Sac'a'rith (22 page)

“I suppose that’s unlikely?” he asked.

“As far as I know, no one has ever attempted to put a gate on a spacecraft,” I said.

“It would be useful. We could put several gates on several ships and send them to key locations where they could be dispatched quickly in the event of a disaster.”

“Perhaps someday it might happen. But even if they had a gate, that wouldn’t help in this situation because we’d still have to communicate via normal means to arrange for the gate to be ready on both sides at the same time,” I said.

Shortly afterwards he left to prepare the report to send to Master Raquel. I sighed and ran my fingers through my hair. It still felt good to have my hair back, and I doubted I’d ever take it for granted again. I still had nightmares in which Master Shadow had never rescued me and I was still a helpless, bald slave. There was no way that would happen again; I’d die fighting first.

An incoming secure message broke the silence in the room and the Resden ambassador’s face appeared on my comm. “Hello, Doctor!” His voice had a sickeningly sweet, cheery tone to it, matching his face which was obviously medically enhanced and looked very fake. He should have presented a friendly appearance, but all I could see was the plastic face of a store mannequin.

“Hello, Ambassador. What can I do for you?” I asked.

“Right down to business, then?” he replied.

“Yes, I’m a busy woman. Now, what do you need?” He usually tried to flirt with me if I gave him any opening at all. I wasn’t sure if it was genuine interest or just a political ploy, but either way I didn’t care for it.

“Well, I can understand that, for sure! I just have a small request for you, unworthy of your brilliant mind. I’m looking for any information you might have on a ship named the Night Wisp.”

“Oh? And why would you expect that I’d have any?” I asked.

He continued to grin, showing his teeth which were much too perfect. I thought that whichever doctor had fixed up his face should be fired; even his teeth looked fake.

“They have been reported at Hospital Station recently. I’m sorry to bother you with such a small request, but they’re assisting a dangerous criminal to escape and we want to help them before they get hurt,” he said.

“I see.”
Yeah, right,
I thought to myself.

“So just transmit any data you have. No need to sort it or anything; we’ll handle all that so you can get back to your work,” he said.

“I’m not even going to check to see if we have any information,” I said.

“Oh? Why not?” he asked. His smile wavered very briefly, but quickly returned, along with the assumed charm that went with his fake concern.

“Doctor-Patient confidentiality. If they were here recently, as you say, then they’re patients of ours and we’re duty-bound not to release any information,” I replied.

He hesitated before responding. “Now, you know I have the utmost respect for your fine institution, but – ”

“But nothing,” I interrupted. “If the Night Wisp were your ship, you’d expect us to keep your visit private. That’s how we’ve operated for decades, and nothing has changed.”

“I see,” he said. He was taken aback by my implacability, but I had no desire to play games with him.

“Good. Then, unless you have a request that I can actually fulfill, I have work to do,” I said.

“Perhaps we can talk about this another time, then? Maybe over dinner?” he asked.

There he went again. “No, thank you,” I said as firmly as I could manage. “Good day, Ambassador.”

I disconnected the line and paged Dr. Hawthorne to return to my office. I got up and took a drink, trying to wash down the bile that the ambassador always brought up in my throat. I wished my job would let me pour one of my exploding potions down his throat and then kick him hard in the stomach.

When the doctor came in he asked, “What can I do for you?”

“What was the name of that ship that has the Cyborg aboard?” I asked.

“The Night Wisp. They’ve been here a couple of times. Very generous donors,” he said.

“I should’ve guessed,” I said and slumped down in my seat.

“Is there a problem?” he asked.

“Isn’t there always? Resden just called asking about them, describing them as harboring a dangerous criminal.”

“What did you tell them?” he asked.

“That slimeball? Nothing, of course.
”

“Let me guess, he asked you to dinner again?” he asked. I knew he found the whole thing a bit humorous. I suppose it was in a way, but that didn’t make it any more enjoyable.

“Yeah. We’d better warn the Night Wisp of what we know. I’ll send you a briefing to include with your transmission.”

“I’d suggest that we stay out of this,” he said. He had made a career from staying out of other people’s fights, and had done well. He’d had to, in order to survive the decades since the fall of the Empire. Dr. Hawthorne had been defenseless until Grandmaster Vydor came out and claimed the station.

“Normally I would agree, but Master Raquel is on a mission for the Wizard’s Council, so if that ship is in danger we need to let them know.”

“Then the Night Wisp is one of ours?” he asked.

“It wasn’t when last I heard, but if Master Raquel is on board then it is at least operating as one of ours,” I said.

“I understand. I’ll come back to you for that briefing once we have the rest ready.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Purwryn,” said Marcus.

“I’m over here.” I was behind his head, working at a terminal just out of his sight.

“What happens if we can’t find a solution?” he asked.

“Then you’re stuck in bed until we can get to Hospital Station. But we’ll figure something out.”

I walked around the bed to where he could see me and opened a door to the implant in his lower arm. A datapad lay next to me so I could follow the directions step by step. I spread out all the tools the instructions indicated I’d need. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they were the same kinds of tools I used in my robotics work.

“What’re you doing?” he asked.

“Well, I’ve been doing nothing but reading about implants for two days now and I’ve had my fill of that. I’m going to start working through the basic diagnostics on each of your implants and see what I can learn,” I said.

“But they’re reporting no errors,” he replied.

“I know that, but there’s obviously something wrong and I need some hands-on time with these to learn enough about them.”

I walked through the steps in the manual and it was as he said: nothing appeared to be wrong. Every motor responded to input and every sensor lit up when prompted. They were functioning as well as brand new prototypes in a lab, and yet he was still unable to stand up. It didn’t make any sense.

The implants were well-engineered and designed to be easy to work on. It felt natural to be working on them, as long as I ignored the flesh around them. Perhaps someday I might become a doctor of sorts for Cyborgs. I moved up to the upper arm implant and started its checklist. “So tell me, Marcus, why did you get all these implants to begin with?”

“It’s quite a long story,” he said.

“Well, it’s not like you’re going anywhere soon, so start talking,” I said.

“I guess you have me there. Well, the short version is that when I was little I was struck with a disease that destroyed the use of my legs. At that time I was given the most basic implants, just enough to enable me to learn to walk again.”

“That must’ve been expensive,” I said.

“Oh, I’m sure it was, but I was too young to be concerned with that kind of thing,” he said.

“Well, if that were the whole story, I wouldn’t be working on your arm right now, and you wouldn’t be in breach of Resden’s laws.” I assumed that Resden would treat medically necessary implants differently from biological enhancements.

“True. It never stops with just one,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s addictive, in a way,” he said.

“Body modification?”

“Yeah. I learned as a teen how to improve my running speed by overloading my implants, but I burned them out. My parents replaced them with a similar model, but I started shopping around. Eventually I found a doctor who would put in vastly superior leg implants at the right price.”

“So you could run faster?” I asked.

“Run faster, jump higher, lift more weight and so on. Anything that you use your legs for, I could do better.”

“Surely someone noticed?” I asked.

“Of course they did. I was too much of a showoff. It got me thrown out of school and all sporting competitions, but I didn’t care. I left home and worked whatever jobs I could in order to raise money to buy more implants. Soon I was replacing perfectly good bodily parts with implants and selling those parts off to people looking for more traditional cures.”

“Wow. I had no idea such a market existed.” It was sickening to think there were people out there preying on addicts like Marcus. I didn’t want to imagine what kind of person would get satisfaction from cutting off perfectly good limbs and selling them to the highest bidder.

“I suppose there’s a market for anything. Well, you can guess how the story goes. I got into deep debt over the implants and eventually called my father for help,” he said.

“I bet that was a hard call to make.”

“Hardest call I ever made, but in the end it should have been the easiest.” He was quiet for a moment and then went on. “My father paid off all my debts on the condition that I came to work for him.”

“On his cruise ships?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Do you still owe him?”

“No, I worked it off years ago; but until you came along I had no place to go, so I stayed and started collecting a salary.”

“Is he going to be upset that you left?” I asked.

“No, I spoke to him about my plans before I left. Dad told me he was proud of me for taking a stand and sticking by a friend. He actually sent me with his blessing.”

I finished checking that arm and found nothing wrong but, as I’d hoped, the information I was reading on the implants was starting to make sense. They were a lot like robotics, after all; many of the same parts would work. If we were back on the Paradise in my shop, I could have replaced or repaired a lot of the subsystems in each implant with spare parts that we had lying around - if I could have found anything to fix.

The temptation to improve oneself with robot parts was understandable. All robots were superior in some way. Some were faster, many were stronger, and most could survive environments which would easily kill organic life forms. It was hard not to be jealous of them, but in the end they were just machines with no free will or emotions and couldn’t care what we thought about them.

“You had no new implants in all that time?” I asked.

“Nope … well, almost none. One of my implants failed and had to be replaced, so I took the opportunity to upgrade it at that time, much to my father’s displeasure. He wanted me to replace it with exactly the same model or even downgrade it.”

I moved down to his leg where, instead of just completing the quick test that I’d been doing, I began the full maintenance and testing procedure. I didn’t think it would help to diagnose the problem, but it would help me towards a better understanding of the implants. “Did you have to borrow to pay for that one, too?”

“No, by that time I was earning a wage and paid for it myself,” he said.

“Ah. So your addiction is broken?”

“A good doctor would tell you no addiction is ever broken, but yes, effectively it is,” he said.

“Good. I’m glad you understand that.” I knew too well the hold that addictions have over a person. No matter how much time had passed since my last hit, I still found myself from time to time thinking about just having one more hit. I couldn’t allow myself to fall back into that trap, but I would carry the consequences of previous mistakes for the rest of my life.

As I finished checking the third implant, my disappointment was growing. I’d still found nothing wrong. There had to be something there, but I couldn’t find it. I considered a forced hard reset of the implants to make them come online, but I didn’t know the risks involved in that. Would they lose some critical programming and cease to function at all? Would they simply never come back online? There was no way for me to know, and I could find nothing in the manuals to answer my questions. If Marcus were a robot I’d definitely try it at this stage, but I couldn’t risk my friend’s life. I decided to wait until after we’d heard from Hospital Station before trying something so drastic. “I’m going to do the standard maintenance on all of your implants, and hopefully something will become obvious as I go.”

“Are you finding them easy to work on?” he asked.

“Actually, I am. Raquel was right; they’re a lot like robotics. I don’t understand how they connect to the body, but the implants themselves are the same kinds of thing we worked on back in the shop.”

I spent the next three days testing each implant one by one and performing all possible maintenance on them, but I could find nothing wrong with any of the implants themselves. Each one appeared to be fully functional. I couldn’t tell if the potion had repaired them or if their self-healing circuits were responsible, but whichever it was had done a good job.

“Still nothing?” asked Marcus.

“These are the best implants I’ve ever worked on,” I said with a grin. “Unfortunately, they’re also the worst.”

“Felix - ” said Raquel as she walked in. “Sorry, I meant, Purwryn.”

“It’s okay. What’s up?” I asked.

“The reply from Hospital Station has arrived,” she said.

We brought the data up on the monitors. “Wow, they were thorough!”

“I noticed that also. They even have a section for what to do if we make mistakes along the way,” she said.

“Even if we don’t need it for this operation, this is a treasure store of knowledge,” I said.

“Look here,” she said, pulling up a record. “They predicted he’d have this problem and sent a procedure to fix it.”

This message would be in reply to the first one we’d sent, so there must’ve been something in those results to make the problem clear. “Interesting: it seems that the implants put themselves in a cripple mode.”