Free Radiant by James Alan Gardner Page A

off my feet right here."
    "Time's a-wasting. And I gotta ask why you're fighting me on this. Maybe that Balrog is twisting your mind."
    "If it's in my mind already, there's no point cutting off my feet."
    "If it's in your mind already and it's so insistent on leaving your feet alone, amputation sounds like a real good idea. Anything the Balrog doesn't want, that's what I should be doing."
    "Please, Tut." I felt tears in my eyes. "I won't be myself much longer. Don't take my feet. I'll lose them soon enough. Please, Tut. Let me stay me as long as I can."
    He didn't answer—just rolled across the roof and grabbed another piece of equipment that had fallen from my suit. The holster holding my stun-pistol. I turned to run; the pistol whirred as he shot me in the back.
    I dropped, with muscles like water. But I didn't black out—just went limp and powerless. That shouldn't be, I thought. Shot at close range with a stunner: I should have gone completely unconscious. How could I still be awake? Unless... oh.
    The Balrog was inside me. And navy records said the Balrog was immune to stun-fire. The spores in my nervous system must have given me enough stun-resistance to stay conscious, but not enough to fight back as Tut scurried forward with the scalpel.
    "Maybe I'd better take more than your feet," he said. "Cut you off at the knees. Or maybe the hip. Just to be safe." He patted my cheek. The bad one. The oozing one. Idly, he wiped his hand off on my chemise. "You'll look pretty with artificial legs, Mom. I bet you can get gold ones."
    He lifted the hem of my chemise, spread my legs, and put the scalpel to my thigh. I thought of how I'd once been a dancer... how I hadn't been practicing enough recently... how I'd let the feel of movement slip away. Now I'd never get it back.
    The blade was so sharp, I barely felt Tut slice in. What I did feel was the warm gush of blood running down my flesh.
    Then something went WHIR. The sound of another stun-shot. And Tut toppled forward, landing unconscious on my blood-slick leg.
    Still paralyzed, I couldn't turn my head to see what was happening. I could only watch as a human hand reached down and rolled Tut off me. A stun-pistol whirred again, making sure he was out cold.
    More sounds of movement outside my line of sight. A fat white bandage appeared and pressed hard against the scalpel cut in my leg. "Not too bad," a woman's voice said. I could see her hand and her sleeve. She wore an Outward Fleet uniform. Admiral's gray.
    Fingers on my chin turned my head toward her. She had a strong face, piercing green eyes, and a furious purple birthmark splashed across her right cheek. The dark of it against her light skin was like a photographic negative of my own white-on-dark disfiguration.
    Ah, I thought. The other human my Bumbler detected. Not an ambitious bureaucrat from the embassy, but the most famous admiral in our navy. Festina Ramos.
    I had a terrible suspicion the Balrog had done all this to bring the two of us together.
     
CHAPTER 4
Karma [Sanskrit]: The consequences of one's previous actions.
     
    Ramos got surgical glue from the first-aid kit and carefully closed my wound. As she worked, I tried to guess what she was doing here. By "here," I didn't mean the top of the ziggurat—if Festina Ramos had been anywhere on Cashleen, she'd hurry to Zoonau as soon as she heard of the Balrog's attack. She would then search the city for the point of maximum chaos and inevitably find her way to Tut's pulpit. Lieutenant Admiral Festina Ramos was the navy's official troubleshooter-at-large. Her job and her instincts would have brought her unfailingly to the heart of the furor.
    But what was she doing on Cashleen at all? What was important enough to bring her when she could have been the darling of New Earth?
    Two years earlier, she'd driven the navy's High Council of Admirals into meltdown by presenting evidence of their massive corruption and wrongdoing. Felony charges against council members still