Read Online The Little Green Book of Chairman Rahma by Brian Herbert - Free Book Online

heard him shouting, and saw him waving a handgun, causing the other bicyclists to scatter. To Ridell’s horror he fired at a woman several times, causing her to crash and fall to the pavement.
    The attacker darted down a side alley and disappeared from view. The woman didn’t move; blood pooled around her head. Hesitantly, a man and a woman approached her, in an apparent attempt to give aid. To Ridell, however, she looked dead. Maybe it was a lover’s crime of passion, a relationship that had gone terribly wrong.
    Police sirens were already whining.
    To avoid getting involved, Ridell turned and hurried down another street, taking an alternate route home. Surveillance cameras would identify and track the killer as he fled. Undoubtedly the man was already being monitored—and he must have known he would be caught quickly by the efficient, high-tech methods of the police. But his hatred of the victim must have run so deep that he didn’t care. There would be no trial. The cops would kill him on the spot, the moment he was apprehended.
    Reaching another street, with the siren noise a couple of blocks away, Doug Ridell thought he might like his new job better than the old one. The factory noise had been driving him crazy, and he was happy to get away from it. Still, he was eager for Jade to advance in her own career, so that she and the entire Ridell family could move up to a higher social rung, with a larger apartment and all of the perks that went with it.
    He wondered if his daughter was having sex with Chairman Rahma at that very moment.…
    *   *   *
    ARTIE WENT THROUGH an open doorway and took an elevator to one of the lower levels, where he boarded a slidewalk that transported him through a long tunnel. After rounding a corner, the hubot sent an electronic signal from his AI core, causing thick double doors to slide open ahead of him, doors that were carved with raised images of extinct animals. Disembarking from the slidewalk, he walked inside, where he felt a slight change in air pressure.
    There were separate forest, arid bush, jungle, and other environments here, with vegetation stretching far into the distance. It was a network of complex subterranean habitats, with sunlight passing through the techplex ceiling overhead to warm the irrigated, nutrient-fed interiors. In the sky visible through the ceiling, he saw the sun peeking around puffy clouds.
    At the front of the enclosure, he paused to examine an array of settings on a control panel, specifying the humidity for various zones of the underground facility, zones that were separated by electronic barriers that flickered and waved slightly from delicate disturbances in the air.
    Two robot technicians worked the controls, part of a larger team of automatons that were linked electronically to Artie and transmitted a constant stream of valuable data to him.
    The hubot saw a red gazelle run by, darting through the bush section and vanishing into the distance, then heard the warbling call of a thrush—both among the once-extinct creatures that had been resurrected with a combination of cellular material, historical information from observers, habitat information, and other data, forming what the inventor of the system, Glanno Artindale, called “genetic blueprints.”
    Many animal species went extinct in the past five hundred years because they were hunted by humans, or because they were killed by predators such as rats, snakes, monkeys, or owls that were brought in by humans who had no understanding of the consequences of their actions. Often the habitats were destroyed by humans or by other related conditions—and to a very large extent the unfortunate creatures went extinct on islands, where their numbers were limited and where conditions changed enough to wipe them out. On those islands, they were sometimes visited by the crews of sailing ships, careless men who had no concern for what they were doing to