Stiletto

by Daniel O'Malley

  “Oh, everyone who works in the morgue is required to carry a pistol at work,” said Clovis. “And we keep a shotgun and a flamethrower on hand, just in case.”

  “I see.”

  “Yes, terribly tiresome. Still, as you are no doubt aware, all sorts of information can be divined from a dead body. Your great-uncle is already working on one of them, and he suggested that you, Miss Leliefeld, might be willing to assist with another one.”

  Please don’t ask this of me, Odette thought. It’s hard enough that I chose this route, but now you’re making me work against my friends directly. It was a ridiculous plea, she knew. She’d set herself against her friends months ago, in that hotel in Paris.

  “Absolutely,” she said sadly. They arrived at the door of what looked like another medical suite. A tall Retainer in a white coat introduced himself as Dr. Robert Bastion and told them he’d been assigned to assist Odette in her examination. His hair was the same pasty color as his skin.

  “It’s a genuine pleasure to meet you, Miss Leliefeld,” he said. “I’m eager to watch a member of the Broederschap in action.”

  “Thank you,” said Odette. “Now, before we plunge in with scalpels and crowbars, my first concern is booby traps. We’ll need to be very careful about activating anything.”

  “Yes, Dr. Leliefeld warned us not to put them into any scanners, so we brought in one of our people to check them out,” said Dr. Bastion. “Pawn Motha can see through flesh. And pretty much everything else. He sketched out the details.” He handed Odette a thick sheaf of papers. They were covered in beautifully done pencil sketches of absolutely hideous things.

  “Good,” said Pawn Clements. “So I don’t have anything to do with this task, right?”

  “Not right now,” said Odette absently. “Ugh, this is a mess.” She sighed as she looked through the pictures. Organs, implants, and weapons had been crammed into the man’s body, but without the meticulous placement that the Grafters were drilled in. “Clearly, whoever did it was in a huge hurry.” Still, they should be ashamed, leaving a subject like this. “What kind of metal or ceramic components did your guy pick up?”

  “Not as much as we expected,” said Bastion. “Some solid objects in his forearms—no moving parts.” He tapped one of the pictures, where three pointed rods were clustered together.

  “Okay, looks like weapons,” said Odette. “A couple of them had blades implanted in their arms. Have you drawn any blood or fluids?”

  “After your great-uncle warned us about the booby traps, we haven’t done anything. Fortunately, there was an astounding amount of blood on Bishop Alrich’s suit, which we managed to intercept before it was incinerated. The lab results all came back fine, nothing unusual except for some generic antirejection drugs.”

  “Do we know the identities of the attackers?” asked Odette. “A medical history from before they were modified might be useful.”

  “We’ve ID’d four of them,” Dr. Bastion told her. “They had no driver’s licenses or phones, but their fingerprints were in the criminal database. Assault. Possession of narcotics. One of them robbed an off-license with a knife. They’re thugs, essentially. We haven’t got a name for the man you’ll be examining, though. Not yet.”

  “Oh, well,” said Odette, “that’s fine.” She peered at one of the sketches and thoughtfully traced a finger around the supernumerary lungs that had been installed. “Fascinating.” She looked over to Pawn Clements. “Are you coming in for the autopsy?”

  “If you don’t need me, I’ll pass,” said Clements. “I can keep an eye on you from the viewing gallery.”

  Because they hadn’t told her what she would be doing, Odette had not brought her own surgical clothes or tools from the hotel. Asking for them to be fetched seemed unreasonably diva-ish. Instead, she stepped into a changing room and pulled on Checquy-supplied scrubs.

  “I’m going to need the most heavy-duty protective garb you can muster up for this,” said Odette as she scrubbed her hands and arms vigorously at the OR sink. “I’ve no idea what I’m going to find in this man.”

  “Not a problem,” Dr. Bastion assured her. “We’re used to venturing into unfriendly territory.”

  Apparently he wasn’t exaggerating, because once they’d both scrubbed in, a couple of medical squires proceeded to garb them in a startling combination of heavy plastic and light metal. Stainless-steel plates were strapped to their chests and arms.

  “What are these?” asked Odette, plucking at the hoses that trailed out from under the armor.

  “They wind back and forth under the armor. You plug them into the sockets in the examination lab and we pump cold water through them,” said one of the assistants. “It gets very warm inside all the layering.”

  After the armor, they were draped in a series of surgical chemises and petticoats, each one apparently providing resistance to a different possible threat. They were all very thin, but Odette was already feeling the heat. Latex gloves were snapped on, and Kevlar gauntlets slid over them and closed at the wrists with duct tape. Finally, they were robed in surgical gowns with the density of tarpaulins. She found herself crumpling slightly under the weight of it all.

  Well, it’s not what I expected, she thought, but it shows they’re taking it seriously. One of the squires held up an enclosed helmet and waited for Odette to bow her head.

  The helmet shut around her head, and Odette heard the faint hiss of oxygen, ensuring she didn’t suffocate. The heat inside the getup was vile. She shuffled awkwardly after Dr. Bastion into a little air lock outside the operating room, one of the squires holding the train of her surgical gown like a bridesmaid.

  Once she was through, the door hissed shut and then produced various heavy clonkings that indicated it would not be opening again until it was damn good and ready. Then the inner door opened, and they dragged themselves in.

  The two-story-high room was brightly lit and lined with tiles that Odette guessed were fireproof, shatterproof, acid-proof, and easy to clean. In the center was the operating table, and on it lay a figure under a discreet plastic sheet. Above the corpse was a lighting array with a camera pointing down. Using sterile gauze, they hurriedly plugged the trailing hoses into the outlets, and a blessed coolness came pumping around them. They slipped antistatic bands around their nondominant hands and connected the trailing cords to the corners of the table the body lay upon.

  “It’s a fairly standard setup,” Dr. Bastion assured her. “Here are the three panic buttons,” he said, pointing out a panel near the operating table. “Blue fills the room with a fire-retardant gas.”

  “Okay,” said Odette.

  “White fills the room with a paralytic chemical. It took down a weremoose last month, so it should be able to sedate anything person-size or smaller.”

  A weremoose? thought Odette, nodding automatically.

  “And the red button fills the room with fire. Don’t worry, though. The really heavy fire will be centered on the table, so if you have to hit the button, be sure to step back as far as possible.”

  “But the whole room is filled with fire?” asked Odette.

  “Only a light fire,” he assured her. “And some of the lower layers of the gowns you’re wearing are fire-resistant.”

  “There’s no button to summon armed guards?” joked Odette.

  “Oh, all three of them summon armed guards,” said the doctor. “Plus, we already have a couple up in the gallery.” Thanks to the armor, Odette couldn’t actually raise her head, but she tilted back at the waist and saw a window beyond which two men with machine guns were standing. She waved awkwardly, and one of them waved back. Behind them were Graaf Ernst, Rook Thomas, Security Chief Clovis, and Pawn Clements.

  “We have pistols here as well,” said the doctor. “Just reach under the operating table, and you’ll find them.” Incredulously, Odette felt around and found herself unholstering an alarmingly chunky handgun. “Armor-piercing ammunition,” he informed her.

  “Okay, well
, let’s see what we find,” she said, picking up the scalpel from the instrument tray. She wasn’t sure what to say, but focusing on science and medicine gave her something to hold on to. She paused when she realized that Dr. Bastion’s eyes were wide open. “Is everything all right?”

  “I’m just rather eager to see a doctor of the Broederschap at work,” he confessed. “Do you use a Y-incision or a T-incision? Or just a single vertical cut?”

  “Usually I do an asterisk or an outward-spiraling incision,” said Odette.

  “Oh . . . By all means, proceed.”

  34

  What’s that?” asked Dr. Bastion in fascination. It had been twenty minutes, and it was, according to Odette’s rough mental tally, the thirty-third time the doctor had asked exactly that question in exactly that tone. She couldn’t really blame him—the interior of the body looked like somebody had taken a copy of Gray’s Anatomy and engaged in some vigorous cutting-and-pasting.

  “I think it’s a junction box,” said Odette. Crammed deep into the man’s torso was a hard, ridged object that looked like the child of an oyster and a chestnut. Clear plastic pipes led out of it, and strands of tissue ran through them to other parts of the body. “See how it’s been plumbed into the spinal cord here?”

  “Fascinating,” murmured Dr. Bastion.

  “Hand me those forceps, please,” ordered Odette. “We should be able to open it up; these are generally accessible to allow for later modifications and—ah!” The casing opened smoothly and revealed a fist-size mass of tissue, its surface covered with familiar-looking ridges and folds.

  “It looks like a brain,” observed the doctor.

  “It is a brain,” said Odette. “A supplementary brain.” She peered closely at it, looking for anything unusual. “When they modified this guy, they had to add in a whole bunch of new ligaments, nerves, and muscles to control his implants. See this?” She reached out with a probe and manipulated a nodule of gray matter. The man’s left arm convulsed, and with a wet cracking sound, a steel bolt launched itself explosively from his wrist. It shot across the room and lodged itself in the shatterproof tiles. They looked at the bolt cautiously. “Okay, well, I probably shouldn’t do that anymore.”

  “Perhaps not,” agreed Dr. Bastion.

  “Anyway, when you receive implants, you don’t just get automatic control of them. Some of them, like respiratory or digestive changes, can be wired into your autonomic nervous system. But for weapons or extra limbs, you’ve got to learn how to use them. It can take months. This type of extra brain is a quick fix to that problem. It’s got instructions and commands preloaded.”

  “Do you have an extra brain?” asked Dr. Bastion.

  “No,” said Odette. “The control they give is very crude. And it’s considered bad form, like cheating. If you want the implants, you must have the self-discipline to train to use them.” She thought of her own implants. She’d mastered sheathing and unsheathing her spurs in a couple of days, but it had taken months before she could use her revamped musculature to perform microsurgery. “These sorts of things are generally implanted if we’re in a hurry. This gets them active, and then we usually remove them later.”

  “You remove them?”

  “Oh yes. Once the subject can take the time to learn things properly. They’re like training wheels. Only, you know, they’re brains.” She didn’t say that the first supplementary brains had been developed for shock troops for the invasion of the Isle of Wight.

  Obviously, whoever put the junction box into this guy didn’t care about him at all, she thought. Quite aside from the seizure fail-safe. The simultaneous deaths of the men proved that it was no accident or coincidence.

  “Dr. Bastion, you said the prisoners were in special cells?”

  “Yes,” he said. “They were underground and shielded from all means of electronic communication.”

  “Why?”

  “Um, we’ve had some problems with previous . . . Grafter . . . prisoners,” the doctor said uncomfortably. “A man in our custody once turned out to be sending information back to his superiors through some sort of antenna on his spine, and then his body was ordered to destroy itself. Of course, this was before we started moving toward peace and amalgamation,” he added hurriedly.

  Odette raised her eyebrows. The implants he was describing weren’t like anything she was familiar with, but she had no difficulty believing they existed. I suppose they’re used for espionage, she thought, which is why I’ve never heard of them.

  “These men were never intended to survive,” said Odette grimly. “They had a mission to accomplish and a set amount of time to get it done. Whoever performed the operations on them knew they would have either succeeded or failed by four a.m. and didn’t want them to be alive either way.” Probably so they couldn’t answer any inconvenient questions. “Disposable troops.”

  “Clever,” remarked Dr. Bastion.

  “Let’s keep going,” said Odette. “Here, can you help me remove the liver and all these lungs?” The two of them worked briskly for a few minutes, and Odette found herself relaxing a little as she slid into the familiar routine and focus that exploring a body required. She scrutinized every organ closely, paying special attention to the points where they had been joined to the man’s nervous system. The placement of the organs might have been sloppy, but the connections were of the highest quality, and there were features she recognized, ones she carried within her own frame. Pim, she thought sadly. Then she noticed something in the cavity, a flicker of independent movement that made her freeze. Not wanting to put her face too close to it, Odette opened her eyes wide, sharpened her gaze, and zoomed in.

  “Oh, shit,” she whispered. Be calm, she told herself. You must be calm.

  How in God’s name could they have managed this?

  “Something wrong?” asked Dr. Bastion.

  “Don’t. Move.” The Checquy doctor looked at her curiously. “We may be in serious trouble.” He started to take his hands out of the torso. “No, don’t do that! Just stay still.”

  “What’s the problem?” came Rook Thomas’s voice from a speaker. Odette looked up to the gallery and saw the Checquy executive pressed up against the glass, an intercom phone in her hand.

  The problem was a small sac tucked away in the folds of a larger-than-usual large intestine. There weren’t any tubes or nerves linking it to other organs; it was just stitched in there, sewn with a cloth ribbon that, before it had spent some time inside an abdominal cavity, had been white. There was even a bow on top. Several ridges of muscle encircled the sac like the rings of Saturn. Occasionally, it gave a little tremble, the muscles flexing softly. Then she noticed something else.

  Drawn on the sac with some sort of indelible marker was a smiley face.

  “They have left what appears to be a Tartarus gourd inside this man,” said Odette tightly.

  “What?” exclaimed Ernst.

  “What’s a Tartarus gourd?” asked the Rook, looking nervous.

  “It is impossible!” said Ernst. “They could never have made one—those take years to ripen.”

  “What are we talking about?” said the Rook.

  “And how could they even source a hippopotamus in which to ferment the base stock?”

  “Ernst!” shouted Thomas. She took a breath and went on at a calmer volume. “What. Exactly. Are we talking about?”

  “It’s a biological weapon,” said Odette. “Can you see the sac thing there?” She pointed at it, and the camera hummed as it zoomed in. “Those muscles ringing it are designed to tear the sac open and then squeeze to release its contents.”

  “Okay, well, not to panic. You’re wearing armor,” pointed out Rook Thomas. “And environmental suits.” Behind her, Graaf Ernst was saying something, and she clicked off the intercom to turn and listen. Odette knew exactly what he was telling the Rook. Thomas looked rather startled when she turned back. “So, apparently the Grafters have developed accelerated bacteria that can eat through metal, plas
tic, and . . . living tissue. All in a matter of moments. Great.” She turned to Ernst. “Why on earth would you people develop those sorts of things?”

  “Because of you people,” said Graaf Ernst easily, his voice just caught by the intercom. “Don’t worry, though, they’re very short-lived.”

  Yeah, just long enough to eat through our armor and then through us, thought Odette.

  “Well, any suggestions?” asked Dr. Bastion tightly. Odette had to give him credit, he was handling the situation fairly well, although she could see a sheen of perspiration through his helmet’s face screen. His hands, however, were dead still amidst the entrails of the corpse.

  “We’re thinking,” said Ernst. His voice boomed over the intercom—apparently they had switched it over to speaker mode. “And Marie is on her way. But we don’t expect that she’ll get here in time.”

  Okay, thought Odette. Maybe we should use the fire button? I’m fairly certain that would kill whatever stuff is in there. She eyed the sac carefully. It’s got muscles, so I could try using my octopus venom to paralyze the fibers. Except that would mean taking off my gloves, and I’m not all that keen on that. Plus, there’s no guarantee that it would work.

  “Maybe we should fill the room?” Security Chief Clovis asked Rook Thomas, who bit her lip. “At the very least, I think we should evacuate all the executives from this observation area.” Odette caught a glimpse of Pawn Clements at the window, looking surprisingly concerned.

  “This is glass, yes?” said Ernst, tapping at the window.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s fine, then,” said the graaf dismissively. “We have never cracked a glass-eating bacterium. Nor a stone-eating one. There are a few natural ones out there, but we could never modify them effectively. They always burned themselves out in seconds. It was extremely irritating,” he mused. “We really should revisit those projects.”

  “Anyway,” said Rook Thomas, “other ideas?”

  “Rook Thomas, this thing is organic,” said Odette. “Can you do anything with your powers?”