The Ramal Extraction Read Free

trooper—his name was Fletcher—looked mostly okay. Some bruises, contusions, nothing broken or majorly torn. But his vitals were off—pulse, respiration, BP were all too fast. His hormones were whacked, and his chem scans a-jumble. Adrenaline and testosterone were sky-high.
    Easy enough to calm down, but better that he could find a cause.
    Wink knew what it was generally—something in his combatware augmentation was malfunctioning. But the C-scans had come up clean, the myoneurals showed the effect but not the cause, and everything on Fletcher’s implant or viral-molecular nanocircuitry list checked out as within normal parameters. He had the standard galactic-military issue: hormone reservoir and pump; auditory and optical sets; nerve enhancers. Nothing else listed.
    Might have to get Formentara in here. Zhe would figure it out in a hurry, but he hated to give up that easily.
    Wink looked at the naked man sitting on the exam table. He had a thought.
    “My chart says your sexual preferences are hetero.”
    “Yeah, so?”
    “You ever see Captain Sims in the buff?”
    Fletcher grinned. “I might have passed her in the shower a few times.”
    As Wink watched, the soldier sported a sudden rampant erection. Jo Sims was drop-dead gorgeous, and a lust magnet among those attracted to women. But to pop a boner with a doctor looking right at you?
    Wink grinned. “Dickware,” he said. “You’re running dickware.”
    Fletcher’s carnal grin vanished.
    It wasn’t against regs to sport nonissue military augs, if you could afford them. Most couldn’t, and those who couldpaid for it in more ways than one. First, they weren’t cheap. A good high-end combat-rated aug could run six months’ pay, and the top-of-the-line stuff? If you had to ask what they cost, you couldn’t afford them.
    Second, the more augs you wore, the more they chewed on your physiology. The old heuristic was, every general-system aug you got cost you five years of life span. At 150 standard years, ten or twelve augs would lop five or six decades off the end. Wink had known rich aug-hogs who ran twenty systems. Live fast, die young, and leave an absolutely hideous corpse, and that didn’t even speak to the psychological problems. Now and then, an aug-hog would unbalance and go amok, and those who sported military- or assassinware could wipe out a lot of people before they got taken down.
    Double-edged sword, that.
    “It’s not illegal,” Fletcher said.
    “Not for the Cutters, though you got it while you were in the Army didn’t you?”
    The kid nodded. “Yeah.”
    The Army didn’t care for pornware. It made you a better killer? Hey, they were all for that. It made you a better fucker? They didn’t want the troops distracted going to, or in the middle of, a firefight. Make war, not love.
    “I don’t care about exercising your willie. I’m your medic, son, and I need to know these things if I am going to keep you alive and fit. It’s piggybacked, isn’t it?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Where?”
    “On the myostim adjunct.”
    Wink nodded. That’s why he hadn’t spotted it. Kid had been hiding it from the Army docs, some of whom might have noticed but most of whom wouldn’t have if they’d even bothered to look. He’d have found it eventually. That wasn’t the first place he’d have looked.
    “Lie down.”
    The kid did, and Wink went to adjust the D&T. The aug had been damaged from the impact with the tree. It was easy enough to fix once you knew what the problem was, and if he was in a good mood, Wink could repair it so it was better than before, just a matter of inserting the right virus and nanosires into the right gene and spinning it. If he was in a bad mood, he could shut it down, or even reverse it. Fix it so Fletcher couldn’t get it up with a crane and a roomful of pornoproj stars paid only if they got him off…
    That would be cruel, and he wouldn’t do that. The troops needed to blow off steam, sex was as good a way as any, and