Deadly Relations: Bester Ascendant (17 page)

“Well, Alfie, looks like we’re on the same team,” Montoya chirped, peering over his shoulder at the posted list.

“I prefer Alfred,” he said.

“I prefer Alfie. Alfred sounds like a butler. Anyway, where do we meet to go over strategy? Oh… we’ve got Vetsch and Nhan on our team. Couple of lowlifes.”

“Hey!” Nhan said, behind them.

“No offense.”

“So, where are we meeting, Captain Alfie?”

“Hiking boots,” AI said.

“Right. Best to be overprepared in the footwear department. Unless they dump us in the middle of a black-tie formal.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Vetsch said, resting his rounded chin on folded arms.

“No,” Al said.

“It can’t be anything that specific. If it is, there will be opportunities for us to acquire the right clothing. We should start with survival gear.”

“Swiss army knives,” Nhan offered.

“Water.”

“It won’t be a simple survival test,” Montoya said doodling on her list.

“We’ll have to track, I’m sure of it.”

“Or avoid being tracked,” Al replied.

“How so? It’s a class on detection techniques.”

“Right. Nothing teaches you to hunt like being prey.”

“Ah! Words of wisdom from the master.”

“Look,” Al said, starting to feel really irritated, “I take this seriously. I want to be a Psi Cop.”

“Hey, we all do,” Montoya gave back, “but can’t you have a little fun with it? Relax! We’re the best of that class.”

“I know we are,” Al said. Actually, he didn’t agree.

Nhan was smart, but she had no stamina. Vetsch tended toward the bottom end of P12 he ought to have been rated a high-end Pll. And Montoya… Montoya had no discipline. Still, if they thought he thought he was better than they, they wouldn’t follow him.

“We are the best, but that just leads to overconfidence. Now, I say lightweight parkas-we can always dump them if they put us on the equator or in the Sahara.”

“Wear pretty underwear, in case we have to strip all the way down,” Montoya added.

“I have a nice set with Narn-head mottle.”

Inwardly, Al sighed It would be a long afternoon. They were in a jet for a while, or perhaps a jet simulator. They might have been on a train, and they were certainly in a helicopter toward the end. A lot of time passed, though thanks to the blackout conditions they traveled under, it was uncertain exactly how much time-their watches had been taken from them before the trip began.

When they finally stood again on the ground, still blindfolded, Al took a deep, slow breath. The air was brittle with cold, and he was glad he had insisted on the jackets. Rich scents of earth, hay, the memory of smoke surrounded them, and he felt tall grass brushing his pants.

It was resoundingly silent - no traffic noises, no distant voices. The same was true of the psychic wind. They were somewhere far away, remote. Someone removed his blindfold - a tough - looking woman with close-cropped hair. Everything remained dark, but it was a darkness with stars, and a moon. Once they and their packs were out of the chopper, it left again on nearly silent rotors.

Al sleepily blinked the nightscape in a series of still lives with eyes gritty from fatigue.

“Well, here we are,” Montoya observed.

“Wherever “here“ is.”

“Now what?”

That from Nhan, who was hugging herself against the cold.

No one move. There might be clues as to what we’re supposed to do almost at our feet. And don’t speak aloud unless you have to.

He glanced slowly around them.

He could make out a horizon, some clumps that might be trees, houses, buildings. A few lights, very distant.

First we listen to see if anyone is out there.

He already had, but now they had line of sight. Right, Captain Alfie. They all concentrated, scanning their limited view.

After five minutes, Anything?

The answer was a uniform no.

Following that, two of them kept watch, while the other two looked more carefully, switching on the two sets of infrared goggles they had between them.

Like meerkats, Montoya said, one of many annoying references Al didn’t get.

When infrared showed them nothing, they switched to flashlights.

“This is getting us nowhere,” Montoya hissed, after a quarter of an hour.

“We need to really look around. We don’t know that we have time for this kind of lollygagging.”

Al didn’t want to agree with her, but he had to. He was impatient. Fine. Let’s do a clockwise sweep, about ten feet apart, with flashlights.

“Wait!” Montoya said.

“Look there!”

Maybe half a mile away, maybe much farther, a string of light raced through the darkness. At times it resolved into circles or arcs. A ground-car, or something similar.

“You think that’s it?”

Al stared at the car, keeping line of sight, reaching out, trying to find - There. He had it. Someone in the car and they were thinking-Catch me if you can! Al opened his mouth to repeat it, aloud, but Montoya was already gone, loping off into the near darkness with amazing speed. Vetsch and Nhan looked to him. Damn it.

“You two follow. Walk thirty feet apart and try to keep us in sight. p-cast if you notice anything. Watch our backs.”

Then he ran after Montoya. It took a minute of hard running to catch her, and she was barely slowing down. He could’ve passed her, but didn’t.

What the hell are you doing? he p-cast.

We have to work together on this.

C’mon, Alfze. You aren’t the cautious type. You’re over-thinking this whole thing. It’s a game of tag. We’re it. If we sit on our hands, we’ll get nowhere. We can’t catch it!

We sure as hell can’t if we don’t try.

He had no argument for that. Besides, he liked running. The grass hissed against their thighs, and he was just getting the wonderful burn in his belly. In the moonlight, Montoya looked fierce and free. She might have been a lioness. So for the moment, he surrendered to the joy of motion, the gratifying feel of his muscles, the night air.

Even when the light vanished over the horizon, they didn’t slacken. A dawn sky like diluted milk revealed a flat plain that met all four corners of the world. Light transformed the landscape in unexpected ways, awakening a severe, bruised beauty. The psionic landscape had altered, too-subtly-throughout the night.

It had seemed at first totally silent, but that was because Al had been immersed in the background growl of Geneva for all of his life. Here, in the quiet hours of morning, faint impressions began emerging-heartbeats a hundred times faster than human, sharp hungers unburdened by denial or need for justification, occasional, almost vivid, flashes of color and structure. The steppes, too, had a mind. At first he enjoyed it, but after a time it became a little distracting - too strange to completely dismiss but of no use in accomplishing his task.

It was Montoya who found two lines of bruised grass that must be the tire tracks. They followed them for hours, alternating between fast walking and trotting, as the sky rapidly filled with light.

Call a halt, Captain Alfie.

He looked up to see Montoya, winking at him.

Tired?

No, but Nhan is. She’s just too proud to say so. If we keep going at this pace, she won’t be any use to us when we get wherever the hell we’re going.

He looked at Nhan, and realized that Montoya was right.

“Let’s take a rest,” he said.

“Fine with me. I’m bushed,” Montoya replied, aloud.

They dropped their packs. Al walked up toward the next rise. The plain wasn’t as flat as it seemed; it had a gentle roll that hid subtle valleys. They had seen a few structures-houses, factories maybe-but as the tracks didn’t go near them, they hadn’t approached them either. He felt Montoya come up behind him.

“North Dakota? Mongolia? Where do you think we are?” she asked.

Looking at the huge sky, AI remembered Cristoban, and Argentina. And Bey.

“Right now it doesn’t matter much,” he said.

“Right now, our job is very simple-we follow these tracks. We’re on the hunt.”

“Uh-huh. Hey, Alfie… Alfred. Aren’t you even going to ask me?”

“Ask you what?”

“Why I kissed you that day.” He considered that for a moment.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“It doesn’t matter. Whatever the reason was, it had to do with a moment a long time ago. It’s got nothing to do with now.”

“You’re a hard case, you know that? They say you had about a year when you unplugged your ass. You even went to semifinals in a team competition, then dumped your friends like a load of smelly shit.”

“They weren’t my friends. They just wanted to win the games.”

“They thought you were their friend. Emory in particular was pretty torn up about it He said it was like you had just cut them out of your head. He understood you were upset about Dr. Bey, and no one expected you to finish the games. They did sort of imagine you would talk to them again, though.”

A sudden suspicion came over Al.

“Who put you up to this?”

“What? Put me up to what?”

“This. Trying to talk to me.”

She stared at him for maybe ten seconds, and then burst out laughing. Still laughing, she walked back to join the others.

Two hours later the tire tracks vanished into a river, one of the oldest tricks in the book. They split into teams, two up, two down, examining both banks. Al took Nhan with him. They met again four hours later. The news wasn’t good - in each direction the river was bounded by bluffs too steep for even the most rugged ground-car, and to the south the channel got too deep to drive in, anyway.

Where they stood was essentially the only place their quarry could have forded the river. And night was opaquing the pearly sky. What wood they found was too damp to start a fire with, so they ended up huddled in sleeping skins, jackets on. Al turned the problem over and over in his mind, but got nowhere. He awoke to a sharp jab in the ribs, and looked up blearily to see a smiling Montoya.

“Found the car,” she said.

She was dripping wet.

“In the river, sunken,” Al guessed.

“Yep. Half mile downstream. Found some footprints in the mud, too.”

He shucked himself out of the sleeping skin. 1111M impressed.”

“Are you? I didn’t think anything could impress you.”

“I’m impressed by a lot of things. The mathematical precision of Bach. The prose of Joyce…” She squatted next to him.

“Are you? Or do you just say things like that?”

That hit him oddly. He remembered - in sudden vivid clarity - the feel of her lips, a moment of impossible intimacy in the midst of humiliation, and for a nanosecond it seemed he knew Montoya, had always known her. And she knew him, saw straight through to the middle of him. For that flicker of time, it seemed a pretense to act like they were strangers.

“Let’s go,” he mumbled.

Montoya led them to the car, and, taking turns diving in the uncomfortably cold water, they did a hurried search of it. Again, Al felt the faint fingerprint of the same person who had challenged them two nights before. That made it easier to follow the footprints, which were almost imperceptible in the grass. After a time, however, it seemed pretty clear where the trail was leading; in the vast distance they could make out a small town, roads converging from several directions, including from slightly south of their own path. Soon they were walking on blacktop, and the sign of their prey was gone entirely.

“This is very bad,” Al confided to Montoya, as they approached the town.

“Two, maybe three thousand people in that town. How do we find him?”

“Or her. You’ve got me. But we’ll think of something.”

“Confident, aren’t you?”

“No more so than you.”

She shrugged, but he could tell the comment pleased her.

“You were raised in the Corps, weren’t you.”

“Yes. My biological parents were Corps, but they died when I was very young.”

“You sure about that?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t know. Have you ever seen any evidence that they really existed?”

“Are you questioning the Corps?”

“No. Yes. We should question everything, shouldn’t we? Even if only for form’s sake? How can we be good detectives if we make a habit of accepting assumptions blindly?”

“Why should the Corps lie to me about my parents? There’s nothing even faintly logical about that.”

The very thought was sickening. Montoya just didn’t know - couldn’t know. She was a later who had been raised as a normal. Normals lived in a world of suspicion and violence, and it tainted them.

“Look,” he said mildly, “my parents don’t matter. They wouldn’t if they were alive, except that the Corps would have two more valuable members.”

“I’m sorry I brought it up.”

She touched his shoulder with her gloved hand a galvanic shock ran through him, as if he were a discharged battery suddenly exposed to current again. Again he remembered her approaching him, noticing him on the parade ground.

“Why, then?” he asked, trying to keep his voice flat, nonchalant Trying not to inflect it with surrender.

“Why what?”

“Why did you kiss me?”

A smile pulled at her lips, but somehow it wasn’t a capricious one. There was something honest about it, something personal.

“To thank you,” she said.

“For what?”

“It’s hard to explain. I… I had just come into the Corps. You have to understand, it’s different that way. Harder. It’s very different from the outside world, and everyone is already broken out into cliques. I was - well, I was having my doubts. Frankly, I was considering running away.”

“That would have been foolish. Another girl…”

“Fatima. Yes, I heard about her. But by that time I was okay, because I saw you.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I had seen you there for days. When I walked past, you were dressed like-like Santa Claus with lipstick. And there was shaving cream all over you. You looked ridiculous - I couldn’t have stood there, like that. I couldn’t have bome it. And the way everyone talked about you-what you were going through was worse than anything that I could imagine.