Free Legion Of The Damned - 02 - The Final Battle by William C. Dietz Page B

and the lights disappeared.
    Servos whined softly as he padded his way over to the bed, checked his wife’s soft breathing, and headed for the door. Her voice stopped him. She sounded sleepy. “Sergi?”
    “Yes, dear?”
    “Be careful.”
    Chien-Chu had the feelings that went with a smile and felt plasti-flesh lips curve upwards in response. “Yes, dear. I’ll be careful.”
    There was little to no point to stopping for a breakfast he didn’t need to eat, and he had changed clothes the night before, so the industrialist headed for the front door. The condominium was generously proportioned, but far from pretentious, and located in a building favored by a hundred or so upper-middle-class professionals, all of whom believed that he was Madam Chien-Chu’s driver and butler. A nice fiction and one that served to protect their hard-won privacy.
    The door saw him coming, checked his identity, and slid out of the way. The hallway was rich with deep pile carpeting, gilded mirrors, and an ornate table that served no purpose at all. Having been summoned by the condominium’s household computer, the elevator was waiting and opened to admit him. He stepped inside and discovered that another of the building’s residents, a judge named Margaret Bretnor, was already aboard. She nodded in the manner reserved for servants and lesser beings. “Good morning, James.”
    Chien-Chu remembered how the same woman had fawned over the previous and more powerful him at a party two years before and nodded in return. “Good morning, Judge Bretnor. You look especially radiant this morning.”
    Bretnor’s aging face brightened considerably. “Why, thank you, James, I’m using some new skin cream. Perhaps that would account for it.”
    The elevator came to a gentle stop. Chien-Chu smiled. “Of course, ma’am. Have a nice day.” Judge Bretnor sailed off the elevator feeling better than she had for weeks, sped off to work, and handed out some of the most lenient sentences defense attorneys had ever seen.
    Chien-Chu paused in the entrance hall and checked his appearance. His new self looked absurdly young, perhaps twenty-five or so, and was slim in a way that his previously portly body had never been. Close-cropped blond hair, blue eyes, and a woodenly handsome face completed the somewhat unlikely picture. Quite a change from the body that had failed him. His Chinese-Russian ancestors would have been shocked.
    The industrialist shook his head in disgust. Not everyone wanted to look young again and Chien-Chu Enterprises was working on more mature and ethnically correct models. He would ask Nola to arrange for a prototype the moment one became available.
    The ornate lobby was empty as usual and the door leaped out of his way. Once on the street, Chien-Chu joined the early-morning throng of people who were headed for work. Most accepted the industrialist for what he seemed to be but some recognized him as a cyborg and edged away.
    Unlike humanoid androids, many of whom looked human but had telltale A’s embossed on their foreheads to avoid any possibility of a mistake, civilian cyborgs were classified as sentients and bore no special markings. And, given the fact that civilian cyborgs were something of a new phenomenon, some people spent a lot of time and energy picking them out of a crowd, and having done so, subjecting them to the same kind of hatred reserved for aliens. Especially since civilian cyborgs tended to be wealthy and were assumed to be greedy, grasping, and dishonest. Just one of the many challenges poor old Anguar had to deal with.

    Chien-Chu allowed the crowd to carry him down into the maze of tubeways that crisscrossed the ancient city of Los Angeles. A quick check showed that he was right on time, as was his train. It arrived with a whoosh of displaced air, slid to a silent stop, and hovered over the rails. Chien-Chu made his way aboard, found a seat, and wound up surrendering it to a woman and two children. He could tell she