05. Children of Flux and Anchor by Jack L. Chalker Read Free Book Online

his knife for aid ripped off her rags, leaving her mostly naked. "Back when I was a stringer and we got into a fight, no wizard around, I sometimes had to operate on people cold. Take off whole limbs with just a knife. Got pretty good, too. 'Course, before I could amputate a leg, it had to have a real bad wound in it." Slowly he removed his pistol.
    "Who the fuck are you?" she demanded with real bravado, but her eyes were entirely riveted on that pistol.
    "James Patrick Ryan's what I call myself these days. because that's the name I was born with. Strings don't give their born names, though, not even to each other, but I haven't been active for fifty years or more. Back then I called myself Matson."
    Her eyes grew wide at the name. "You ain't Matson! He's dead!"
    "Yeah, I been dead more than once. Once for real, way back when, but I got snatched back. Once again about thirty years ago so I could get some freedom of movement again. I come back to life whenever the stench gets too big. Feel conversational?"
    "Go back t'hell!"
    The big man fired his pistol into her right kneecap. She screamed in pain, and writhed on the post.
    "Oh, my," the old man sighed. "I do forget the power of these things. Looks like I blew your lower leg clean off. Grandson?"
    Rondell looked sicker than ever, but he tied a tourniquet around the upper leg and heated an iron to cauterize the wound. She passed out from the pain, and after she was tended to they went over to the other woman, the one hanging from the hitching post. She'd apparently awakened very early in the game and had been able to witness the whole thing.
    "Much too slow and messy, Grandson. I'm really out of practice. We won't make that mistake with this one. Nice, neat little knife thrust into the lower spinal column here and we'll just paralyze her from the waist down. Then we'll do the same at the neck. A lot less messy, nobody passes out, and there's a lot less blood."
    "You slimy son of a bitch!" she snarled, with difficulty. Clearly she'd bitten her tongue when he'd knocked her cold. "They'll get you. They'll get you both for this, and your kin, too!"
    "Brave talk," Matson told her. "Stupid talk, too, from somebody who slaughters kids and then takes their cocks for trophies. Now, like I told your friend, I'm not gonna waste any time. I'm gonna ask you a few questions. You answer straight, and it's a clean out for both of you. You give me any shit and I'll leave you both here crippled and hung out to dry for the New Eden boys. They'll milk you dry with their machines, then take you into their little chambers at the Gate and turn you into good little Fluxgirls. Which'll it be?" He took out the hunting knife and made sure she could see it in the torchlight.
    "You can't do nothin' noways anyhow. Ask."
    "You're with Borg Habib's bunch?"
    "Who?"
    The knife came out again and he stooped down. "I might not hit it the first time from this angle. I'm out of practice and it might hurt a lot."
    "All right, damn you! Yeah, Borg's chief. He and Ayesha."
    "Ayesha?"
    "Ayesha the Whore. She can't do nothin' but fuck, but she's his brains. You don't think a man could run this thing?"
    Slowly the story came out. She didn't know much about their past, but Borg Habib's reputation as a man of direct action but not a plotter or planner was justified. When he'd fled New Eden, he'd taken along his regiment's whore, a Fluxgirl of incredible beauty who, for some reason, had not changed when the rest of New Eden was reset, but had been frozen as she was for all time. She appeared both passive and ignorant, but Borg at least knew she had quite a brain in that body, and she knew it, too. Because of her limits, and her needs, she needed Borg, who was incredibly well endowed, and he did pretty much what she told him because it always was right or it always worked. She got power and influence through him that she was incapable of exercising on her own, and he—well, among other things, he got Ayesha.
    The gang was