Wolf Time (Voice of the Whirlwind) Read Free

calculating frown. “It could have been us, yes. An effective little action, if it was.”
    “The people who got killed weren’t volunteers, anyway. Not your people.”
    He grinned in a puzzled way. “No. Of course not.”
    Reese turned to look at him, folding her arms. “That’s what scares me about you idealists. You shoot sixteen people into a vacuum, and it’s all for human betterment and the triumph of the revolution, so everything’s okay.”
    Ken squinted as he looked at her against the light. “I’m not sure it’s different from what you do.”
    “I’m a soldier. You’re an ideologue. The difference is that you decide who gets killed and where, and I’m the one that has to do it and face the consequences if you’re wrong. If it weren’t for people like you, I wouldn’t be necessary.”
    “You think this difference somehow makes you less responsible?”
    Reese shook her head. “No. But the people I fight— they’re volunteers, same as me. Getting paid, same as me. It’s clean, very direct. I take the money, do a job. I don’t know what it’s about often as not. I don’t really want to know. If I asked, the people I work for would just lie anyway.” She moved to the shabby plush chair and sat, curling one leg under her.
    “I fought for humanity once, in the Artifact War. I was on Archangel with Far Jewel, making the planet safe for the Freconomicist cause. Making use of the alien technology we’d stumbled on by accident, all that biochemware the Powers are so good at. It sounded like a noble adventure, but what we were doing was looting alien ruins and stealing from the other policorps. The war blew up, and next I knew I was below the surface in those alien tunnels, and I was facing extermination cyberdrones and tailored bugs with nothing between death and my skin but a very inadequately armored environment suit. And then I got killed.”
    Ken looked at her with his head cocked to one side, puzzled. “You had clone insurance? This is a different body?”
    Anger burned in Reese as she spoke, and she felt it tempering her muscles, turning them rigid.
    Remembered dark tunnels, bodies piled in heaps, the smell of fear that burned itself into the fibers of her combat suit, the scent that no amount of maintenance and cleaning would ever remove.
    “No. Nothing like that. I did the killing— I killed myself, my personality. Because everything I was, everything I’d learned, was just contributing to help my employers, my officers, and the enemy in their effort to murder me. I had to streamline myself, get rid of everything that didn’t contribute in a positive way toward my own physical survival. I became an animal, a tunnel rat. I saw how qualities like courage and loyalty were being used by our bosses to get us killed, and so I became a disloyal coward. My body was working against me— I’m too tall for tunnels— but I tried real hard to get short, and funny enough it seemed to work. Because in times like that, if you’ve got your head right, you can do what you have to.”
    She looked at Ken and grinned, baring her teeth. An adrenaline surge, triggered by the violent memory, prickled the down on her arms. “I’m still an animal. I’m still disloyal. I’m still a coward. Because that’s the only way to keep alive.”
    “If you feel that way, you could get out of the business.”
    She shrugged. “It’s what I do best. And if I did something else— got a job as a rigger, or some kind of tech— then I’d just be somebody else’s animal, a cow maybe, being herded from one place to another and fed on grass. At least this way, I’m my own animal. I get my reward up front.”
    “And during?” Ken’s dark eyes were intent.
    Reese shifted in her seat, felt a certain discomfort. Nerves, she thought, jinking from the adrenaline. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
    “You like the work. I have that impression.”
    She laughed. No reason to be defensive about it. “I like being wired