The War Machine: Crisis of Empire III Read Free Page A

sleepily, happily, and decided it didn’t matter. None of it mattered. Not knowing, not caring, Captain Allison Spencer, High Secretary’s Guards, slapped down the button again. A pulse of pleasure, of emptiness, of exultation and omnipotence washed over him, sweeping away all thoughts, all concerns, all fears before it.
    The numb rig was good—no, more than good. The numb rig was Goodness, the spirit, the embodiment of all that was good in the universe. Al reached down and picked up the battered metal box, careful not to jar the wire that led from the rig to the implant in his skull. He smiled at the box, held it to his filthy, unshaved face, caressed it, planted a respectful, chaste kiss on the grubby, much-used button that was the source of all pleasure. For a time that could have been a split second, or an hour, or both, he floated in ecstasy.
    The rig was Goodness, he thought again, blearily, happily, pleased and proud to have discovered such an essential truth.
    But the feeling was fading already. The glow of well-being was dimming, clearing enough so that bits and pieces of reality were beginning to shine through. He could remember again, remember bribing his way through the spaceport, bluffing his way onto the ground-to-orbit shuttle, the humiliating way he had been stopped attempting to board the Bremerton, the cool, professional way the marines had folded him up when he tried to rush the hatch. The Pact military didn’t much care for attempted stowaways—after all, they were, almost by definition, also attempted deserters.
    The Bremerton Marines hadn’t even permitted him the dignity of arrest, charges, detention, had instead just thrown him back aboard the shuttle, bruised and battered in a dozen places, the most serious injury the one to his pride. The shuttle crew had ignored him too, shoved him out the hatch at landing, tossed him aside like so much garbage to be disposed of.
    Too much of it was coming back. Not just his memory, but his senses. He could taste the foul bile in his mouth without recalling how it came to be there, smell the sourness of his uniform and his person. He could see the stained mattress he had been on—for how long now?
    How had he come to be here, in a wire room, hooked up to a numb rig? How drunk had he got, in what bar, that he would have agreed to the numb-rigger’s harmless-sounding offer of a free sample? Shame and self-loathing washed over him, and uncontrollable tears of self-pity streamed down his face. No man likes to find the depths of which he is capable.
    But the body learns quickly. Already Al Spencer had developed a reflex that would wash away all bad feeling. His finger plunged down on the button again, and a tiny pulse of electricity arced directly into his brain’s pleasure centers. The universe went away in a bloom of happy colors.

    ###

    The Kona Tatsu man looked down at Spencer in disgust and sorrow. He should have expected this, he told himself. He had expected it, almost. What else could the poor bastard do when the whole universe turned against him, when his future was stolen without so much as an apology, when a lifetime of loyalty was rewarded with such callous cruelty, with a casual gamble for momentary advantage in some meaningless political game halfway across the Galaxy?
    Then the KT man caught a whiff of what Captain Spencer smelled like at the moment, and disgust got the upper hand. Even so, there was a debt owed here. “Get him up,” he ordered testily. His two ratings stepped in, a bit reluctantly, and scooped up the softly giggling form of Allison Spencer. The two men started to drag Spencer out toward the waiting ambulance. “Hold it,” the KT man said. “He has to be unplugged before you move him, for God’s sake. Here, let me do it.”
    The two ratings held Spencer in a standing position as the KT man stepped behind him, and gently reached up to where the grubby ribbon cable attached to Spencer’s skull. The incision had been done