Deadly Relations: Bester Ascendant (29 page)

Thank you, he said, very faintly.

Then massive hemorrhaging took him away. Bester wasn’t remotely interested in following. Whatever hell McDwyer was off to couldn’t compare to the one he had just been in.

“Whoof,” he muttered, sitting down in another chair - a hardwood that creaked dangerously.

Someone came into the room behind him.

“Are you all right, sir?”

“Quite all right. I…”

“Then what the hell is going on here?”

Bester turned to regard a tall, almost gigantic frame filling the doorway. Behind him there were at least ten men in black uniforms and hoods, not unlike Bester’s own bloodhound units.

“We apprehended a rogue,” Bester said, indicating the dead McDwyer. “I’m Alfred Bester, attached to the MarsDome precinct. And you are…?”

“Who I am is of no concern. You, Mr. Bester, are a long way from home, and this is Department Sigma business.”

“Well, it wasn’t specified as such on the distress signal we received from the hotel.”

“Hotel? There is no hotel - this is a ruin! Who notified you that McDwyer was here?”

“One of the residents-one of the dead ones, I believe. He called MarsDome and they patched it to me. What’s the problem?”

“One problem is that this man was carrying classified information. The other is that I have a deep suspicion that some of your bloodhounds laid false trails, to slow me and my people up.”

Bester shrugged dispassionately.

“Well. As you may or may not know - I’m song, I still haven’t caught your name. I am cleared up to level A.”

“Yes? Well…”

“Surely this matter couldn’t require clearance above that? What’s your clearance? And, again, your name?”

“Ah… I’m Joseph Talmedge. My clearance is B.”

“So you see? There is no problem. I have higher clearance than you do.”

“Sir… I’m afraid you’ll still have to be debriefed.”

“No doubt. I was prepared for that. I’ll follow you to Syria Planum - don’t worry, I know the way.”

“As I told your man, I have the clearance. Now I want to exercise it.”

“Yes, in theory you have the clearance, Mr. Bester,” Aubrey Pierre-Louis replied, bushy grey eyebrows sinking lower and lower on his forehead. “But this is a singular situation, and in fact, you may not be cleared for this.”

Bester crossed his left hand across his belly and fingered his chin with the right.

“I don’t see how that can be, Mr. Pierre-Louis. Maybe you can explain it to me. Perhaps this is a need-to-know situation? Well, then, I have a need to know.

In case you were asleep when it happened, one of our better P12s just went completely berserk. He was driven berserk by something right here. A new drug? A new technique to push past P12? Was he a volunteer? I don’t care. But to do my job, and to keep things like this from leaking out-to the provisional government, for instance… I. Need To. Know. Keeping me in the dark is simply stupid, and is a greater threat to Corps security than telling me.”

“Al…”

“Don’t Al’ me, Aubrey, unless you plan to do something here.”

“Al, you have every right to be upset…”

“Wrong. I have every right to know what the hell is going on. I have the obligation to be upset. Now are you going to tell me, or do I keep going over your head?”

Here was where his bluff rested on a fine line. Bester had worked for almost two months, keeping careful watch on Sigma’s movements, waiting for something like the McDwyer breakout, an event that would allow him to claim privilege. He had even cultivated Pierre-Louis as best he could, hanging out in the chief’s favorite bar, swapping war stories.

If Brett was right, and this went much higher, he was likely to hit a stone wall. His security clearance might even be in jeopardy. He had called in half a dozen favors just to get where he was at this moment. If Pierre-Louis didn’t cave, it was over.

“Very well,” the older man sighed. “I suppose you should see. But this-this is top secret, you have to understand that. This goes way beyond clearance.”

“I understand,” Bester said. “I will be the soul of discretion.”

“My God,” Bester said. “What is it?”

“We aren’t sure. We think it’s a ship.” It was more than he had ever imagined.

Ship? No. It was a fallen angel. Just the sight of it ate at his back-brain, at the part of him that remembered the days before life crawled out of the oceans, when things like this ate his wormlike, notochord ancestors. This is what had bred spiders in Endra, who had never seen a spider. It was what had driven McDwyer as mad as the hatter in Alice.

A scene flashed behind his retinas, so vivid and disorienting that he nearly stumbled. Suddenly he was six years old, facing Director Vacit. Every detail was as clear as a photograph.

Watch for the Shadows, Vacit had said. Watch and beware.

It chilled him to the marrow. The ship was huge, even only half excavated. Its skin was black, but all shades of black-not the absence of color, but the maiming of it. It moved, it shifted. And he could feel it.

“Is it alive?”

“Yes. It is. Or we think it is, anyway.”

“Sentient?”

“That’s what we were trying to find out when McDwyer touched it. You saw the answer we got.”

“Yes, I suppose I did. How long has it been here?”

“We don’t know. It was buried, not covered by natural deposition. We think maybe two thousand years, maybe more.”

“It’s beautiful, in a way.”

“It gives me the shakes,” Pierre-Louis confessed. “Beauty should shake you up, Aubrey. It should shake you to the core…”

“Very nice philosophy, but if that’s the case, I’ll stick to the plain and ugly, thank you. I can do without the nightmares.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

“Study it. See what makes it tick. It’s clearly more advanced than anything any of the races we know possesses, with the possible exception of the Vorlons - and there, of course, we only go on rumor.”

“And the Corps has it. Wonderful. Does EarthGov know?”

“Al… you really don’t want to know who knows about this thing. You really, really don’t.”

“I’ll take your word for it. But-can we work a little more closely from now on? You’re the administrator. It’s your job to provide the Corps with a future. It’s my job to catch rogues, solve crimes, keep the peace. When those things overlap, as they did today, we should talk. Otherwise, I’ll try to stay out of your hair. Agreed?”

“Agreed.” Bester looked back at the ship. “I think I’m starting to agree with you about this thing. Why don’t I buy you a drink?”

“Not a bad suggestion.”

Bester left with the feeling that he had approached the edge of a very deep canyon, teetered on the rim, and then withdrawn safely. It was time to lay low. Brett had voiced suspicions, about a mundane-backed hegemony in the upper ranks of the Corps. Even if they were unfounded - and Bester didn’t think they were - it still wasn’t wise to attract undue attention.

Especially now. Because it was clear that Brett was right about at least one thing: big happenings were afoot, very big. Bester was determined to be a part of them, but he would have to be patient. A few days will tell if I’ve gone too far, he thought. Mentally, he crossed his fingers.

Chapter 3

Three days later, he got a call from assistant director Menendez. There were four assistant directors - Bester usually dealt with Kaufman, in the Mars office. Menendez he had never spoken to. On the vid he looked awfully young, almost baby-faced.

“Beta Colony?” Bester repeated, politely.

“Yes. It’s priority one.”

Bester considered Menendez for a moment.

“I can have my Black Omega Squadron ready in four hours.”

“Negative on that. Black Omega Squadron is needed on Mars.”

Bester blinked.

“She’s my squadron. I fought for years to form her.”

“Mr. Bester, whatever role you had in the formation of the Black Omegas, they - like you - belong to the Corps.”

“Of course. But I command them. Are you relieving me of that command?”

“No, Mr. Bester, I am not. These are delicate times. We need you at Beta Colony and we need your squadron near Mars, on standby.”

“You’re expecting trouble.”

“Maybe.”

“Very well, then. How do I get to Beta Colony?”

“The way anyone else would, Mr. Bester. We bought you tickets on a commercial transport.”

“And how many of my bloodhounds may I take?”

“What’s needed on Beta is an investigator, not a whole unit. Beta is not particularly-friendly-to the Corps, so we have to do this without much intrusion. The local office will supply you all the people you need.”

“With all respect, I work better with my own people.” “I’m sure you do. But it’s not going to happen.”

Bester shrugged.

“If that’s the way the ball bounces… When do I leave?”

“You have two hours.”

All the way to his quarters, and even while packing, he fought through his outrage, looking for perspective. They wanted him alone, far from his troops. If they had just sent him to Beta Colony, he would have considered it a distraction, something to get him away from Mars and the black ship - for a time. But this-well, he must have miscalculated. He must have gone too far, after all. He regretted, for a moment, putting off the appointment he had been planning. True, he had wanted to find precisely the right time, but…

No matter. He would survive this. The time would come, soon enough. It was inevitable; it was destiny. There were a lot of things Al Bester might not have-true love, deep friendships, a beatific relationship with a happy cosmos - but if there was one thing he did have, it was a destiny.

“Well, place-names go through fashions,” Bester was explaining to his fellow passenger. He was a man in early middle age, who identified himself as an insurance broker.

“You have to consider the historical context.”

“What historical context could there be for there to be fourteen Beta’ colonies in Human space?”

“Well, you’re from North America, right?”

“The United States,” he said, a trace of pride in his voice.

Ah. A romantic, potentially even a national separatist, Bester thought, and filed it away for future reference. You never knew, with mundanes.

“Well, think. Almost every state in the United States has at least one “Columbus“ or “Columbia“, one “Franklin“, one “Madison“ - usually more than one. These names crop up everywhere because they were a part of the collective unconscious of the European-American settlers.”

“Yeah, but those places are named after people.”

“Well, consider the Springdales, the Oaklands, the Lake Cities.”

“Still, Beta…?”

“I think it’s two things. First, we keep coming back to Greek. It symbolizes certain things to us-democracy, learning, literature, education. Never mind that Greeks were, for the most part, very undemocratic and not particularly literary or advanced compared to, say, China at the time-the symbolism remains. Oh, Greek went out of fashion-Sanskrit and Mandarin were all the rage in the last century. At the beginning of this century, Centauri had a brief heyday. Then, yet another Greek revival - I think in response to the fear of having our culture swamped by alien influences. Greek Latin, Sumerian - all became very popular again. I’ll bet you had at least one grandfather named Achilles and one named Gilgamesh.”

The fellow nodded.

“The funny thing is,” Bester continued, “the Centauri picked up on that, too. If you’ll remember, at the time they were trying to convince us we were a lost Centauri colony. They started using Greek and Roman names and their derivatives to translate the names of their planets and star systems. Oddly enough, a bunch of their colony worlds ended up being “Beta“ this and that, because in their settlement system there could be only one “Alpha“ - Centauri Prime.

Mat’s the second thing, of course. By the time we started setting up colonies, “Beta“ had almost become a slang word for `less important colony. It’s not systematic-look at any star system with more than one colony. Odds are you won’t see an Alpha, Gamma, or Delta colony - but it’s even odds that at least a city somewhere will be named “Beta“.”

“That makes sense, I guess. Do you teach geography or something in the Psi Corps?”

His eye was drawn, as it had been several times, to Bester’s badge.

“Oh, no. But the last guy I sat next to on a ship was a geography professor.”

“And he told you all of this?”

Bester forced his face into a puzzled frown.

“No. Why would you ask that?”

He loved the expression on their faces when he said things like that. Some men liked fine cigars, some liked French brandy. He preferred the man next to him, trying to laugh it off as a joke - and in the end, failing. In point of fact, he had read everything he just said in a standard tourist guide, but he wasn’t going to tell his seatmate that.

An hour later he set foot for the first time on Beta Colony. This particular Beta was one in a system of only two colonies - unless you counted the minor settlements in the metal - rich asteroids. In that case, there were four. The system’s largest colony was on the fourth planet from the star, a world called simply Sheffer 4 on the star charts, and Azdan by its inhabitants.

Beta was the third planet. Smaller than Azdan, it still boasted almost half as many settlers as Mars - one million, two-thirds of them located in the polar industrial city, also called Beta.

Only the poles were cool enough to be habitable, but that was greatly outweighed by the fact that the atmosphere had fine oxygen in quantities sufficient to sustain Human life, and plenty of nitrogen, necessary for food crops.

Bester found Beta City to be quite impressive. The buildings had a massive, muscular feel after all, they had to cope with the same gravity that was nagging Bester at the moment, nearly one and a quarter times that of Earth. A hot, blustery wind combed through them - which after his years in the thin, frigid air of Mars, proved more than welcome.

The wind smelled something like ginger. Around the city, what looked like tall - grass prairie flowed off to mountains-distant except to the north, where a long row of them scraped at the sky. The sun looked almost exactly like the sun of Earth, and the sky was a velvety blue.