Tangent Channel

By DC Breznik

It's been over ten years since Simon Almeida began running nigh-invincible alien behemoth Tangent Channel in the planet Veci's bloody tournaments. His big break is in spitting distance, but a run of bad luck and worse choices have left Almeida with unhappy sponsors, a pile of debt, and the enmity of powerful criminals . . . and Tanchan has begun to die. Almeida's last chance is Vivian DuVerger, refugee from a dying Earth, whose biotechnological prowess might give Tangent Channel a final push and a winning edge. DuVerger's own troubles run deep, however, and it isn't long before she and Almeida run afoul of corporate assassins, murderous gangsters, and a sinister conspiracy bent on preserving Veci's way of life--at any cost.

• Language: English
• Publisher: DC Breznik
• Release date: Oct 26, 2013
• ISBN: 9781310032844

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TANGENT CHANNEL

by D.C. Breznik

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 D.C. Breznik

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Contents

Prologue: Container Space

PART I: DESIGN PATTERNS

Chapter 1: Up a Crick

Chapter 2: Inevitable

Chapter 3: Rivalry

Chapter 4: Vivian

Chapter 5: Rendezvous

Chapter 6: Newcomer

Chapter 7: Symphony

Chapter 8: Drowning

Chapter 9: Metamorphosis

Chapter 10: Loadout

Chapter 11: Jitters

Chapter 12: Weapons Free

Chapter 13: Aftermath

PART II: DELTA NORTH

Chapter 14: Three Strikes

Chapter 15: Antisocial Behavior

Chapter 16: Consequences

Chapter 17: On the Road

Chapter 18: Hearing

Chapter 19: Outreach

Chapter 20: Teambuilding Exercise

Chapter 21: Blue Skies

Chapter 22: Groundwork

Chapter 23: Road Trip

Chapter 24: Tundra Night

Chapter 25: The Facility

Chapter 26: Evasion

Chapter 27: Off Her Leash

Chapter 28: Everything in its Place

Prologue: Container Space

The container's atmosphere was smothering, its heat tropical and its humidity oppressive. Some of her fellow travelers had succumbed and no longer moved. Polina's own breathing was labored as she made her way back from the toilets bolted to the rear bulkhead to the sitting space she had staked out weeks before.

Unfriendly eyes tracked her. The container had been subdued since the last outburst. Its occupants were wary and restless, expecting violence. Its huddles, nestled shoulder-to-shoulder, were armed camps in miniature.

"Spasiba," Polina thanked the old man as he shifted to admit her. He drew his boy closer, protectively, toward the center of the circle she made with him and the scarred Mongolian midwife and the sepia-eyed brothers, twins of unknown provenance who spoke a barely comprehensible pidgin. Before transshipment they had all been strangers, but proximity and privation and the hostility of their fellow passengers had pushed them together, created this bubble of familiarity that was all but adopted family.

Family was important. When the food had run short, the loners had been the first to go, beaten away or shunned and starved in the corners. The circles survived, formed alliances and unfolded little intrigues centered on the crates of foil-wrapped ration bars and the spigots that dispensed miserly allotments of clean filtrate squeezed from waste.

I almost sent Odvai after you, the old man said. The midwife agreed with a dour grimace, fidgeting with something that likely was a knife.

The line was long, Polina replied. Actually, the Egyptians were playing games again, but she did not want to worry them. Many days left, you think?

She asked the question at least once in each timeless waking interval. In the container's constant dim red light the only rhythms were internal, and hers were broken. She slept poorly, in fits, but the old man ran like clockwork and could count the hours and days.

Not much longer, he said, if they were honest. If things are running smoothly outside.

Outside was vague to her. The immediate problems of food, water, and sanitation--the struggle over who would have them and who would not--had shrunk the world of her concerns. She knew the container was a pocket paradise in an airless void bombarded by lethal radiations, but that danger was remote. It lay beyond the box's shielded skin, amid a forest of alloy struts in which hundreds of outwardly identical containers nestled like steel cocoons, snug for a journey between stars.

It's been fifty two days, the old man continued, cradling his sleeping son. The average run is forty-five. Any minute everything might change, and it can only become better.

He had an optimism that buoyed their little group: more than something, he had someone waiting at journey's end, though he remained sparing with the details. He offered her a reassuring smile that Polina accepted gladly because his words rang true: after the life she had left behind, nothing--not even the container--could be worse.

A few hours later, the Egyptians did their best to prove her wrong.

They were not Egyptian in the lineal sense, though they had been recruited in Egypt, dredged from some awful Sahara-2 gutter Polina hesitated to imagine. Aloof from the beginning, they had cordoned off one of two water taps only seconds after the container was sealed. When they spirited three ration crates into their circle, none stood up to object. The old man called it Lord of the Flies in a box.

The Egyptians favored a patois unique to their gang, and most of their discourse seemed to be at the expense of the other circles. Susanna with the twisted arm--their nominal leader--laughed a lot when she wasn't barking imperatives to her sycophants. Hulking Darius and freckled, looming Shiro enforced her edicts. The rest, men and women and even a few children, wore a variety of complexions and features. Polina could not keep them straight. In her eyes they were only a backdrop of hostility and the threat of violence.

Polina felt the disturbance before she heard it: a wave of anger and panic radiating from the Egyptians' territory. She gained her feet, caught sight of a squadron of them armed with makeshift weapons--splinters of plastic torn from the crates and sharpened, clubs made of the same--as they descended upon an adjacent circle and intent on an all-but-depleted crate of foil-wrapped nutrient bars. Then children were scrambling around her, and fleeing men and women too weak or fearful to fight.

Polina saw the old man pause in indecision, torn between the melee and his son, between protecting his own and standing shoulder to shoulder with others against the predators. Odvai was already up, brandishing her smuggled blade.

I'll take him, Polina offered.

"Spasiba," he said--her own language--and delivered his boy into her arms. Then he was off to war.

The battle was short and brutal. She clung to the boy, shielded him from the press of escaping bodies, held his head against her shoulder. He woke up with a plaintive moan. Nearby she heard the smack of fists on flesh, of plastic cudgels on skulls, the clang of bodies thrown against walls and floors, grunts, and cries of pain and outrage. Polina held him tight.

Then the container shifted. The floor slid beneath her--she was sliding, along with her neighbors, a tangle of limbs and panic that came up short against the far wall before rebounding into air: null gravity, and dizzy confusion, all kicking feet and grappling hands struggling to catch the straps and folds of cargo webbing that lined the bulkheads. Already reeking, the air was spiced with spreading droplets of vomit, blood, and panic urine. Polina caught a strap and pulled herself to the floor and the boy along with her, holding him down against the chaos boiling overhead. There was another abrupt shift. Someone landed hard on her leg, twisting her knee, and she hissed in pain. The boy was crying. Other people were screaming as though the world were coming to an end.

The container reverberated: twin metal-on-metal clangs from either end. It swung around. Bodies, some feebly struggling, others limp--the unconscious and the dead--slammed against the far wall. Then smooth acceleration gripped her.

A mechanical whirr and the moans of the wounded accompanied the hours-long descent. The animosity of fifty-two days in space banked down as the container was brought to ground and for the first time in a long time real gravity pressed the refugees against the floor. The container rocked. The boy asked for his father, for his mother. Polina reassured him, quietly, almost wordlessly as the world spun and teetered. She bit her lip when the container bounced and grounded. Noises filtered from outside: engine roars, the vibration of heavy equipment. Half an hour passed before they finally came to rest.

There were tool-sounds at the end of the container opposite the lavatories. She looked around: bright eyes, anticipation in the dim red light, heads alert and hopeful. Someone staggered to her: the old man, clutching a bleeding shoulder. She felt relieved. He looked angry.

Madness, he growled.

The seals cracked and fresh air flooded the compartment. The slit of light was blinding. Elation flooded her, and tears swelled in her eyes. They were here. They were home. Someone next to her was crying aloud in joy.

. . . this end of the operation, a male voice was saying. The man was a shadow against the brilliance of outside. Now, we tend to suffer some casualties. You're familiar with the reports. But, then, some, um--'spillage' is the word, I think--is to be expected. These are not all well people.

These are more than 'some casualties.' The second voice was flat and calculating.

My specialty is receiving, not delivery. You'll want to speak to my counterpart on Earth about that. Cousin Jeffrey, I think. But, yes . . .

Polina saw the old man step forward.

I want to speak to the man in charge here, he demanded. Who's responsible for this?

Well now, the first voice said. Sometimes they do become testy, given the duration of the voyage.

These conditions were intolerable! the old man took a step forward. "Food, sanitation--you can't shovel men and women from a dozen different countries into a crate for months at a time without supervision, without rules! This was not the agreement! Children died! For the love of . . ."

Tewolde, the first voice ordered, sounding almost bored. Take care of this.

A third shape at the door raised an arm. The flash blinded Polina's already dazzled eyes, and the roar was deafening in the confines of the chamber. The old man crumpled. There were no last words, no lingering beseechments. She clung tight to his son, who wailed soundlessly and struggled to reach his father. The old man lay still, the hope flushed from his eyes by death. She felt sadness and anger rising in her own chest at this culminating atrocity. So close . . .

Are you stupid, Kasper? the second man was saying, the words faint in her ears. You're paid to satisfy a quota!

Defective, the first man--Kasper--said. We send this group north, and we'll have fifty more in two weeks' time. Inspect the records if you'd like. I'll be down in the pit when you're ready to continue our discussion.

PART I: DESIGN PATTERNS

Chapter 1: Up a Crick

Simon Almeida made a fan of five bills from his mailpod and picked two to pay. The final notice on his electric was a no-brainer--no way could he make it to the next match without power--and as to the insurance, well, bad things happened. The rest went into the later pile, which had begun to teeter precariously over the burn bucket. Beneath the bills was a cryocase from Terran-Veci Combine Health with his name and shareholder number prominently displayed on the top: the March vaccination series. He left it next to the bills.

On a more upbeat note, the week's copy of Current Tournament News had come in, and he riffled the pages one-handed in search of the feature as he slotted bread into his toaster. The cute redhead with the freckles and the lisp had interviewed him, and her style tended toward the breathlessly enthusiastic. Lydia's profile could be a real boost to his ego--and more importantly his pocketbook--if she struck the right notes and the sponsors had their ears up. He frowned as he found the page. Sponsors were always listening.

The photograph was unflattering. It was true, he'd put some weight on in the last year or two, and maybe the three-or-four days' stubble said something about his priorities these days. His eyes were bloodshot. He looked old.

I'm not even thirty, he grumbled. His toast popped with a heavy clunk and the stench of char. He crunched the carbonized slabs without noting the taste.

Lydia had done a credible job on the text, he granted. Simon Almeida, twenty-nine, one of Physiosys' top Class B competitors, with notable supplementary sponsorships from X-Cise Arms and DuraTech. Three wins in the season so far, one loss, and his most recent match--last weekend's--a fight to a bitter draw against Mandy Masuda and her beast, Ping Pong. His own animal, Tangent Channel, was a tough-as-nails brawler going on her eighth year. He frowned. Lydia was using a lot of words he wasn't comfortable with. TanChan wasn't slowing down, and he choked on his toast when Lydia called her middle aged, whatever that meant for an animal that could fight for fifteen years easily. Hell, he thought, Thad Umber's monster had just hit twenty-two and had only been retired for six months.

Sure, TanChan had been favoring her right hind leg for the past few weeks, a leg that had buckled at a key moment in the last match, but that was probably just shrapnel that hadn't worked its way to the surface yet. It was today's major project, and then it would be fixed. Almeida felt a flash of anger at Lydia. The interview had gone smoothly, he thought, but now he wanted nothing more than to tear the magazine in two and see it crisp and crumble in the little incinerator.

Instead he carefully tore out the page with his profile and pinned it to the bulletin board over his bill heap, next to his grocery list and the newspaper clipping showing him with an arm around a smiling Sophie Tinderthal after the 2v2 team competition at Wolf Peak two years back: Better times.

He washed down the rest of his breakfast with some stale coffee and shrugged the top of his coverall up over his shoulders. Work was waiting, but the flashing red light on the box by his door stalled him. The call must have arrived while he collected the mail pod. He hesitated before he tapped the machine. There was a long beep before the message played.

Simon. It's Symphony . . . Physiosys, then. Symphony Sugiura was the corporate liaison in charge of his sponsorship. ". . . saw your write-up in CTN. Good job. I've spoken to a few of my supervisors in Special Promotions, and we all think that this season could be your shot. If--big if--you win your next match decisively, I may be able to talk them in to some more substantial support. To help you out, I'm diverting some of the department's discretionary funds your way . . ." Almeida's ears perked up. . . . to cover a special promotional upgrade and a new technician. Her name is Vivian DuVerger, and she's done some exceptional work out on the test farm. Salt Flats Invitational is in two weeks, and I've taken the liberty of signing you up. Win and it's good. Lose . . . not so good. I'll talk to you before then. And shave. Please. The message ended with a click.

Almeida ran his fingers over his jaw. He liked Symphony, but the woman was a real type A. He supposed she had his best interests at heart, as did the company, but sometimes he wondered. He dismissed the thought and considered the new biotechnician.

In better years he hired on the occasional technican. Lance Li had been Almeida's go-to biotech before striking out on his own, and now and then a gifted freelance cybertech named Adelus Humphries would lend a hand with Tangent Channel's mechanics. A little free help would be welcome, if free help really came without a cost. He wondered if this DuVerger was any good. He wondered what Symphony meant by more substantial support.

Zipping his coverall, Almeida stepped out the door.

* * *

His compound was tucked into a little green hollow in the flank of the mountains north of Port Callahan. There was a clear view to the spaceport and its slender filament of space elevator fading into the sky. Somewhere beyond the ridge lay the Proving Grounds, and on the rare day when the wind wasn't blowing off the ocean a faint reek of high explosive hung in the air. Its scent carried bittersweet associations: Soph's silky brown hair had always smelled of ozone and brimstone.

The compound itself consisted of his house and a few work buildings surrounded by a tangle of conifers that smoked in the early morning light. Most of the vegetation around Port Callahan was Earth-imported; the ecocline between native Vecian and terrestrial biospheres lay about ten miles past Almeida's valley, and he drove out there from time to time to enjoy the juxtapositions: the Vecian flora were just a little bit bluer than the Earth imports, their shapes subtly more alien, and the line between the two was a chaos of conflicting biology.

Downwind from the house--more comfortable since he'd taken off its wheels--were a hemispherical aircraft hangar serving as Tangent Channel's stable and a towering feed silo topped by the satellite dish that gave him the weathercast and all three of the planet's television stations. The feed level was lower than Almeida would have liked; he would not be able to slip that bill into the later pile for much longer, even with the Combine subsidy. Across the hollow and connected to the hangar by a utility tunnel, Almeida had sunk the low concrete bunker that did double duty as his armory and workshop.

The valley had been his for seven years now, ever since TanChan had outgrown his budget for Port Callahan. Almeida had battled half a dozen different land-use committees and filled out a mountain of paperwork before receiving Combine approval to use the land. His trials weren't unique--the Charter guaranteed the same procedures for both hydroponic peasants and company presidents. If a shareholder didn't have a damned good reason to use a chunk of Veci, you didn't get it. Now that he had his pocket kingdom, Almeida could appreciate these hurdles: his neighbors on the mountain were few and far between. That was how he liked it, mostly.

Whistling, he took the cinder block steps two at a time toward the hangar. His breath clouded in the early morning mountain air, drifted away toward the lip of the hollow, and disappeared.

Outside the hangar's hemisphere loomed TanChan's bulky transport rig. Almeida inspected its trailer where another operator's animal had given it a rattle over the weekend, leaving silvery scars in the rust-flecked safety-yellow paint of its bulkheads. He hadn't checked the springs yet, but the tires were holding and the frame wasn't visibly deformed. The trailer weighed a good thirty tons, was welded together of heavy-duty honeycomb-corrugated laminate, and each of the sixteen tires rose well over his head--a real pain to fix when it broke, which was frequently given the lousy state of roads over the western prairies. This time he had lucked out, he expected; vehicle maintenance could be shelved until after the next match.

The hangar door--really just a folding quarter segment of the aluminum hemisphere's wall--was always open, and an intermittent cloud of vapor clawed its way past the threshold, billowing up to meet Veci's rising sun before fading away. It was a lair: Tangent Channel's lair. Her scent wrapped around the place, a thick earthy musk spiced with alfalfa and steel and freshly fallen rain.

She loomed within, a wall of quivering gray-blue velvet striped across her flanks in a zebra pattern of pale greens that shimmered with her breath like submarine gardens. She was not sleeping. A single lid folded up as he entered, her glistening black eye rotating out with mild interest, and she released a sigh that fluttered the legs of his coverall.

Morning, TanChan, he greeted her, as he adjusted the microphone on his headset. The animal wheezed and rolled onto her back, presenting a broad expanse of belly like a puppy's to be rubbed. She was no puppy, though, with muscular shoulders over four meters across, and fourteen meters separating nose from rump. According to her CTN stats block, Tangent Channel weighed just shy of two hundred metric tons, and her sickle-shaped claws were scaly prominences each as long as Almeida was tall. Never a puppy, he thought, but she had acted it since she was small enough to fit in his cupped hands, a ravenous ball of mossy pudge with wet onyx eyes that followed his every move.

The last match had left her pretty banged up, but the worst had faded. TanChan's resilience was astounding even for a whump, and her regenerative capacity stood second to none. Against Ping Pong she'd suffered a broken spine and shattered jaw, but that damage was already mended. Almeida imaged it every morning with the aid of a ladder and ultrasound, monitoring closely but never worrying that TanChan fail to recover. She had fought in over three hundred battles since her first bout in Class B, and the only difference was her size, which was bigger, and her ferocity on the field. Standing seven point two meters at the shoulder now, she was probably not going to grow much more unless he boosted her. Middle-aged? He snorted. Tangent Channel was at her peak.

We'll dig ourselves clear, he assured her as he powered on the ultrasound. We're still winning matches. Maybe with this new Physiosys money, we'll make Class A. We'll take it back to Savage and her beast. Payback. How's that sound?

She gave a low rumble of pleasure that resonated back from the hangar's dome. Tangent Channel might find the words unintelligible, but she had always responded to his voice.

He swept the ultrasound over her flanks, watching the computer knit narrow sections into a three dimensional model with blacks and grays for the soft tissue, dark and lightening blues for the denser bone, and bright yellows and reds where her skeleton was reinforced with alloy. Three of TanChan's vertebrae, those highest on the arch of her back--sustaining the most compression stress from bearing the weight of her body--were wholly artificial. The long bones of her forelimbs were jacketed in steel, their joints augmented by armored auxiliary actuators wired to her muscles. Whole segments of hide, especially at the vulnerable axillary joints, were girded with composites of chain mesh and nacreous plates.

Almeida had done most of the work by himself: design, mechanics, and surgery. He could no longer count the hours spent welding under the glare of the hangar's lights, sticky to his elbows with visceral and hydraulic fluids, whispering reassurances to TanChan through the paralytics. He would wrestle a hoisted mechanism a hundred times his own weight into place and then weave her flesh around it. She would wait quietly, sometimes trembling, her shivers like small earthquakes. She did not feel pain--he didn't believe she did--but she did not care for the surgeries.

He always talked her through it, trying to soothe her. He could not picture what she thought of him, if she thought at all. To her he would be a little thing, an insect but with a voice she listened to. The old commands worked as well as when she'd first learned them, when she was the size of a tennis ball and her most fearsome opponents were his rolled-up socks. She was a marvel.

He crisscrossed her flanks with the probe, noting the positions of a few new trouble signals, encysted shrapnel or bits of metal spalled from her external armor to be dug out later. Getting at the volume shielded by embedded mesh involved contortions, and then he moved to the troubling hindlimb. He nickered into his headset, and Tangent Channel rose to her feet. She angled her nose toward the open air and snuffed. He reached up and ran his fingers across the downy surface of her belly. She had short, soft fur like velvet covering rugged inches-thick skin crevassed so deeply and sharply that its wrinkles were invisible to the eye. Only his fingertips read them.

He rolled a short ladder into place with his foot and began his scan, dousing the ultrasound across a limb the diameter of an old-growth tree. A three dimensional reconstruction of the bone materialized first on the left half of his screen, and he kept one eye on that, the other on the live two-dimensional section displayed on the right. He traced lines of pulsing blood vessels, twitching bundles of muscle fibers meters in circumference, imaged the thick footpad layered with horny callous.

As he scanned toward her knee's joint capsule, teetering on the top rung of his ladder, he almost missed a dense cluster of vasculature knotted between the twin heavy muscles analogous to the gastrocnemius in Terran biota--her calf. It was deep, close to the medial tibia, near a gap in the lattice of the bone's armor sheath and almost hidden by the piston that augmented plantarflexion during her charge. Cold sweat chilled his forehead. He adjusted the focus on the imager, dialed it to image the soft tissue with a finer granularity . . .

The telephone by the hangar door wailed.

He ignored it, fiddling with the dial on the sonar gun. The phone rang again, a strident howl that echoed in the round hangar. He had wired it to a salvaged fire alarm klaxon. It was very loud. TanChan snorted and peered down at him, one huge wet eye inspecting him quizzically.

No, Almeida said, concentrating on the screen.

The phone rang a third time, and TanChan delicately tipped the ladder over with her free claw. Almeida, ladder, and ultrasound tumbled to the concrete in a clatter. Batteries popped free and rolled across the floor in four different directions, and the housing on the sonar gun popped off.

Your funeral, Almeida snapped his headset off as he reached for the phone's receiver. Almeida.

Tonight. One o'clock A.M., the voice was flat and unemotional. The Belrang pit under the Dim Mockery. Mennesker would like to discuss what you owe him. Not optional.

There was a click. Mennesker Group goons were not known for their loquacity at the best of times, and Eddie Yu could be frosty over the phone.

Almeida felt weakness steal over him, and he sank back down to the concrete, looking at the phone in his hand, at the whump towering over him, at the ultrasound strewn across the floor. He suddenly felt very small and not very well.

Chapter 2: Inevitable

Nathan Hayes' practice shared a block with half a dozen other small businesses including the offices of a dentist, a few lawyers, and a boutique aerospace firm. Almeida left his truck in the public parking lot, its frame sagging beneath the weight of TanChan's shoulder guards and tournament harness. He admitted himself via the back door, to which he still had a key.

The sudden meeting with Mennesker was a sucker punch, but he could not think about that now. He had to keep rolling, take care of what he could, stay in control as best he could while not committing to anything rash. And TanChan always came first.

Almeida entered just in time to catch the tail end of Hayes' spiel to the mother of a mildly ill seven-year-old of indeterminate sex, which clung to her shirt and sniffled loudly.

. . . my advice is to make sure you administer the monthly boosters promptly. Combine Health is working tirelessly with Physiosys and half a dozen other vendors to ensure that even weak infections are addressed in the vaccination packages. This should run its course in a day or two, but next time it may not be so simple to deal with.

But are the vaccines safe? We hear so many rumors, about side effects . . .

They're as safe as we can possibly make them, Hayes assured her, but even if they weren't, they're better than the alternative.

He shooed them out and clicked his tongue as he looked over his schedule for the rest of the day. Hayes was a tall, gaunt, white-coated man with a thick head of graying curls that poofed out like the coat of a sheep wired to a light socket. He peered out at the world through thick glasses, and had no peripheral vision to speak of. Almeida cleared his throat.

Hey, Doc.

Hayes started, and then adjusted his glasses. Dammit, Simon. I told you to give me my key back.

I know, I know. I will, but I want you to look at something. Tell me what you think. Almeida displayed the memory card from his ultrasound between two fingers. It's important.

Hayes examined Almeida's face intently for a moment and then nodded. I can give you a few minutes. Next appointment isn't until three. I'm thankful for the hospital--before that new wing opened, I was booked solid, days at a time. Nice job out there this weekend. Caught the Tournacast. You make me proud.

I do my best, Almeida tried to be modest, but was pleased at the praise. Had a good teacher.

Hayes snorted. I put you and your sorry animal up for three weeks and you call me a teacher. How is TanChan holding up?

She's good. Strong. Back to a hundred percent. I think. He passed the card to Hayes, who frowned at it briefly and then plugged it into a wall console slot. The lights dimmed slightly and an overhead projector whirred to life, casting the two-paned sonograph on the wall: the three dimensional representation on the left, and a slideshow of sections and a few movies to the right.

Left hind leg? Hayes asked, manipulating the image with the console's trackball.

I've kept my eye on it for a few weeks now, and haven't caught anything until now. Almeida watched the image, biting back pangs of wariness. He rarely trusted others with full scans of TanChan--most experienced operators never allowed such data to touch computers outside their control, and the secrecy became habitual--but Hayes was a trusted friend and an expert on whump biology. He was even Almeida's district representative on the Combine advisory board. The man wore a lot of hats.

There's been some speculation. Not a lot, mind you--the voices haven't picked it up yet, but those of us in the know . . . Hayes trailed off.

That noticeable?

The doctor nodded. You didn't think it was?

I knew it was a problem . . . but I was hoping it would go away, he added silently. His initial scan weeks ago had not shown anything, and he tried not to cut her without a clear purpose.

The doctor nodded and rolled the image of the leg around. The 3d was indistinct: a smudge that could have been higher density in between the paired tibias or just a shadow on the wall. Hayes swept a cursor through it anyway, bringing up the stack of 2d slices that comprised the model.

That a General Technics servo? he asked as he worked. The piston augmenting her gastrocnemius was bright on the screen. General Technics built heavy machinery for mining operations on- and off-planet.

They traded a pair to me in exchange for those radio spots last season.

Figured as much. Best keep that quiet: they're susceptible to high temperatures.

Do you see it?

Hayes pushed