Ragnarok by Ari Bach Read Free Book Online

the well-controlled air. She walked toward the tent, but the man motioned for her to stick to her own dwelling.
    â€œYou will not see the patient until tomorrow. You will be summoned.”
    He set her luggage down at her tent door and handed her a key card. Then without another word, sat on the tram and headed back to the lobby. A very cold reception. She found the tent to be as spartan as the rest of space, just a cot and a bathroom. She lay down and immersed herself in a memory partition. The net didn’t reach to Venus, so she blocked out the world and slept in the files for the job to be done.
    Dr. Mowat knew nothing about the client. She knew his injuries, his physiological scans, blood typology, immune system, and obviously she had seen images of his face—or at least what his face looked like before. But there was no name, no history beyond medical allergies (Novusazidocillin and Carbamazepine) and the injuries she was there to fix.
    The patient was in a miserable state. Mutilated and murdered a year prior and whisked away without treatment. She had seen worse lapses in treatment and time. Many a businessman had been forced to wait in stasis for several years while his company or family saved up to hire her. Her last client back on Earth had slept for three years, unlinked and unconscious, while his spine was built, then scrapped for nonpayment, then rebuilt, then misplaced, then built again. So one year wasn’t bad. What was bad was that he wasn’t in stasis. He was awake and aware the whole time.
    The patient refused to be knocked out. They resurrected him minutes after the murder without fixing a single thing and plugged his wounds for the trip to Venus. But he wouldn’t go back under for anything more than a night’s natural sleep. He had been living for a year with a smashed skeleton, no jaw, no legs, and no link. Dr. Mowat couldn’t think of a worse kind of hell. Or one more easily avoided—if he could afford a flight to Venus he could have stayed on Earth and been fixed in a day. If for some reason he absolutely had to be in a Venusian sulfur mine, he still could have flown in a doctor like her within the month. And with a year to wait, he could have slept. But she was paid not to ask. And not to ask about the new jaw.
    The nerve damage was minimal, and scans showed the loss of his jaw was physical trauma, no microwaves or burns or irradiation. He could have had a new normal jaw grown and attached without a problem. Same with his feet. But he had ordered some of the strangest modifications Dr. Mowat had ever seen. Mostly in that they didn’t fit.
    The jaw, when implanted, would be about two centimeters larger than his old one. Two centimeters isn’t much in some engineering, but on a face, it’s night and day. And this jaw wouldn’t have skin over it. It was essentially a chain saw made to fit where a mandible used to. The inner teeth and soft tissue would let him eat and talk normally, but the outer teeth, jagged blades on a fast rotary track, were something not even the Cetaceans would ask for. Rumors of modifications for the Unspeakable Darkness contained massive fangs or horns and the like, but she’d never seen someone rich enough to get a jaw like this ever get anything so bizarre. Rotary teeth, structure extendable to half a meter, chrome plating instead of skin.
    It was less rare for a man with a crushed skeleton to ask for a larger build and, given the funds, for some new intracranial armor and the latest designer marrow by Ossium. Almost half of her male clients ordered larger genitals. No reason for this one to be different. Link repair was common as cockroaches. A hidden link in the neck was not uncommon either. His hands would be bigger and stronger by far, and his feet—would also be hands. She had done palmed feet with opposable thumbs for Spetsnaz a few years back, the biggest paycheck she’d ever had until the Venusian client. She had