"Lawrence Watt-Evans - War Surplus 01 - The Cyborg And The Sorcerers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watt-Evans Lawrence)

THE CYBORG AND THE SORCERERS
Copyright ┬й 1982 by Lawrence Watt-Evans
ebook ver. 1.0

Dedicated to my father, Gordon Goodwin Evans

Chapter One
HE LAY BACK ON THE ACCELERATION COUCH AND WONDERED idly whether he had
been officially decommissioned, and whether anybody left alive had the authority to decommission him.
He had no idea, and there was no way he could find out. He had been under total communications
silence when the D-series destroyed Old Earth's militaryтАФand probably its civilization as wellтАФand since
then, of course, there had been no signal at all from his home base on Mars. There could be little doubt
that his superiors were all long dead; if the war hadn't killed them, the passage of time would have. The
fourteen years of subjective time he had spent in space worked out to about three hundred years of
outside tune, and he doubted very much that anyone on Old Earth had been making breakthroughs in
geriatrics after the war was lost.

In fact, it was entirely possible that there was no one at all left alive on Mars or Old Earth. Even if he
chose not to believe the enemy propaganda broadcasts he had picked up all those years ago claiming
total victory, he had overheard enough ordinary ship-to-ship chatter to know that his side had lost the
war quite decisively. That didn't mean that the other side had won, but it did mean that the world he had
grown up in was gone forever.

None of this proved be hadn't been decommissioned; there might be enough odd survivors scattered
about to have formed a successor government, and it was possible that some general somewhere, in a fit
of tying up loose ends, had put an official stop to the IRU program.

Of course, it didn't matter what anybody said or did, or what was legally or technically true. As long as
he and his damned computer hadn't received their release code they were still an IRU, and as long as
they hadn't received their recall code they would continue their current open-ended reconnaissance. It
didn't matter in the slightest whether he had been decommissioned or not, because if he tried to do
anything about it the computer would burn out his brain.

If he had been left to his own devices he would have surrendered long ago, immediately after he learned
that his side had lost and Old Earth's rebellious colonies had conquered the mother world. He had tried
to convince the computer that that was the sensible thing to do, that there was no point in fighting on. He
had tried to explain that there was no one left alive who knew their release code or recall code.

The computer hadn't cared at all. Its programming was very explicit in forbidding anything resembling
surrender, and it reminded him unnecessarily that it was programmed to kill him if he disobeyed that
programming. The Command's method of ensuring the loyalty of its IRU cyborgs and making certain that
none of them fell alive into enemy hands was very simple; any attempt at surrender, or any sign of
cooperation if captured, and the thermite bomb at the base of his skull would go off. They had assured
him that such a death would be quite slow and painful, and he had believed every word. At the time he
even thought it a good and clever idea; since the D-series, he had cursed it at great length.

It didn't matter at all whether he had been decommissioned or not, but it was something to think about,
and after fourteen years alone with his ship that was a precious commodity.

He hadn't been in space all that time, of course; there had been half a dozen planetfalls. Unfortunately, in