The Ramal Extraction Read Free Page A

better than a lot of other options. As he well knew personally.
    Wink grinned. Formentara would still get a kick out of this story. It was hir kind of thing. Zhe knew way more about cybernetic biologicals than he did. Maybe more than
any
body did. If Wink wanted wetware of any kind, Formentara was who he’d want installing and tweaking it.
    The D&T hummed away, and Wink stood there watching. He was bored. He was usually bored. He needed to do something active. Preferably with some risk to life or limb. Sex was way safer, mostly. Unless you decided you wanted to do it with the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time, just to juice it up. Once, he had picked up a miner’s woman in a downlow pub near the big iridium mine on Far Bundaloh. Taken her into a stall in the public toilet and had noisy intercourse there. The miners were hard-asses and they would have casually killed him for all kinds of reasons just because they felt like it, but that one, screwing one of their fems? That would have put him high up the to-do list.
    It had given the activity a certain spice…

THREE
    In the comshack, Jo Sims did a quick, personal radiopathic scan—one of her most useful augs, what with the subcell neuron implants, she had all kinds of available frequencies—and admitted the ophthalmic flit from Formentara:
Time for a tune-up,
scrolled across her field of vision. And if that’s what Formentara said, Jo was good with that.
    Formentara was a
mahu
, a human androgyne whose gender wasn’t readily apparent at first glance. Nor on second, third, nor however many glances. Nobody in the unit claimed to know whether Formentara was a “he,” a “she,” or “other,” but Jo didn’t care. Zhe was the best hands-on cybernetist around, the kind of diagnostician who could run hir fingers over your body and intuit what was wrong with your onboard systems, then fix them while zhe ate a sandwich and read a novel. Hir expertise was beyond science and well into art.
    Why zhe wasn’t under contract to some giant university or corporate cybernetics unit was a mystery—zhe could make five times what CFI paid anywhere in the civilized galaxy, no questions asked.
    Jo had more implants than anybody she knew who wasn’t dead. They gave her power and ability beyond most humans’, but, she had been told going in, at a cost: They would kill her eventually, and sooner rather than later.
    She had made her choices, for her own reasons, and she was willing to live—and die—with those. She had never expected to see seventy or eighty standard years—until she met Formentara.
    “Camel cark!” Formentara had said. “If systems are balanced and maintained right? If you repair wear-and-tear biodamage and gross injuries properly? No reason you can’t live out a normal span, you don’t burn the lamps overtime.”
    “How many technomedics can do that?” Jo had asked. “Keep systems that perfectly balanced?”
    Formentara grinned. “Counting myself? Two. Maybe three.”
    Jo laughed. “I expect they have a long waiting list.”
    Zhe shrugged. “If they spouted off and
told
people they can do it, sure.”
    “You just told me.”
    “And that’s the deal: I’ll keep you running, but you keep it to yourself.”
    Jo didn’t take long to answer: “I’m good with that.”
    Zhe grinned. “I figured.”
    Jo shook the fugue and got back to the project at hand. A kidnapping, and an op she’d be running. Rags liked fieldwork, but his time was better spent running big strategy, not little tacticals. He was the colonel and she the captain, but he knew he was too valuable to risk in too many dustups, so his forays into the field were limited. Now and then, he had to get out and shoot something, but she was careful to keep those to scrapes where the risk was minimal. He didn’t like it, but he did it. He’d sit back at the mobile HQ and drum his fingers, unless the shit really hit the fan.
    Or he got really bored.
    At least, she’d get a chance