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

sloppily, that was sure. There might be danger of infection. Working carefully, he undid the retaining clip and pulled the cable free. A tiny pair of spiky wires, only a few centimeters long, stuck up grotesquely through Spencer’s scalp.
    The KT man let the cable drop and stepped back around in front of Spencer. Still working with exquisite care, he pried Spencer’s fingers away from the numb rig and took the unclean device away from its victim. He threw the damn thing into the far corner of the wire room, drew his repulsor pistol and blasted it down into scrap with a single burst of glass beads accelerated to supersonic speeds.
    The troll-like Cernian who ran the Paradise Wire Palace was angered enough to step forward in protest. “You must not do that! That is my property! I do naught illegal here. You burst in, steal away customer before he can pay his bill, I say nothing, I permit. But you draw guns and shoot my own—”
    The Cernian stopped in mid-sentence, apparently recalling too late that this was no corrupt vice cop he was shouting at, but quite a different sort of animal. He closed his lipless mouth and gummed his jaw into a hideous imitation of a human smile. He seemed to have forgotten all his human speech for a long moment. “My apolllogeee,” he said at last, lisping out the last word in the Cernian equivalent of a nervous stutter.
    The KT man stared at the Cernian a long moment. No, nothing illegal went on here—thanks to the bribes the numb riggers could pay. But how many lives had been ruined past all rescue in this fetid place? “Your apology will be accepted,” he said, “if I decide to let you live. You will know the results of my decision in a few days. One way or the other.”
    The KT man fought back a feeling of overwhelming disgust and loathing for the alien. He, as much as any human, was influenced by the stereotype that all non-humans were criminals. It was an act of will to remember that the Pact was as much to blame as anyone for the fact that most criminal enterprises were run by aliens. Many planets had laws on the books to keep non-humans out of the best jobs, out of high-ranking professions and guilds. With every door to legitimate advancement closed, of course the aliens were channeled toward crime, toward the despised jobs humans would not do. Then the humans despised the aliens for doing the dirty work.
    Well, the KT man thought, here was a human doing a little errand that was dirty enough. The KT man turned and walked away, his two ratings dragging the inert Spencer behind them. The KT man grimaced as he stepped into the street. He watched them load Spencer into the ambulance, and pulled his collar up—not against the cold, but as if to block out some part of the contagion that seem to hover in the very air here in the low places of the city.
    He longed to go to someplace clean.
    But he would have to travel a great deal further than the other side of the city to get to any such place.
    If there were any clean places left in the Pact.

    ###

    They knew how to handle wireheads at the discreet hospital where Spencer was brought. A strong sedative, to force sleep for a day or more; an IV to restore the vitamins and other trace elements lost to the days of malnutrition and unnoticed self-starvation; a careful check for lice and the other, less savory parasitic animals that flourished at places like the Paradise Wire Palace. Simple things, really.
    It was rare indeed that much in the way of heroic measures was needed to bring the half-dead wirehead back to life. Cleanliness, nourishment, rest were the keys, and there was no great art in making the body whole once again.
    But when the physicians and the medical AIDs were done, then others were called on. Others ministered to the mind diseased, plucked from the memory rooted sorrows, razed the written troubles of the brain. Even the Kona Tatsu itself had practitioners skilled in those arts; the secret police had much need of