Forster selected one and raised it in a gloved hand, holding it up to the light. “Interesting.”
Valens wandered over, leaning into Charlie’s light. “Some of the wires are sheared off. Broken,” he commented after a minute. “What’s that dark stain?”
“Given that—without oxygen, in the cold, without microbes—it could have lasted this long …” Forster laid the cable down on the papasan and reached into his kit for scrapers and sample envelopes. “Blood, Colonel Valens. I think it’s blood.”
0930 hours, Wednesday 6 September, 2062
Jefferson Avenue
Hartford Hospital Medical Offices
Hartford, Connecticut
“Did it bother you to be called a baby killer?”
I shrug and start unbuttoning my shirt. “No more than it might bother you, Simon. What the hell brought that on?”
My neurologist—who also happens to be a friend—shrugs and turns his back to give me a little privacy. He’s already taken my vitals. We’ve long since gotten past the first-names stage. Never mind the silliness with paper sheets and hospital johnnies.
The office is cold. I’ve spent an awful lot of my life perched on examining tables, and the percentage gets higher every year. I let my question hang on the air, but Simon doesn’t answer. Instead, he turns on the water and starts soaping his arms to the elbow.
I drape my shirt over a straight-backed green plastic chair and unbuckle my holster before skinning my jeans off, too. The boots are already neatly side-by-side on the floor under the chair seat. I keep my undershirt and panties on. I got out of the habit of wearing a bra when my burns were still tender. Never really needed one anyway, except for running.
I change the subject. “Did you get those pills analyzed for me, Simon?”
He turns back as I put my good-side foot on the black rubber step and lift myself up on to the examining table. “I did,” he answers. “Where did you get that stuff, Jenny?”
Lifting my shoulders, I lie facedown on the sterile paper-covered table. “Street.”
His hands are very gentle as he pushes my shirt up over the long-faded ridges of scar running the length of my spine. Cool latex-wrapped fingers find the lumps of the nanoprocessors at the small of my back, the nape of the neck. “Some minor inflammation here, Jen. Any soreness?”
“It hurts less than physical therapy,” I answer.
He grunts. “What doesn’t? What have you been taking for it?”
“The usual. Booze, caffeine, aspirin.”
“You look like you’ve lost weight.”
I sigh and press my face into the padded headrest. Paper crinkles against my forehead and cheek. “I’m clean. Promise. Years now.” Change the subject. “Simon, you look tired.”
“I was up late. So how did you happen to get possession of a half-dozen tabs of rigathalonin?”
“It is Hammer?” I am sure he feels me stiffen. “I didn’t take any.”
“Nearly, and I know you didn’t, unless you got really lucky. It’s tainted. A third of the pills.”
“I knew that.” Three more deaths this week. “What do you mean nearly?”
“I mean, it’s nearly rigathalonin. It’s a closely related drug, at least—and there’s traces of something else in it, too. Probably from inadequately cleaned equipment. Routine testing would have revealed it.”
“So how did it wind up in Hartford? And did you identify a serial number?” I wince as he probes around the edge of the prosthetic arm, feeling the scarring. There’s a synthetic mesh woven into my deltoid and what’s left of the upper arm musculature on that side, anchored to my scapula to support the weight of the arm. There’s some other stuff in there, too, all knitted together with a mass of scar tissue and baling wire.
It hurts when he touches the place where the skin chafes around the point of contact, flesh to metal.
“Yah. Canadian Consolidated Pharmacom. Listed as a destroyed batch. Which answers your first question.”
“Somebody stole it and smuggled it out to sell.”
“Right. Ready for the readings?”
I nod against the headrest. The air slides cold across my back.
“Pinprick,” Simon warns. Frigid alcohol defines a path across my skin, and then the tug and wince of wires going in at the base of my spine, just above the pelvis. A weighty, coiled cord lies on my butt like a snake. So much practiced is Simon that he gets it in on the first try. “Again,” and he links to the nanoprocessor that hugs my cervical vertebrae as well.
Machinery hums—soft, electrical. He touches a plate near my left elbow. I don’t raise my head to look at the readouts. He is silent for an uncomfortably long time. “Problem?”
“Hmmm.”
You never want to hear a doctor, an officer, or a cop make that sound. “Hmmm?” My voice is muffled by the headrest.
I hear him depressing keys. “Sit up, please. Jenny, have you been sleeping with the prosthesis on?”
“So who sleeps?” I follow directions well. They teach you that in the army, too.
He has the decency to chuckle. “Not me. I’ve gotten hooked on online role-playing games. Raise your right arm.”
I do it. He watches the monitors over my shoulder. They are arranged so I can see, too: the electrical activity reads normal. More or less. One of the long-term problems with my cyberware is that it can’t match the delicacy of normal bioelectricity.
“Lower it. Now the left.”
The prosthesis straightens ceilingward.
“Hmmm.”
“Stop that, Simon.”
“Stop what?”
“Hmmm-ing.”
“Sorry.” He walks around in front of me and taps one of the monitors—flat screens, set in the office wall at eye level. “This dip here—damn, Jenny.” He interrupts himself, finger tracing a red line farther down the graph. “How much pain are you having?”
“Some,” I admit, lowering the metal arm.
“You want something for that?”
“I can’t,” I remind him. “No narcotics. Nothing else works.” Except the booze.
“Ah. Yeah. I’ve got some different anti-inflammatories I want you to try. How’s the arthritis?”
“It’s arthritis. How’s the tendinitis?”
“It only hurts when I laugh, so it doesn’t bother me much.” We share, for a moment, an old-friends grin. He turns back to the monitors after a moment. His finger moves back over to the sudden dip on the readout. “This concerns me.”
“Is that a loss of functionality?”
“It’s a minor degradation. So far.”
“Big problem?” I find myself leaning forward, frowning.
He shakes his head. “Not yet. But—you’re a freak, Jenny. You know that as well as I do. That you’ve survived this long, with the quality of life you have …”
“Don’t tell me it’s a miracle.”
He shakes his head with a rueful sigh. “I was going to say, enigma.” A long pause. “If you notice any pins and needles, let me know, okay? I’m going to test your reflexes now.” He touches an icon, and my left hand rises as if of its own volition, clenching into a fist.
“Damn, Simon. Now that’s creepy.”
“Yeah,” he says, making adjustments. “I think so, too.”
Afterward, he makes me lie facedown while he pulls the wires out of the processors. He pauses and takes his hands off me. “You’re drinking too much, aren’t you?”
“Fuck it, Simon.” He steps away and I sit up, yanking my shirt over the lumpy contours of the machinery snuggling my spine. “I’m still off the damned speed. There’s only so much you can expect of a girl in one lifetime. Do I need batteries yet?”
“No, you’re good.” He looks at me sadly while I button my shirt. “Want to do a bloodborne test? Cholesterol? Any of that?”
“When do you suppose was the last time I had sex?”
“Ah.” He turns away to strip off his gloves before leaving the examining room. By the tim
e he knocks and returns, I’ve buckled my sidearm to my thigh and am stamping into my boots.
Simon moves abruptly, untelegraphed, only a few feet away. Something flashes toward my head. In that microsecond
the sensed world drifts to a crawl
my heartbeat decelerating in my ears
Simon transformed into a statue as
my left hand comes up to intercept and
my right hand drops
slaps leather
comes up with a nine-millimeter leveled
at Simon’s head
the left hand closing on a round red
object strikes metal with a wet thwap and I
almost
pull
the trigger.
By the time Simon’s wide eyes finally focus on the barrel of the pistol, I’m already drawing a deep breath to steady my shaking hand, lowering it by inches. A stream of juice drips over metal fingers, spattering the speckled white tile floor. The sharp scent of crushed apple fills the room.
I swallow hard and holster my gun. “Fuckall, Simon. I could have shot you.”
White behind the rich olive of his complexion, he manages a shaky smile. “Damn, Jenny.”
“You know what I am.” I turn away, buckling the safety strap over the grip of the pistol one-handed.
“It’s still amazing to watch you do that.” His head oscillates slowly from side to side. Admiration or rue?
I drop the crushed apple into a biohazard bag in the corner by the stainless steel sink. There are still droplets of water on the floor from Simon’s handwashing. “Amazing? Yeah. As amazing as walking out of twenty years of service with a combat-drug-and-painkiller habit to dull the hyper-sensitivity and the hurting. So get off my back about the booze, already. I’m entitled to one or two vices, considering how many I gave up.”
He turns the water on so I can rinse my sticky metal fingers and he pats me on the shoulder. “All right, Jenny. But do me one favor?” I dry my hands on the towel he hands me.
“What’s that?”
He pokes me in the ribs. “Eat something once in a while?”
I leave Simon’s office with a head full of unanswered questions and an ache in place of my heart, having promised to stop on the way home and find something for breakfast. I could have taken surface trans—Hartford’s long-contemplated light rail never quite materialized, but electric buses run until ten o’clock or so, although not into my neighborhood. I took one much of the way to the medical building.
Hartford isn’t a big town. That’s one of the reasons I like it. The morning promises fair and cool, the first traces of autumn outlining the leaves of a few caged trees that haven’t yet choked. First time I was here, in ’35, ’36—whenever it was—it had almost as many trees as in Toronto. Tugging a black leather glove on over my left hand, I decide to walk.
I leave the buckles of my jacket open, the sidearm in plain view as I follow Jefferson Street east to Main before turning north, parallel to the river but out of sight of it. My body shakes with the aftereffects of adrenaline and my boosted reflexes. In the service, I learned to self-medicate, the way a lot of people with more organic problems than mine do. In fact, you might say I have an inorganic problem. Hah. When I got out, I couldn’t get the combat drugs anymore. The Hammer, guaranteed to make you just as invincible and focused as a dose of PCP, but without the recreational effects. Also allegedly nonaddictive. Like cigarettes and caffeine. So I learned to make do with less legal things. It took me about four years to wise up.
I was lucky to have good friends.
When they reconstructed me after the bad one, the army modified just about everything about the way I respond to threat, from my endocrine system to muscle memory. The human body isn’t meant to withstand what mine has been engineered to do. There are prices. My heart still hammers in my chest. The edges of my vision hang dark in the long minutes before the enhanced reflexes let go of my nervous system, but I force myself to breathe slowly, look calm, walk with as little trace of a limp as possible.
I’m paranoid. I’m also pushing fifty, and the two are not unrelated.
An early hour, for this neighborhood. It makes the street quiet. Park Avenue and Main Street, by ratty little Barnard Park. Here, at the edge of the barrio, I pass three gangsters in Hammerheads colors—Face’s boys—standing in the shadow of a doorway. Up late. Nothing but a house fire would have gotten them out of bed this early.
One of them nods to me, a single sharp jab of his chin. I return the gesture, no eye contact, and a third of a smile. They never know what to make of me, these kids. I’m not one of Razorface’s old ladies—except in the sense of being old as their grandmothers—but they know he trusts me. And most of them were raised by their grandmothers, so I do receive a certain amount of respect on that front, too.
I’m certain none of them understand the real deal, and I bet it drives them buggy.
When you save somebody’s life—especially another warrior’s—you’re brothers. Maman taught me that. Face’s mama apparently taught him the same thing. It all works out in the end. Assuming you live that long.
The roads get repaved once in a while in this part of the city—access to the hospital and the highway is maintained. Following Main Street, I stroll through the downtown, passing a historic graveyard older than these quasi-United States. It lies uncannily green in the shadow of a thirty-story gold-glass office building which is itself almost a hundred years old. A rat and two pigeons scatter away from a puddle of vomit on the sidewalk as I approach. A few office workers on a midmorning coffee break likewise flush out of my path; they try to be more subtle about it. I turn my head to examine myself in the street-level glass of the gold building. I’d get out of my way, too.
I laugh at myself and they duck away faster. At State House Square, near the crumbling ruin of Constitution Plaza, I turn west onto Asylum Street. Just out of sight of the river—two city blocks and a highway away. Close enough to smell water. There’s a footbridge and a landing there, pretty view down the river. I go the other way, my left knee finally loosening as I warm into my stride. About a third of the way home.
I stop at a Jamaican bakery and buy three beef patties, soursop, and coco bread, although I’m not actually hungry. What the hell. Boris likes the meat.
My shop fronts Sigourney Street, on Asylum Hill near the railroad tracks. The streets here are very different: asphalt crumbled into gravel, powdered further by unrelenting traffic, city water, and power long since shut off. On my end of town, the road crews won’t work since the shootings back in the forties. Empty lots, houses bulldozed by the city, are palisaded by pilings erected to keep abandoned vehicles off the grass. Instead, shanties have sprung up, leaning together, nailed or wired or tied. Narrow mazes of alleys run between, and in July thickets of Queen Anne’s lace, fleabane, and bachelor’s buttons festoon the verges of cracked pavement, thicker clouds of white-and-blue lace than ever bloomed at Grand-père’s farmhouse, out behind the pigpen. Those were the wild-flowers I had wanted to have for a wedding bouquet, back when I was young enough to take those things seriously. By September, the flowers are over, tangles of yellowing weed marking the places where they bloomed and faded.
There aren’t as many rats here. The streets are very clean. It has nothing to do with civic pride. And a lot to do with not being able to afford to waste anything.
Boris waits by the door, watching for me so that he can collect his handout. I bend down and disorder his tigery fur. “Don’t get killed and eaten, Cat.” He purrs roughly, twining my legs, returning the advice in catly fashion. I unlock the door and enter the dim, echoing space of my shop. After my walk through downtown, everything here looks old, tired, rusty, used up, and nasty—but too stubborn to quit. Most of it was thrown out by somebody. Not unlike Boris. Not unlike me.
The message light on my weblink winks at me like a flirtatious eye.
Avatar Gamespace
Mars Starport
Circa A.D. 3400 (
Virtual Clock)
Interaction logged Thursday 7 September,
2062, 0400 hours
Leah Castaign shouted at the angular frame of her new partner. Tuva lounged against the crowded rail in the Starport bar, watching people pass. She jogged through the concourse, waving her arm so he couldn’t miss her.
He turned with a broad wave, setting aside his iced cola. His eyes twinkled under wavy gray hair. He’s so cool for an old guy, Leah thought, and gave him an encompassing hug.
“What’s going on, kiddo?” He ordered another cola and handed it to her before picking up his, ignoring a brief sparkle of unreality as the glass left his hand and leaped to hers.
I wish I had a better VR interface. Nevertheless, she all but squealed around the news. “I got in!”
His grin widened. “Get out! You won the lottery?”
Leah bounced on her toes, swinging her arm and slopping cola over her hand. It hit the floor and vanished; there wasn’t much problem with litter in virtual Marsport. “I won the lottery. I have the points from the Martian Treasure you helped me find, and I’m going up to Phobos the next time I log in. Can you believe it?”
He laughed and laid a hand on her shoulder. “You’ll come back to Marsport to tell me about it, won’t you?”
Leah gave Tuva a coy glance, which made him laugh harder. She twisted her toe on the decking and grinned. “If you buy me another drink when I come back.”
“Mercenary. All right. You’re on. Have they told you yet what the training entails?”
Words tumbled over each other like moths struggling to get at a light. He was still laughing at her, and she didn’t mind. Some people tried for years to get into pilot training and never made it. “There’s simulator training first. Navigational stuff, although they tell me it’s weird. And then I get to fly a real starship!” She paused. “Well, a real virtual starship. But it’s supposed to be great. It’ll kind of suck, because I don’t have neural and my dad wouldn’t let me get it even if he could afford it, but you can do the training even without. There’s this guy on one of my web-groups … oh, you don’t care about that.”
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