Free Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2013 by Penny Publications Page B

like a damaged but still useful exo-form.
    But the journey, why the pointless search?
    The Client needed me separate from it because as an exoform close to it I could pick up on some of its thoughts and might uncover the lie I had been told, and learn that the farcaster was intact and that what it wanted was the bio-weapon I had destroyed. That separation was maintained by the first-child ganglion in the tank and U-space communications that could be shut down in an instant. With our minds so close, why could it not take the design of that weapon straight from my brain? It couldn't, because it wasn't there—it was lost with a large chunk of my brain. However, the skills were still there and I was capable of remaking it.
    It took the Client many years to build my avatar. It used one of the Golem whose mind it had destroyed, it used elements of the thetic program, which had been the product of one of the research team it had killed, and it did the best it could. It needed me motivated to rebuild that weapon. My motivation was an ersatz freedom, maintained by my ostensible separation from the Client and the firm knowledge that the bioweapon would work as well against it as against the prador. I responded as predicted. I remade that weapon, it resided aboard the
Coin Collector,
and it resided inside the bullets in the gun inside my thigh.
    Give me the gun.
    I realized that the action of handing over that weapon wasn't the main thing the Client required, but its consequence. The knowledge was locked inside me and, by handing over the gun, I would unlock it.
    Trillions of prador. I didn't like them very much but such a genocide appalled me. The Client had its farcaster—had never been without it—and shortly it would have the weapon to annihilate them all. How it intended to target them I didn't know, but it could find a way, for it had the time of an immortal and the utter certainty of purpose. I put up futile resistance and agony filled my skull, not the one in my artificial body, but in that one over there, wrapped in worms and entombed in crystal. My vision was blurred as I stared at the seared ground and fought for, I don't know, at least some redemption from what was to ensue. Then my vision cleared a little, and I saw a strange thing.
    Ten objects lay scattered across the ground in front of me. They were colorful curved spikes, shocking pink.
    I gave up, simultaneously sending the signal to open the hatch in my thigh while reaching down to tear aside the canvas flap. My hand closed around the butt of my fungus gun and I withdrew it, all the knowledge of what its bullets incorporated riding up inside me. I really wanted to aim the weapon at the Client and pull the trigger, but that was utterly beyond me. I turned it, rested it in the flat of my hand, and presented it. Already the Client was looping down, both mentally and physically, multiple wings roaring to support its weight, its wasp-like leading segment reaching out with four limbs terminating in hands that seemed to be collections of black fish hooks, black hooks in my skull too.
    But it was the hand of a reptile, sans claws, that took the gun.
    "Tuppence," said a voice, but I was still in that moment.
    I saw Harriet aiming the gun with a dexterity she had seemingly not possessed in many decades. One shot went into the Client's leading segment, into its thorax, which in turn was partially melded to the head of the segment behind. A second shot went intwo segments back from that. Then another two shots went in widely spaced, one after another. The hooks withdrew from my mind, but I was rigid with agony, the Client's agony. I managed to turn my head in time to see Harriet flung aside by a detonation in her side. It tore a hole, but what was revealed inside wasn't bloody, but hard and glittery. She rolled, came up again, and fired the remaining two shots.
    "Tuppence."
    A roaring scream filled the cavern as of a whole crowd being thrown into a furnace. The Client reared