Tails You Lose Read Free Page A

lines that Hailey's Comet had activated, unleashed new and terrible magics upon the Salish-Shidhe forces. Most of the Rangers were killed outright by the incredibly augmented stunballs the Tsimshians hit them with—their basic motor functions shutting down as the synaptic connections in their brains were torn to shreds. Others lived but suffered severe brain damage that neither the medical mages nor the cybersurgeons could repair.
    Peter was one of the unlucky ones who wasn't killed outright. The lingering effects of the stunball produced an overstimulation of a part of his brain called the reticular formation. It destroyed his ability to sleep. By the time he was med-evacuated down to Vancouver, he'd been awake for nine days. Alma had been shocked by his deterioration. Hollow-eyed, trembling, unable to feed himself or form a complete sentence, he'd lingered for two days more. Alma had held his hand and told him she loved him, and she thought she heard him slur the same words back at her but couldn't be sure. Then he died.
    The badly mauled Salish-Shidhe Council had drafted a peace accord with Tsimshian in the week following the battle that came to be known as the Mind Grind. That peace had been strained to the breaking point over the past nine months, as Tsimshian forces and Ranger patrols continued to clash along the border. Many of the skirmishes ended with yet another use of the deadly stunballs, putting more brain-damaged soldiers into Salish-Shidhe critical-care wards.
    Alma lifted her finger from the Heroes' Totem and watched as Peter's face faded from view. His death was what had prompted her to volunteer to have a beta-test version of the REM inducer implanted in her brain. The very day that she'd been briefed on Gray Squirrel's project, she'd insisted on becoming one of the test subjects. The testing could be brought home to PCI's Vancouver laboratories, speeding up the project. The sooner a fully tested REM inducer was ready, the fewer soldiers had to die.
    In the wake of Gray Squirrel's extraction, that testing had come to a complete halt. Alma glanced up
Burrard Street
toward St. Paul's Hospital, with its veterans' wing. The lives of the soldiers who lay wide awake in their beds, unable to sleep despite heavy doses of magic and medication, were in the hands of one Pacific Cybernetics researcher: Gray Squirrel. It was up to Alma to bring him home.
    * * *
    Alma activated her binocular vision and peered out through the rain-smeared windshield of the panel van. They'd parked on the uppermost level of a parking facility that afforded an excellent view of the cargo terminal—the perfect spot to set up an observation post.
    On the waterfront below, containers were stacked in long rows, one on top of the other, like gigantic building blocks. Enormous automated cranes that ran the length of the pier lifted the metal containers one by one and deposited them into the holds of waiting container ships. The low whine of heavy machinery and the distant clank of steel container on steel deck drifted in through the driver's window, which Alma had cracked open in an effort to clear the smoke from the incense Reynolds had just burned. It was cloying against the heavy smell of the oil-collection containers in the back of the van.
    Alma watched for signs that the port's security force had noticed the shaman's astral incursion. Nothing looked out of the ordinary, however. A
Port
of
Vancouver
patrol vehicle cruised slowly past the Plum Blossom ' s berth but did not turn onto the pier itself. So far, so good.
    Alma switched her binocular vision off and glanced over at the elf who sat in the passenger seat beside her. When he was conscious, Reynolds was a constant flutter of nervous energy, but now he slumped looseboned in the worn bucket seat. His body was completely motionless except for his eyes, which roved back and forth under closed lids like those of a dreaming man. He wore his prematurely gray hair Native-style, in two long