Chapters (2)
Bothari stood at rest, awaiting orders. "Do you require anything further, my lord? I would feel easier if I could supervise the weapons search of the prisoners myself." He gazed on the corpse with
indifferent eyes.
"Yes—no . . ." Miles walked around the examining table at a distance. His eye was drawn to the dark clot on the pilot officer's right temple. "What did you do with his implant nexus?"
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Bothari looked mildly surprised, and checked his pockets. "I still have it, my lord."
Miles held out his hand for the crushed silver spider. It weighed no more than the button it resembled, its smooth surface concealing the complexity of the hundreds of kilometers of viral circuitry packed
within.
Bothari frowned a little, watching his face. "One casualty is not bad for an operation of this nature, my lord," he offered. "His life saved many, and not just on our side."
"Ah," said Miles, dry and cold. "I'll keep that in mind, when I come to explain to my father how it was we happened to torture a prisoner to death."
Bothari flinched. After a silence, he reiterated his interest in the ongoing weapons search, and Miles released him with a tired nod. "I'll be along shortly."
Miles puttered nervously around sickbay for a few more minutes,
avoiding looking at the examining table. At last, moved by an obscure impulse, he fetched a basin, water, and a cloth, and washed the dried blood from the mercenary's face.
So this is the terror, he thought, that motivates those crazy
massacres of witnesses one reads about. I understand them now. I
liked it better when I didn't.
He drew his dagger and trimmed the trailing wires from the silver
button, and pressed it carefully back into place on the pilot officer's temple. After, until Daum came looking for him with some request for orders, he stood and meditated on the still, waxen features of the
thing they'd made. But reason seemed to run backwards, conclusions
swallowed in premises, and premises in silence, until in the end only silence and the unanswerable object remained.
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CHAPTER TEN
Miles gestured the injured mercenary captain ahead of him into
sickbay with a little jab of his nerve disrupter. The deadly weapon seemed unnaturally light and easy in his hand. Something that lethal should have more heft, like a broadsword. Wrong, for murder to be so potentially effortless—one ought to at least have to grunt for it.