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Disease, of course, had never been a factor. If anyone would help, he would.
"No! I'm not leaving you. We can fight!" Steve whirled despairingly.
Janie, impulsive as ever, killed his plan before it ever got off the ground.
The enhanced dog and corporate police officers spotted them at the same time.
The dog howled in an almost human voice and charged toward them. The two
policemen ran after it, drawing their stickysticks from holsters as they came.
Steve braced himself for the charging dog which was well ahead of the
uniformed Corpolice. There was still a bare chance that he could kill or
disable it, then hamper the two policemen long enough for Janie to escape. The
dog leaped with extended legs, trained to bowl over criminals with its weight
then stand guard with bared fangs until its master was able to take over.
Steve swung his right arm in a simple swift chop, fingers extended and
held together like a thin spade, connecting solidly with the leaping dog's
forelegs, then spun right with a kick to its ribs as he avoided its rush.
The dog howled and rolled, attempting to gain its feet. Broken bones
punched through the skin of its forelegs and one side of its ribcage was caved
in. It fell back down. "Oh, oh, oh!" It howled, reverting to English.
"Janie, run!" Steve cried, but it was already too late. Both police had
stopped, aimed and fired. A thin rope of white goo shot from their
stickysticks, coiling, spreading and separating into smaller lines and
tangling as it flew outward. Steve twisted, trying to avoid the mess, but it
was too late. It hit him in the chest and spread over his body like a spider
web, yanking him off his feet and throwing him bodily to the pavement.
Immediately the coils began constricting, pulling him into their painful
embrace. He relaxed, knowing there was no use fighting; that would only cause
the binding matter to constrict more forcefully, possibly breaking bones. From
one uncovered eye he saw Janie struggling against her own tangle. "Janie!
Don't fight it. You'll get hurt!"
"Jam right she will," one of the police said, coming up beside him.
"You bastard, you hurt my dog." He threw a hard kick against Steve's
unprotected ribs, then another. His partner joined him, aiming kicks at any
area of his body where the sticky ropes wouldn't catch his own foot. The
beating continued for a long while. Just before he lost consciousness, he saw
one of the men leering over Janie's bound body. The policeman reached down and
grabbed a breast, squeezing painfully. "Little bitch, wait till we get you to
the station."
Steve lurched upward, spraying blood from split lips, then mercifully,
darkness took him away.
* * * *
Doctor Ignaz Porter still sat in his cell under the edifice of the Houston
corporate justice building, wondering why he hadn't been shipped out yet. His
sentence was for life in the African work camps, what he thought would be a
very short life, given his already advanced age. Enhanced lifespan hadn't been
available before he was born, although his status in the medical community
allowed some less effective treatments with Sporeworld drugs that had kept him
healthy and promised several decades of extra life, until now. He berated
himself again for ever getting mixed up with Derik Anders and his son, then
threw it off. If it hadn't been him, it would have been someone else. He never
had agreed with the limitations imposed on medical care, and as he grew older
the resentment had grown inside him like a malignant tumor, wanting only an
opportunity to burst forth and engulf his life. When democracy died, something
inside him had died, too. The ruling elite no longer had to care about
pressure groups or ethnic voting blocks like gays or minorities or pro and/or
anti-abortionists. Revision of laws into corporate regulations had seen to
that, and they were bent heavily in favor of the middle and upper class
stockholders, leaving welfare support and fair criminal codes to the ash heaps
of history.
There was no official distinction between races or ethnic groups, or
financial status, but the regulatory laws almost by necessity forced the lower
class minorities into either criminality or bonding contracts, especially
after the discrimination codes and most welfare laws were scrapped.
Advancement in society was strictly by merit now, but merit for the most part
meant only how many shares of stock were owned by parents or sponsors when
their offspring entered the workforce. Even that nebulous merit was no
guarantee of jobs and medical care any more when workers were forced to toe
the corporate line. There was always a regulation handy to discipline rebels,
whether they owned shares or not, and Africa or the Crazy Ships always lurked
in the background.
"Ignaz Porter." The old doctor looked up from his reflections.
"Yes?"
The guard motioned for him to hold out his hands. Porter got up and
pushed his wrists through the bars and allowed the manacles to clamp his
wrists. "I'm being shipped out, I suppose?"
"No. You're going to see someone."
"Who?" [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]