Check functionality. I heard Virginia Vidaura’s admonitions from the Envoy training modules. It’s not injury you’re concerned with, it’s damage. Pain you can either use or shut down. Wounds matter only if they cause structural impairment. Don’t worry about the blood; it isn’t yours. You put this flesh on a couple of days ago, and you’ll be taking it off again soon if you can manage not to get killed first. Don’t worry about wounds; check your functionality.
My head felt as if someone was sawing it in half from the inside. Waves of feverish sweat spread down through me, apparently from a point on the back of my scalp. The floor of my stomach had climbed and was nestling somewhere at the base of my throat. My lungs hurt in an obscure, misted way. It felt as if I’d been shot with the stunner in my jacket pocket, on a not particularly low beam.
Functionality!
Thanks Virginia.
Hard to tell how much of this was hangover and how much was dying. Hard to care. I worked myself cautiously into a sitting position on the edge of the shelf and noticed for the first time that I’d fallen asleep more or less in my clothes. I searched my pockets, turned up the battlefield medic’s gun and the anti-radiation capsules. I weighed the transparent plastic tubes in one hand and thought about it. The shock of injection was very likely going to make me vomit.
A deeper trawl through my pockets finally turned up a stick of military-issue painkillers. I snapped one loose, held it between finger and thumb and looked at it for a moment, then added a second. Conditioned reflex took the controls as I checked the delivery muzzle of the medic’s gun, cleared the breech and loaded the two crystal-filled capsules nose to tail. I snapped the slide and the gun made a high-pitched scaling whine as the magnetic field charged.
My head twinged. An excruciating hard-under-soft sensation that made me, for some reason, think of the flecks of systems data floating in the corner of the coil at the other end of the room.
The charged light winked redly at me from the gun. Inside the breech, inside the capsules, the military-format crystal shards would be aligned, sharp-edged ends pointing down the barrel like a million poised daggers. I pushed the muzzle against the crook of my elbow and squeezed the trigger.
The relief was instant. A soft red rush through my head, wiping the pain away in smudges of pink and grey. Wedge issue. Nothing but the very best for Carrera’s wolves. I smirked to myself, stoned on the endorphin boost, and groped for the anti-radiation capsules.
Feeling pretty fucking functional now, Virginia.
Dumped out the shredded painkiller caps. Reloaded with anti-rad, snapped the slide.
Look at yourself, Kovacs. A dying, disintegrating set of cells, woven back together with chemical thread.
That didn’t sound like Virginia Vidaura, so it might have been Semetaire, creeping back from last night’s retreat. I pushed the observation to the back of my mind and focused on function.
You put this flesh on a couple of days ago, and you’ll be taking it off again soon…
Yeah, yeah.
Waited out the rising whine. Waited for the red-eyed wink.
Shot.
Pretty fucking functional.
Clothing arranged in something approaching fastened order, I followed the sound of the voices to the galley. Everyone from the party was gathered there, with the notable exception of Schneider, and breakfast was in progress. I got a brief round of applause as I made my appearance. Cruickshank grinned, bumped hips with me and handed me a mug of coffee. By the look of her pupils, I wasn’t the only one who’d been at the mil-issue medicine pack.
‘What time did you guys wind up?’ I asked, seating myself.
Ole Hansen consulted his retinal display. ‘’bout an hour ago. Luc here offered to cook. I went back to the camp for the stuff.’
‘What about Schneider?’
Hansen shrugged and forked food into his mouth. ‘Went with, but then he stayed. Why?’
‘No reason.’
‘Here.’ Luc Deprez slid an omelette-laden plate in front of me. ‘Refuel.’
I tried a couple of mouthfuls, but couldn’t develop any enthusiasm for it. I wasn’t feeling any definable pain, but there was a sickly instability underlying the numbness that I knew had set in at a cellular level. I hadn’t had any real appetite for the last couple of days, and it had been getting increasingly hard to hold food down early in the morning. I cut up the omelette and pushed the pieces around the plate, but in the end I left most of it.
Deprez pretended not to notice, but you could tell he was hurt.
‘Anyone notice if our tiny friends are still burning?’
‘There’s smoke,’ said Hansen. ‘But not much of it. You not going to eat that?’
I shook my head.
‘Give it here.’ He grabbed my plate and scraped it onto his own. ‘You really must have overdone the local hooch last night.’
‘I’m dying, Ole,’ I said irritably.
‘Yeah, maybe it’s that. Or the pipe. My father told me once, never mix alcohol and whiff. Fucks you up.’
A comset chime sounded from the other end of the table. Someone’s discarded induction rig left on broadcast. Hansen grunted, and reached for the set with his free hand. He held it to his ear.
‘Hansen. Yeah.’ He listened. ‘Alright. Five minutes.’ He listened again, and a thin smile appeared on his face. ‘Right, I’ll tell them. Ten minutes. Yeah.’
He tossed the set back among the plates and grimaced.
‘Sutjiadi?’
‘Got it in one. Going to fly a recon over the nanocolonies. Oh yeah.’ His grin came back. ‘And the man says don’t turn off your fucking rigs if you don’t want to log a fucking disciplinary.’
Deprez chuckled. ‘Is that a fucking quote?’
‘No. Fucking paraphrase.’ Hansen tossed his fork across his plate and stood up. ‘He didn’t say disciplinary, he called it a DP9.’
Running a platoon is a tricky job at the best of times. When your crew are all way-past-lethal spec ops prima donnas who’ve been killed at least once, it must be a nightmare.
Sutjiadi wore it well.
He watched without expression as we filed into the briefing room and found seats. The memoryboard on each seat had been set with a foil of edible painkillers, bent and stood on end. Someone whooped above the general murmur when they saw the drugs, then quietened down as Sutjiadi looked in their direction. When he spoke, his voice could have belonged to a restaurant mandroid recommending wine.
‘Anyone here who still has a hangover had better deal with it now. One of the outer-ring sentry systems is down. There’s no indication of how.’
It got the desired reaction. The murmur of conversation damped out. I felt my own endorphin high dip.
‘Cruickshank and Hansen, I want you to take one of the bikes and go check it out. Any sign of activity, any activity at all, you veer off and get straight back here. Otherwise, I want you to recover any wreckage on site and bring it back for analysis. Vongsavath, I want the Nagini powered up and ready to lift at my command. Everybody else, arm yourselves and stay where you can be found. And wear your rigs at all times.’ He turned to Tanya Wardani, who was slumped in a chair at the back of the room, wrapped in her coat and masked with sunlenses. ‘Mistress Wardani. Any chance of an estimated opening time.’
‘Maybe tomorrow.’ She gave no sign that she was even looking at him behind the lenses. ‘With luck.’