Alita_Battle Angel - Iron City by Pat Cadigan

Author:Pat Cadigan [Cadigan, Pat]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B077WYMTKH
Publisher: Titan Books
Published: 2018-11-20T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

Damn that squeaky wheel, Ido thought as he wheeled the case through the late-night streets. He could resize a twelve-year-old’s cyborg arm, give a guitar player a new start, and fix a man’s autonomic nervous system. But he couldn’t get that goddam wheel to stop squeaking. Someday it was going to drop him in the shit in a way he never saw coming.

Ido paused to get his bearings, then headed towards the jagged silhouette of the ruined cathedral. The Un-Coupler liked the cathedral because of the stones. They were nice and heavy, good for crushing heads. Ido wheeled his case around to the far side of the cathedral and found a patch of scrubby grass in the shadows near an outside wall where he could lay the case on its side to open it.

One of the other Hunter-Warriors, that vain son of a bitch Zapan, had told Ido any weapon that had to be assembled was a ridiculous waste of time and effort. Death could creep up behind him before he could stick tab A into slot B. He advised Ido to get himself either another weapon or another line of work.

Ignoring Zapan had never got anyone killed, so Ido went with that. He already had another line of work. As for weapons, there were an astonishing number of devices made for the express purpose of taking people out of this world. Ido had tried just about all of them from every arms dealer in town, legal and illegal. Then he’d gone home and made the Rocket Hammer.

Constructing an instrument for killing went against everything he stood for as a doctor. However, the murder of his daughter had gone against everything he had stood for as a father, so maybe that evened things out.

Well, no, not really. The clinic was supposed to even things out, but there was nothing that could ever balance the murder of his daughter. He was simply doing the only thing left for him to do. He took her killer off the streets. Then he took other killers off the streets and hoped that would save other parents from the miserable perversity of having a child die before them. Only a Hunter-Warrior could cure that condition, not a doctor.

Ido wasn’t sure where the idea of the Rocket Hammer had come from or what had suggested it to him. He’d sketched it on paper, then used a design-engineering program on the computer. It had been hard to construct, harder than anything else he’d ever done—well, until the chip.

Ido took the two main components out of the foam-lined case. The lower part of the handle had the controls; the upper part included the hammer head. As he put them together, he felt the handle vibrate in his grip. The sensation made him feel strong. He tightened his grip on it as he looked up its length to the head.

The head had come to him practically in a vision. One side was blunt, like a mallet, made for smashing.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.