Introducing Level Six: The Exciting Second Installment in the Killday Series!
“If you want a novel that leaves you terrified of how easily tiny changes multiply to planet-sized problems, don’t miss Level Five.” –Nerds of a Feather
We’re thrilled to announce that pre-orders are live on the second installment in the KILLDAY series from William Ledbetter!
Fifteen years after warring artificial intelligences nearly destroyed Earth, Abby, the daughter of Killday hero Leah Gibson, finds an artifact from that struggle, upsetting a delicate balance of power and dragging her into the middle of a new fight for humanity’s survival.
One AI faction is working with humanity to repair a biosphere teetering on the edge of collapse, while another faction cares only about elevating itself to a higher plane of intelligence and will destroy anyone who gets in the way. As the only humans still not controlled by AIs race to build huge orbital habitats in space, a more secretive organization grows in the shadows and idolizes the man who triggered the nano-replicator attacks that nearly destroyed the world. They, too, believe the only way to stop the AIs is to annihilate everything.
In Nebula Award winner William Ledbetter’s Level Six, one woman has the power to save humanity — if she can survive long enough to use it.
Read on for an excerpt from this latest scifi adventure!
From Level Six…The robot tractor rumbled to life, its powerful electric motor rising in pitch to a loud whine, scaring the horses into a nervous prance.
“What the hell?” Danny said. “Your dad said he’d come by later to — ”
The tractor lurched forward, spun through the yard in a tight u-turn, then raced down the driveway toward them.
At first no one moved, not quite understanding what was happening, then Juan leapt from the porch and screamed, “Run!”
Julio slapped Worf’s rump and yelled, “Go!”
Worf reared but Abby held on as the horse came down and bolted away from the oncoming tractor. She pulled the reins tight, refusing to let Worf run more than a few strides and wheeled left into Danny’s front yard.
The air around Abby sparkled briefly as dozens of hummingbird-sized robots streaked past her head with a loud shriek. They hit the tractor like a shotgun blast. Two of the huge tires exploded, sending long shreds of rubber flying in all directions. Sparkling air surrounded Julio too as several large rubber chunks erupted into sizzling white blobs just before hitting him, then fell to the ground.
The tractor dropped lower on one side as its metal rims raised gouts of asphalt and gravel from Danny’s driveway, but the tires on the other side still provided enough traction to drive it forward. It zipped past Danny, missing him by a foot, but hitting the old mailbox, which exploded into spinning splinters of wood. Then Abby screamed as the massive tractor hit Julio at about forty miles per hour. Only it didn’t exactly hit him. Julio’s sparkling cloud expanded to create a buffer between him and the tractor, pushing him ahead of it for a couple heartbeats, before he rolled away on one side.
Another wave of flying robots hit the control module sitting on the tractor’s top, but they disintegrated uselessly against the heavy-gauge wire brush guard and the machine wheeled around toward Abby. It was slower in the yard, the shredded wheels sending up rooster-tails of dirt and grass, but it still moved so fast there was no way to avoid it.
Juan stepped between her and the speeding tractor, raised a pistol in both hands, and fired repeatedly into the control box on top. Unlike the robot darts, the bullets were small and fast enough to pass through the wire guard and puncture the housing. Sparks and smoke spewed from the holes as Juan held his ground and emptied the entire magazine into the monster. It lurched, and bucked a few times, then swerved off to the left until it crashed through the corner of the porch and into the house, where it finally came to a stop.
“Shit,” Juan muttered. “I just poured that tea.”
About the AuthorWilliam Ledbetter is a Nebula Award winning author with two novels and more than seventy speculative fiction short stories and non-fiction articles published in five languages, in markets such as Asimov’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Analog, Escape Pod and the SFWA blog. He’s been a space and technology geek since childhood and spent most of his non-writing career in the aerospace and defense industry. He is a member of SFWA, the National Space Society of North Texas, and a Launch Pad Astronomy workshop graduate. He lives near Dallas with his wife, a needy dog and three spoiled cats.
“A propulsive techno-thriller that steps outside the well-established tropes of a scientist struggling to save the world from being taken over by AIs who see no further need for humanity.” –Mike Finn’s Fiction
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[image error]Introducing Level Six: The Exciting Second Installment in the Killday Series! was originally published in Interstellar Flight Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
