A Dark and Hungry God Arises Read Online Free PDF Page A

had satisfied the former at the expense of the latter. The fact that Angus had obstinately declined to be broken was beside the point. Milos had met DA's requirements. Neither Lebwohl nor Dios had any reason to criticize the results he'd obtained for them.
    Yet here he was: sitting at Trumpet's second's station, at least nominally responsible for communications, scan, and data and damage control; about to go into tach with the same slimy illegal he'd once ambushed; about to face disaster and death in forbidden space - and not only had he been forced into this position by the very people he'd just satisfied, but he'd been forced into it dirty.
    So that he would be a believable second for Captain Thermopyle, who was known on Thanatos Minor: so they said. Shit. He knew the real reason, and it had nothing to do with believability. It had to do with humiliation and control.
    Milos couldn't remember a time when he hadn't understood such things.
    Ever since his childhood in one of Earth's more degraded and pestilential cities, he'd been aware that the only effective way to evade the harm a guttergang might do him was to make himself valuable by passing along information about the plans and doings of some other bunch of thugs; purchase safety with other people's secrets. Then he was thought of as an important resource by the first guttergang: he was protected.
    But of course that couldn't last. Eventually the second guttergang would guess what he was doing and come after him. Then the situation would be too dangerous to survive. So the only effective way to keep his skin whole was to pass information both ways: to make himself essential to both guttergangs — or to three or four, or however many there were - and to control as much as possible what the gangs knew, in order to mask his own intricate loyalties.
    Yet even that wasn't enough. Guttergangs protected their sources of information - in those days, kids like Milos were called 'buggers' - but didn't respect them.
    Whenever the thugs felt like it, they brutalized and tormented their buggers. Like the UMCP, they forced their buggers into dangerous and shaming tests of loyalty.
    Humiliation and control.
    By the time he was ten, Milos Taverner had learned how to deal with those as well.
    It was amazingly easy. A word or two in the right places - not too often, not too obviously—and individual pieces of slime who degraded or scared him were destructed. Guttergangs may not have respected their buggers, but they had too much to lose by letting someone else damage their sources of information.
    All Milos needed, the one absolute requirement for keeping his neck out of the noose, was to make sure that no one knew he was buggering for both sides.
    So mighty Warden Dios and his precious Hashi Lebwohl - not to mention the sanctimonious Min Donner - were wrong about Milos. They didn't know what their own actions could cost them.
    They thought that if they rubbed his nose in their power hard enough, if they made him feel beaten and filthy enough, they could compel him to submit to having his neck in the noose.
    Milos didn't doubt for a second that the noose was real. After all, if none of Lebwohl's and Dios' plans went awry there weren't likely to be many survivors on Thanatos Minor when their pet cyborg carried out his programming. And Milos wasn't likely to be one of them: he didn't have Thermopyle's enhanced resources to help him escape alive.
    Which of course was exactly what Lebwohl and Dios were counting on. If Trumpet brought anyone back to UMCPHQ, it would be the cyborg they had spent so much money on, not the relatively inexpensive human being.
    They should have known better.
    They shouldn't have let him have the command codes that ruled Thermopyle. If they hadn't given him the capacity to redirect Angus' prewritten exigencies, he would have had only one option left; only one place to go with his anger. Now, however, he had several.
    One of his options was to make Thermopyle pay at