blood. The gouges along her neck where the last one had grabbed at her were already healing. Alternating cold and hot water helped bring her back to alertness; it wasn't really possible for her to go into shock, but she'd come as close as her biology allowed. Besides that, she had the slightly flushed sensation that meant her immune system and panspecifics were eliminating a number of unfamiliar bacteria and viruses.
Only one shot had hit her, in the thigh muscle. The molecular-web armor under her skin had caught most of the impact, leaving the slug a lump between the subcutaneous fat and the muscle. She probed carefully with a pair of nail scissors from the medicine cabinet, gritting her teeth against the sting. She could will the pain away, of course, but it was unwise to do that except in an emergency.
Pain was a valuable teacher; the universe whispered to you in pleasure, talked to you in reason, but with pain, it shouted.
The twisted lump came free and she pressed the lips of the small wound back together long enough for the clotting to seal it, testing the leg. Full junction. Then she brought the spent bullet up and looked, tasted.
Jacketed lead alloy, she decided. Quaint. That type had gone out of use about the time she was born, in the 1970s, replaced with prefragmented synthetic crystal. The slug was coated with some sort of long-chain polymer and tipped with tungsten; that and the pointblank range were why it had got through her blacks.
She tossed it aside and walked back into the living room, picked up the body of the shabby apartment's owner and dropped it behind the couch. The stink was one more minor annoyance in the foul air of the place. She gathered up the . . . newspapers, that was the word . . . and went into the kitchen cubicle. Most of the food in the cooling unit was repulsive, but she'd eaten worse in her time, and Homo drakensis' digestive system could handle anything organic. Methodically, she stoked herself, starting with the two liters of milk and loaf-and-a-half of bread. She read.
New York City. 1995. She felt her skin roughening, and forced blood into the capillaries. Four years before the start of the Final War; according to that date, she ought to be on board a cruiser orbiting Titan.
And less than twenty years old. Her eyes scanned in a flicker, taking a long ten to twenty seconds per page. The written language was much closer to her own than what she'd heard of the spoken form, but still a struggle.
I was right. This isn't my 1995.
Which was almost a relief; her New York City had been destroyed by multiple fusion-bomb hits in the opening minutes of the War. The newspapers showed her a world so alien, so full of assumptions she didn't know, that they were mostly incomprehensible. The "Many Worlds" hypothesis must be literally true; every collapsing of a quantum wave front produced all possible outcomes. This was a world whose history followed a different track.
There are hundreds of separate nations here.
In her history, there had been only two by the last decade of the twentieth century. The Domination . . . the Domination doesn't exist at all. The people who'd given birth to the New Race had never been. Her mother had never been, her human mother, nor the womb-mother brooder who'd borne the egg. Her own children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren would never be born. Her whole species didn't exist.
Her stomach knotted again. No. Reverse peristalsis wasn't going to do her any good at all.
Nothing is going to do any good. She was exiled as no one in all history had ever been exiled.
She was the only one of her kind in the entire universe.
"No," she said aloud. "The world's still there; the Domination's still there. It's just not here. "
And any transfer process had to be reversible, at least in theory. If the local humans didn't kill her, she was going to live a long, long time—with the last retrofit, indefinitely, the geneticists said. There was no hurry. The thought
Only one shot had hit her, in the thigh muscle. The molecular-web armor under her skin had caught most of the impact, leaving the slug a lump between the subcutaneous fat and the muscle. She probed carefully with a pair of nail scissors from the medicine cabinet, gritting her teeth against the sting. She could will the pain away, of course, but it was unwise to do that except in an emergency.
Pain was a valuable teacher; the universe whispered to you in pleasure, talked to you in reason, but with pain, it shouted.
The twisted lump came free and she pressed the lips of the small wound back together long enough for the clotting to seal it, testing the leg. Full junction. Then she brought the spent bullet up and looked, tasted.
Jacketed lead alloy, she decided. Quaint. That type had gone out of use about the time she was born, in the 1970s, replaced with prefragmented synthetic crystal. The slug was coated with some sort of long-chain polymer and tipped with tungsten; that and the pointblank range were why it had got through her blacks.
She tossed it aside and walked back into the living room, picked up the body of the shabby apartment's owner and dropped it behind the couch. The stink was one more minor annoyance in the foul air of the place. She gathered up the . . . newspapers, that was the word . . . and went into the kitchen cubicle. Most of the food in the cooling unit was repulsive, but she'd eaten worse in her time, and Homo drakensis' digestive system could handle anything organic. Methodically, she stoked herself, starting with the two liters of milk and loaf-and-a-half of bread. She read.
New York City. 1995. She felt her skin roughening, and forced blood into the capillaries. Four years before the start of the Final War; according to that date, she ought to be on board a cruiser orbiting Titan.
And less than twenty years old. Her eyes scanned in a flicker, taking a long ten to twenty seconds per page. The written language was much closer to her own than what she'd heard of the spoken form, but still a struggle.
I was right. This isn't my 1995.
Which was almost a relief; her New York City had been destroyed by multiple fusion-bomb hits in the opening minutes of the War. The newspapers showed her a world so alien, so full of assumptions she didn't know, that they were mostly incomprehensible. The "Many Worlds" hypothesis must be literally true; every collapsing of a quantum wave front produced all possible outcomes. This was a world whose history followed a different track.
There are hundreds of separate nations here.
In her history, there had been only two by the last decade of the twentieth century. The Domination . . . the Domination doesn't exist at all. The people who'd given birth to the New Race had never been. Her mother had never been, her human mother, nor the womb-mother brooder who'd borne the egg. Her own children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren would never be born. Her whole species didn't exist.
Her stomach knotted again. No. Reverse peristalsis wasn't going to do her any good at all.
Nothing is going to do any good. She was exiled as no one in all history had ever been exiled.
She was the only one of her kind in the entire universe.
"No," she said aloud. "The world's still there; the Domination's still there. It's just not here. "
And any transfer process had to be reversible, at least in theory. If the local humans didn't kill her, she was going to live a long, long time—with the last retrofit, indefinitely, the geneticists said. There was no hurry. The thought
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