by Steve Perry
“You are a medic.”
“And I have killed men. More than a few.”
“I never shot anybody before. It all happened so fast. There he was, and I shot him!” He paused. “I was afraid,” Singh said.
“We were all afraid,” Jo said.
That wasn’t strictly true, Wink knew. In combat, people got moving fast, and they tended not to notice. Jo had been too busy. Gunny had ice water in her veins. Kay? Nothing frightened her he had ever seen.
And Wink enjoyed it too much. The fear was the spice. But the kid didn’t need to hear any of that right now.
Singh stared at his boots, shaking his head.
Wink said, “We’ve all been where you are, Singh. We all killed somebody the first time. It isn’t an easy thing.”
The young man looked at him.
“It will be a while before we get back to the base,” Wink said. “You want to hear a story?”
“About what?”
“About the first man I killed.”
Singh looked up.
~ * ~
“I was at India General, on Terra, a megaplex teaching hospital we called Panda, short for ‘pandemonium,’ which means, ‘House of Demons.’ Which is pretty much what it seemed like.
“Seventeen thousand patients, ten floors, place half a klick by half a klick, every kind of illness and injury you can think of and a bunch you wouldn’t ever imagine. Huge place, and half the time, PPS didn’t work, and you had to resort to hard-copy maps to find your way around.
“I was an intern, four months in, one of five covering our resident, who was overworked but sharp. Our rotation was through the burn unit, and among two hundred others, there were some soldiers with bad plasma injuries from a training accident at the GA base just outside the city. An AP carrier’s capacitor overloaded and sheeted. Killed fifty-odd outright, injured thirty others. Enough so the Army’s hospital was overwhelmed.
“Panda got the worst of them, and when I say ‘worst,’ if you’ve ever been around plasma burns, you know what I’m talking about.”
Most of the crew nodded. Yeah. They’d been to war.
“We had five with deep charring, third-degree, lot of soft tissue and bone destruction. They were there when I started my rotation, and they’d be there long after I was gone.
“There was one guy, Benton, who’d caught the flash full on. Burned out his eyes, took most of his face down to the skull, ears gone, half his voluntary muscular system destroyed outright. Charred off his penis and testicles, melted both knees, stripped his hands palmar sides to the skeleton. He was swathed in artificial skin and biodenics, and his CNS and peripheral pain receptors mostly pulse-blocked so he wasn’t screaming in agony, but he was feeling constant disquiet, six on a one-to-ten scale, and he knew what had happened to him and what it meant.
“He was looking at at least two more years in the skin-tent, daily debriding, waiting for the muscles and skin to be cloned and regrown, multiple surgeries to replace arteries, veins, his eyes and optical nerves, a cloned face transplant, plus rehab physical and emotional therapy that would probably take him three more years after he was ambulatory. Been much cheaper to let him die, but bad for troop morale.
“He was a teaching case, Benton, destined to be poked and prodded and cut upon by a legion of student doctors and techs for a long time, so there was that, too.
“At best, with everything working exactly as it should, in five years, he’d be 50-60 percent of what he’d been—and his own mother wouldn’t recognize him.
“He couldn’t talk out loud—his mouth and half his tongue were gone. The surgeons had done implants so he could hear and see after a fashion—computer-augmented cam vision— but he had a com aug he could subvocalize enough so pickups could deliver speech. Plus he had an EEG aug so he could run a computer, could read and create messages.
“People have survived worse, but barely.
“Benton was in the depths of major depression. He had every kind of neurochem circulating that the neurologists and psychiatrists could throw at it, but his mood wasn’t what you’d call elevated. He had a certain amount of control over the dosages, within safe limits, a demand-switch, but mostly, he wasn’t keeping himself zoned out.
“He’d had a lot of time to think about things. Pretty much all he had.
“Even with a new dick and balls cloned, any chances of fathering his own germ-cell children anytime soon were iffy because his life partner had bailed, and nobody was coming round to visit: He had no immediate family, and all the members of his squad had been killed in the blast that maimed him.
“I could not even imagine myself in his situation. It was overwhelmingly horrifying. I’d rather be dead.
“One night, as I was checking his tubing and tentware, Benton lit his computer:
“ ‘Should have died with my unit.’
“Yeah, I thought, he was right.
“But I had read his chart, and I knew he had been raised in a traditional religion, and I said what they’d taught me to say in med-school psych to people of faith. ‘But you didn’t, so there must be a reason.’
“ ‘What possible reason?’
“I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Maybe someday, you save the galaxy. Maybe you discover a cure for death.’
“ ‘Maybe I go through years of shit and fall over dead from complications. I want to leave now and save myself the grief. God let this happen, fuck God.’
“I was with him. I knew the stats for long-term prognosis in this kind of case, and it wasn’t good. Suicide was the second leading cause of death, after immune-system disfunction, either or both as likely as not.
“He had a point. At some juncture, living is not better than dying.
“Here we were, spending millions on keeping this kid alive, and to what end?
“I hurt for Benton. He was essentially an overcooked soypro roast, and the best he could look forward to after years of misery and pain was to be half the man he had been, and probably a short and unhappy life after that.”
He looked around at the others. They were attentive, waiting.
They would know where he was going, except, maybe, for Singh.
“The burn-unit recorders caught our conversation, of course, and there were cams set to watch the patients, as well as all the telemetry gear. I said all the right things, didn’t do anything that could have been construed as malpractice or worse. ‘I wish I could help you,’ I said.”
Wink stopped talking. There was a long pause.
“I was an okay programmer,” he finally said. “Good enough to get into the central medical system and out again without being caught. I built a program for Benton’s chem-demand switch. It was on a timer. For six hours, he would have the ability to administer more of the chem to himself than was allowed. A lethal amount. After which, the program would shut off and eat itself, and only an expert looking for it would be able to spot that it had been there, and even then, not what it had been.”
Gunny nodded. “Uh-huh.”
“I went to see Benton. Asked how he was feeling. ‘The same.’
“ ‘Maybe if you allowed yourself more antidepressants, that might do the trick.’
“ ‘Yeah. Maybe.’
“Two hours later, Benton died.”
“I’m not sure that qualifies as your first one,” Gramps said. “You didn’t actually kill him.”
“I gave him a gun, cocked it, put it in his hand, and pressed the barrel against his head,” Wink said. “And if I could have pulled the trigger and gotten away with it, I would have saved him that, too. It qualifies.”
“Qualifies as mercy, too,” Gunny said.
“Obviously, they didn’t catch you,” Jo said.
“They knew. My resident pulled me aside, and said, ‘The official cause of death here was a hypersensitivity to Pacem-Myotica. That’s what goes into my report. But I heard the recording, kid, and I know what you did. I understand why, and I don’t even blame you, but it better not happen on
my watch again, ‘prehendo?’
“Yeah. I understood.
“And that was that.”
He looked at Singh. The boy nodded.
Did it make a difference to him? Sometimes it helped just to know you weren’t the only passenger on the ship.
And sometimes it didn’t...
~ * ~
SIXTEEN
Cutter leaned against the wall and looked at his staff. “Jo, you want to start?”
She nodded. Mostly for Formentara’s benefit, she ran through the particulars of the mission. And while it was patently obvious to everybody, she restated it:
“It was a trap. They knew we were coming.”
Cutter played devil’s advocate: “You sure? Isn’t it possible they set up the lodge as a decoy and just happened to catch us?”
“I don’t think so. Couple reasons: First, we’re the Rajah’s main recovery team, and there’s no secret about us, so if somebody was going to find the lodge, we should have been at the top of the worry list.
“Second, whoever is running the opposition here has a shitload of money and some serious personpower to have that much gear and boots ready to spring a trap just in case somebody stepped into it. It makes more sense that they knew we were coming and when.”
Cutter nodded. “So they put out bait, and we took it.”
Jo looked at Kay.
Kay’s expression was not easy to read, even after the six years she’d been working for CFI, but Cutter thought she looked a little peeved. He said, “Kay?”
“Prey would of course lie to save itself, but the Rel believed it was telling the truth. Which means that Sims Captain is correct—we were specifically targeted.” A beat, then: “Perhaps I should revisit the Rel and overcome my dietary distaste of them.”
Cutter grinned. A Vastalimi joke.
He said, “How so? The targeting, I mean, not the diet.”
“Not likely humans would think to question Rel in this matter. If Rel were given false information designed to draw hunters into a trap, it would be aimed at someone who would pursue this line of inquiry. Whoever did it knew that this was apt to be a Vastalimi. I would like to speak to this person.”
Cutter nodded again. “Anybody want to jump in?”
Gramps said, “Well, it brings up the big question, doesn’t it? Why?”
“Take out the people most likely to find the girl?” That from Wink.
Gunny said, “The old man has a point. That’s a lot of trouble. Be a lot easier just to sit tight somewhere, com all shut down, bottled. Pack her up and move her every once in a while. It’s a big planet. And they’d have to know that the Rajah can afford to hire more mercenaries. Why bother?”
Cutter said, “So they could have another reason. Any thoughts as to what?”
Nobody leaped on that one, and Cutter himself didn’t have any ideas that made sense.
“What now?” Formentara asked.
“Back to what we were doing. We keep looking—”
Cutter’s personal com chortled. The tone was the Rajah’s ID. He held up a hand, tapped the com crowed to his belt, put it on loudspeaker: “Cutter.”
“Colonel, the kidnappers have called with a ransom demand.”
“I’m on my way.”
He tapped the com off. Looked at Gramps.
The older man had his own com unit in hand, shaking his head as he looked at it.
“Nope, we didn’t catch that call.”
Cutter frowned. “Jo, with me. The rest of you stay loose.”
He started for the door. “Oh, and think of ways we might make an extra million-and-some noodle, to pay for the suits you left in the forest.”
He saw them grin at that. Well. Even though he would sacrifice a dozen suits to save any one of these people, he had a reputation to maintain, didn’t he?
~ * ~
In the Rajah’s conference room, Ganesh looked as if he had been hit by a van, and neither Cutter nor Jo were surprised at his appearance, both of them having seen the vid showing the reason why. There was a vaguely medicinal smell about him.
Fuck with the Vastalimi, get the claw. He was lucky to be alive.
Jo noticed that Rama, the prospective son-in-law, was not there. She said so aloud.
The Rajah said, “I thought it better to speak to him of this privately later.”
The big man pointed at the table, upon which was a sand-colored sheet of something like paper with writing on it. Looked as if it was Devanagari—Manak Hindi, a bit of which she could understand when spoken, but couldn’t read. The sheet was inside a clear plastic cover, sealed all the way around.
Ganesh looked at the Rajah, who nodded once.
The security chief said, “This was found tacked to a lamppost at the end of Smuggler’s Alley, two kilometers from the palace.”
“Forensics?” Jo asked.
“Nothing apparent—no DNA, fingerprints. It is foolscap folio bamboo paper, made by Hakkas Manufacturing, in Depok, Balaji.”
Ah. Rama had a hard-on for the ruler of Balaji. That the paper came from there might be enough for him to blow a valve.
Ganesh continued: “This paper is used for official archive hard copy from Pahal to Hem, including here in our country, and often in high-end POD editions of The Vedas. One of those rests on every other coffee table on the planet. The ink is standard India jet, available at any artist-supply market, applied, our technicians say, with a metal nib.
“It was affixed to the post by four brass thumbtacks, also clean.”
“Cameras?”
“None directly covering the lamp. The four security cameras nearest to the location all malfunctioned precisely at midnight. Those farther away have been downloaded, and the recordings scanned. Thus far, nothing of use has been found there.”
Jo and Cutter exchanged glances.
“What does it say?” Cutter asked.
Jo had already snapped an image, stored it in her optical aug. She would be able to call up the image whenever she wanted. Whatever Ganesh had to say, they could check it with their own translator later.
“It says, ‘We have your daughter, and she lives but by our sufferance. Your mercenaries are no threat to us. The ransom will be the equivalent to ND ten million. Await further instructions.’”
Jo figured the Rajah could come up with ten million in pocket change, though that part was tricky. Any kidnapper with half a brain would know how easy it was to mark any kind of tangible ransom. Cash, even old, used bills, could be steganographed with something virtually undetectable, unless the scanner had the code. Somebody with the money could examine it under a microscope and not find anything, but the first note to pass under a scanner programmed with the find-it code would trip silent alarms. And in a case like this, every commercial and government scanner in the system would get that code. Buy a packet of soup mix at the local market way out in the country, in the middle of nowhere? They’d collect you before you got two klicks away.
Likewise, gems could be micronumbered invisibly, unless you were an expert and knew exactly where to look. A couple of those in a bag of one- or two-carat stones would be enough.
Platinum could be tagged with tracers that were inert until a coded scanner bathed them. Bank transfers could carry a find-me code.
The smartest way would be to have an e-transfer, then have that rerouted through additional transactions, which would strip out the original deposit code. Put it in Bank A, and by the time it got to Bank Z, which could be done quickly, following it would take a while. At some point along the way, the electronics could be changed into something more tangible: cash, gems, a shipful of guns or pharmaceuticals, and be half the galaxy away by the time the law caught up to the transfer.
That would take some organization, but the kidnappers had already proven they had plenty of that.
~ * ~
Gunny saw Singh coming out of Doc’s suite, and she drifted over to see how he was doing.
“Singh. How you holdin’ up?”
/> “I am better.”
Didn’t sound like it to her, but she didn’t press it.
“When we got back to the hopper, I saw you,” he said. “You and the others, none of you were afraid, what we had done did not seem to bother you at all. It was”—he said something in a dialect she didn’t recognize—”how to say it? A stroll in the field? for you.”