“What kind of chems are you on?” Coldhand asked the terrified pirate.
“What?” the skinny human squealed. “I ain’t taken nothing, I swear to God!”
“What kind?”
The pirate jerked and shook spasmodically in Coldhand’s grip, not daring to try to escape but unable to keep his body still. The air of the mess hall was taut with anxious anticipation. Every eye was surreptitiously on Coldhand and the man he interrogated.
“Cedrophin,” the pirate whimpered at last.
“How much do you have?” Coldhand asked.
“I uh…” the man stammered. He reached into the breast pocket of his jumpsuit with his free hand and fumbled free two vials. They clattered off of the open computer and rolled in a tight crescent on the tabletop. Each was tiny, no longer than Coldhand’s smallest finger. The glass had deep grooves in each side, guide tracks for insertion into a syringe.
“I’ll take both.”
“Take them! Just don’t kill me,” the pirate begged.
Coldhand picked up the cedrophin in his flesh hand and let go of the other man. He fished two orange color chips from his pocket. They slid for a mechanical heartbeat in his illonium fingers and he dropped them to the tabletop. The pirate stared at the money fearfully, as though it might bite him.
“I’m a bounty hunter, not a thief,” Coldhand told the pirate. He pocketed the vials and left the Temptation’s mess hall. Everyone in the room watched him, but no one hindered his leaving.
Back in his rented quarters, Coldhand fitted the first ampoule of cedrophin into a needle. He pulled a nylon strap around his arm, a couple of inches above the seam where his flesh met cold metal, and waited. Coldhand didn’t bother pumping his fist, working the muscle in hopes of hurrying his blood vessels into visibility, as Maeve had on the streets of Axis. It would have been pointless, anyway. Coldhand’s organic muscles ended at the elbow. There was nothing but metal and wires to react to his balled fist.
When he could see the blue lines of his veins, Coldhand checked the seal on the vial. It was intact. He didn’t tap the syringe and nudge the plunger just enough to squirt an aesthetic amount of his drug into the air. That kind of thing was for the shows, theoretically to remove potentially lethal air from the needle. These days, even the cheapest chems in the core came in vacuum-sealed packaging that made such practices obsolete.
Coldhand put the needle to his arm and pushed, watching it tear a small hole in his skin. The pain was hollow and distant. He emptied the stimulant into his vein and waited. Nothing. The hunter loaded up the second vial of cedrophin and injected it. Still nothing.
He lay back on his narrow bunk and stared up at the blank fibersteel ceiling. The double the dose of cedrophin would have most men, even the resilient Hadrian and Lyrans, crawling up the walls. Coldhand rested his right hand in the center of his chest.
He could feel his mechanical heart rhythmically beating. It would never race with excitement, even chemically induced. Even now, it was filtering the toxins from his blood, encapsulating them in lipids for safe transport for excretion. In an hour, he would just piss out a hundred cenmarks worth of drugs. He would never get sick, never get drunk, never get high off of chems. A feature of the new computerized hearts, the surgeon had told Coldhand.
Twenty percent. Only twenty percent.
