Free EdgeOfHuman by Unknown Page A

light-cargo model, approaching the window bank. No one in the pilot seat; the program triggered by the push of the remote's button guided the spinner closer, the steel-reinforced nose gleaming a meter away from the glass, then less.
    With a sweep of his forearm, he pushed the disconnected machines away. Another chrome rack toppled, sprawling the loose tubes, spastic octopus. With the roll of surgical tape he spliced the smaller lines from inside the attaché case, snugging them tight to the implant connections that studded the patient's torso.
    "Let's go--" He flipped the switch beneath a glass square set in the case's lid; a fiat green line coursed across the monitor. "Son of a bitch . Come on!" Smile into angry scowl; a fist struck the densely packed machinery; a miniature bellows sucked and gasped through a mesh filter, but the green line remained a perfect horizon. Both fists doubled, he struck the man on the bed, hitting the narrow target between the throat and the red-edged tubes hard enough to partway jackknife the man's knees toward his chest.
    "Jesus . . ." An agonized whisper. One of the heart-and-lung patient's hands came free, from where it had been bound by the wrist to the bed's chrome rail; he feebly tried to fend off his attacker. "Jesus Christ . . . get away from me . . ."
    The man above leaned down, sealing his mouth over the other's, a suction tube already prodded into the kiss. A hard exhale, and the patient's chest raised in response. From the attaché case came a birdlike chirp, as the monitor's green line jittered, then caught in a two-stroke beat. The artificial pulse slowed, steadied as the man, smiling again, wiped his mouth and adjusted the knob for the adrenaline flow.
    "I hope you're ready to travel--"
    Words barely spoken, when the high bank of windows shattered, sparkling points of glass arcing across the ward. The segmented metal frame bent and twisted, bolts screeching out of the floor and walls as the nose of the freight spinner shoved its way inside the hospital building. The smiling man brushed glitter of broken glass from the heart-and-lung patient's raw, exposed chest; he reached a hand behind and raised the patient up, his other hand looping the surgical tape around, strapping the attaché case and its nest of hoses tight against the body.
    "Hold on!" Glass crunched underfoot as he shoved the wheeled bed toward the spinner, now motionless in the gaping architectural wound.
    Rifle fire behind him -- he glanced over his shoulder and saw the bright muzzle flashes, the crouching figures of an LAPD security team, more of them darting from the bank of elevators as the doors slid open, the dark-uniformed men running head down and with guns in hand, taking up positions around the ward's narrow entrance. A bullet clanged and ricocheted from one of the bed's curved metal bars; others slammed into the surrounding walls. The ruptured floor, with the entry device's battering ram still rearing up into the space, and the knocked-aside medical equipment formed a partial barricade between the man and the new arrivals on the scene, momentarily shielding him from a direct line of attack.
    He reached to the small of his back for his own gun, found nothing, remembered that he had left it sitting on top of the main respiratory-assist machine, at the edge of the nest of tubes and hoses from which he'd yanked the bed. He could see the gun now, a small black shape on top of shiny chrome. Too far away to reach, especially with a sharp horizontal rain of hollow points lacing the room -- he swung back toward the shattered windows, watching across the prostrate form of the heart-and-lung patient as the freight spinner outside rotated, bringing its open cargo-bay door toward the jagged teeth of glass. The glaring sunlight hit his face like a furnace's hot flood.
    One of the spinner's flanged air intakes caught on a bent, broken section of the windows' steel frame. The thrust engines whined higher in pitch, as the