The War Machine: Crisis of Empire III

by David Drake

  So what it came down to was that AIDs were supposed to squeal, but they never really did it, except sometimes.

  There was an old, old theory that uncertainty was a cornerstone of deterrence. Usually, that was true—but today it wasn’t going to work. Al had no choice but to use his AID in the commission of a major crime. One that might even be regarded as treason. No danger would stop him.

  “AID, report ship name and location and confirm if certain person is aboard.” Al spoke a bit stiffly to the gadget, and found himself holding it the way he would a small dog that might bite. He made sure his finger was over the scram button seal and forced himself to relax.

  “What is the ship?” the AID asked.

  “Senator Hildebrandt Windsor’s ship.” Spencer held his breath. This was the moment of truth. If this AID was going to betray him, this was the moment. “Such information is under security block,” the AID announced. Al felt his mouth go dry. Either he’d get his information, or the KT would be all over this toy store in four minutes. At the first hint that his AID was reluctant to help, Al was going to scram the thing and toss it into a bin of stuffed toys. “One moment, please,” the AID continued. “Sidestepping security may take a moment.” Al breathed a sigh of relief. “Security overcome. I have access to all in-system ship locations.”

  “So which is his ship?”

  “The governor does not own any ship, but he is billeted aboard the Bremerton, currently in parking orbit.”

  Damn smartass machine. But he’d settle for a helpful smartass. “Is his niece aboard?”

  “Confirmed, Captain Spencer. Bethany Windsor billeted compartment four, B deck.”

  That was another little stab in his gut. This AID not only used Al’s new rank, but Bethany’s maiden name.

  Somehow, hearing it from the damn machine made it seem real, official. He felt a surge of anger welling up inside him. “Thank you, AID. Now—how do I get aboard to see her?”

  “You cannot,” the machine said flatly. “Special orders have been issued specifically to keep you off. The crew has been told that Guard officers may attempt to desert and escape to Harmony Cluster by talking their way onto the Bremerton. You cannot get past them.”

  Spencer felt his anger turn cold, calculating. “All right, then AID, I cannot get aboard. Then at least tell me how I can try.”

  Even as he listened to the AID’s patient instructions, Al knew the attempt would fail, knew that the KT could not fail but to keep a watch for him, knew that he was chasing toward disaster.

  Deep in his heart, Captain Allison Spencer wondered if it was heroes or cowards who rushed toward their own destruction.

  Chapter Two

  Wires

  Al Spencer came back to himself, just a little, and felt sick. How much time had passed? How long since he had been thrown off the shuttle, how long since the last drunken bar fight? How long since he had paid the Cernian to cut open his skull and put wires in there, install the pleasure implant in his brain?

  Disorientation. Confusion. A feeling as though he had just appeared here.

  A gap in his life.

  Bethany, his life, his career. They all seemed a lifetime ago. What had become of them all? How had he gotten here?

  But then his worries faded. He blinked, sleepily, happily, and decided it didn’t matter. None of it mattered. Not knowing, not caring, Captain Allison Spencer, High Secretary’s Guards, slapped down the button again. A pulse of pleasure, of emptiness, of exultation and omnipotence washed over him, sweeping away all thoughts, all concerns, all fears before it.

  The numb rig was good—no, more than good. The numb rig was Goodness, the spirit, the embodiment of all that was good in the universe. Al reached down and picked up the battered metal box, careful not to jar the wire that led from the rig to the implant in his skull. He smiled at the box, held it to his filthy, unshaved face, caressed it, planted a respectful, chaste kiss on the grubby, much-used button that was the source of all pleasure. For a time that could have been a split second, or an hour, or both, he floated in ecstasy.

  The rig was Goodness, he thought again, blearily, happily, pleased and proud to have discovered such an essential truth.

  But the feeling was fading already. The glow of well-being was dimming, clearing enough so that bits and pieces of reality were beginning to shine through. He could remember again, remember bribing his way through the spaceport, bluffing his way onto the ground-to-orbit shuttle, the humiliating way he had been stopped attempting to board the Bremerton, the cool, professional way the marines had folded him up when he tried to rush the hatch. The Pact military didn’t much care for attempted stowaways—after all, they were, almost by definition, also attempted deserters.

  The Bremerton Marines hadn’t even permitted him the dignity of arrest, charges, detention, had instead just thrown him back aboard the shuttle, bruised and battered in a dozen places, the most serious injury the one to his pride. The shuttle crew had ignored him too, shoved him out the hatch at landing, tossed him aside like so much garbage to be disposed of.

  Too much of it was coming back. Not just his memory, but his senses. He could taste the foul bile in his mouth without recalling how it came to be there, smell the sourness of his uniform and his person. He could see the stained mattress he had been on—for how long now?

  How had he come to be here, in a wire room, hooked up to a numb rig? How drunk had he got, in what bar, that he would have agreed to the numb-rigger’s harmless-sounding offer of a free sample? Shame and self-loathing washed over him, and uncontrollable tears of self-pity streamed down his face. No man likes to find the depths of which he is capable.

  But the body learns quickly. Already Al Spencer had developed a reflex that would wash away all bad feeling. His finger plunged down on the button again, and a tiny pulse of electricity arced directly into his brain’s pleasure centers. The universe went away in a bloom of happy colors.

  ###

  The Kona Tatsu man looked down at Spencer in disgust and sorrow. He should have expected this, he told himself. He had expected it, almost. What else could the poor bastard do when the whole universe turned against him, when his future was stolen without so much as an apology, when a lifetime of loyalty was rewarded with such callous cruelty, with a casual gamble for momentary advantage in some meaningless political game halfway across the Galaxy?

  Then the KT man caught a whiff of what Captain Spencer smelled like at the moment, and disgust got the upper hand. Even so, there was a debt owed here. “Get him up,” he ordered testily. His two ratings stepped in, a bit reluctantly, and scooped up the softly giggling form of Allison Spencer. The two men started to drag Spencer out toward the waiting ambulance. “Hold it,” the KT man said. “He has to be unplugged before you move him, for God’s sake. Here, let me do it.”

  The two ratings held Spencer in a standing position as the KT man stepped behind him, and gently reached up to where the grubby ribbon cable attached to Spencer’s skull. The incision had been done sloppily, that was sure. There might be danger of infection. Working carefully, he undid the retaining clip and pulled the cable free. A tiny pair of spiky wires, only a few centimeters long, stuck up grotesquely through Spencer’s scalp.

  The KT man let the cable drop and stepped back around in front of Spencer. Still working with exquisite care, he pried Spencer’s fingers away from the numb rig and took the unclean device away from its victim. He threw the damn thing into the far corner of the wire room, drew his repulsor pistol and blasted it down into scrap with a single burst of glass beads accelerated to supersonic speeds.

  The troll-like Cernian who ran the Paradise Wire Palace was angered enough to step forward in protest. “You must not do that! That is my property! I do naught illegal here. You burst in, steal away customer before he can pay his bill, I say nothing, I permit. But you draw guns and shoot my own—”

  The Cernian stopped in mid-sentence, apparently recalling too late that this was no corrupt vice cop he was shou
ting at, but quite a different sort of animal. He closed his lipless mouth and gummed his jaw into a hideous imitation of a human smile. He seemed to have forgotten all his human speech for a long moment. “My apolllogeee,” he said at last, lisping out the last word in the Cernian equivalent of a nervous stutter.

  The KT man stared at the Cernian a long moment. No, nothing illegal went on here—thanks to the bribes the numb riggers could pay. But how many lives had been ruined past all rescue in this fetid place? “Your apology will be accepted,” he said, “if I decide to let you live. You will know the results of my decision in a few days. One way or the other.”

  The KT man fought back a feeling of overwhelming disgust and loathing for the alien. He, as much as any human, was influenced by the stereotype that all non-humans were criminals. It was an act of will to remember that the Pact was as much to blame as anyone for the fact that most criminal enterprises were run by aliens. Many planets had laws on the books to keep non-humans out of the best jobs, out of high-ranking professions and guilds. With every door to legitimate advancement closed, of course the aliens were channeled toward crime, toward the despised jobs humans would not do. Then the humans despised the aliens for doing the dirty work.

  Well, the KT man thought, here was a human doing a little errand that was dirty enough. The KT man turned and walked away, his two ratings dragging the inert Spencer behind them. The KT man grimaced as he stepped into the street. He watched them load Spencer into the ambulance, and pulled his collar up—not against the cold, but as if to block out some part of the contagion that seem to hover in the very air here in the low places of the city.

  He longed to go to someplace clean.

  But he would have to travel a great deal further than the other side of the city to get to any such place.

  If there were any clean places left in the Pact.

  ###

  They knew how to handle wireheads at the discreet hospital where Spencer was brought. A strong sedative, to force sleep for a day or more; an IV to restore the vitamins and other trace elements lost to the days of malnutrition and unnoticed self-starvation; a careful check for lice and the other, less savory parasitic animals that flourished at places like the Paradise Wire Palace. Simple things, really.

  It was rare indeed that much in the way of heroic measures was needed to bring the half-dead wirehead back to life. Cleanliness, nourishment, rest were the keys, and there was no great art in making the body whole once again.

  But when the physicians and the medical AIDs were done, then others were called on. Others ministered to the mind diseased, plucked from the memory rooted sorrows, razed the written troubles of the brain. Even the Kona Tatsu itself had practitioners skilled in those arts; the secret police had much need of psychiatrists in their work. Such as the nameless case officer who had been handling the Spencer docket right along.

  The job of healing a mind was no easier than it had been millennia ago. Al Spencer had to be brought back to reality—and be made to accept reality. That could prove not only difficult, but impossible, when the psychotic escape mechanism was something as seductive as a pleasure implant. Why choose an unpleasant reality over a wire-paradise?

  The usual technique was to remind the patient of the hideous external world that was part and parcel of the wire-paradise hallucination. The lice, the stench, the fetid odors, the self-debasement of being reduced to a button-pushing robot, the very real danger of brain infection as an after-effect of the clumsy brain surgery the wire-shop operators were famous for.

  That was why the surgery robots left behind a scar when they removed the pleasure implant from a wire-paradise victim. The surgery robots could easily pluck the implant out neatly, perfectly, clean the wound and repair the original sloppy incision, and so make the insertion point undetectable. But better, far better to leave a mark behind. For the rest of his days, Al Spencer would have a small, lumpy scar, no larger than this thumbnail, there just above the base of his skull. It would be hidden beneath his hair, but there just the same to remind him. Whenever he scratched his head, or put a hat on, or felt the barber’s clippers, he would remember. He would carry the scar as a warning for the rest of his life.

  And if he heeds the warning, he might remain sane, the KT man thought. He sat, watching Spencer, for a long time after the med team cleaned him up. What could be salvaged from this wreck? What value could the State, the Pact, squeeze out of this dried-up husk?

  But those were mere issues of bureaucratic smoke screening, ways to justify action. The true issue was that the Kona Tatsu had caused this disaster, and honor required the Kona Tatsu to set things to rights. For the KT cleaned up its own messes. How, the nameless man wondered, could he turn this ruin back into a man under the guise of doing the State’s bidding?

  ###

  Spencer awoke to the strange double sensation of not knowing where he was—and yet knowing exactly why he was there. They were trying to cure him here, wherever here was. Someone had found him, brought him to this place.

  He opened his eyes and found himself looking up at an antiseptic white ceiling. The room smelled of fresh linens, everything crisp and clean. A hospital of some sort, no doubt.

  Spencer blinked and tried to take stock of himself. He felt a bit weak and light-headed, the way he had as a child in the throes of this illness or that flu on the morning the fever broke and he knew he was going to be all right even if he wasn’t quite there yet. He could feel a small bump on the back of his head, still half-numb from the anesthesia. He reached back gingerly and touched the bump. What the hell was that? Even through the drugs, it was still tender, and he winced slightly as his fingers examined the scar. Then, at last, he understood.

  He remembered. That was the place the Cernian had cut his skull open.

  “Welcome back, Captain,” a somber voice said, startling close at hand. “The robodoc said you’d be waking up just about now.”

  Spencer flinched in surprise, still not quite oriented. He had thought he was alone. He tried to sit up and got about halfway before he felt dizzy. But that was far enough. Far enough to recognize the Kona Tatsu man sitting at the side of the bed. The man who had begun the nightmare.

  “Things have been busy since you dropped out of sight,” the man said. “The High Secretary was assassinated, for starters. You and I may be the only humans in the Pact not trying to succeed him. Unless you’d care to give it a try.”

  “How long has . . . ” Spencer started to ask, and discovered his voice didn’t quite work right.

  “Here, let me get you some water.” The KT man stood and took a pitcher and glass from the bedside table. He poured the drink, and gently slid his hand under Spencer’s head, lifting him enough to drink comfortably. Spencer took the glass and drank deep, shocked at how heavy the glass seemed. “It’s been about two weeks since I visited your office,” the KT man said, obviously using as neutral a phrase as he could to describe the interview. “Twelve hours later you were thrown off the Bremerton’s shuttle and went straight from there to a bar called the Wild Side, a portside place that never closes. You stayed there about eight hours before they threw you out. They didn’t let you into the Officer’s Club, but you got into a strip joint called the Bottom’s Up—which is where you wiped the floor with those two marines. Quite an accomplishment for a man in your condition. Do you remember any of this?”

  Spencer’s voice had come back, at least a bit. “No. Not past going into the first bar. When did—” He hesitated and gestured to indicate the back of his head.

  “About 30 hours after you sent the marines to the infirmary. More bars, more drinking; wake-me-ups that worked, sober-ups that didn’t. Then you wandered into a bar on the first floor of a certain building. One with the Paradise Wire Palace on the third floor. According to the bartender, you didn’t take much persuading once the wire-pusher got talking to you.

  “The next week you spent pushing a feel-good button. For all intents and purposes, you didn’t eat, you didn’
t sleep. You lost twenty kilos, were almost completely dehydrated—and you pretty much emptied your credit account too. It cost you five pounds in planetary currency every time you hit that button.

  “According to the doctors here, another two days of that and you’d have turned Drone. That’s what they call it when the feel-good wire burns your pleasure centers out. The wire wouldn’t have been able to stimulate that part of your brain any more—because that part of your brain would have been dead, gone, cooked away.

  “To oversimplify a bit, Drones are left incapable of feeling any pleasant sensation, any positive emotion. They can only feel pain, sadness. Nothing else gets through to wake them from their stupor. They get to where they welcome pain and sorrow because it’s better than nothingness. They seek out pain. Sooner or later the pain kills them. You were headed that way. It will be a while before anyone knows for sure if you escaped damage altogether. It’s possible you lost something.”

  Al Spencer shut his eyes and slumped back on the pillow. Yes. He could believe that. He could believe that a part of his soul had been badly injured, was near death, might never return. Oh, yes, he could believe that. “How did you find me?” he asked at last. “How do you know so much about where I was and what I did?”

  “Your AID,” the KT man said. “That’s a good unit you’ve got there. Hang onto it. Apparently you dropped it downstairs in the bar when you went upstairs to get a wire jammed in your brain. They must do some mighty illegal things in that building—it’s completely shielded against every usable radio frequency. The AID could tell you were still up there pushing the feel-good button by listening to the staff gossiping—but it couldn’t call for help until someone tossed it in the trash and threw it out with the garbage. Once it was clear of the building, it could patch into the AID nets and call for help. My office’s computers were watching for any calls regarding you—we responded to the call. And here you are. For about the past week or so, recovering. And now it’s time to go back to work.”