“Not every time,” Danny said. “Sometimes … mostly not, but if we’re real close, or if the pain is real bad, or real sudden, and I can’t try and dissociate… distance myself… most times, I feel the injury, but that’s all.” Her fingers massaged her twisted leg. “Nothing feels broken this time. I think I’m okay.”
“Which is it, Corporal?” Battle wanted to know. “We can’t wait forever while you decide whether or not your leg is broken.”
“Give her a minute,” Ray snapped.
“I’m okay.” She took a deep breath. “I can go on. It’s under control.”
Ray gave her a hand up. “Lean on me,” he said, “if you have to.”
She flashed him a smile. “Okay, tough guy.”
Travnicek inspected the torn hip joint, the alloy socket with its bright edges of torn metal, the burned, melted, and torn contractile plastic with its fine web of conducting wires.
Down in flames, Modular Man thought. Like a World War I fighter ace.
The android had managed to stop the shorting with some swift rerouting of his inner electronics. The medical staff, a few overworked jokers, only a few with medical training, could think of nothing to do other than supply him with a crutch.
“I thought you were learning how to be a winner, Apple Mac,” Travnicek said. “A shooter. You disappoint the shit out of me.” The screams of a wounded patient echoed from the stone walls of the infirmary. One of the few jokers with medical training ran to the patient’s aid.
At least there were plenty of drugs down here to keep the patients quiet. The android had never seen so many drugs in his life.
“Burying Snotman was clever of you,” Travnicek went on, “but I expected better when you dealt with that flying terrapin.”
"Can you repair me?”
“Hah! Of course.” Travnicek waved a hand; cilia sang through the air. “When I get around to it. After this little adventure is over.”
Modular Man’s heart sank. Travnicek was lying, and they both knew it.
“I don’t know how long I can go on fighting this way,” the android said. “Perhaps we should evacuate.”
Travnicek paused, held up a hand. Something pulsed under his blue, hairless scalp. His sensory organs unfolded.
“Tub-of-Lard is doing something,” he said. “Gotta go, toaster.”
He sprang away, jumping up to run on the wall when someone got in his way. Modular Man rose from the infirmary bed — there wasn’t anything they could do for him here — and tentatively put his weight on his remaining foot. He rewove his programming to compensate for his altered balance and took a careful hop.
He could move faster by walking on his hands, he realized. And faster still just by levitating and flying under the power of his flux generators.
The screaming patient — disemboweled by shrapnel, the android now saw — fell silent as his joker nurse pumped him full of rapture.
The android glanced up, saw Patchwork. She still wore her camouflage uniform and helmet, but had left her pack and firearms behind.
“They told me you were wounded,” she said.
He looked into her anxious gold-flecked eyes. “I lost a leg.”
She stepped back, looked at him. She was breathing hard; it seemed as if she’d run all the way from the Iron Tower.
“How bad is it?” she said. “You’re not suffering the way a human would.”
“Take my word for it,” Modular Man said. “I’m not a happy individual.”
“Your… creator?” She waved an arm in the direction of the absent Travnicek. “He’s not concerned?”
“He seems determined to fight to the last Bloat.”
Patchwork looked at him soberly. “And to the last android?”
“Since Bloat seems determined to put me between himself and danger, that would seem very likely.”
“Isn’t he — Travni —”
“Travnicek.”
“Yes. Isn’t he concerned about how to get off the Rox? Or does he think we’re going to win?”
“He’s not thinking about what happens next. I think he’s intoxicated by Bloat.”
“That’s a new reaction to the governor.”
The disemboweled patient began to moan. He sounded as if he were working his way up to orgasm.
“When I was first created, I wanted to try everything,” Modular Man said. “Every drink, every dessert, every experience. Sort of like Travnicek is doing now.”
“You tried every woman, from what I hear.”
“That too. But I didn’t put others in danger.”
The disemboweled patient screamed in ecstasy. Patchwork’s face screwed itself into an expression of distaste. “Can we leave? I don’t think they’re helping you here, and this place isn’t doing me any good, either.”
She reached out, took his hand to help him balance.
He found himself not wanting to tell her he could levitate.
He left the crutch behind, leaning against his bed.
“Aren’t you supposed to be in the Iron Tower?” Modular Man asked.
“Things are pretty chaotic,” Patchwork said. “The governor’s rebuilding the fortifications and had better things to do than to see if everyone’s at their station. Nobody told my own squad to expect me, so they’re not missing me. Last I looked, Bloat’s officers were rounding up people to reoccupy the Jersey Gate and Liberty Park. Considering what happened to the last batch, they’ll probably have to drive them over the causeway with whips.”
Patchwork and Modular Man had found refuge in a room off one of the tunnels under the Rox. It was one of those odd places where Bloat’s imagination had failed: the walls were scabbed and fused, and the room was used for storing supplies, mostly huge blue-plastic-wrapped bales of drugs. There were also boxes of ammunition and grenades, the latter labeled WP, for white phosphorus.
Modular Man and Patchwork sat side-by-side on a package of rapture worth about two million dollars on the street. He hadn’t as yet let go of her hand. The android touched the bale with his free hand, drew fingers down the gritty plastic. “So the stories about the Rox being full of drug dealers are true,” he said. “I thought they might be exaggerations.”
“All the stories about the Rox are true,” Patchwork said. “We’re quite a little enterprise here.”
“Tell me the story again about how you’re all a bunch of noble idealists fighting for your freedom.”
“Some of the jokers are idealists. And some of them hurt so bad they need drugs just to get through the day.”
“In quantities like this? Joker idealism seems rather pliable.”
She gave a little laugh. “Well. I was just in it for the red Ferrari, myself. After I kicked the big H, other drugs never had much of an attraction.”
“You were a heroin addict?”
“Back when I was twelve, yeah. My father got me onto the stuff.”
“Your father was an addict?”
“No. He just thought the junk would make me easier to control.”
Modular Man looked at her for a moment in thoughtful silence. Her cheeks flushed slightly and she turned away.
“You’re so much older than I am,” he said. “I’m something less than five years old, and —”
She laughed. “You’re going to ask me for wisdom? I got talked into going onto the Rox, and I never even figured out that once I got here there was nowhere to drive the Ferrari. Which I never got anyway.”
“I don’t want to die,” Modular Man said. Patchwork looked at him, startled.
Her gold-flecked eyes were wide. She swallowed hard. “I don’t want to die, either.”
“I was dead once and I didn’t like it.”
She opened her mouth, then closed it. “Can’t top that,” she said.
“Hundreds of people have been killed here. Sacrificed for Bloat or for the other side. Some of them volunteered, in one sense or another — the soldiers, people like Cyclone, most of your people.”