Not For Glory Read Online Free PDF Page B

by concentrating on something extraneous. She had a mole below her mouth, right on the jawline, with three long, black hairs sticking out of it. I tried to focus my attention on how ugly it was, but that didn't help much.
    I hurt.
    Everything hurt: a side-effect of one of the drugs they give you when they have to regenerate certain kinds of damage quickly. They call it NoGain. It's expensive as all hell, and it doesn't work with valda oil. Anything more, I don't Need to Know.
    Normally, after the aborted kneecapping I'd received in Eire, I could have looked forward to perhaps as much as a couple thousand hours of rest and gradual physical therapy, accompanied by whatever reconstruction and occupational therapy the fourth-best reconstructive surgeon on Metzada prescribed. Except for some of the occupational therapy, which I'd have enjoyed, it would have been a rough regimen, but I'd been through it before. But this wasn't normal.
    The stainless steel therapy table was painfully cold against my back as I lay there, wearing nothing but a thin pair of cotton shorts. The light of the overhead glow hurt my eyes.
    My heart thudded slowly in my chest, each dull beat a dismal, distant ache. That's the thing I hate most about NoGain; even when it doesn't put me through agony, it leaves me feeling exactly the way I do when somebody I love dies.
    When I was a boy, I thought heartache was just an expression.
    Boys can be such fools.
    Her fingers hurt.
    "Again, Tetsuo," she said, digging a knuckle into the back of my calf. That wasn't for therapy, not directly. It was just to force me to do what she wanted me to. "You will—"

    "You will be telling us what you are doing here," he says.
    He is the slightly larger, the fractionally older of a pair of big men in the black uniforms of Irish Republic guardsmen, politely wondering what somebody with no Sein ID is doing on the cobblestones of a Dublin back street. He rubs a large hand against his stubbled chin in curiosity while his partner sticks a spearpoint under my chin to push me up against the battered brick wall so they can comfortably inquire.
    "Sooner or later," he says. "Sooner or later." He slaps his nightstick against his palm. It isn't as though he's threatening me with it. It's more like he's fine-tuning, either the stick or himself. "Sooner or later, you will be telling us. I say again—"

    "Again. But harder this time. You're not scheduled for more NoGain sessions; we have to make this last one count."
    I pushed up my leg, my knee setting up a scorching, ripping pain that made me think she was going to tear the leg right off.
    The sadist responded by pushing down harder. There's supposed to be a point at which pain becomes so great that it overloads the mind; the mind blanks, and the victim smiles at his torturer. I don't believe in it, and I'm not sure P'nina did, but she was accelerating toward that point, like a ramscoop trying for lightspeed, knowing that it will never make it, but feeling that the effort is enough, will do enough, will result in—
    "Enough!"
    "Hardly. Push back."
    I screamed.
    Granted, I usually wear a soldier's uniform, but I'm a butcher, not a hero. I'm not downplaying my skills—

    Long-practiced skills come into play when the more soft-hearted of the two Irishmen drops the spearpoint and lets me collapse to the ground.
    I fall hard, limp, to the rough stones. It's a high art to fall hard without hurting yourself, but it's not art, not for me, not now. I'm just a man in agony.
    But then I move.
    Half-blind with pain, I brace myself on my hands, grit biting hard into my palms, making them bleed, but you need a tripod. Mine is two palms and a hip. I lash out with my good leg, steel-toed boot bites hard, deep into the soft muscle of his calf; on the backswing, heel catches him square on the shinbone. I fall to my shoulder while I slip my baby Fairbairn knife out of my left sleeve and into my right hand.
    Fingers tighten on the grip; I slash upward into his