Foreign Legions by David Drake

“I had to try, Matt. She wasn’t going to do anything, and at least this treatment had a chance of working. The nano-machines should have been able to find and destroy the cancer cells. I really thought they could do it.”

“Maybe they could have, but they didn’t. They also destroyed her.”

“I couldn’t just let her die,” he said. “Can’t you see that?”

“No, dammit!” I screamed. “I don’t see that at all. It was her choice, not yours.”

“She was making the wrong choice,” he said. “I couldn’t let her do it when I knew there was a chance I could save her.”

“It was her choice,” I said. “Hers!”

I grabbed his throat with my left hand and began to squeeze. He tried to buck out from under me, but I kept him pinned, kept slowly increasing the pressure. I wanted to kill him, and I wanted to do it slowly.

“I’m the one holding you down, Jim, so I think I’m the one who gets to make the choice right now. How do you like it?”

I squeezed more, and I could see in his eyes that the lack of air was starting to really hurt him. I wanted so much to finish it, to crush his throat and kill him for what he did, but I didn’t. I forced myself to let go of his throat, and then I stayed on top of him until the police arrived.

* * *

I looked again at the dead man and shook my head. “Why help them, Jim? What’s in it for you?”

“I suppose I could say I helped them because they saved my life,” he said, “but you’d know better than that.” He leaned against the pool table that held the dead man. “I helped them because I knew I’d get a chance to steal this technology. Do you have any idea how valuable this technology will be once I perfect it? How much it could do for us? Imagine the possibilities. Want to know what your lover is really feeling? This can let you. Want to know what it’s like to play in the NBA All-Star game? Now you can, even if you’ll never be that good.”

“What about the people you infect with these things?”

“Once I get it working, they won’t suffer at all. I doubt they’ll even know.”

“That’s not the point, Jim, and you know it. You can’t just take control of other people’s lives like this. They get to decide; not you.”

“No, Matt, they don’t. None of us gets to decide much of anything. Haven’t you learned that yet? Governments decide to fight wars, and people go off and die. Companies that leave toxic materials where their employees work and ultimately cause the deaths of those people decades later are making fatal decisions for those people—and the people never even know it. Drivers who aren’t paying attention kill other drivers who never had a choice in their fate. It happens all the time. This technology will be just one more way some people won’t get to make choices.”

I raised the gun. “No, Jim, it won’t. It’s wrong. I can’t stop all the ways that people don’t get to choose, but I can stop this. And I will.”

He pushed off the table and walked toward me. He stopped six feet away.

“What are you going to do, Matt? You couldn’t kill me before, and you can’t kill me now. Oh, I believe you can kill, but you can’t kill me because I won’t fight back and because we’re brothers, two of a kind.”

“No. We were brothers. We haven’t been that for a long time.”

“Maybe not, but you still can’t kill me, and you can’t stop me without killing me.” He turned his back on me and headed over to the table that held the computer. “Get out of here. Go tell them you couldn’t find me, and let me get back to work.”

“Jim.”

He stopped and turned. “What?”

I pointed the shotgun at the ground in front of him. “You may be right that I can’t kill you, but that doesn’t matter. I don’t have to kill you to stop you.”