A demented mind.
The tense-relax cycle was reflected, most horribly, in the few remaining human features of the Magus’s face.
The spectacle of human-machine interface gone awry might have been funny to Crecca if he had been watching from say, forty or fifty yards away, while hiding behind a large boulder, and if a battle royal for control of the ville hadn’t been going on just outside the wag. As it was, the carny master could only stand there in the shambles of the big salon, grim faced, trying not to show his impatience and growing concern over the deteriorating tactical situation, while he awaited further orders from his commander in chief.
He didn’t have to wait long.
“Give me a speed wrench!” the Magus cried.
Crecca handed over the adjustable crescent.
With wet steel fingertips, the Magus fitted and tightened the jaws of the wrench over the coupling nut on the ruptured steel-mesh vein. “Replacement tubing,” he snarled. “Third drawer of the cabinet. Fast! I’m losing pressure to my head!”
The carny master didn’t see fit to point out that there was also an alarming knocking sound coming from inside his boss’s torso. He grabbed a twelve-inch length of preassembled tubing from the drawer and ripped it free of its hard plastic shrink-wrapping.
The Magus loosened the nuts at either end of the broken vessel. “Finger, here,” he ordered Crecca, indicating the lower end of the vein, where it joined a stub of rigid steel pipe.
When the Magus freed the bottom coupling, Crecca jammed his thumb over the threaded hole, stopping the gush of tranny fluid.
The Magus fitted the new coupling and vein to the top, torquing it down. After he had Crecca move his thumb, he attached the length of tubing at the bottom. This repair completed, the steel-eyed monster turned his attention to his madly jerking leg.
To Crecca, the problem didn’t seem life-threatening, or even important—a painful inconvenience, mebbe—but when he suggested that perhaps he was needed to supervise the rousties in the battle for Bullard ville, the Magus would have none of it. “Let Furlong deal with rad-blasted dirt farmers!” the creature snarled. “I need your help to deactivate the servo’s internal power supply. I can’t afford to lose any more of my calf muscle.”
The Magus rarely explained anything, so the carny master was somewhat surprised when he continued. Carefully, as if to a slow child, he said in the unusually high-pitched voice, “There is a balance, precarious at best, between my living and my nonliving parts. I know you think that eventually I will become an entirely mechanical being, but that just demonstrates your profound ignorance of the energy dynamics of biological systems. The steel and plastic parts I have accumulated over the years allow me to survive, but they are clumsy and inefficient, and the replacements are only useful below a certain number. Above that total number, they become a serious liability. My ratio of human tissue to mechanism is already so low that if I exert myself to any degree the nutrient supply to the living flesh is challenged, and I risk massive cell death of my remaining tissue.”
Though the Magnificent Crecca very much liked the sound of “massive cell death” when it was applied to the Magus, he understood nothing else of what had just been said. Because he understood nothing, he didn’t dare make a sound or even a facial expression.
When he made no response, the Magus barked more orders at him, demanding a succession of tools from the rollaway box. The titanium housing on the servo had been partially crushed by the slug impact, and two of the retaining bolts had been badly twisted. Because of this, and because the Magus couldn’t keep his leg still, the removal of the outer case not only required Crecca’s hands-on assistance, but that he sit on the ankle to pin it down on the autopsy table while they worked.
The bent case bolts proved difficult to extract with hand tools. As the moments stretched on, and the din of blasterfire continued, Crecca’s urge to look out the window grew until it became almost intolerable, but he couldn’t leave the operation. As the Magus worked on one of the two bolts with a socket wrench, he cursed Ryan Cawdor. “He did this to me! That one-eyed son of a swampie jolt whore!”