Read Wolf Time (Voice of the Whirlwind) for Free Online Page B

practiced at reading X-rays, either. She patched herself up, swallowed antibiotics, and then out of nowhere the pain slammed down, right through the endorphin. Every muscle in her body went into spasm. Reese curled into a ball, her body a flaming agony. She bounced gently off one wall, then another. Fought shuddering waves of nausea. Tears poured from her eyes. It hurt too much to scream.
    It went on forever, for days. Loaded on endorphins, she looted the station, moving everything she could into the freighter, then pissed bright blood while howling in agony. Fevers raged in her body. She filled herself with antibiotics and went on working. Things— people, aliens, hallucinations— kept reaching at her, moving just outside her field of vision. Sometimes she could hear them talking to her in some strange, melodic tongue.
    She grappled Voidrunner to the freighter’s back, then lifted off Cuervo and triggered the charges. She laughed at the bright blossoms of flame in the locks, the gush of air that turned to white snow in the cold vacuum, and then into a bright rainbow as it was struck by the sun. Reese accelerated toward Earth for as long as she could stand it, then cut the engines.
    There was a constant wailing in her ears, the cry of the fever in her blood. For the next several days— one of them was her birthday— Reese hung weightless in her rack, fought pain and an endless hot fever, and studied the data she’d stolen, trying to figure out why nine tame scientists were willing to commit murder over it.
    The fever broke, finally, under the onslaught of antibiotics. Her urine had old black blood now, not bright new crimson. She thought she was beginning to figure out what the station crew had been up to.
    It was time to decide where she was going to hide. The freighter and the tug were not registered to her, and her appearance with them was going to result in awkward questions. She thought about forging records of a sale— credentials, after all, were her specialty. Reese decided to tune in on the broadcasts from Earth and see if there were any new places for refugees to run to.
    To her surprise she discovered that Ram’s executive board on Prince Station had fallen three days before, and Cheney had been made the new chairman. She waited another two days, studying the data she’d stolen, the bottles of strange enzymes and tailored RNA she had moved to the freighter’s cooler, and then beamed a call to Prince and asked for S. C. Vivekenanda. She was told the vice president of communications was busy. “I can wait,” she said. “Tell him it’s Waldman.”
    Ken’s voice came on almost immediately. “Where are you?” he asked.
    “I’m coming your way,” Reese told him. “And I think I’ve got your architecture of liberation with me. But first, we’ve got to cut a deal.”
    *
    What the lab’s inhabitants had been up to wasn’t quite what Ken had been talking about that gusty spring night in Uzbekistan, but it was close. The Brighter Suns biologists and artificial intelligence people had been working on a new way of storing data, a fast and efficient way, faster than variable-lattice thread.
    They had succeeded in storing information in human DNA.
    It had been tried before. Genetically altered humanity had been present for a century, and the mysteries of the genetic mechanism had been thoroughly mapped. There had long been theories that genetic material, which succeeded in coding far more information on its tiny strand than any comparable thread-based technology, would provide the answer to the endless demand for faster and more efficient means of data storage.
    The theories had always failed when put into practice. Just because specialists could insert desirable traits in a strand of human DNA didn’t mean they had the capability of doing it at the speed of light, reading the genetic message the strand contained at similar speed, or altering the message at will. The interactions of ribosomes, transfer