• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By this time, Thondu had put away his harp.

“Any chance you could stay and join our team?” Tania asked him. “I could put you to good use. We’ll gain a lot of knowledge from this”—she waved a hand at the processors holding the digital corpse of the sapient—“even if we can’t recover the sapient itself.”

He shook his head. “Sorry. I have other commitments. I will zap you a bill before I leave.”

“Very well,” Tania said. “Thanks again for your help.”

He looked at Jane. “I’m very sorry. I wish we had been more successful.”

“As do I.” The words crossed her tongue, tasting of cinders.

* * *

Jane hailed Sean. “The sapient is gone. You can call off your attacks.”

“Already done. We severed the connection to the surface.”

“We saw, from our end. In case you’re interested, you got it with very little time to spare. We would not have been able to stop it without you.”

“Well, that’s something, at least.” He paused, and sighed. “Ma’am … Commissioner Jane … I’ve got bad news.”

Jane braced herself. Sean did not get rattled over trifles. “Go on.”

“Communications went down right after you called me, while I was briefing my second-in-command. I couldn’t get warehouse crew down to the Hub. So, well.” He cleared his throat. “I recruited four of those young bikers who helped us rescue the ice stores the other day.”

“Holy shit, Sean!”

“Yeah. One of them I believe you know, Geoff Agre—the brother of the young man who was killed in the disaster. I recruited him and three of his friends. They were with me at the time of the attacks, I had very limited time, so … I made a command decision.”

“I see.” Jane tried to absorb this. A breach of judgment on Sean’s part? No. They had had only moments, she had given him an order, and he had done what he must. But she could picture Sal and Deirdre’s reactions now.

“They came through,” Sean reported. “In a big way. But one of them was injured in the attack. Badly.”

Geoff’s face flashed in her mind, and an icy hand squeezed her heart. “Who was injured? How?”

“Name’s Ian Carmichael. A friend of Agre’s. His arm was ripped off by one of the maintenance craft out on the Hub, under control of the feral sapient. He and two of the others were fending off the machines, while two of us were cutting through the conduit housing for the xaser transmitter.”

“Will he survive?”

“He’s in surgery now. They say his chances are good. They got to him right away. And they expect to be able to either reattach the arm or grow him a new one. Likelihood of long-term damage to his shoulder is still uncertain. He’ll probably lose some mobility. They won’t know for a while.”

Jane released her breath, slowly. He was very fortunate, she thought. As were we all. If the young man had died, given current tensions and the overcrowding, they’d have an uprising on their hands. “Have the parents been notified?”

“I’ve been trying. I can’t get through.”

“I’ll make sure they are contacted tonight. I’d like you to follow up with a personal visit to each of the families first thing in the morning.”

“All right.”

“Are they all of age?”

“Let me check.” A pause. “Yes. Geoff, Amaya, and Ian are seventeen. In Geoff’s case, just barely—his birthday was two weeks ago. Kamal is a year older, eighteen.”

So Sean could not be prosecuted for endangering minors. He added, “I’ve been in touch with Shelley on the warehouses. They were alerted in time, and were able to shut down all their automated systems quickly. The feral did not do serious harm up there.”

“Good. Anything else?”

“Well, there was something odd…” Sean’s voice trailed off.

“Go on.”

He hesitated. “It’s not urgent. It can wait till our morning meeting. I’d like Tania to hear it, too.”

“Very well. Get some rest, if you can.”

Next she called Xuan. Even before she spoke, just seeing his pug face and the figures of his siblings behind him filled her with a deep sense of relief. She could hear one of the twins squalling. “Is everyone all right?”

“It was a scramble, but