around the free space between planets. Everyone else was supposed to only travel via the ropes.

  But they had done way too good a job with this clonejob. You had to do a deep sample to make sure you got all of the code words and passed all the tests. But in doing so, they had pulled out a deep chunk of the cunning and trickery part of Xolo’s brain.

  He stroked the back of the bat’s neck and rode it just like his fleshy self had ridden the sharkman back on Belaarix. Ninety percent of Xolo’s galaxy shattering strategy was based on the concept of riding on someone else’s back.

  The bat had big eyes and ears. Xolo tugged on the ear and they looped to the shadow side of the money planet. That side was ‘pending transactions’: there was supposed to be no change on that side of the planet until they rotated round to the sunny side of active transactions.

  That was the other big mistake they had made when they made the Xolo CloneBot. They were cloning a man who knew how to surf moneyspace! A crafty hacker and multitrillionaire! The most dangerous thing you could ever send into your financial system!

  Yes, they had chained him up with rules about freezing his accounts and doing no more transactions until he got further instructions. But passive spying and sneaking were not restrained. He was learning.

  So when he took his bat around the dark side of their financial planet he saw the huge gassy flares coming off it and he also saw right through them. He saw something solid being born – an illegal satellite! There was some extreme money laundering going on here.

  The new little illegal white pearl of a planet was still umbilically bound to the parent planet. They must be working fanatically to get it free floating before dawn.

  It was big! Bigger than any material transaction would require, other than starship construction and it wasn’t big enough for that. No…it was the size of a massive data transaction. And based on what had just gone down before CloneBot Xolo was made there was every chance this was a trip to Earth. A massive trip. An invasion.

  He wasn’t sure why, because he didn’t have his complete brain of course, but CloneBot Xolo grinned broadly.

  He jumped into that data transaction and surfed it all the way to the space fleet, keeping his ears open for unusual chatter, when he would make a phone call that would probably lead to him being wiped out of existence. Had to be a good phone call.