The War Machine: Crisis of Empire III (3 page)

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 psychiatrists in their work. Such as the nameless case officer who had been handling the Spencer docket right along.

The job of healing a mind was no easier than it had been millennia ago. Al Spencer had to be brought back to reality—and be made to accept reality. That could prove not only difficult, but impossible, when the psychotic escape mechanism was something as seductive as a pleasure implant. Why choose an unpleasant reality over a wire-paradise?

The usual technique was to remind the patient of the hideous
external
world that was part and parcel of the wire-paradise hallucination. The lice, the stench, the fetid odors, the self-debasement of being reduced to a button-pushing robot, the very real danger of brain infection as an after-effect of the clumsy brain surgery the wire-shop operators were famous for.

That was why the surgery robots left behind a scar when they removed the pleasure implant from a wire-paradise victim. The surgery robots could easily pluck the implant out neatly, perfectly, clean the wound and repair the original sloppy incision, and so make the insertion point undetectable. But better, far better to leave a mark behind. For the rest of his days, Al Spencer would have a small, lumpy scar, no larger than this thumbnail, there just above the base of his skull. It would be hidden beneath his hair, but there just the same to remind him. Whenever he scratched his head, or put a hat on, or felt the barber’s clippers, he would remember. He would carry the scar as a warning for the rest of his life.

And if he heeds the warning, he might remain sane,
the KT man thought. He sat, watching Spencer, for a long time after the med team cleaned him up. What could be salvaged from this wreck? What value could the State, the Pact, squeeze out of this dried-up husk?

But those were mere issues of bureaucratic smoke screening, ways to justify action. The true issue was that the Kona Tatsu had caused this disaster, and honor required the Kona Tatsu to set things to rights. For the KT cleaned up its own messes. How, the nameless man wondered, could he turn this ruin back into a man under the
guise
of doing the State’s bidding?

###

Spencer awoke to the strange double sensation of not knowing where he was—and yet knowing exactly
why
he was there. They were trying to cure him here, wherever
here
was. Someone had found him, brought him to this place.

He opened his eyes and found himself looking up at an antiseptic white ceiling. The room smelled of fresh linens, everything crisp and clean. A hospital of some sort, no doubt.

Spencer blinked and tried to take stock of himself. He felt a bit weak and light-headed, the way he had as a child in the throes of this illness or that flu on the morning the fever broke and he knew he was going to be all right even if he wasn’t quite there yet. He could feel a small bump on the back of his head, still half-numb from the anesthesia. He reached back gingerly and touched the bump. What the hell was that? Even through the drugs, it was still tender, and he winced slightly as his fingers examined the scar. Then, at last, he understood.

He remembered. That was the place the Cernian had cut his skull open.

“Welcome back, Captain,” a somber voice said, startling close at hand. “The robodoc said you’d be waking up just about now.”

Spencer flinched in surprise, still not quite oriented. He had thought he was alone. He tried to sit up and got about halfway before he felt dizzy. But that was far enough. Far enough to recognize the Kona Tatsu man sitting at the side of the bed. The man who had begun the nightmare.

“Things have been busy since you dropped out of sight,” the man said. “The High Secretary was assassinated, for starters. You and I may be the only humans in the Pact not trying to succeed him. Unless you’d care to give it a try.”

“How long has . . . ” Spencer started to ask, and discovered his voice didn’t quite work right.

“Here, let me get you some water.” The KT man stood and took a pitcher and glass from the bedside table. He poured the drink, and gently slid his hand under Spencer’s head, lifting him enough to drink comfortably. Spencer took the glass and drank deep, shocked at how heavy the glass seemed. “It’s been about two weeks since I visited your office,” the KT man said, obviously using as neutral a phrase as he could to describe the interview. “Twelve hours later you were thrown off the
Bremerton’s
shuttle and went straight from there to a bar called the Wild Side, a portside place that never closes. You stayed there about eight hours before they threw you out. They didn’t let you into the Officer’s Club, but you got into a strip joint called the Bottom’s Up—which is where you wiped the floor with those two marines. Quite an accomplishment for a man in your condition. Do you remember any of this?”

Spencer’s voice had come back, at least a bit. “No. Not past going into the first bar. When did—” He hesitated and gestured to indicate the back of his head.

“About 30 hours after you sent the marines to the infirmary. More bars, more drinking; wake-me-ups that worked, sober-ups that didn’t. Then you wandered into a bar on the first floor of a certain building. One with the Paradise Wire Palace on the third floor. According to the bartender, you didn’t take much persuading once the wire-pusher got talking to you.

“The next week you spent pushing a feel-good button. For all intents and purposes, you didn’t eat, you didn’t sleep. You lost twenty kilos, were almost completely dehydrated—and you pretty much emptied your credit account too. It cost you five pounds in planetary currency every time you hit that button.

“According to the doctors here, another two days of that and you’d have turned Drone. That’s what they call it when the feel-good wire burns your pleasure centers out. The wire wouldn’t have been able to stimulate that part of your brain any more—because that part of your brain would have been dead, gone, cooked away.

“To oversimplify a bit, Drones are left incapable of feeling any pleasant sensation, any positive emotion. They can only feel pain, sadness. Nothing else gets through to wake them from their stupor. They get to where they
welcome
pain and sorrow because it’s better than nothingness. They seek out pain. Sooner or later the pain kills them. You were headed that way. It will be a while before anyone knows for sure if you escaped damage altogether. It’s possible you lost something.”

Al Spencer shut his eyes and slumped back on the pillow. Yes. He could believe that. He could believe that a part of his soul had been badly injured, was near death, might never return. Oh, yes, he could believe that. “How did you find me?” he asked at last. “How do you know so much about where I was and what I did?”

“Your AID,” the KT man said. “That’s a good unit you’ve got there. Hang onto it. Apparently you dropped it downstairs in the bar when you went upstairs to get a wire jammed in your brain. They must do some mighty illegal things in that building—it’s completely shielded against every usable radio frequency. The AID could tell you were still up there pushing the feel-good button by listening to the staff gossiping—but it couldn’t call for help until someone tossed it in the trash and threw it out with the garbage. Once it was clear of the building, it could patch into the AID nets and call for help. My office’s computers were watching for any calls regarding you—we responded to the call. And here you are. For about the past week or so, recovering. And now it’s time to go back to work.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you haven’t quite been stripped of your commission or court martialed yet. Your office is under the impression that you are on detached duty assisting the Kona Tatsu. I have not yet disabused them of that notion—which is why you aren’t in the brig. And you’ll stay out of it if you pass a certain test.” The KT man pulled a thick file folder from his briefcase and dropped it on Al’s chest. “Read that. Analyze it. Get it right and you stay on detached duty. Get it wrong and you’ll get a lot of practice breaking rocks on Penitence. Please bear in mind that, even for a prison planet, Penitence is not a nice place.”

The KT man stood, nodded to Spencer, and walked out of the room. Spencer, feeling a bit stronger now, lifted himself up on his elbows to watch the man leave. There was no mistaking it, even behind the threats and the cold, hard language. This nameless secret policeman was a kindly, decent man. There had been no need for him to rescue Spencer, or block the Guard’s quite legitimate efforts to punish Spencer. He was doing Spencer a
kindness,
attempting to make redress for the disaster that the system had inflicted on him.

And it was a hell of a note when you had to depend on the kindness and decency of the secret police.

Kindness or no, Spencer had no doubt that the threat of Penitence was real. There were sharp limits to the KT’s forbearance—and the KT man was requiring Spencer to earn his own survival.

Still a little light-headed, he sat up in bed and broke the seal on the fat file, noting that it was printed on rapid-decay paper that would collapse into powder in a few hours. He’d have to read fast.

The first words his eyes fell upon scared the merry hell out of him. BASIC SECRET KONA TATSU. In the understated world of KT parlance, “Basic” corresponded roughly with “Ultra Eyes-only Human-only Secure-room Access Defended Document” in the rather verbose Guard terminology. And “Defended Document” meant it was legal to kill anyone who
might
leak it. If Spencer flunked the KT man’s little test, Penitence might be the least of his worries.

More than a little nervous, Spencer began reading the file. Ten minutes later his nervousness was forgotten. He was too baffled and curious to remember the danger he was in.

There was something mighty peculiar going on out in the Jomini Cluster.

KT agents had gone missing. In a high-risk sector, that would not have been remarkable—but the disappearances were from Daltgeld, the capital world of the cluster, and Daltgeld was no danger zone. It was a tourist world, safe in the interior of the Pact’s communication lines, nowhere near any of the dozens of potential flash points.

Perhaps that was the point. If Daltgeld could become unsettled—then what place was safe?

Spencer pored over the papers. Agents were vanishing—but reports from the remaining agents were perfectly routine. Their fellows were disappearing, and the survivors did not bother to report it.

It was obvious that there was a lot missing from this file, as well. It had been heavily censored. Spencer frowned. Maybe they didn’t have all the data—but they weren’t even telling him everything
they
knew.

Up until the moment the KT man had arrived in his office with the news that his wife was no longer his wife, Allison Spencer had been an intelligence officer. A good one. He had never gone out to play spy—he had done
real
work, serving in combat units, gathering and analyzing tactical data, and then a hitch back at Guard HQ, working with long-term strategic studies. He found his old reflexes swinging into action. This sort of thing was his bread and butter.

A small part of his mind considered that the Kona Tatsu had to know that Spencer was an intel man who loved puzzle-solving. Spencer knew that the very act of briefing him this way, showing him a part of the puzzle rather than telling him everything, was part of the game they
were
playing with him. More KT manipulation. The secret police were messing with his mind, teasing him.

He knew all that, and he didn’t care. Because it was working. This puzzle intrigued him. There
was
something wrong on Daltgeld.

***

The last of the pages had rotted away to powder, had been vacuumed away by the cleaning robot, and Spencer was sitting up in bed, eating his dinner, when the KT man returned.

Spencer looked up and nodded thoughtfully as his control retook his seat. The term “control” seemed strange to Spencer, but after all, spies had controls, not commanders. The only possible reason to show Spencer that file was to prepare him for playing spy. He looked at the KT man, who sat, saying nothing, waiting expectantly.

“I assume that this room is secure?” Spencer asked. A service robot rolled in, unbidden, and removed the remains of Spencer’s dinner.

“You passed the first part of the test,” the KT man said. “You are quite right to assume that—and equally right not to trust that assumption. You may talk freely.”

Spencer noted that the KT man did not ask him any questions. The KT man wanted him to work this out on his own. “All right, then. There was nothing in that file to suggest it directly, but it seems to me that the Kona Tatsu has been penetrated,” Spencer said. “Someone has subverted the subverters.”