“Sure, Cap,” Meg replied. “But where do we take ’em?”
“Clinic. We got a few leeches left, and we may as well use a couple. Just make sure they don’t break ’em. We can’t spare them.”
Megak grinned. “Leeches, huh? Why don’t you let me pick the woman and let her pick the guy? Get better results.”
“Never mind that! I don’t want them harmed, just leeched. I’m gonna have to talk to this Doctor and I think he’s one tough son of a bitch. They also got a few people up there with full combat gear. Three or four of them could wipe us out if they could find us and their people. You keep that in mind, too! The odds are we’re gonna suffer for this, but it was take a chance or learn to love wheat threshing. Now—go! They’re starting to pick up their own hostages, and we can lose some real support at our backs as well as much of the village if we don’t get cracking!” He turned to a woman standing by. “You contact that Doctor. You tell ’em we’ll talk in—oh, make it an hour. I don’t want this to drag on, and that should be enough time for the leeches to set in.”
“Right away, sir!”
“Gerta—use human runners from outside town. Do not use any comm links. Not yet. They’ll be ready to pounce on the slightest transmission.”
He’d hoped to be able to use the hostages’ own links, but they apparently had a receiver implanted. Not practical if you wanted to use it yourself. He thought a moment. Or was it? Wouldn’t the pair he would have with him be perfectly okay for that?
The native woman came in and looked around, as if thinking about something, or perhaps judging each of the hostages on some unknown level. Finally she looked at Eve, who was closest to her and to the cave opening, shrugged, and gestured for two very large men with a crude wooden cart to enter. “May as well take that one,” said the woman, pointing to Eve. “She’s small and light and nearest the exit.”
Eve wasn’t sure whether this was a good or a bad thing. Certainly unhooking her from the wall and harness was both excruciatingly painful and wonderful at one and the same time, but she was then placed, still bound, on the small cart. One of the men pulled it, while the other man and the woman made certain she stayed on the wooden bed.
They went through the small complex of modern-style cubicles built, or rather stacked, along both sides of a wide cavern within the cave, and she felt both ashamed that they could see her nakedness and yet curiously detached from it. It was hard to think about such things and be that concerned about them; she hadn’t broken, but she was very much on the edge.
Down one of the caves that led out of the cavern complex, and into a “room” that was certainly carved out of a much smaller natural opening but was anything but natural now. It looked quite familiar in its basics—a clinic, not the kind of place you went for major operations or diagnostics but the kind of place you went when you just felt a bit off or had a splinter you couldn’t get out of your finger, that kind of thing.
It did, however, have a fully reclining surgical bed that had seen better days and perhaps better years. It looked as if the entire population had used it repeatedly, and it had been inexpertly reupholstered far too many times. Still, it served. A medic, or at least somebody in a medic’s gray tunic, came over, gave her a cursory examination while still on the cart with a diagnostic wand, checked a few readings, and then picked up a small pressure syringe. He set the dosage and then injected whatever it was into her behind. She didn’t feel it, not even the pressure of the thing against her skin. She was that numb.
Within a minute she was drifting off, the residual pain ebbing away, and she felt some relief and a pleasant feeling of floating through the clouds.
Once she was unconscious, they undid her chains and the two big men straightened her out, something that would have produced unbearable agony had she not been sedated. Now they lay her on the surgical bed and the medic performed a far more extensive series of tests.
“You all can go now, prepare the male. This won’t take long,” the medic told them. “However, you should tell the Captain that neither one of them are likely to be physically able to walk for some time.”
“He won’t like that,” one of the men warned.
The medic shrugged. “Then he shouldn’t truss them up like this. You can’t get full muscular function back easily or quickly after such abuse any more than you can stop a storm by telling it to not get you wet. If reality was like that then he could just will the damned crashed ship to fix itself and take off. Now, go.”
“You sure she’s not gonna wake up and maybe do some harm in here?” the woman asked.
“Were you listening? Odds are this girl couldn’t lift her arms or walk two feet at the moment. I’m sure if we had a full ship’s hospital we could do wonders, but we don’t even have a real doctor here, so forget it. Besides, the shot I gave her is good for an hour or more at her weight. My only danger from her is if I spend that hour talking to you and then turn my back on her.”
With that, they left, leaving him to his business.
There was bruising and cramping for sure, but nothing that couldn’t be overcome if she went through a series of exercises over the next day or so. Without the automatic machines to do that, though, he could only rely on the leech.
He had often wondered who had invented the ghastly things, and he was sure that he never wanted to meet them. They certainly were an unfinished product. An artificial parasite, programmable, controllable, and knowledgeable about the human nervous system. He pulled down the full body probe and passed it over her from head to foot, then back again. The data piled up in the medical computer he normally used to see about internal injuries and breaks and the like and gave a three-dimensional hologram of the woman. He could even spot the implants in her head and admired the workmanship. If only they had that kind of skill!
Then he reached into a drawer and pulled out a small sealed container. There weren’t many in there, and there were no more when these were gone. He put the container directly into a special socket made for it in the medlab computer console, and said, “Download human schematic.” What the probes had learned, which was quite a lot, was compressed, condensed, and passed down to the leech.
The damned things scared him a bit, not so much for what they did but for what they probably could do in their finished, polished form which must be perfected by now somewhere in the human side of colonization. This thing could turn a complex human into a far simpler machine. Very limited usefulness, really. He could imagine, though, that whatever mad scientist or madder government or agency had been working on these must by now have one that fused with and reprogrammed the host. You’d seem the same, but you’d be always totally loyal to the leader, you would be obedient to all law and authority, and you’d turn in your own mother if she deviated. And that would be just for starters. This was bad enough, but at least it was basic and as easy to recover as to implant.
Maybe somebody had blown up the gates going back to the Mother System. Maybe they didn’t want a virus of slavery spreading so quickly. That sure would explain the Great Silence.
He turned her over on her side a bit. She gave a mumbled protest but didn’t awaken, and he didn’t need very much area. He looked over, saw green, and removed the container from the programming slot, then turned it and positioned it just so against her neck. When he had the exact spot he wanted, he pushed a small switch at the end of the container. The thing quivered, and something small and black and sluglike went from the container into her body at that point. He withdrew the container, noted the clean but small and almost antiseptic-looking wound, got some cotton and alcohol and cleaned it off, then patched it with artificial skin. In a few hours there would be no trace of it unless you were looking for it, and even most medical diagnostics would miss the leech as it virtually merged with the spinal column just at the back of the head where it emerged from the brain. And you’d need the code and the container to transmit it to get the thing out.