Ragnarok (6 page)

She looked forward to it. He must have been a powerful man to afford what he was getting, to afford her and her trip to Venus. To be there at all. And to have earned the injuries she was treating—he was not mugged on the street. Someone had torn his jaw off, crushed him, torn his limbs apart. Someone hated this man. She looked over his external scans from before the incident. His face was not one to be hated easily. He was only just showing signs of his age, more signs of experience than midlife decay. His eyes especially, piercing eyes. There was a strong mind behind them, one strong enough to wake up day after day with an unset skeleton, with no mouth, with only something to do so urgent and so far away….

She had been staring at his insides and outsides all night. She was jarred awake by a page from the cold henchman summoning her to the hospital tent. The Donatsu medical facility was impressive, state of the art from Nippon, so they wouldn't have to send expensive doctors like her out too often. The programming went quickly. All his scans
matched observations of his body. She had to correct for some
necrosis that the calculations didn't expect, but those were
calculations by
programs made to predict a body's change over hours, not a year. Some of the skeletal damage was more severe than predicted. The mass of what crushed him must have been tremendous. There was also one more skewed prediction—his body was devoid of painkillers and showed no signs of sustained analgia field exposure. Over the last year his entire skeleton had been growing back wrong, and the tears in his flesh had been
cauterized
of all things. And he had not been living in an analgia field nor drugging himself into a daze. Who was this man?

Once programmed, the robotic arms took almost an hour to complete their jobs. The longest operation she'd ever designed. She watched the mechanical arms dig in to break all the misfit bones, inject new marrow, repair and plate the tissue in its new position. She saw the hands and handlike feet she'd grown on Earth attached and tested for reflex. And the jaw, that strange apparatus built by Fuji Automatic. They'd consulted with her over the last few months about nerve endings and skull sutures, so she knew what to expect, but to see the thing on his face, held on by bolts instead of muscle, teeth of glistening metal at the angle she devised carefully to not rip off his upper lip. A brutal mechanism. Yet it didn't ruin his face. He looked strong, unnatural to be sure, but not bad or unattractive. He looked bold.

The robotics and tools receded into their holds. The surplus tissue, 20 percent of his former body, took a last pathological scan and then incinerated, its ashes dumped into the boiling sulfur air, scattered to the terrible winds and burning rock below.

The patient awoke five minutes later. He was eager to stand, as all patients were. But unlike every patient before him, he was able. Dr. Mowat gently helped him up to his alien feet, and he stood on them, flexing his new muscles, popping his new joints. It was a reward in every patient to see the parts she constructed come alive. But never had she seen a man who lived a year waiting for them. It was a look of ecstasy on his face, a smile like no other that formed on his silver lower lip. He spoke, and his voice was deep, tremendously deep and half metallic. His voice from before must have been penetrating. His voice now certainly was.

“Dr. Mowat, thank you! I feel like a new man.”

He put his new hand on her left shoulder. She couldn't even muster the will to say “You're welcome.” His presence when awake was intimidating. His pleasure, being free of pain for the first time in so long, standing for the first time in so long, was radiating from him like steam. She stood and smiled, and regretted deeply how obviously she must have blushed.

The rest of that day passed quickly. It was all tests, which he performed perfectly, and scans, which showed a surgery gone well, flawlessly. She didn't dare to ask any questions. She was scared enough when he laughed or spoke a stray word. Every miniscule fiber of information she could glean from him was a treasure. He had been crushed by an animal. He had been awake because he lost his business empire and busily ordered his men in black to reassemble what they could from his meager Venusian holdings into something worth investing in.

As days went on, she heard more and more snips and bits about his enterprises. She wasn't a businesswoman by nature or education, but she could grasp his skills. Back on Earth he had a great company, and for every euro of it he kept one cent on Venus. Though he had no interest in sulfur mining, he gradually paid for repair and improvement work on Iwo Donatsu. Over the years he replaced so much of it that he owned it. He never told a single Earthside employee about the venture. He never even made a profit on it. In fact, once he owned the mine, he made certain its output never improved.

So in time he had an off-planet resort, staffed by 200 or so men loyal to him and nobody else. Filled with supplies to start anew should the need arise, not only lawyers on the strangest retainers in history or investment bankers ready to activate other hidden accounts but more. She asked what the “more” was once, and he almost told her before one of the black rubber men interrupted to dissuade him from answering, and raised a stranger question—he called the man “Little Boots.” And the patient did indeed wear shorter boots than usual to fit his Spetsnaz feet. But lacking his real name, the nickname struck her as oddly childish.

As much as she listened to him, he seemed interested in her. What can a common programming physician say to compare with stories about conquering another planet? Every day she felt more and more inadequate, socially. Like she had nothing to offer. His recovery was so flawless she had no need to be there, so she thought. She was there as company and began to wonder why. She couldn't be so lucky as to have caught his eye. Not like that. He didn't give any hint of interest either and finally in passing mentioned that there was someone back on Earth. Though she wasn't sure it was his wife. She pushed for a little more about her, called the lady back home a lucky woman, but he shook his head.

“No,” he told her, “I wouldn't say that at all.”

After a month he asked her to take a walk with him to a disused part of the balloon. They passed some things she didn't expect to see. One was a giant mining drill. But this was a floating mine that collected rare, short-lived sulfur isotopes in the rain. She knew a little about Venus, but she had never heard of any purpose or even capability to mine the surface. Nobody had ever even stepped out onto the surface, she read in school, leading to a broken line of memorable first statements. “That's one small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind,” on Luna, “I wish that the peace I see here could bless the Earth again,” from Mars, “This one's for you, Mark Twain,” on Halley's Comet. And from the only manned landing on Venus, “Oh my holy fucking shit I think we're on the fucking ground! Get us up we're gonna fucking die!”

She was surprised, almost disappointed that he let her in on so much. Even worried that he might not let her leave knowing what she knew. But she wouldn't tell him to stop. She wanted anything she could get of this man. No matter the cost.

They came to a storage bay set aside from all the others. It was white and subtly decorated. It looked almost like an Elline temple with the pillars. He opened the door and let her inside. The room was flooded with orange light, she realized, because it had a window in the floor. They were looking down onto the clouds and raw orange air. The rain dripping from the bottom of the balloon cast a rippling light on them both. In the room were two crates. Coffins, she realized. He put his hand on one gently.

“This was my brother. My twin. He met with the same
executioner that cut me apart.”

She couldn't think of a condolence to offer. She looked at the coffin and imagined a man like her patient within. She felt a stab of anger toward whoever did all this. He was the strongest, most noble, most passionately alluring man she had ever met. And the most cursed. Who would kill his family? Cut him apart and crush him? It was unthinkable. It was sickening. And to her, it was personal. Doctors take no oaths to bar them from feeling the pain of their patients, or the vengeance of them.

“Who? Who did all this?” she implored.

He took his hand from his brother's coffin and set it on the other. He looked at it gravely.

“In this coffin is something that she—that the girl who did this doesn't know I have. Something of hers. Something it would hurt her to know I have. At least that's what I hope. Tell me, my doctor”—those words, “
my
doctor,” filled her with light against the dark facts she was learning—“if you could fix me after a year, what could you do with some body that's been rotting for two?”

The job he had in mind was perverse. She was sickened by it at first. But she had come to understand him in that month. What he wanted was possible. It wasn't even half as hard as his own surgery. The body wasn't rotting at all. It had been in stasis. A computerized brain, not a person but a simple A.I. with two settings, had already been programmed and set for the corpse. She wished that he could have reanimated his brother instead, to have given him back what he lost, for in that loss she now knew he had lost too much of himself. He had lost the pin in the grenade, the tourniquet that kept the madness in him from bleeding out.

If he had his brother again, he might have gone on just restarting his business. In that coffin on the right was a lost chance. A future that couldn't have been because some monster had burned away his brain. A future Dr. Mowat would have given anything to rebuild for her patient. In the coffin on the left was revenge, cruel and twisted, a future of pain, hatred, and blood. And that was the future she had awakened. The only future he had left.

So she gave him what he wanted. And she didn't hold it against him. She loved the man. She knew it in those last days. She could have told him. He might have even let her stay. But he was busy playing with his new toy. The doctor was, like so many with the privilege of knowing great men, only a pawn. A cameo compared to the star. She knew that what he was doing, what she had helped him to do, was wrong, terribly wrong. But he was an eccentric, all great men were. And he needed it more than he needed her.

She darted through the airlock and into the shuttle. Her eyes protected from the sting of sulfur by the sting of tears. She dared not look out the portal to see Venus fall away, and for the rest of her days on Earth, retired on the sum she'd been paid for that job, she never looked at the morning star again. She ignored the whole night sky and tried not to think about the man she met there, the man who she loved, or the unspeakable task she completed for him.

 

 

T
HE
B
LACKWING
'
S
canopy was heavier than Tahir expected. He linked on highest crypto to Tasha and Toshiro.

“I've got it. Where's Trygve?”

“Monitoring the northern Skunkforce squad, too far to link to you safely.”

“Relay to him, I've got the canopy. It's intact, but I'll need help. Tasha, bring the pogo. Toshiro, you—Ah shit, they're here.”

The white landscape in moonlight was ten times brighter than the Skunkforce camouflage, nothing like the Thaco that could glow to match perfectly. The enemy was combing the place like ants, and they'd see the pogo as soon as it arrived. If T team wanted the rest of the Blackwing, they'd be fighting for it, and Skunkforce was no petty gang. Like Valhalla, they had a knack for trying out their research team's latest inventions in the field. Tahir had read Veikko's report from within Skunkworks: 70 percent humor, 25 percent information relevant to stealing the BIRP, 5 percent other. Other included the latest projects they were handing over to Skunkforce for aggressive testing. There were Gat-Zooks, Gatling bazookas. Tahir had to wonder why everything in recent years seemed all about antiquated spinning barrels, Gatling this, Gatling that. Easy enough to see these squads didn't carry them, much too big. But they would surely have the other prototype Veikko logged.

Flight capable spaz-razors. Tahir hated sharp objects. Microwaves burned and projectiles ripped holes, explosions were all kinds of terrible, but even in a blast it was the shrapnel he loathed. And Skunkforce would be eager to try the flying blades. He stood by the canopy and looked around for the pogo. He knew how Tasha flew. She'd have sent the pogo straight up from where they landed, and it would be coming straight down on the canopy. On him. He could sense Trygve enter his safe link range. Toshiro arrived at the canopy.

“What? You can't lift that yourself?” he whispered.

“You lift it.”

Toshiro gave it a kick, it didn't move. He grunted, “I don't think they know we're here. Their search patterns aren't tactical. They're still just looking for their lost parts.”

They felt a tingle on their shoulders, then the wind of a pogo overhead. They both stuck close to the canopy so Tasha would have only one target to avoid. Trygve linked in.

“Three minutes! Don't wait for me, tractor me up later!”

“Why? Did they see you?”

“No, dammit, they see you, or the black canopy! On the plateau to your north!”

They looked up at the plateau. There was nothing there. They kept their eyes on it. Then Tasha landed and the ridge sprang to life. Incoming fire, microwaves. Tahir saw something wrong instantly. The beams were hitting the pogo's dispersion field with red sparks. UNEGA signature microwaves. This wasn't Skunkforce. It was someone from across the pond. Skunkforce saw them and opened fire immediately. With the damn razors. Thankfully they were visible to the naked eye. Even in the dark, he could see the spinning blades. He dodged two. Toshiro ducked behind the canopy, and the razor bounced off. Tasha finally opened the pogo door.