Ragnarok by Ari Bach Read Free Book Online Page A

no occasion to follow the soldiers’ progress with the feet, all top secret, but she’d get to see it through this time. Two more months on Venus after the surgery. She knew nothing of the man so far but would be getting to know him very well.
    She looked forward to it. He must have been a powerful man to afford what he was getting, to afford her and her trip to Venus. To be there at all. And to have earned the injuries she was treating—he was not mugged on the street. Someone had torn his jaw off, crushed him, torn his limbs apart. Someone hated this man. She looked over his external scans from before the incident. His face was not one to be hated easily. He was only just showing signs of his age, more signs of experience than midlife decay. His eyes especially, piercing eyes. There was a strong mind behind them, one strong enough to wake up day after day with an unset skeleton, with no mouth, with only something to do so urgent and so far away….
    She had been staring at his insides and outsides all night. She was jarred awake by a page from the cold henchman summoning her to the hospital tent. The Donatsu medical facility was impressive, state of the art from Nippon, so they wouldn’t have to send expensive doctors like her out too often. The programming went quickly. All his scans matched observations of his body. She had to correct for some necrosis that the calculations didn’t expect, but those were calculations by programs made to predict a body’s change over hours, not a year. Some of the skeletal damage was more severe than predicted. The mass of what crushed him must have been tremendous. There was also one more skewed prediction—his body was devoid of painkillers and showed no signs of sustained analgia field exposure. Over the last year his entire skeleton had been growing back wrong, and the tears in his flesh had been cauterized of all things. And he had not been living in an analgia field nor drugging himself into a daze. Who was this man?
    Once programmed, the robotic arms took almost an hour to complete their jobs. The longest operation she’d ever designed. She watched the mechanical arms dig in to break all the misfit bones, inject new marrow, repair and plate the tissue in its new position. She saw the hands and handlike feet she’d grown on Earth attached and tested for reflex. And the jaw, that strange apparatus built by Fuji Automatic. They’d consulted with her over the last few months about nerve endings and skull sutures, so she knew what to expect, but to see the thing on his face, held on by bolts instead of muscle, teeth of glistening metal at the angle she devised carefully to not rip off his upper lip. A brutal mechanism. Yet it didn’t ruin his face. He looked strong, unnatural to be sure, but not bad or unattractive. He looked bold.
    The robotics and tools receded into their holds. The surplus tissue, 20 percent of his former body, took a last pathological scan and then incinerated, its ashes dumped into the boiling sulfur air, scattered to the terrible winds and burning rock below.
    The patient awoke five minutes later. He was eager to stand, as all patients were. But unlike every patient before him, he was able. Dr. Mowat gently helped him up to his alien feet, and he stood on them, flexing his new muscles, popping his new joints. It was a reward in every patient to see the parts she constructed come alive. But never had she seen a man who lived a year waiting for them. It was a look of ecstasy on his face, a smile like no other that formed on his silver lower lip. He spoke, and his voice was deep, tremendously deep and half metallic. His voice from before must have been penetrating. His voice now certainly was.
    â€œDr. Mowat, thank you! I feel like a new man.”
    He put his new hand on her left shoulder. She couldn’t even muster the will to say “You’re welcome.” His presence when awake was intimidating. His