Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2013 by Penny Publications Read Free Book Online

prisoner.
    "The customer presumably being a prador... So let me clarify," I said. "Each and every human being in your cargo has suffered the removal of both the brain and a portion of the spinal cord so is essentially just technologically animated meat. They're all dead."
    "Yes... it's best... they don't suffer."
    "I see." No one here to rescue then. I had done some questionable things in my time, but what was being done here was utterly beyond the pale. I'd known that Straben's organization was involved in the coring trade, which was why I'd had no reservations about sending the thetics in like I had, and now I had complete confirmation.
    "Next question." I held up a finger, then brought it down on the touch controls. The encrypted files refused to transmit. I stared at them for a moment, then banished them from the screen and called up a ship's schematic. "What did the salvagers find in Penny Royal's planetoid and where will that find be located now?"
    "I don't know... I don't know what you're... talking about."
    The schematic showed the location of this ship's mind—a second-child ganglion that was barely sentient. It merely acted as a data processor and stored none at all in itself. However, it had to store it somewhere. After a moment I had it. Smiling, I reached down and tore off the panel in front of my seat. In there I located a series of crystals plugged in like test tubes in a rack. I detached optics and switched the rack over to its own power supply before detaching the external power feed and pulling the whole thing out. I now had the ship's collimated diamond data store. I could try to break into the files it contained and sort through the data myself, but there were terabytes of it here. Best to hand it over to Tank.
    "You don't know about some item or items obtained from Penny Royal's planetoid?"
    "No... I don't."
    The man seemed to be telling the truth and really I didn't feel I had the time to check. Hobbs' Street had to be our next target and we needed to move swiftly.
    "Thank you." I dipped my head in acknowledgement, then patted a hand against my left thigh. I could try out the
other
gun now, but that seemed mean, since Harriet hadn't seen much action here. I relented. "Harriet, you may kill him now."
    The man shrieked as I stood up with the ship's data store and headed for the door, glimpsing, as I went, Harriet pulling on something like a dog worrying a length of bloody rope. As I headed back toward the bathysphere I decided that first I would have the prador mind removed from this ship and transferred over to my own—a useful replacement should that thing in the tank finally expire, or should I, for whatever reason, want a ship mind that did not owe its loyalty to the Client. The best optionthen would be a kiloton thermite scatter bomb on a timer set to go off sometime after our visit to Hobbs Street. It would completely gut this ship, burn up its cargo and destroy its workings, including its U-drive and fusion reactor. The ship would then only have any value as scrap and one portion of Straben's organization would be defunct—and during this mission I would have cleaned up at least a small portion of the crap scattered about the Graveyard.
    Hobbs' Street smelled odd, damp and sweet. That wasn't due to the residents here, but to an odd mutation of a terran honey fungus that had spread throughout the moon colony, running its mycelia through air vents, electrical ducting or any other opening available, sucking nutrients from spillages on the floors of hydroponics units or out of the soil of private gardens. I paused in my study of a clump of honey mushrooms sprouting from a crack in the foamstone pavement and considered the workings of coincidence. I had decided that here I would use the
other
gun, and there was a connection....
    As I looked up an ancient hydrocar motored past. It was the cops, and I was surprised to see them. The car, a by-blow of flying saucer and Mercedes, had an assault drone like a