Resnick, Mike - The Widowmaker Trilogy 03 - The Widowmaker Unleashed

VIP免费
2024-12-20 0 0 747.37KB 268 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
The Widowmaker Unleashed: Volume 3 of the Widowmaker Trilogy
by Mike Resnick
2
Fictionwise
www.fictionwise.com
Copyright ©1998 by Mike Resnick
NOTICE: This ebook is licensed to the original purchaser
only. Duplication or distribution to any person via email,
floppy disk, network, print out, or any other means is a
violation of International copyright law and subjects the
violator to severe fines and/or imprisonment. This notice
overrides the Adobe Reader permissions which are
erroneous. This book cannot be legally lent or given to
others.
This ebook is displayed using 100% recycled electrons.
Distributed by Fictionwise.com
The Widowmaker Unleashed: Volume 3 of the Widowmaker Trilogy
by Mike Resnick
3
To Carol, as always
And to Ed Elbert:
friend,
producer,
keeper of promises
The Widowmaker Unleashed: Volume 3 of the Widowmaker Trilogy
by Mike Resnick
4
1.
The emaciated figure, its flesh hideously disfigured by the
ravages of a virulent skin disease, lay perfectly still. Patches
of shining white cheekbone protruded through the flesh of the
face, knuckles pierced the skin of the hands, and even where
the skin remained intact it looked like there was some
malignancy crawling across it and discoloring it.
Suddenly a finger twitched. An eyelid flickered. The
breathing, though weak, became more regular, and finally
Jefferson Nighthawk opened his eyes.
“I'm starving!” he croaked.
“Of course you are,” said the man in the white outfit. “You
haven't eaten in more than a century.”
“Am I cured, or did I just run out of money?”
The man in white smiled. “You're not cured yet,” he said.
“I just brought you out of the deep freeze. But we finally can
cure you, and we will in the coming weeks.”
Nighthawk closed his eyes and sighed deeply. “Thank
God!”
The man looked amused. “I thought the Widowmaker
didn't believe in God.”
“I believe in anyone or anything that keeps me alive,”
rasped Nighthawk.
The man in white leaned over him. “Do you remember my
name?” he asked.
“Gilbert something.”
“Gilbert Egan. I'm your physician. Or, to be more accurate,
I've been your most recent attending physician while you
The Widowmaker Unleashed: Volume 3 of the Widowmaker Trilogy
by Mike Resnick
5
were cryogenically frozen. In the coming days, you'll be in the
hands of specialists.”
“Help me up,” said Nighthawk, reaching a hand weakly in
Egan's direction.
“That wouldn't be a good idea, Mr. Nighthawk,” said Egan.
“Your body is riddled with eplasia, and you haven't used your
muscles in ... let me see ... 112 years.”
“So it's 5106?”
“5106 Galactic Era,” Egan confirmed.
“And my clone's been out there for five years?”
“Actually, your first clone died a few months after they
created him.”
“My first clone?”
Egan nodded. “They created a second clone two years
later.”
“I don't remember.”
“I wouldn't allow them to wake you for that one. You were
too weak. I felt we could only revive you one more time. This
is it.”
“This second clone—did he die too?”
“Nobody knows. I have a feeling he's still alive somewhere
out on the Rim, probably with a new name and a new face.”
Egan paused. “But he accomplished his purpose. He sent back
enough money to keep you alive until the cure for your
disease was discovered.”
“I'll thank him when I see him.”
Egan smiled and shook his head. “People have been
looking for him for three years. You'll never find him.”
The Widowmaker Unleashed: Volume 3 of the Widowmaker Trilogy
by Mike Resnick
6
“If I need to find him, I will,” replied Nighthawk with
certainty. Suddenly his body went limp. “What's the matter?”
he asked, puzzled. “I've been awake for maybe two minutes
and I'm exhausted.”
“As I said, except for one five-minute interlude a few years
ago, you've been in deep freeze for more than a century. All
of your muscles have atrophied. Once we get you healthy
again, you've got a lot of work to do with the physical
therapist.”
“Why am I so damned hungry?”
“All we did was slow your metabolism down to a crawl. We
didn't stop it, or you'd have died. And no matter how slow it
was, eventually you digested everything in your stomach.
From time to time—actually, about every sixth year—we've
fed you intravenously to keep you alive ... but there's a
difference between being alive and not being hungry.”
“So can I get something to eat?”
“Not for a few days. We have to be sure your digestive
system is functioning properly. A meal right now could kill
you. As soon as you're moved to the hospital, we'll inject
some proteins and carbohydrates directly into your
bloodstream, enough to keep you going for a couple of days.”
“Then what?”
“The doctors perform their magic and eradicate all traces
of eplasia from your system—and then, since you still look
like something from a child's worst nightmare, you'll undergo
a month or more of reconstructive cosmetic surgery.”
“How soon before I'm out of here and on my own?”
The Widowmaker Unleashed: Volume 3 of the Widowmaker Trilogy
by Mike Resnick
7
Egan shrugged. “That's up to you—two months, four
months, a year, whatever it takes.”
Nighthawk was silent for a moment. Then he spoke again:
“There was another man last time you woke me.”
“Yes,” answered Egan. “Marcus Dinnisen. Your attorney.”
“Where is he now?”
“Who knows?”
“I want to know. His firm is in charge of my money.”
“Not any more. Your second clone sent five million credits
back with Ito Kinoshita and instructed him to pay it directly to
us as we required it, rather than to allow the money to pass
through Mr. Dinnisen's law firm.”
“Were they robbing me?”
“I don't think so. It's just that your clone was not the most
trusting soul I've ever encountered.” Suddenly Egan smiled.
“We were able to imprint your personality and memories on
him.”
“Who is this Kinoshita?” asked Nighthawk. “I never heard
of him.”
“He trained your first clone. The second one didn't really
require any training, but Kinoshita accompanied him on his
mission.”
“Is he still around?”
“I believe so.”
“And he's still got my money?”
“No. He deposited it in his own bank with instructions that
they were to continue making payments to us, and were to
release whatever remained only to you after you were cured.”
The Widowmaker Unleashed: Volume 3 of the Widowmaker Trilogy
by Mike Resnick
8
“He sounds like a good man,” said Nighthawk. “Pass the
word that I want to see him after all this surgery is done.”
“I'll contact him now. Your recovery will be a long, painful
process. You could use a friend in the weeks to come.”
“Just do what I said,” replied Nighthawk, fighting back a
surge of nausea and dizziness.
“Whatever you say.”
“That's what I say.”
“And now, if we have nothing further to discuss, I think it's
time I transferred you to the hospital.”
“Good,” said Nighthawk. “The sooner we get this over
with, the sooner I can do the two things I most want to do.”
“What are they?” asked Egan curiously.
“Eat without getting sick, and look in a mirror without
flinching.”
The Widowmaker Unleashed: Volume 3 of the Widowmaker Trilogy
by Mike Resnick
9
2.
The small man entered the hospital room and walked to
the foot of Nighthawk's bed. There were half a dozen tubes
running into the old man's body, some dripping medication,
some supplying nourishment, one delivering the recently-
synthesized enzyme that would finally trigger the cure to his
eplasia.
“Who the hell are you?” demanded Nighthawk.
“My name is Ito Kinoshita.”
Nighthawk instinctively extended a hand, saw the bones of
his knuckles protruding through the rotted skin, and pulled it
back, hiding it beneath the light blanket that covered him.
“I'm told I owe you a debt of gratitude.”
Kinoshita shook his head. “It was a pleasure to work with
you.” He paused. “Well, a version of you.”
“You worked with both clones?”
“Not really. All I did with the first one was train him as
best I could, and then they sent him out alone.” Kinoshita
frowned. “I warned them that he wasn't ready, but they
wouldn't listen.”
“Killed the first day out?” suggested Nighthawk.
“No, he was you at age 23. He had your abilities, your
instincts. Nobody could kill him.”
“Then what happened?”
“Innocence. Ignorance. Hormones.” Kinoshita shrugged.
“You name it.”
“I don't understand,” said Nighthawk.
The Widowmaker Unleashed: Volume 3 of the Widowmaker Trilogy
by Mike Resnick
10
“Physically he was 23. But in actuality he was two months
old. He had your skills, but not your experience. He didn't
know who to trust and who not to, he couldn't spot a woman
who was using him or a man who was conning him, and it
cost him his life. He lasted a lot longer than I thought he
would—long enough to fulfill his mission—but he was doomed
from the day they created him.”
“If he did what he was supposed to do, why was there a
second clone?”
“Inflation,” answered Kinoshita. “The money the first clone
was paid bought you two extra years, but it took longer to
come up with the cure for your disease, and the planet's
inflation rate is running at 22 percent. There was nothing in
the initial agreement that allowed your attorneys to dip into
capital, and the medics wouldn't give them permission to
awaken you. When the interest could no longer pay the bills,
that would be the end of it—so they had to accept another
commission on your behalf or you'd have been turned out.”
“Tell me about the second clone,” said Nighthawk. “You
traveled with him?”
“By the time they created him, they'd found a way to give
him all your memories.” Kinoshita looked into the past and
smiled. “There was never anything like him—except you, of
course,” he added hastily. “I remember once he was
surrounded by a couple of hundred angry men on a planet
called Cellestra. All I could think of was that those men were
in a lot more trouble than they realized.”
“Where is he now?”
摘要：

TheWidowmakerUnleashed:Volume3oftheWidowmakerTrilogybyMikeResnick2Fictionwisewww.fictionwise.comCopyright©1998byMikeResnickNOTICE:Thisebookislicensedtotheoriginalpurchaseronly.Duplicationordistributiontoanypersonviaemail,floppydisk,network,printout,oranyothermeansisaviolationofInternationalcopyright...

展开>> 收起<<
Resnick, Mike - The Widowmaker Trilogy 03 - The Widowmaker Unleashed.pdf

共268页,预览54页

还剩页未读， 继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：268 页 大小：747.37KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-20

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 配电装置 动力学连接体 力的合成 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 268
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注