Deadly Relations: Bester Ascendant (10 page)

Brazg approached from the left. Even in the dim light, her face seemed haggard, with crescents under her eyes nearly as dark as her newly dyed hair.

“Why have you been following me?” she asked wearily, then frowned. “Port, he’s just a boy.”

“But what kind of boy?” Nielsson wondered, following the question with a quick, brutal scan.

Al met the scan and brushed it aside. Nielsson gritted his teeth and went again, using his mind like a sledgehammer. It was strong, but nothing Al couldn’t handle. When Portis stopped, his breathing had quickened noticeably. His breath stank.

“I guess that answers that question,” he said, grimly.

“Boy’s a regular prodigy. So what are you doing following my good friend, Prodigy? I don’t take kindly to it.”

“I… ah… I want to join the underground.”

“The what?”

“You know. The underground. I want to be a Blip.”

“A Blip, huh? Funny thing about that word-only people I’ve ever heard use - it were from Psi Corps.”

“I was raised in the Corps,” Al said, trying to hide his dismay at the blunder.

“I ran away.”

“Did you.”

“Port, he’s just a kid,” Brazg repeated.

“Yeah. Ramie was just a kid, and Jio, and what did the Psi Cops do to them?”

“Can’t we just - tie him up or something?”

“He’s a pup, but he’s got a hell of a mind. Can you be sure he didn’t pick your brain? Can you be sure what he knows?”

Brazg regarded Al for a long moment. Her eyes were unreadable.

“Let’s get in the boat,” she said at last.

Nielsson nodded and gestured with the weapon. A small powerboat drifted at the edge of the canal. Not seeing that he had any options, Al stepped into the rocking craft. In a few moments, Brazg had the motor humming, and they plowed quietly down the canal, away from the tunnel, leaving a wake like ripples of black glass.

“What’s your name?” Brazg asked.

“Al, if you really want to join the underground, you’ll have to let us scan you. You know that, don’t you?”

Her voice took on a slightly pleading tone.

“If you don’t well, Port is right, we can’t really risk letting you go.”

“No, we can’t,” Nielsson affirmed.

“I just wanted…”

“Let us scan you. Let us see what you wanted for ourselves.”

The boat was leaving the end of the canal, joining some larger waterway. The Seine? The quays along it were broad, tree-lined. Farther down he could make out crowds of people. Would they hear him if he shouted? Would they pay attention? Probably Nielson would just shoot him.

“I guess I have to, huh?” he asked.

“Yeah, Al, you do,” Nielsson answered, grinning in a thoroughly humorless fashion.

“Okay, then. I’m ready.”

He had one very small chance. He tried not to think about what would happen if he failed. Nielsson was a killer-they both were, really, but Nielsson probably enjoyed it. Al dropped his guards. They both came in.

Al knew full well that if they combined their efforts, they likely more than doubled the strength of their probe. It took training, but some telepaths could weave their minds together, intensifying the results. And he might be able to use that against them. These two would have to be compatible with him and with each other. What he had in mind he had to do against their will, and it still might be for nothing. Oddly, he was calm. His heart was beating just like a clock, though he might be an instant away from floating dead in the river.

Part of him was distantly amazed at his composure. As Al dropped his guard, he pulled something else up.

Help me. Help me. I fear the Corps. The Corps is chasing me. And I’m afraid of you. I have no one.

A trained P12 would see through that in a nanosecond. He was hoping it would take Brazg and Nielsson just a bit longer. It did, and Brazg actually moved to meet him, which was good We’ll help you… she thought. And then the three of them howled like the damned, as Al fused their minds to his and screamed Amplified through two minds, he sent a shock wave racing into the night, carrying on its crest a single word.

HELP.

The wave rang out for a quantum’s worth of time only, then their guards snapped down, severing the brief union with what felt like twin lightning bolts to his brain.

He had been as open to them as they were to him. He used the pain, rode it up to take command of his muscles, and jumped. Arcing toward the water, he gulped a deep breath, which went somehow wrong, as if he had sucked in an icicle. They were only about thirty feet from the bank, and as he plunged into the chilling wet, he felt something bum his ear, a crescendo of rage-from Nielsson-and shocked betrayal from Brazg. And something else, something that had come out of the fusion with them.

A place.

He swam frantically, unwilling to come up because he felt Nielsson trying to find him, knew that he had the flechette gun. Normally he could hold his breath for quite a long time, but his lungs hurt already, which didn’t seem at all right. In fact, the pain was really, really bad. He managed the quay, though, and glyphed himself rising from the water, back nearer the mouth of the canal.

He didn’t know if it was enough, but he couldn’t wait: he heaved himself from the water. Something whined by him, struck sparks from a wall. He bounced to his feet and ran, suddenly filled with an almost electric energy. He hadn’t gotten very far when he heard the boat bump behind him, and then footsteps pounding on stone.

He sprinted down an alleyway, turned a corner, took a right, a left. Nielsson was still behind him, but Al was drawing farther away, he could feel it. Cops and blips again, just like when he was a kid. He could do this. He could win.

He wondered where the Paris Psi Corps station was. He should know that, shouldn’t he? He should have checked during the train ride. He didn’t have the faintest idea where he was running, only that he had to lose Nielsson or die. His lungs felt full of molten tar, some of which was bubbling out of his nose, so he had to open his mouth to get enough air. But he couldn’t get enough, not nearly enough… He came hurtling down the end of the street and found himself back at the broad, tree-lined quay along the river.

He almost ran headlong into a group of revelers, toasting one another with champagne. They laughed curiously at him as he staggered past, found his stride again, and dug in. He stayed on the quay because there were a lot of people on this section, walking dogs, jogging, going from bar to bar and coffeehouse to coffeehouse. He tried to quiet his mind, draw the seared edges of his blocks back together, knowing they were leaking, knowing also that if Nielsson could get a clear shot he would take it, even with all of the witnesses. The flechette gun was silent, and besides, Nielsson was a psychopath.

He felt as if he ran on a rapidly spinning disk now. The lights of Paris weren’t points, but the tails of orbiting comets. His feet were becoming slabs of duracrete. He no longer had any idea where Nielsson was. He passed through a large crowd, ducked up a street into an alley, and finally, wheezing, hid in a recessed doorway.

As he collapsed against the brick wall, the dark alley strobed, and another-sunlit-scene replaced it. He was back in Teeptown, at the spot the Grins had burned into his mind. The vision shivered with unnatural color, as if the walls, trees, grass, and sky were producing light instead of reflecting it, as if their very atoms were tiny arc lamps…

The specter faded, and he was in the alley again, trying to be quiet, to make a quiet place… Quiet, quiet… He could barely inhale now. Water was still bubbling out of his nose. He wiped at it. It was sticky.

He was never sure if it was the realization that what he was exhaling wasn’t water at all, or a simple lack of oxygen that took him out. One moment he was sitting, back to the wall, trying to brace himself to face Nielsson. The next his face was pressed hard against the street. Then nothing.

A conversation woke him. Two black rats were discussing where their morsel had gone off to.

“A tasty corpse it looked, not long dead. It was here somewhere.”

“Maybe not dead at all. Maybe he’ll squirm a little when we start chewing on him.”

Then he really woke. His face was in a sticky puddle on the stone. The rats from his nightmare were still talking, though their conversation was a bit different. I can feel him. I think he’s out of it. This way.

Nielsson.

Let’s just get out of here, Port. That call… No. You felt him get it, the safe house. He knows where it is. He’s here, somewhere. He won’t be arty trouble. He’s already been too much trouble. This is taking too long. And he could hear their footsteps now, not through their ears, but through his own. This wasn’t good. He had to get up, to rim some more.

He told his muscles to do so. They told him they had the night off. He dimmed his mind, made it seem as if it were going out, as if he were dying. He was, of course. That seemed obvious. Still, he had no intention of going peacefully. He wondered what Cadre Prime would think of him now. Stupid or brave orjust suicidal?

They came closer. He held imagoes of their minds, now. Nielson’s was simple, and if he had to draw it, it would be a knife. Brazg’s was her face, simplified almost as much as a Grin’s, mournful, hopeless. Closer, closer he let them come. But once they saw him he would have to…

They saw him. He used every bit of will he had left to raise his head and establish line of sight. Nielsson was a blunt’ shadow, but that was plenty. He hit him with everything he had, just a simple burst to the pain center. Nielsson screeched, his knees buckled, then straightened. He laughed harshly.

“Still got some left, eh? This ends it. Tell the Devil I said hello.”

Then a confusing thing happened. Nielsson spun on his heel and fired the flŠchette away from Al. At the same moment, the alley flickered yellow-like someone lighting a cigarette-and the walls seemed to slap together like giant stone cymbals. That was the sound he heard, anyway. Then Nielsson’s knife mind was shattered. Al saw what looked like a door crack open, and white light stabbed through, and something yanked at him-He yanked back. The door slammed, the light went out. There were some scuffling sounds. Al coughed. And something large and wet came up. Then a hand touched him, warm, and he suddenly felt reassured.

“Ambulance. Now.”

A man’s voice, a rich baritone, very precisely articulated. What sounded like a British accent.

“You’ll be all right,” the voice said, gripping Al’s hand.

“Don’t worry, son. You’ll be okay.”

Al opened his eyes to see sterile, white walls, comforting and familiar. At first he thought he was back in the academy, until he raised his head enough to see an unfamiliar skyline beyond the window.

“Well,” a man’s voice said.

“I wondered if you had gone into some sort of hibernation cycle.”

The voice he remembered, the cultivated baritone from his fevered nightmare. He started trying to turn his head, but then the speaker walked into view. The first thing Al noticed about him, of course, was the black uniform and brass-and-copper badge. A smile quirked seams in a dusky, broad face with a nose as large and proud as the beak on an eagle. A salt and pepper-mostly salt-mustache and goatee gave him a look that AI tentatively assigned as Shakespearean. Few Psi Cops had facial hair.

“Sir?”

“My name is Sandoval Bey, Mr. Bester. You may call me Mr. Bey.”

That name rang a bell. Bey… Dr. Bey, if he remembered correctly-was a high-level instructor. Why was he in the uniform of a Psi Cop?

“What happened, sir?”

“Not a very precise question, Mr. Bester. What happened today, yesterday, a thousand years ago? Here, in Spain, on the moon?”

Al detected no actual remonstrance in his gentle, jovial tone or merry eyes.

“I mean, what happened with the Blips, sir.”

He paused an instant and then modified that.

“Lara Brazg and Portis Nielsson. I was chasing them…”

“Yes, yes, Mr. Bester. I think I can guess what you meant from context. Lara Brazg is in custody, thanks to you, on her way, hopefully, to be reeducated. Portis Nielsson - well, I’m afraid he didn’t make it.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, sir.”

“Are you? He did try to kill you. Put a neat hole through your left lung with that flechette pistol of his.”

“Yes, sir. But he might have been reeducated, if…”

“If what, Mr. Bester? If we had captured him alive? Yes, the odds of that would have been increased greatly if you had done the proper thing, and called Psi Corps the moment you picked up their trail.”

Al winced. Then it dawned on him.

“Will I get a reprimand on my record, sir?”

“That would seem to be appropriate, wouldn’t it?”

An ambiguous smile ghosted Bey’s lips.

“But no, the test of intelligence is in the evaluating of its mistakes. That test is one you must take now, but it won’t be Psi Corps that judges your score - it will be the universe, and her executioner, evolution.”

Al smiled weakly.

“Yes, sir. Natural selection almost got me, I suppose.”

“Almost, Mr. Bester. But don’t forget whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

He cocked his head thoughtfully.

“Of course, in actual fact something that almost kills you can leave you crippled for life, mentally and physically, and greatly hasten your death. I find that Nietzsche engaged in a lot of wishful thinking, not a trait I associate with strength, really.”

Despite the grim topic, he smiled broadly. That made Al’s head swim, ever so slightly. In the that queasy at - sea state he remembered something, however.

“Sir, I got something from them. They were headed for a safe house on the rue-the Rue de Pepin. 1412, Rue de Pepin.”

“I see. Well, very good, Mr. Bester. That will be seen to, and your cooperation noted, I’m sure. You’re a very lucky fellow.”

“I’m lucky you found me. Thank you, sir, for saving my life.

“Well, that is the function of the aged, Mr. Bester. Once we can no longer contribute to the race in a direct, genetic way, we keep our eyes on the young. But you helped yourself a great deal, with that distress call of yours. If not for that, we would have certainly been too late. We were looking in a whole different quarter of the city.”