Lawrence Watt-Evans - War Surplus 02 by The Wizard & the War Machine

Author:The Wizard & the War Machine [Wizard, The & Machine, the War]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-06-03T20:16:45+00:00

At most, he thought, it should have registered as that faint tingling he remembered. He had become so accustomed to it that he no longer felt it himself, really. He was usually aware of wizardry being performed in his immediate vicinity, but that was because he could sense it psionically, not because of his cyborg nature.

He would not have thought the tingling would be enough to awaken her. If she had felt anything more than that, though—

He broke off his thought there and started a different one.

He was an abysmal telepath by the standards of Praunce’s other wizards, because his aura was so different from a normal one that he had difficulty in meshing it with any other. The differences were the result of the rewiring of his nervous system. This had also meant that other wizards had always had difficulty in reading his mind, even when he made no attempt at privacy and thought slowly and clearly in the Prauncer dialect.

Flame’s nervous system had been reconstructed along the same lines as his own. Her aura would also be distorted and abnormal—but should be a close match for his own.

Therefore, he should be able to read her mind eas-ily, where no other wizard would be able to, even though he could not read ordinary, undefended minds, or even cooperative ones, very well.

This resonance, if it actually existed, would explain why she might have felt something when he broadcast his message.

He forgot completely about Parrah’s message of urgency as he considered the possible implications of his theory.

If he could read Flame’s mind, then he had an advantage in any future confrontation. He would know what she was going to do before she did it. He could look in and see which personality was dominant at any given time. She could keep no secrets from him.

He had never been very enthusiastic about telepathy before, since he had been so bad at it and others so much better, but now he saw all the possibilities laid out enticingly before him.

He could learn what drove her, and maybe talk sense into her. He could listen in on her private conversations with the computer. He could find her real name and use it as her release code—that would settle matters very quickly. If the reintegrated personality was sane, the threat to Dest would be ended; if it was as mad and bent on destruction as her default self, he could kill her without bringing on a holocaust, since the computer would be released from its military programming by the code, just as Flame would be.

That was too good a possibility to pass up, even though the computer might notice something was going on. He would, he told himself, approach the matter gingerly, working his way gradually, carefully, under the psychic blocks her trainers had set up, until he found the suppressed memories of her civilian life.

Eventually he would find her name, and he could then convert IRU 247 from a fighting ship to harmless war surplus.

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