Deadly Relations: Bester Ascendant (28 page)

He considered, for a moment.

“On the surface it is. But underneath, the message has changed.”

“Changed how?”

“We always learned that we were special - better than mundanes. That all telepaths were brothers, even the Blips we have to track down. Now it’s - it’s just the Corps, Al. Blips are enemies. They do things to them…”

“We always did things to them,” Al said. “Have you ever seen a reeducation camp? Or someone on sleepers?”

“Have you ever seen one telepath dissect another?” Brett countered. “Have you ever seen one driven mad, when they tried to push him past PI 12 with drugs?”

“I’ve heard of such things, of course. Sometimes they may be necessary. You know as well as I do that one day there will be a war against the mundanes, Brett, a war we cannot lose. I, for one, am willing to make a few sacrifices to see that my people aren’t slaughtered.”

“Of course. I don’t question that, Al. Any of us should be happy to sacrifice anything and everything for the others. What I’m trying to tell you is that this isn’t being done for us-for teeps - it’s being done to us. By mundanes.

“When Vacit was in charge-and for years after - the Corps was controlled by telepaths. Now it’s not. They aren’t experimenting for our own benefit, but to make us better weapons. Hell, surely you’ve heard about dust?”

“Yes. What’s wrong with trying to enhance our powers?”

“Bull. Dust was developed to give mundanes psi, AI. To undercut us completely.”

He stopped, picked up a Martian rock, turned it at a few angles, then let it drop.

“It’s a matter of control, Al. In the old days, Cadre Primers were placed in strategic positions. The low-level ones became instructors, but the P12s went on to high command. Now there’s a black box out there that they won’t let any of us into. Because we’re all suspect. Do you know how many of us have died?”

“No.”

“Most of us, Al. Milla’s gone. And Menno. Ekko. And I went back through the older generations. You met Natasha Alexander once?”

“Yes. Here, on Mars. She was the commander of Department Sigma.”

“One of the first from Cadre Prime, and her mother and her mother’s mother were both in the Metasensory Regulation Authority before it became Psi Corps. She was assassinated. She used to be Vacit’s aide, did you know that? No Primers in Department Sigma, Al. Or in top Admin. She was in the black box and so they got her out. You should have been promoted all the way to the top, years ago. You know it, I know it.

Oh, they let you have your Black Omega Squadron to keep you busy, but you know you’re still on the outside. You have to. I should be higher up, too, though I never had the ambition you did.

They’ve held us down, Al. And if they ever think they can’t, they’ll kill us.”

“They? Who is they?” Al demanded angrily.

Montoya had spoken of they.

“Johnston and his cronies, his pet telepaths, laters all-And behind them, a select group of senators, governors, industrialists-IPX especially. Mundanes, Al, mundanes. They’re taking it away from us. From our children.” He grabbed Al’s arm.

“Don’t you know why Sandoval Bey was killed? You were his friend, don’t you want to know?”

“Enough!” Al shouted.

Despite his full-throated roar, his voice was surrealistically thin in the Martian air.

“What are you here for? Are you trying to talk me into some kind of revolution? Assuming all you say is true, you think the two of us can just…”

But Brett was shaking his head.

“No, Al. I’m just trying to save your life. I’ve already given up on mine.”

“What?”

“I investigated. I left a trail. They’ll find me.”

“Oh. Wonderful. And you’ve led them right to me. It’s so good to have friends.”

“No, I promise you, I’ve fixed that. Anyway, they may have already been coming for you. Whether they were or not, something is happening here, on Mars, in Department Sigma. Something very big and very nasty.”

“And what would that be?”

“They found something. Lots of some things, actually, out there on Syria Planum -some of it long, long ago. Hell, the facility has been there since ‘73s. Some of it we now think is Vorlonorganic technology, anyway. More recently, though, they found other things.”

He stopped and took Al by both shoulders.

“Some very bad things have been happening to telepaths on Mars, Al.”

“You have proof of any of this?”

“No. But look-look very carefully - and you’ll find it. You’re better placed than I, smarter than I, stronger than I. You have your Black Omega Squadron and bloodhound units loyal to you. Al, whether you know it or not, you’re the most powerful man on our side. You’re the Black Pope.”

“What side is that, Brett?”

“The only side that really matters, Al. The teep side. Don’t you see, they’ve played you against the rogues, kept you occupied so you don’t ask questions. But soon now. very soon, they won’t be able to hide all of it from you. Then they’ll have to do something about you. Something permanent.”

“If what you say is true, they have their excuse now - you’re talking to me.”

“No. As I said, I’ve fixed that.”

Brett was good. Al caught his intent an instant too late. The larger man’s fist drove into his face, ripping the breather half off. His sharp intake of breath was already in progress, but it was almost all CO2, and his head swam. Brett helped out by hitting him again, and his knees buckled, but Brett took him down gently to the jagged rocks.

“Sorry, Al.”

Brett yanked Al’s PPG from its holster.

“Just make sure you pick this up,” he said. “And don’t forget what I said. You’re the one, Al. The only one who can save us. The Corps is mother. The Corps is father.”

Brett shot himself in the face. Al fumbled his mask into place and stood shakily, staring at Brett’s corpse, determined not to move again until he had worked out exactly what to do. On consideration, he upholstered Brett’s weapon and fired it - once into the side of the mountain, once so that it scorched his arm. PPGs had faintly different signatures and the weapons were registered - an investigation would tell who had fired which.

Then he took his own weapon from Brett’s outstretched hand and replaced it with the other. He closed the dead fingers and squeezed them, and he remembered, so, so long ago, playing cops and blips, pretending Brett wasn’t a good guy. Betraying him. His brother.

“I’m sorry, Brett,” he said softly. “I really am.”

And for the first time in a very, very long time he felt something that might have been a tear start in the comer of his eye. He cracked the mask, let the desiccated Martian atmosphere have it. He had no time for that. He could hardly doubt that Brett believed what he said - he had died for it. Brett might be wrong, but too much of what he said fit too well with what Al already suspected

He had known about Johnston for years. Indeed, he and Johnston would have a personal meeting one day, to discuss purely personal matters - that was certain. But the larger conspiracy-he hadn’t exactly seen the shape of it until now.

If Brett was right, this amounted to much more than a political game inside the Corps. His telepaths were in danger. Alfred Bester’s telepaths. They were all he had all he cared about.

God help anyone who got in his way.

Chapter 2

Glass shattered, and though it was up ahead somewhere, Bester ducked reflexively. He signaled his bloodhounds, and they spread out around him, their excitement barely contained. They relayed their impressions back toward him in a chain.

He loved it, hunting with his hounds. It was like being the conductor of a symphony. For the moment he conducted them like bassoons and low strings, plucked, as they crept like thieves though ruined corridors of antique white and aquamarine.

A hundred yards ahead, they came across a normal. Like the others they had found, he was curled against the wall, his expression slack. Blood seeped through a crack in his faceplate, but he was still alive. One eye was a bloody ruin, but the normal didn’t care. He was more occupied with the nightmare his remaining eye saw, wherever it tried to look.

I don’t understand, Tapia mused. Why is he doing this?

“Shh. Don’t p-cast,” Bester warned.

He noted that she seemed to have recovered most-but not all-of the use of her arm. He had heard that she was proud of the injury, because it made her more like him. She was a good cop, and one of the few he was certain he could trust, especially now.

“Yes, sir. But McDwyer is smarter than this. I trained with him. If he were going Blip, he wouldn’t…”

“No, no, Ms. Tapia. He hasn’t gone Blip. That’s not what’s going on here.”

His link quietly vibrated. He touched it on.

“Bester.”

“Sir, this is Donne. Sir, I’ve been watching like you said. Another team just came in. Looks like Sigma, all right.”

“Good work, Ms. Donne. You know the plan. I’m sending a few back to help. Just keep them busy for a few minutes. Nothing overt, nothing we can’t plausibly deny.”

“On it, sit”

He motioned to a couple of the bloodhounds, and they turned and raced the way they had come.

“What’s going on, sir?” Tapia asked.

“Better you don’t know right now,” he told her. “If everything goes as I want it to, I’ll tell you. Meantime, our job is to concentrate on catching McDwyer. Alive.”

“Yes, sir.”

They passed through a high-ceilinged chamber that must have once been the resort’s ballroom. Modest in size by Earth standards, by Martian standards it was lavish. And in nuns. No one had even bothered to loot it - the shattered crystal of candelabras littered the floor, and once plush, real - leather sofas eked in the dry Martian air. A fine coat of red dust covered everything, puffing up as they moved through it.

The Earth-Minbari War, the embargo that had followed, and the provisional Mars government hadn’t done much to help the old tourist industry. New Vegas had survived, as had the upper - crust entertainments of Olympus Mons, but none of the more exclusive - and isolated - imitators. This one, the hotel Tharsis, would likely never open again. It was home to fifty or so squatters, some fugitives from the EPG, some just half-crazed outbackers.

McDwyer had made a sizable dent in their active population-the trail of bodies was even clearer than his footprints in the Martian dust. Something else, breaking ahead, and three of his bloodhounds bolted forward. As per orders, they didn’t draw their PPGs. Bester hurried his own pace, through the ballroom and into a wing of suites. The hounds were already down when he entered, clutching their heads in stunned agony.

McDwyer sat across the room, balanced on the high back of a chair, feet in the seat. He was leaning forward, posed like a cross between a gargoyle and Rodin’s Thinker. Behind him there was a large picture window, threaded with cracks. A dune of rusty sand piled against the outside, obscuring more than half the view. The plain beyond was lit by a rare, amber sky. The light from the window tinged everything in the room with a faintly sulfurous hue.

“Hello,” McDwyer said, not looking up.

“Hello, Mr. McDwyer,” Bester said.

“I’ve come to help you.”

He couldn’t see the man’s face behind the respirator, but a shim of glee drifted up from him, though it had an odd quality to it. Like honey with an aftertaste of anise. McDwyer’s mind imago resembled a blob of caviar, a thousand little black bubbles, shifting this way and that. McDwyer slowly shook a finger at him.

“You know that pi doesn’t resolve. But neither does two plus two. It’s just an approximation, you know?”

“No, I don’t. Help me understand.”

A muffled laugh.

“You just want me to go back. But I’m already back, that’s what you don’t know. They’re everywhere. Scratch the fabric of space, and you find their eyes, looking at you. You know? So why should I go back? I just wait, I wait, sometimes I forget, but then they return, because they never left…”

He shook his head.

“You want to see? You wanted to see, and now you don’t want to see? You still think pi resolves? You…”

“All right,” Bester said. “Show me.”

McDwyer clutched at his head.

“Oh, sure…”

The caviar-mass of his mind suddenly jiggled, and each tiny egg split open - no, slitted open, like an eye. The whole thing had changed, become like the compound eye of an insect. Glyphs swarmed out. Madness swarmed out. Things like spiders, like black sea urchins, stinging things, poison ampoules.

But that was only the beginning - it was the tide of feeling that hurt so, brought emotions like the scent of formaldehyde, the taste of rotted meat, the sound of a drill in a tooth. Passions that felt like skin tearing between fingers, a paper cut on an eyeball, the almost-pleasurable rupturing of a pus - filled wound. Desires that meant nothing, could mean nothing, to a warm-blooded mammal.

All of that hit Bester in under a second, and he snapped his guards up. Nonetheless, he was stunned by the intensity of the wave.

“No!” McDwyer screamed. His head jerked up. “You said you wanted to see!”

He slammed the glyphs back at Bester, who countered, though he was still weakened by the experience of McDwyer’s insanity. Things from McDwyer’s nightmare attacked him; chitinous stings bristling with hairs, and each hair an eye. The clacking mandibles of a spider, or a mantis. Ropes of maggoty sinews. Bester fell back before the onslaught. Drawing McDwyer out, a bullfighter waving his cloak.

When the attack thinned, when it seemed overextended, Bester struck back, a hard spark to the back-brain, meant to disable.

But the madman’s defenses were too powerful, too alien. It was as if McDwyer’s brain had been imprinted with something not Human at all-it didn’t react like a Human brain, or even like the Minbari prisoners Bester had scanned during the war. McDwyer renewed his assault, and it was all snapping in like a bear trap. For the first time it occurred to Bester that he might lose this battle. After all, he was strong, but not the strongest by far…

He couldn’t get out the way he had come in - it was a sort of Chinese finger-puzzle - so he plunged forward and burrowed out. Blood vessels exploded like water balloons, and he had no idea whose they were. Then he was outside, looking through his own eyes. McDwyer sighed and fell off of the chair.