Humans Only: A Jake Dani Novel (Jake Dani/Mike Shapeck Book 2) Read online

  Humans Only

  Jake Dani is alarmed when his daughter Alena comes to the planet Rossa. When Jake and her mother go to the airport to pick up Alena, an explosion protests Bingers and robots. Later, Alena discovers a link between mercon, human, Binger, and native nape DNA, alarming a supremacist group called “Humans Only.” Jake figures he can still ignore them. Then Alena turns up missing.

  The first five chapters are available for reading on www.crayne.com.

  Praise for the novels of Victory Crayne

  “I was going to finish this tomorrow but I just couldn’t stop reading. Great story.”

  - J. Bowers

  “Solid sci-fi spy thriller. One thing I particularly liked is that many of the supporting characters are well developed, atypical, and just plain fun. …I recommend it to anyone who likes sci-fi, thriller and/or [espionage] combinations. I'll definitely be buying the sequel.”

  - S. Barnes, Editor of NewMyths.com

  “…you hit the ground running and you're compelled to turn the page. I'll conclude with a final warning to potential readers of this book: Jake Dani is addictive.”

  - R. Murray, speculative fiction writer

  “…a beautifully woven rug, every piece of the story, yet complex, fits perfectly with the other pieces.”

  - T. Khan

  “The story drew me in early and maintained its pull on my imagination as the plot included many twists and turns and surprises. I especially liked the way [the author] established a link between earth and the planet Rossa, and the fact that people travelled back and forth between the two. This picture grounded the story in a level of reality not common in some science fiction stories. I like the way [the author] developed the key characters and created webs of intrigue. I found the story to be powerful and entertaining.”

  - D. Sainsbury

  “As a SciFi and mystery fan since childhood, blends of both are high on my reading list. Ms. Crayne's novel does an excellent job of merging the genres, allowing her character's story to unfold naturally, with neither genre's elements seeming forced or clichéd. The pacing is quick, the characters are well-drawn and the story grabs the reader from the get-go and leads to a satisfying conclusion.”

  - Gil C. Schmidt

  Novels by Victory Crayne

  Freedom

  Humans Only

  For a free ebook of short stories see www.crayne.com.

  Humans Only

  By

  Victory Crayne

  Chapter 1

  Leanna and I had just passed Gate 4 when the bomb went off.

  I was watching the six humanoid robots and their human guards when the flash backlit them and the blast slammed me backwards against the beige cement wall. Dazed, I tried to catch my breath as I surveyed the scene—the robots had disappeared, but the ground around them was littered with body parts.

  Leanna was my ex and our daughter was due to arrive in sixteen minutes at Gate 7.

  Leanna had on a light brown pantsuit, yellow lace shirt, and matching brown low-heeled shoes. I had strode beside her in jeans, white dress shirt, and work shoes. We had left our weapons in the car. We’d just have to give them up passing through Security.

  There was no sign of the dozen human males in green uniforms who had escorted the robots. Nor of the taller robots themselves.

  What the hell?

  The scene near the gate was chaos. Sounds stopped. Body parts and blood lay scattered everywhere. Faces appeared to scream in the absolute silence.

  There was nothing where the six bots had been. Nothing. Nor was anything in a radius of twenty feet. Bright red lights flashed from exit signs over the doorways. Fresh cool air streamed in from the broken windows that overlooked the landing strip.

  A bomb had gone off?

  My eyes opened wider as I struggled to peer through the smoke. Dozens of people near me lay injured or still─and probably dead. I smelled cordite from the explosion.

  Destruction and death lay around me.

  But no sound came. Everything was quiet.

  Hands pushed on my sides. My ex-wife Leanna lay behind me, pressed against the hard wall by my body.

  I struggled to move away from her. My limbs didn’t want to obey my commands.

  Her lips moved and she had a glare in her eyes I had not seen in a long time, with eyes lit up like the fiery ends of ecigs. After ten years of marriage, I recognized the signs of anger.

  “Sorry,” I said but only the vibrations of my voice rattled through my skull. My ears ached in the silence.

  Wonder how long it will take for my hearing to return.

  As I moved off her, her straight brown hair flopped on the sides of her head. Her eyes gazed behind me and opened wider. Her jaw slid down as her mouth opened.

  I examined at my clothes. Blotches of red lay on my gray pants and suit jacket. Somebody's blood. A human finger stuck on my white shirt.

  Yuck!

  Despite the daze in my head, I forced two of my own fingers to grasp the finger and throw it off. It landed next to a robot hand with wires dangling from its wrist.

  Then I realized my daughter might be hurt.

  Alena!

  My gaze snapped to Gate 7 where she would arrive in a few minutes, but folks at Gate 6 blocked my view. Dozens at Gate 5 lay still. The explosion had not gotten as far as her gate.

  My daughter had escaped the worst.

  Movement on the floor near me grabbed my attention. Four people tried to sit up but most of the others lay still. All wore the red of blood. Most of the people close to the blast stayed prone, without motion of any kind.

  It dawned on me that the dozens of people between us and the blast had saved Leanna and me.

  A woman reclined in a nearby chair. She sat still with unblinking eyes gazing at the carnage. A blue scarf covered her hair and I saw blotches of red on the blue. In her arms a baby rested with its mouth open and frozen in a scream.

  Was it the father who had died?

  Another movement caught my eye. A man with clothes covered in red sat up from the floor and stared without expression on his face. Then his eyes closed and he fell. Blood poured from his mouth. Another victim.

  Other bodies lay shattered beyond recognition, a pile of arms, legs, heads, and torsos. A sea of blood covered most everyone near me. Blood that just a short while ago was deep inside a living, breathing human being and now was outside, where it didn’t belong.

  In one bent chair rested a green and black backpack, miraculously free of red.

  Had its owner left it to greet a loved one coming off a plane?

  He was lucky. Perhaps he had gone to the men's room instead and had lived.

  The odor of fresh blood hit my nostrils. It could be from the goo on my clothes or from the sea of red in front of me. I tasted salt and spat out something red.

  Was that mine or someone else's?

  Since I felt no pain, I assumed I was uninjured, but experience had taught me that sometimes I didn't feel pain immediately, even if I had been shot.

  Leanna’s eyes opened wide. Her lips moved and I read the name “Alena.”

  Motion caught my attention. I looked up as police and airport security straggled in one by one from the hallway in their blue and green uniforms.

  I had never been this close to a terrorist bomb.

  Instinct took over and I wanted to get away. So I pulled Leanna up and led her away from the chaos toward Gate 7.

  As we went past people with eyes drawn toward Gate 4, many stared at the blood on my clothes. One lady rushed her hands to her mouth.

  I still could
n't hear anything.

  On the way, I passed an overhead sign of “Restrooms.” So I halted Leanna and pointed first to my ears, then at the blood on my clothes and then to the men’s room.

  She watched my motions and nodded. Then she crossed her arms and leaned against the wall.

  Inside, I washed off as much blood as I could.

  When I came out, a cop in a blue police uniform blocked my path.

  What the hell is this? Does he think I did it?

  His lips moved. I shook my head and pointed to my right ear. With his right hand he grabbed my arm. At least he hadn't pulled his gun.

  As the guard led me away, Leanna pushed away from the wall.

  “Leanna!”

  The sound pierced the bones of my skull but I heard nothing.

  I pointed with my finger in the direction I walked. She nodded, put her arms down, and walked away toward Gate 7. At least she wasn't splattered with blood. It was a good thing I was in front of her when the explosion occurred. I wondered if she could hear.

  I felt a jerk on my arm. My cop nodded his head in the direction we had been going. There was no sense in fighting him so I let myself be herded back toward Gate 4 and the other people.

  On the way, I scooped up a leaflet someone had discarded and read as we walked.

  The words across the top of the page stated, “Rossa is for humans!”

  In the first column, I read “We all came here to get away from the damned robots on Earth. Since the middle of the twenty-first century, robots have taken over our jobs and the military. Now they want our bodies as more and more people have artificial body parts. Where will this madness end? When they take over our souls too?”

  The angry face of Guy Coocher filled the left column. He was head of the Human Only organization and an elected member of Parliament.

  “We came to Rossa to get away from the sameness of Earth. We came here to get away from the damned hybrids and the robots. We came here to get away from half-human half-robots. Let us keep our humanity. It's precious. We deserve a place to call our own. We deserve Rossa to be free of robots and aliens.”

  Quite an appeal.

  I read on.

  “If we let the damned robots come here, we're just inviting the Devil to dine with us.”

  The Devil?

  I must have stopped because I felt the cop tug on my arm. As we walked past Gate 4, I peered at the carnage.

  Hope there's no second explosion.

  Chapter 2

  As I strode back with the guard, a crowd rushed in the opposite direction. Wondering what I had missed, I glanced their way.

  At Gate 5 two black aliens, mercons, stared at the crowd as it got closer to them. Shorter than adult humans and with almost black skin, their nose slits came up to the spot between their eyes.

  I wish I could hear, damn it!

  As the crowd got near the mercons they blocked my view of them. Arms waved in the air. A few carried signs but I couldn’t read them from my angle. They acted like a mob.

  I must have stopped because the guard grabbed my arm and pulled me in the opposite direction.

  Pushy little bugger.

  He led me down the hall to an open area crowded with people. A man got up from a chair and I was about to sit on it when I noticed an older woman entered the room wobbling on a cane. So I surrendered the seat to her and sat on the floor next to a blue wall with my knees tucked up under my chin.

  She mouthed, “Thank you.”

  Maybe she had lost her hearing too.

  I bobbed my head a couple times in reply.

  Over the next a few minutes, the guards and staff got organized. Nothing like this had ever happened in York. Maybe they were more used to it next door in Algebra, where immigrants settled from the Mideast, but we weren’t used to it here.

  With nothing to do, I checked my comm, figuring I could learn more about the explosion. But before I could read much, a guard positioned himself in front of me and covered my comm. He pointed to the top of a digital pad in his hand, where I read, “Your comm will be returned to you after you are interviewed about your experience.”

  I sighed and presented my left arm. He pulled off my comm and attached a rubber band and sticker to it with a number. He presented a clipboard. I printed my name in block letters next to the number on the pad and memorized the number, thirty-seven.

  Great. That meant I would have no idea how bad the damage was or how many had been killed.

  Spies like to know that stuff. But I could understand his point. Someone wanted my report before I interpreted my responses based on what I learned from my comm.

  I remained on the floor, bored, and in silence. A clock on the wall showed the time, fifteen minutes past ten. Ever notice that no matter how you try to speed up the second hand, it still maintains its sluggish but relentless pace? You can’t slow it down nor speed it up. Time is like that. Seconds slip by and turn into minutes, minutes into hours, and soon a day is gone. Forever.

  I read someplace that ten thousand days pass in about twenty-seven years. That meant I was working on my second ten thousand.

  When a man sitting in a chair along the wall opposite me rose and made off, I took his seat.

  Beats sitting on the floor.

  Two minutes later, a guard in a green uniform drew near me. He motioned with his finger that I should go to my left. I rose and went as directed to a gray plastic chair next to a gray desk. A black male nurse took my blood pressure, pulse, and temperature. Then I got in line to get my photo taken, bloody shirt and all, and in yet another line to be interviewed.

  Waiting is not my favorite game.

  Finally, they let me have a seat in a chair with black plastic for the seat and back, and with stainless steel legs ending in rubber feet. The kind you see in school auditoriums. Must be easy to clean, easy to stack.

  On a bench opposite me a boy rested with a dark-green toy army man in his lap. The boy's pants and shirt had red blotches and he stared tearless. Probably in shock. I waved my hand and grabbed his attention. I pretended to duck and fired a finger-gun at him. He smiled in return. Somebody was playing with him.

  I remembered myself as a little boy after my older brother Ken had been killed. That happened a long time ago, but it was one of those key moments in my life that changed me forever. It drove home what it meant to be a Binger and face discrimination.

  Years before I came into this world, Dr. Bing inserted snippets of mercon DNA into human children to copy some of the alien strength and intelligence into humans. The children of those experiments became known as Bingers.

  That was during the war against the alien race who lived on the planet Durr, at about the same distance from Earth as Rossa. The three planets’ stars formed an equilateral triangle with its corners spaced twenty-five light years apart.

  My father was a full-blood Binger and my mother a full human. So I had half my DNA altered. Most people on Earth treated Bingers as part-alien. The resulting discrimination was hard for a boy of twelve to grasp until the day I learned Ken was dead because someone suspected he was a Binger.

  Two seats down and across from me, a girl sat next to a woman with the woman’s left arm wrapped around her. The girl had puckered lips and her body shook. I figured she was crying. On the floor a few feet away lay a stuffed giraffe. I stooped, picked up the giraffe, and held in out in front of the girl. She reached out with her arms and pulled the toy animal close to her body. I detected a brief smile on her face. Then she spotted the blood on my clothes. In seconds, the edges of her mouth turned down and her jaw dropped. Her eyes squeezed shut. I figured she cried again.

  The mother mouthed, “Thank you.”

  I pointed to my ears and her head went up and down an inch. She was probably deaf too, another victim of the explosion.

  The boy on the bench across from me waited until I parked in my chair. Then he used his fingers to fire back. I grabbed my chest and winced. Another smile was my reward. He fired again but a woma
n in white came up in front of me and grabbed my arm. It was my turn for interrogation.

  As I rose from my chair, I waved to the little boy. He gave a small wave back. At least I had broken his loneliness for a few seconds with playtime.

  All this happened with the ringing in my ears as the only sound I perceived. Weird.

  This time I parked my behind in a brown metal folding chair while a middle-aged woman wearing a Zor-Franken Airport badge on the front of her green uniform asked me questions via a digital pad. She took my blood pressure and pulse. Why they did that twice I didn't know. Then my training kicked in. They were checking to see who went into delayed shock.

  Being deaf put me at a disadvantage. So I scanned around me every ten seconds to see if anyone came up behind me.

  The nurse spoke into a microphone and her words appeared on her digital pad.

  “Is there something you're worried about?”

  “Yeah, being killed.”

  “I assure you, Mr…” She paused to read my name from her pad. “…Snyder, you’re safe. Try to relax.”

  Easier said than done, sister. You're not a deaf spy.

  We’d received a tag a few hours ago that our daughter would land at the airport from the Meda Space Elevator and needed a ride.

  Which was a shock to both Leanna and me. We had kept Leanna’s presence on Rossa a secret from Alena. We never expected her to come to Rossa.

  “Serves us right,” Leanna had said, “for deceiving her like this.”

  Before Leanna and I had left for the airport, one problem had been what names to use. I didn’t think it was wise to give our own names “in the open.” Leanna agreed. But what to do with Alena’s last name of Dani?

  I had searched for a name to call myself and hit upon Snyder. Ralph Snyder was the protagonist in the current novel I was reading. The name sounded nice.

  I had suggested to Leanna that she use Ebonta Snyder. We could say Alena Dani was her daughter from a former marriage.