We Only Need the Heads Read Free Page A

impatiently. “Use your BrainPal. If there’s a chip, it’ll respond.”
    Wilson turned away from Lee and Jefferson’s truly compelling discussion and headed farther into the hut. The bodies had been in an open area that he suspected, true to Lee’s hunch, was used for colony gatherings. Farther in were a set of what used to be cubicles and a small enclosed room.
    The cubicles were a shattered mess; the room, from the outside, at least, looked intact. Wilson was hoping the colony’s computing and communications hardware were in there.
    The room door was locked. Wilson jiggled the door handle a couple of times to be sure, then looked at the other side of the door. He pulled out his multipurpose tool, formed it into a crowbar and pulled the pins out of the door hinges. He set the door aside and looked into the room.
    Every piece of equipment had been hammered into oblivion.
    “Crap,” Wilson said to himself. He went into the room anyway to see if anything was salvageable.
    “Find anything?” Lee asked a few minutes later, appearing by the door.
    “If someone likes puzzles, they could have fun with this,” Wilson said. He stood up and gestured to the remains of the equipment.
    “So nothing you can use,” Lee said.
    “No,” Wilson said. He bent down and grabbed a piece of debris and held it out for Lee to take. “That’s supposed to be the memory core. It’s been hammered out of usability. I’ll take it back and try to get something out of it anyway, but I wouldn’t be holding out hope.”
    “Maybe some of the colonists’ computers and handhelds will have something,” Lee said. “I’ll have my people collect them.”
    “That would be nice,” Wilson said. “Although if everything tied through this central server, it’s possible everything got wiped before this got broken up.”
    “It wasn’t just destroyed in the fighting,” Lee said.
    Wilson shook his head and motioned to the wreckage. “Locked room. No other damage to this part of the hut. And it looked to me like the damage here was methodical. Whoever did it didn’t want what was stored on it to get captured.”
    “But you said the door was locked,” Lee said. “Whoever ran over this place didn’t stop to check the computer.”
    “Yeah,” Wilson said, and then looked over at Lee. “What about you? Get anything off the bodies?”
    “Yeah, once Jefferson figured out what he was doing,” Lee said. “Martina and Vasily Ivanovich. In the absence of any other evidence to the contrary, I’ve nominated them as the two who ran the computers here. I’m having the teams check the other bodies for ID chips, too.”
    “Anything else but their names?” Wilson asked.
    “The usual biometric data,” Lee said. “I pinged the Tub to see if there was anything in its databases, but there wasn’t anything. I wasn’t expecting there to be, unless they happened to be ex-CDF.”
    “Just two more idiots on a spectacularly ill-advised colonization attempt,” Wilson said.
    “With about a hundred and fifty other idiots,” Lee said.
    “And thus the Colonial Union is infinitesimally smarter,” Wilson said. Lee snorted.
    In the distance came the sound of someone retching. Lee craned back to look. “Oh, look, it’s Jefferson,” she said. “He’s popped.”
    Wilson got up to look. “That took a little bit longer than I expected,” he said.
    “He’s been driving us all a little crazy with the gung ho thing,” Lee said.
    “He’s new,” Wilson said.
    “Hopefully it wears off,” Lee said, “before the rest of us kill him.”
    Wilson smiled at this and then threaded back through the mess to Jefferson.
    “Sorry, sir,” he said. He was kneeling by the body of the late Vasily Ivanovich, a puddle of sick off to his side. His other two fire team members had found some other place to be.
    “You’re hanging out near two partially decomposed, partially eaten bodies,” Wilson said. “Being sick is a perfectly rational response.”
    “If you