“Normally I would agree, but Master Raquel is on a mission for the Wizard’s Council, so if that ship is in danger we need to let them know.”
“Then the Night Wisp is one of ours?” he asked.
“It wasn’t when last I heard, but if Master Raquel is on board then it is at least operating as one of ours,” I said.
“I understand. I’ll come back to you for that briefing once we have the rest ready.”
“Thanks,” I said.
Chapter Thirty
“Purwryn,” said Marcus.
“I’m over here.” I was behind his head, working at a terminal just out of his sight.
“What happens if we can’t find a solution?” he asked.
“Then you’re stuck in bed until we can get to Hospital Station. But we’ll figure something out.”
I walked around the bed to where he could see me and opened a door to the implant in his lower arm. A datapad lay next to me so I could follow the directions step by step. I spread out all the tools the instructions indicated I’d need. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they were the same kinds of tools I used in my robotics work.
“What’re you doing?” he asked.
“Well, I’ve been doing nothing but reading about implants for two days now and I’ve had my fill of that. I’m going to start working through the basic diagnostics on each of your implants and see what I can learn,” I said.
“But they’re reporting no errors,” he replied.
“I know that, but there’s obviously something wrong and I need some hands-on time with these to learn enough about them.”
I walked through the steps in the manual and it was as he said: nothing appeared to be wrong. Every motor responded to input and every sensor lit up when prompted. They were functioning as well as brand new prototypes in a lab, and yet he was still unable to stand up. It didn’t make any sense.
The implants were well-engineered and designed to be easy to work on. It felt natural to be working on them, as long as I ignored the flesh around them. Perhaps someday I might become a doctor of sorts for Cyborgs. I moved up to the upper arm implant and started its checklist. “So tell me, Marcus, why did you get all these implants to begin with?”
“It’s quite a long story,” he said.
“Well, it’s not like you’re going anywhere soon, so start talking,” I said.
“I guess you have me there. Well, the short version is that when I was little I was struck with a disease that destroyed the use of my legs. At that time I was given the most basic implants, just enough to enable me to learn to walk again.”
“That must’ve been expensive,” I said.
“Oh, I’m sure it was, but I was too young to be concerned with that kind of thing,” he said.
“Well, if that were the whole story, I wouldn’t be working on your arm right now, and you wouldn’t be in breach of Resden’s laws.” I assumed that Resden would treat medically necessary implants differently from biological enhancements.
“True. It never stops with just one,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s addictive, in a way,” he said.
“Body modification?”
“Yeah. I learned as a teen how to improve my running speed by overloading my implants, but I burned them out. My parents replaced them with a similar model, but I started shopping around. Eventually I found a doctor who would put in vastly superior leg implants at the right price.”
“So you could run faster?” I asked.
“Run faster, jump higher, lift more weight and so on. Anything that you use your legs for, I could do better.”
“Surely someone noticed?” I asked.
“Of course they did. I was too much of a showoff. It got me thrown out of school and all sporting competitions, but I didn’t care. I left home and worked whatever jobs I could in order to raise money to buy more implants. Soon I was replacing perfectly good bodily parts with implants and selling those parts off to people looking for more traditional cures.”
“Wow. I had no idea such a market existed.” It was sickening to think there were people out there preying on addicts like Marcus. I didn’t want to imagine what kind of person would get satisfaction from cutting off perfectly good limbs and selling them to the highest bidder.
“I suppose there’s a market for anything. Well, you can guess how the story goes. I got into deep debt over the implants and eventually called my father for help,” he said.
“I bet that was a hard call to make.”
“Hardest call I ever made, but in the end it should have been the easiest.” He was quiet for a moment and then went on. “My father paid off all my debts on the condition that I came to work for him.”
“On his cruise ships?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Do you still owe him?”
“No, I worked it off years ago; but until you came along I had no place to go, so I stayed and started collecting a salary.”
“Is he going to be upset that you left?” I asked.
“No, I spoke to him about my plans before I left. Dad told me he was proud of me for taking a stand and sticking by a friend. He actually sent me with his blessing.”
I finished checking that arm and found nothing wrong but, as I’d hoped, the information I was reading on the implants was starting to make sense. They were a lot like robotics, after all; many of the same parts would work. If we were back on the Paradise in my shop, I could have replaced or repaired a lot of the subsystems in each implant with spare parts that we had lying around - if I could have found anything to fix.
The temptation to improve oneself with robot parts was understandable. All robots were superior in some way. Some were faster, many were stronger, and most could survive environments which would easily kill organic life forms. It was hard not to be jealous of them, but in the end they were just machines with no free will or emotions and couldn’t care what we thought about them.
“You had no new implants in all that time?” I asked.
“Nope … well, almost none. One of my implants failed and had to be replaced, so I took the opportunity to upgrade it at that time, much to my father’s displeasure. He wanted me to replace it with exactly the same model or even downgrade it.”
I moved down to his leg where, instead of just completing the quick test that I’d been doing, I began the full maintenance and testing procedure. I didn’t think it would help to diagnose the problem, but it would help me towards a better understanding of the implants. “Did you have to borrow to pay for that one, too?”
“No, by that time I was earning a wage and paid for it myself,” he said.
“Ah. So your addiction is broken?”
“A good doctor would tell you no addiction is ever broken, but yes, effectively it is,” he said.
“Good. I’m glad you understand that.” I knew too well the hold that addictions have over a person. No matter how much time had passed since my last hit, I still found myself from time to time thinking about just having one more hit. I couldn’t allow myself to fall back into that trap, but I would carry the consequences of previous mistakes for the rest of my life.
As I finished checking the third implant, my disappointment was growing. I’d still found nothing wrong. There had to be something there, but I couldn’t find it. I considered a forced hard reset of the implants to make them come online, but I didn’t know the risks involved in that. Would they lose some critical programming and cease to function at all? Would they simply never come back online? There was no way for me to know, and I could find nothing in the manuals to answer my questions. If Marcus were a robot I’d definitely try it at this stage, but I couldn’t risk my friend’s life. I decided to wait until after we’d heard from Hospital Station before trying something so drastic. “I’m going to do the standard maintenance on all of your implants, and hopefully something will become obvious as I go.”
“Are you finding the
m easy to work on?” he asked.
“Actually, I am. Raquel was right; they’re a lot like robotics. I don’t understand how they connect to the body, but the implants themselves are the same kinds of thing we worked on back in the shop.”
I spent the next three days testing each implant one by one and performing all possible maintenance on them, but I could find nothing wrong with any of the implants themselves. Each one appeared to be fully functional. I couldn’t tell if the potion had repaired them or if their self-healing circuits were responsible, but whichever it was had done a good job.
“Still nothing?” asked Marcus.
“These are the best implants I’ve ever worked on,” I said with a grin. “Unfortunately, they’re also the worst.”
“Felix - ” said Raquel as she walked in. “Sorry, I meant, Purwryn.”
“It’s okay. What’s up?” I asked.
“The reply from Hospital Station has arrived,” she said.
We brought the data up on the monitors. “Wow, they were thorough!”
“I noticed that also. They even have a section for what to do if we make mistakes along the way,” she said.
“Even if we don’t need it for this operation, this is a treasure store of knowledge,” I said.
“Look here,” she said, pulling up a record. “They predicted he’d have this problem and sent a procedure to fix it.”
This message would be in reply to the first one we’d sent, so there must’ve been something in those results to make the problem clear. “Interesting: it seems that the implants put themselves in a cripple mode.”
“‘Cripple mode?’” asked Marcus.
“I would have thought you’d know more about your own body parts. Cripple mode is when they shut themselves down to prevent damage,” I said.
“Why did they do that?” he asked.
“It appears that there’s a specific set of operations needed in order to restart them after they’ve been in a hyberpod,” I said, pausing to consider how to explain what I was reading. “In a sense they still think they’re in the hyberpod, so they’re not running.”
“I don’t recall reading anything about this in the manuals,” said Marcus.
“Did you actually read the manuals?” asked Raquel.
“Yes; well, maybe not all of them. I mostly flicked through them looking for the interesting stuff,” he said.
Raquel chuckled. “I say we shouldn’t turn his implants back on until he’s read all the manuals.”
“A little help here, Purwryn?” asked Marcus.
Chapter Thirty-One
“Hey, Zah’rak,” called Purwryn as I was on my way to the bridge.
“Yes?” I said.
“Marcus is fully functional again. He’ll need a bit of recovery time, but thanks to his implants he can get around just fine now.”
“Excellent!” I said, although ‘fully functional’ seemed like an odd way to put it. “I take it that the message we received from Hospital Station yesterday was of some assistance?”
“Yes. Raquel is preparing a reply with all our new information, just to make sure we didn’t miss anything else.”
“Good. I was just going to the bridge to check out our progress. I believe we’re less than a few days from the military base. From there, we should be able to establish an encrypted channel over the military network for a real-time conversation with the hospital.”
“That would be great. Maybe we should hold the update until then.”
“Good idea, since we might be able to contact them before they could receive that message.” I had turned to continue my way to the bridge when he stopped me again.
“There was something else in the message from Hospital Station, and I think you should look at it right away.”
I followed him back down the corridor and we met with Marcus and Raquel in the mess hall on the Resden craft. They played the message from Dr. Leslie on the hospital station warning us that Resden was hunting us.
“Since we’re sitting on a stolen Resden cruiser, do you want to tell me what it was you did?” I asked.
“Nothing. I already told you everything I know,” said Purwryn.
“I doubt they’d put this much effort into hunting you if there’s no more to it than what you’ve told us. There must be something else,” I said.
“I agree, but I really don’t know what,” said Purwryn.
“Marcus, do you know any more?”
He shrugged and said, “Honestly, I don’t. Before we left I checked with my father, who is the captain of the ship we were serving on, and he didn’t know anything either. He said he anticipated that Resden agents were going to take control from him at the next stop and sweep the ship.”
“That could be it,” said Purwryn. “Maybe they weren’t after us specifically but, since we ran before they could search the ship, they’re making the assumption we’re part of whatever was going on.”
Raquel frowned in thought. “That’s a possibility. Any idea what they were looking for? Was it a person or a thing?”
“No. I wish I did, but I don’t know what they were after,” said Marcus.
“How did they know about the Night Wisp?” I asked. The whole thing stank. Someone knew something; whether it was Purwryn or Marcus I didn’t know, but one of them did. I was sure of it.
“I can answer that,” said Purwryn. “They intercepted the call from me to Crivreen, and his reply. The encryption code we used is a fairly simple one. If they transmitted a copy back home, I’m sure their computers could have cracked it.”
“Makes sense,” I said.
“Look, Resden is after one or both of you for some reason. If we’re to protect you, we need to figure out why they’re pursuing you,” said Raquel.
They both remained silent. Despite everything, I believed Purwryn was telling me the truth, or at least the truth as he understood it. That left Marcus as a wild card. Had he done something and decided to capitalize on Purwryn’s departure to make his own escape, or was he the innocent tagalong friend he claimed to be? I wasn’t sure I trusted him fully. He’d done nothing to make me think he wasn’t trustworthy, but there wasn’t much he could do when paralyzed in sickbay.
“We’re en route to a Phareon military base to restock weapons and ammo. From there we’re heading into what is likely to be a hot battle zone. We can’t have Resden making a move while we’re already in combat, and we can’t show up at a Phareon military base with a stolen Resden cruiser,” I said.
“What are you suggesting?” asked Purwryn.
“First we have to ditch the cruiser. So, Marcus, you have a choice: you can come with us and potentially be killed in combat, or you can take this cruiser and try your luck alone,” I said.
“Purwryn told me quite a bit about you all while I lay in sickbay,” he said. “If I understood correctly, you’re all citizens of the Wizard Kingdom?”
“Yes,” I replied.
“Then I’d like to stick with you. The way I see it, the only way I’m going to be safe now is to move there. Resden certainly won’t look for me there and you don’t seem likely to cut me apart and remove my implants.”
“Raquel?” I sent telepathically. “What do you think?”
“Marcus knows more than he’s telling,” she sent. “But ultimately he’s right; the only safe way for him is to stay with us for the moment and later move back to the Wizard Kingdom.”
“So your advice is to help him?” I sent.
“I’m not sure it’s the wisest course, but we should do it. I think Purwryn at least feels we owe him that much, and he may be right.”
I sighed. It seemed I’d picked up a new team member. “Fine. Our next step is to gut this cruiser of everything that might be of value: armor plating, launchers, ammo, food, medical supplies, or anything else at all. I’ll get Crivreen to lead the salvage operation. Once that’s done we detach and blow her up.”
“Let’s get s
tarted, then,” said Purwryn. There was relief in his voice. I wondered if he’d have gone with Marcus had we turned him away. Perhaps they’d have tried to make it to the Wizard Kingdom. That trip would have taken many years in the small cruiser, but for most of it they’d be out of Resden’s reach.
They’d be out of everyone’s reach. The inner galaxy was heavily populated in the controlled systems, but that was only a tiny fraction of the space; most of it sat empty. A ship making the trip would be completely alone without supplies or help should anything go wrong.
I left them to start salvaging and went up to the bridge. When I’d brought Crivreen up to date, I asked, “Is there anything creative we can do?”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“We don’t have any shuttles. Can we make one out of that cruiser, perhaps? Or - heck, I don’t know; you’re the engineer.”
He shook his head. “We can probably cut off most of her armor and attach it to our hull, which would give us greater mass, which in turn would increase our jump distance. We’d need to compensate for that mass by adding in their engines, but all of that would take weeks in a space dock. Out here, without access to the tools we’d need, it’d be best to strip her of supplies and move on.”
“All right. Head over there and take charge of that. I’ll stand watch here.”
“Okay, I’ll keep my eye open for anything creative we can do,” he said.
Chapter Thirty-Two
“Zah’rak, our fearless handler is calling,” said Crivreen.
We were approaching the military outpost, and once again were in range of the military jump space repeater network that allowed for real-time communications. “Did you send the list of supplies we need?”
“Yes,” he said, “yesterday, so they should have it.”
“Okay. You’d better put our friend up on the big screen.”
Sac'a'rith Page 18
