Cauldron of Ghosts by David Weber, Eric Flint

had sustained making her escape—her hair-breadth, hair-raising, barely-in-the-nick-of-time escape—from Mesa’s security forces after the nuclear detonation at Green Pines had been horrible.
    The amputated legs weren’t even the worst of it. Karen was also missing her spleen as well as one of her kidneys and most of her liver. And there’d been some damage to her brain, too. She sometimes had trouble talking and her vision was impaired.
    More to get her mind off the depressing subject of Karen’s medical condition than out of any real interest, Cary moved toward the table where Stephanie was sitting. “Any news?” she asked.
    Moriarty jabbed an accusatory finger at the computer screen. “This is official Mesan news, remember? Better known as the Fantasy Channel.”
    Cary ignored the sarcastic remark and leaned over her comrade’s shoulder to get a better look at the screen. The portable computer was another antique. Its virtual screen expansion had collapsed a few weeks earlier so their view was limited to the screen’s physical dimensions. Which were all of twenty-five by fifteen centimeters. It was almost like looking through a keyhole.
    Cary now knew what a keyhole was, because the small apartment they’d rented actually had one as a supplement to the usual security devices. There was no key, though, which didn’t matter since the lock was broken anyway. Their landlord, as shrewd and grasping as such people usually were in slums, had quickly gauged their level of desperation, divided it by his equally quick gauge of their resources, and provided them with the smallest and most rundown unit in his building for a price they could just barely afford.
    At that, they’d been lucky. There’d been rumors of a robbery gone badly wrong in a nearby district just a day before they’d approached the landlord, and he’d assumed they were what was left of the criminal gang. It hadn’t occurred to him that their battered appearance and the two badly injured members of their party had anything to do with the Green Pines incident.
    The one male in their four-person group, Firouz Howt, had died two days later. Since disposing of the body themselves would be very dangerous, they’d decided the landlord was the lesser risk. That assessment had proven correct. He’d disposed of the body for the value of the organs and tissues, and charged them nothing.
    So, he’d seen the wounds that had finally taken Firouz’s life, and had had no trouble recognizing them as injuries sustained in a gunfight. The landlord had a couple of visible scars himself that showed he was no stranger to violence. But that had simply confirmed his supposition that they were criminals. And not very competent ones, so he wasn’t too nervous at having them around.
    That had been just about the only good luck they’d had since Green Pines, but it had been enough to keep them alive. If they could somehow come up with the money, they might even be able to get Karen the medical treatments she needed to stay alive.
    The landlord had offered to be of assistance there also, as what he called their “manager” but what he meant was their pimp. Cary and Stephanie had turned him down. Partly because the idea of becoming prostitutes was repellent, partly because it would be dangerous, but mostly—being honest—because they couldn’t possibly raise the sums necessary in that manner.
    The news being carried on the channel Stephanie had turned to was the usual fare these days. Fifty percent, a relentless drumbeat on the ever-present danger of Audubon Ballroom terrorist activity; twenty percent, a relentless drumbeat on the also ever-present if not quite as fearsome danger of criminal activity; ten percent, bits and pieces involving official Mesan politics; ten percent, bits and pieces of galactic news. The remaining ten percent was distributed fairly evenly between quirky human interest stories, natural disasters—those were mostly of human origin given