Mangled Meat Read Online Free
Author: Edward Lee
generator, I expected the OAC to shut me down because of the danger margin, but that never happened. I cranked the beam nozzle over the right thigh; I had a depth marked, by one-tenth of one millimeter that would scroll down to a max of five. I punched in my pass-crypt and then turned on the power.
The general-quarters alarm sound immediately after I pressed the DISCHARGE switch. Even through my rebreather, I could smell burning metal. I began to get sick. The beam jumped to its max of 180,000 degrees in a split second but it shut down after penetration was achieved; the material of the VO’s suit was only one-tenth of one micron deep.
As the beam powered down, and as the GQ alarm blared, I just stood there, frozen, looking down at the VO. Then the VO began to convulse: arms and legs and back flip-flopping on the analysis table.
Like it was still alive.
And that’s when I shit my pants.
***
See, at the same instant I burned that hole into the VO’s suit, all kinds of powerups starting happening on the victor. Lights came on. RAD displays began to appear: instrument displays. Some kind of humming began to reverberate, like an engine starting. What I mean to say is...I wasn’t the only guy on the plat who shit his pants. Damn near everyone did.
But they were all in R-Dock. I was all alone in the medcove, the VO still convulsing on the table.
I asked the OAC what to do but there was no answer. Just me standing there, my brain ticking, warm shit running down the back of my leg.
Penetrating the VO’s suit was some kind of trigger. It turned things on in the victor. And one of the things it turned on was a 2D map projection. No doubt there were computers laced into the victor’s hull, but there was no way the OAC would ever be able to get into them, and even if it did, what language would such programs be written in?
But seeing is everything, right? And when we digigraphed those map-projection displays, the OAC instantly recognized the astronomical reference points.
It matched those points to our own recorded star charts.
Everything happened so fast after that...I’m not sure about the order. But it was the OAC that determined the victor had powered up because I had finally penetrated the VO’s suit. It had occurred at the same microsecond. It was as if I’d pulled some kind of a trigger, but none of us could guess why.
And I didn’t have time to wonder, not then. The body convulsed on the table for maybe five seconds but to me it seemed like an hour. Once it fell limp again, though, I got back to work. It took me three days to put a microscopic hole in the suit—how long would it take me to cut the whole thing off?
Not long, I found.
I managed to sink a kinetic needle into the puncture hole, then I connected the needle to a maletric field amplifier. From there it was cake. It was like cutting the carapace off a sextapod. It probably didn’t take me two minutes to cut the rest of the suit off the VO.
The material fell off the limbs and torso like cheesecloth; what lay there afterward was an intact humanoid male. Sturdy, well-formed physique, unblemished skin, long hair and beard. When I weighed the naked body on the spec-grav scale it came up the same: one hundred forty-six point four pounds. Which meant the suit had no perceptible weight. But even before that, I hooked the body up to the sensor monitors.
It was still alive.
Those initial convulsions hadn’t been a reaction from exposure to air pressure or heat; they hadn’t been autonomic or the result of perimortal nerve conduction. The body maintained a regular heartbeat of about seventy pulses per minute and registered systolic/dystolic blood pressure in the normal range for humans. Pulmonary expansion and collapse was normal too; the VO was breathing .
But the electroencephalopeg readout was the kicker. Alpha, beta, and theta four-wave brain patterns indicated a 1.0 synaptic coma.
But with slow-gradual improvement.
The VO wasn’t dead.
The general-quarters alarm sound immediately after I pressed the DISCHARGE switch. Even through my rebreather, I could smell burning metal. I began to get sick. The beam jumped to its max of 180,000 degrees in a split second but it shut down after penetration was achieved; the material of the VO’s suit was only one-tenth of one micron deep.
As the beam powered down, and as the GQ alarm blared, I just stood there, frozen, looking down at the VO. Then the VO began to convulse: arms and legs and back flip-flopping on the analysis table.
Like it was still alive.
And that’s when I shit my pants.
***
See, at the same instant I burned that hole into the VO’s suit, all kinds of powerups starting happening on the victor. Lights came on. RAD displays began to appear: instrument displays. Some kind of humming began to reverberate, like an engine starting. What I mean to say is...I wasn’t the only guy on the plat who shit his pants. Damn near everyone did.
But they were all in R-Dock. I was all alone in the medcove, the VO still convulsing on the table.
I asked the OAC what to do but there was no answer. Just me standing there, my brain ticking, warm shit running down the back of my leg.
Penetrating the VO’s suit was some kind of trigger. It turned things on in the victor. And one of the things it turned on was a 2D map projection. No doubt there were computers laced into the victor’s hull, but there was no way the OAC would ever be able to get into them, and even if it did, what language would such programs be written in?
But seeing is everything, right? And when we digigraphed those map-projection displays, the OAC instantly recognized the astronomical reference points.
It matched those points to our own recorded star charts.
Everything happened so fast after that...I’m not sure about the order. But it was the OAC that determined the victor had powered up because I had finally penetrated the VO’s suit. It had occurred at the same microsecond. It was as if I’d pulled some kind of a trigger, but none of us could guess why.
And I didn’t have time to wonder, not then. The body convulsed on the table for maybe five seconds but to me it seemed like an hour. Once it fell limp again, though, I got back to work. It took me three days to put a microscopic hole in the suit—how long would it take me to cut the whole thing off?
Not long, I found.
I managed to sink a kinetic needle into the puncture hole, then I connected the needle to a maletric field amplifier. From there it was cake. It was like cutting the carapace off a sextapod. It probably didn’t take me two minutes to cut the rest of the suit off the VO.
The material fell off the limbs and torso like cheesecloth; what lay there afterward was an intact humanoid male. Sturdy, well-formed physique, unblemished skin, long hair and beard. When I weighed the naked body on the spec-grav scale it came up the same: one hundred forty-six point four pounds. Which meant the suit had no perceptible weight. But even before that, I hooked the body up to the sensor monitors.
It was still alive.
Those initial convulsions hadn’t been a reaction from exposure to air pressure or heat; they hadn’t been autonomic or the result of perimortal nerve conduction. The body maintained a regular heartbeat of about seventy pulses per minute and registered systolic/dystolic blood pressure in the normal range for humans. Pulmonary expansion and collapse was normal too; the VO was breathing .
But the electroencephalopeg readout was the kicker. Alpha, beta, and theta four-wave brain patterns indicated a 1.0 synaptic coma.
But with slow-gradual improvement.
The VO wasn’t dead.
Readers choose
Mary Roberts Rinehart
Sarah Morgan
LaVie EnRose, L.V. Lewis
Walter Farley
Roald Dahl
S.M. Stirling
Michael McCloskey
Candace Camp
Aila Cline