Deadly Relations: Bester Ascendant (27 page)

“Take the next one, mindfrikkers,” the woman named Endra said, as the doors sighed open.

“I don’t think we will,” Tapia said.

In the lull, some of her confidence had flagged, but Al could tell she was going to bluff it on out, now that she was committed.

“Yeah? Well, just come on.”

A silicon cutter appeared in the miner’s hand, a wicked tool with an edge only a few molecules wide. She brandished it, and with her other hand made a gesture of contempt at least as old as ancient Rome.

“Next time you freaks all know to travel in a real pack, rather than just one old scrag and his little puppy-bitch.”

“That’s illegal possession of a weapon, under Earth Provisional Government regulation…”

Tapia was still reciting the regs and reaching for her PPG when Endra threw the knife. The years had taken away some of Bester’s speed, but the same years of training had helped wear neural grooves deeper than reflexes.

Al managed to knock Tapia far enough aside to save her life, but the spinning blade nevertheless slipped almost frictionlessly through her biceps. For an instant, it almost seemed as if it had missed, and then Tapia’s arm sagged halfway off, blood fountaining out. Cursing himself for not stepping in sooner, Al jammed Endra’s mind and watched her drop. Then he pulled his PPG and shot four other miners in the legs as the rest, howling with fear, crushed onto the train.

Ignoring the groans of the injured mundanes, AI knelt quickly, used Endra’s knife to cut a tourniquet from his shirt, then called for medics on his link. He laid Tapia’s head back gently.

She had gone into shock, eyes glassy, but he had seen a lot of wounds in his time and suspected she would live. So would those he had shot. He turned to them.

“I want you to remember something,” he said, very softly, but very distinctly. “I want you to watch this, and remember it, and I want you to tell your friends.”

He stood up and walked toward where Endra lay puddled. Her eyes were starting to clear.

“First of all, this isn’t Earth. You people turned your backs on Earth, remember? The officers who run the provisional government here-men and woman who fought in the war for you-well, they don’t really care so much if you Marsies don’t receive the full protection of Earth law.

“So, for instance, if something like this were to happen…”

He pushed, and Endra screamed, trying, it seemed, to touch the back of her head to the heels of her feet.

“Well, on Earth someone might wonder why I did it. They might even bring it up in a court of law. Not here. Or maybe…”

Just for form’s sake, he hit the woman with a deep, hard scan. Unearthed her hatred of the Corps, saw how she had lost a child in the food riots, found-something else. Something buried, encrypted, hidden. It was entombed in her hatred, but she hadn’t repressed the memory by herself. He recognized the signs - a P12 had cauterized a memory. A sloppy job, though, and it was still half there.

He yanked it out, like a rotten tooth, set it aside, and got back to the business at hand. He sparked her mind and then diced it. It was so easy to do to Normals. When he was done, she just lay there, drooling, staring at the ceiling and making gagging noises. Then he pushed each of the other four, just a little, so they would worry about what he might have done to them.

“Touch one of my telepaths again, and what I’ve done to her will seem a kindness,” he promised. “Are you all quite clear on that?”

The four nodded vigorously, and about that time the medical team arrived. Satisfied that Tapia would live, he went back to his apartment and carefully unwrapped the thing he had torn from Endra’s mind.

Not surprisingly, it had Psi Corps in it, everywhere, all around her. Department Sigma. Interested, he sifted the broken strands, weaving here, extrapolating there. He had worked with Department Sigma on a number of occasions, and was aware of some of their projects, but to a large extent they were still a black box to him. He didn’t like that.

He saw Endra working for them, running a backhoe, cutting blocks of rustred permafrost with a silicon knife - that’s where she had come by it. Digging for something in the Martian dirt. The digging was just the frame of the picture. Endra Nadja had been digging most of her adult life. No, it was where she was digging-and why - that they had cut out. He carefully worked his way to the core of the burned memories, and in the ashes, in the powdery place between what is forgotten and what was never known, he found spiders. Spiders boiling out of her flesh, spiders crowded on her eyeballs, spiders invading her mouth. Strange.

The records showed that Endra Nadja had been born on Mars and had never been off planet. Where would she have seen spiders? He supposed someone in the Corps might have planted the images there, as some sort of punishment, but that seemed unlikely - this was the part of the memory that was most damaged, that had been most viciously suppressed. Anyway, it explained Endra’s bolder-than-normal hatred.

She didn’t remember being hurt by a Psi Cop, but one had hurt her a great deal, doing this. The buried memory had fed her natural antipathy. Whoever had done this deserved a reprimand for such a half-assed job. It wasn’t a signature he recognized. He shrugged and started to file it away again, but paused for a long moment. There was something familiar about this. But what?

He stood with his eternally clenched hand pressed against the macromolecular glass, staring out over the battered surface of Mars. His mind traced back through the years, in search of the feeling of spiders, of an alien touch… The rogue in Brasilia. What was it, more than twenty years ago? She had had some sort of thing going with spiders. And hadn’t she come from Mars? Yes, this certainly went into the “to be considered” file.

Tapia dimpled at the flowers.

“Thank you, Mr. Bester.”

“Don’t mention it. Next time, though, you should try to catch the knife by the hilt.”

“I’ll try to remember that. If it weren’t for you, I’d be dead now. I guess - I guess I lost control.”

“We all do that now and then,” Al said. “It’s perfectly natural to get frustrated, especially with mundanes. They can’t understand us, any more than a blind man can understand a roomful of painters discussing a landscape.”

“I know.”

She looked at him very seriously.

“May I ask you a personal question? How have you been able to stand it all of these years?” He looked her dead level in the eye.

“It’s very simple,” he said. “I always have the Corps behind me. My family. And then, of course, I have my loving wife, and my son.”

“They live here, on Mars?”

“My wife is still on Earth - though she’s thinking about moving up here, next year, now that the kid’s out of the house. She doesn’t deal with space travel very well. My son is grown and in the Corps back on Earth, I’ m happy to say.”

“You must be lonely. Haven’t you ever considered requesting assignment on Earth?”

“It’s hard, but I feel I’m needed here, on Mars, and with my Black Omega Squadron. As much as it hurts, we do what we must “

“It’s romantic, in a way,” Tapia said.

“Yes. In a way. And now I want you to get some rest, because when you get out of here, you’ll have some hard training ahead of you. No slackers in the Black Omegas, I promise you.”

“Yes, Mr. Bester.”

He made his way to his office, put off combing through a year’s worth of backed-up paperwork in favor of glancing at the Universe Today headlines.

He took notes on two items of mild interest. The first concerned telepaths on Io who had cooperated in a union work shutdown. This wasn’t news to Al, and the idiots had been dealt with already. After all, telepaths had a union, Psi Corps-they had no business entangling their allegiances, officially or unofficially. For Al, the article was noteworthy because of its very existence - the whole affair was supposed to have been stifled. Again, someone had been sloppy.

A little more interesting was a profile of William Edgars, an up-and-coming billionaire in the pharmaceutical industry. Edgars was one of the contractors who produced sleepers, so anything concerning him was of interest. The article was typical Fortune 500 stuff, though-hobbies, carefully chosen political views, photos with the dog. When asked about business teeps, he seemed to avoid the question, an interesting thing in and of itself. He moved from the paper to the revised hunt list but had only read a page when his vidcom belled.

“Answer,” he told it. “Bester here.”

A face appeared, a receding blond hairline, strong jaw, very white teeth. He had the momentary disorientation that came from recognizing someone once well-known, but transformed.

“Brett?” he asked, a little incredulously.

“Hello, Al. I was wondering if you’d remember me.”

“Of course I do. Cadre Prime. What can I do for you?”

Brett hesitated for an instant.

“Al, I’m on Mars. I wondered if I might look you up?”

That was - odd. He and Brett hadn’t seen each other except in passing, in the halls back in Geneva, for more than thirty years. Thirty.

“Yes, of course. Where would you like to meet?”

“Well, I’ve never been on Mars before, and I don’t have long here. I was thinking about hiking a little around the slopes of Olympus Mons.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, not at all.”

“I can tell you’re a tourist. Not all the way up, I trust.”

“Probably not. Are you game?”

“I…” Something was wrong here. “Sure.”

“Great. When are you free?”

Al didn’t much like being outside on Mars. He didn’t like trusting his life to canned air. And he didn’t like the distant horizons, with no walls to put his back to. How many ways could you kill a man outside? It was easy enough on Earth: a hidden marksman, a well-timed avalanche, a falling accident. On Mars, it was so much simpler. A cracked air valve and a faulty gauge. A few molecules of any of a number of nerve toxins placed in the breathing mix.

Sure, it was the same inside the domes, but written on a larger page, and scale did make a difference. Few people would blow up a whole dome, or poison the entire colonial air system just to kill Alfred Bester. He could think of many who wouldn’t mind waiting in a fissure on Olympus Mons, even for hours, peering through a telescopic sight.

A lot of people stood between him and death. That made him very uncomfortable. Brett could well be one of those people. They had always been rivals. He had left Brett in the dust, rank wise, many years ago. Was he here to beg a recommendation-or earn one from Al’s enemies?

“Ever climbed this whole thing?”

Brett gestured at Olympus Mons, which dominated not just the sky, but the world. The tallest volcano in the solar system, its fifteen miles of height were difficult for the mind to comprehend. They were only about a mile up from the base, and already the puny horizon of Mars made the planet seem smaller, while the endless slope rose above them.

“C’mon, Brett.” Al paused on a ledge.

“We haven’t spoken in more years than I can remember. Let’s be honest. We were never friends, not really. You didn’t bring me out here to renew an old acquaintance or to chat about our childhoods.”

Brett stared up the vast slope.

“Okay, Al. It’s true. You were always the strange one in the cadre. I always did sort of like you, whether you knew it or not. We all did. You were just - you wanted more than we did, maybe. But you were Cadre Prime, Al, and I was Cadre Prime. We are alike in a way that others can’t be.”

Here it came. Brett wanted something, all right, and he was hoping to key in on the only thing he could, the only thing the two of them had in common.

“Even after all of these years? You really think we share that much? Twelve years out of sixty-four?”

“Yes, I do. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be here. We were never friends, Al, but we were brothers.”

“So we were taught. But isn’t everyone in the Corps brother and sister?”

Brett shook his head and started forward on the slope. He moved with greater ease than Bester. After years in the Martian gravity, Al’s muscles had weakened somewhat. Brett was still used to the heavier pull of their home planet.

“You remember what they told us? The Grins? That we, Cadre Prime, had a special duty?”

Al laughed harshly.

“How could I forget?”

“Al, we were born in the Corps. Everyone else in our cadre joined before they were seven, and all of them were bom manifested. Between us, we celebrated only one birthday. Remember? I still celebrate it. I’ll bet you still do, too - and I’ll bet you never tried to find out what day you were actually born.”

Al shrugged.

“You don’t think that makes us different? We see things, Al, in a way that those who joined the Corps when they were twelve, or fifteen, or twenty simply can’t. They grew up as mundanes, then learned to be Corps. We grew up as the real thing.”

“I’ll grant you that. What’s your point?”

“My point is that the director is a mundane.”

“Very good, Brett. Perhaps that’s because the Corps’ charter states that the director will be assigned by the EA senate and shall always be a normal?”

“Yes. But Director Vacit was a telepath, you know.”

“What?”

“You heard me. He was a telepath. He put the Corps together, him and Senator Crawford. It’s not what they taught us as kids, but…”

“Yes, yes, of course I knew the William Karges story was a fairy tale - but Vacit?”

“You met him once.”

“Yes.”

He could picture him, too, that fine, wrinkled skin and white, close-cropped hair. The faint feeling, like a wind.

“You felt something?” Vacit had asked. “Interesting. Most don’t.”

And then Director Johnston’s interest in him, because Vacit had been interested…

“How do you know?”

“Al, you’ve been in the field. I’ve mostly been in administration. You hear things there. A few people knew all along. Johnston suspects it, if he can’t prove it.”

“I fail to see what any of this has to do with me,” Al said. “Have you been to Teeptown lately, Al? Have you been in the classrooms, seen what they’re teaching the kids? It’s not the same as what we learned.”