Deadly Relations: Bester Ascendant (8 page)

There was no place or need for Al Bester. It’s always going to be like this, he thought. Me, out here, in the dark. Sometimes I can look into a window; see people in love, see people with friends. But I’ll always be out here. He also realized that it was okay. One had to be stronger out here. His allegiance to the Corps could remain untainted. How could he really protect and serve all humanity if he went in there, inside? If he loved anyone - if anyone loved him - it would only serve to weaken him.

If he were a part of their tapestry, of their song, their power to betray him would be almost infinite. But they were beautiful. He would protect them - Julia, Milla, yes, even Brett. He would protect all of them, all of his people. But to do that, he had to be what he had been tonight. Stone.

Antoine couldn’t have hurt stone. Julia couldn’t have hurt stone. I’m glad I feel this way. I’m glad to admit it’s over. But he did have a question to ask.

“That must have been some walk,” Julia said the next morning, as they packed up the camp.

“You didn’t come in until we were all asleep.”

“I was just-thinking,” Al told her. He took a deep breath.

“And wondering.”

“About what?”

“About why you asked me along on this trip.”

“Because you’re our friend, Al. Because we miss you.”

He paused.

“I don’t think that’s the truth. Won’t you tell me the truth?”

She wouldn’t meet his gaze.

“I… Al, we were worried about you…”

“Your professors are worried about you. They don’t think you have any friends. And you didn’t stay in touch with us…”

“You didn’t stay in touch with me,” he corrected.

“Al, you never liked us. We never thought you did. We thought you were happy to be away from us. But the teachers worried, and…”

“…and they asked you to do something with me. You bumped into me on purpose, didn’t you?” She nodded.

“Are you angry?”

“No.”

It was the truth - he didn’t feel angry at all.

“No, I’m grateful. I used to wont’ about having friends - everyone else seems to. Sometimes I think it would be nice to have people to talk to…”

He broke off, remembering watching them the night before, remembering also the stolen feel of Julia’s lips.

“Anyway, I don’t care about that anymore. I’m over it. And you can tell the teachers not to worry.”

“Al…”

“It’s okay, Julia. Thanks for asking me along. I’ve learned a lot.”

He didn’t speak anymore on the trip down the mountain, and after a while nobody really tried to speak to him.

When they reached the train station at St. Gervais, he poke his silence to say that he would buy their tickets if they wanted to grab some lunch at the restaurant on the corner, and he would join them there. They accepted the offer, he knew they would talk, and Julia would tell them everything he had said He didn’t really care.

The line was surprisingly long, but he supposed it was Sunday-there must be a lot of people returning from the country. Surrounded by Normals, he felt a little dirty. He almost imagined that they smelled different, earthier. He caught an older woman in a black shirt buttoned to the top staring at his clothes, her distaste undisguised by what, a moment before, he had taken for pleasant features.

A dark, rotund man, who had also taken note of him, wore a stonier expression. Al returned the old woman’s gaze, narrowed his eyes, then smiled faintly, nodding as if to himself. She reddened and looked away. He had not scanned her-not even touched her surface thoughts-but he let her wonder about that, about what dirty little secret he might have uncovered.

He found himself slightly cheered by this. He was three back in the line now, and the longhaired woman buying tickets turned and hurried off, preoccupied. She didn’t see him at all, but he caught a vague whiff of-fear? He glanced after her. He knew her, he was certain, he just couldn’t quite place the face. Something about the hair wasn’t right, and the eyes.

He felt a little catch in his throat, an acrid taste on his tongue. It was Lara Brazg. A rogue. A Blip. The raid had been in the UIN. He pictured those who had escaped, radiating outward, rats fleeing a sinking ship, searching for another place to hide. Brazg had been there after all, and gotten away. And now here she was, hurrying off to catch a train. He didn’t hesitate for an instant. It all seemed so clear, what he should do. The next person was done, and he stepped up to the window.

“Five for Geneva, please,” he said and at the same time, lightly, glyphed the image of Brazg at the woman.

She didn’t seem to notice anything unusual - probably because Brazg had been there so recently - but the information bounced right out of the ticket seller’s surface thoughts. Paris. Brazg’s ticket was for Paris.

“And one for Paris,” AI finished.

He passed her his card. This would nearly clean out his meager allowance, but what better way to spend it? At the restaurant, he paused for an instant, wondering if he should tell them, but no. Brett, at least, might want to go along-or more likely would call the Corps. That didn’t fit Al’s version of the immediate future. So he smiled and put the tickets on the table.

“We got you a sandwich,” Julia said, a little too brightly.

“Thanks. Just let me go wash up.”

But he went straight past the washroom, hoping there was a rear door and finding it. He went out and jogged quickly back to the station. There, he used the few credits left in his chit to buy a black over shirt and pulled it on, hiding his academy garb. Then he was off to catch the train to Paris. He felt a peculiar humming in his blood, a sort of fierce joy that washed through his disappointments like a cold, cleansing stream. He was on the hunt.

Chapter 3

Al watched the farmland of Bourgogne whip by, startled by the quality and quantity of green, intrigued by the small hamlets with their ancient churches, by the antique feel of the landscape. A hundred years ago - three hundred years ago, if he had taken this same train ride, how different would it have been? It made him feel smaller. His own history began and ended with Teeptown.

His biological parents had died in a terrorist bombing, and he had never known them. His earliest memories were of the creche. For Al, Teeptown was like an album of memories; any route he took through it jogged constant reminders of his childhood and the lessons he had leamed. He still flushed with shame when he passed the steps where he’d betrayed Brett - that place haunted him.

Crossing the sidewalk between the old cadre dorms and the Minor Academy never failed to remind him of that terrible and wonderful day when the Grins revealed themselves.

The statue of William Karges held new significance each time he saw it, as did the parade ground, the quads. His personal story was a thread in die tapestry of Psi Corps history. But out here, he felt unraveled, a strand drifting on an ocean of time. A million years of normal history a landscape that held no clear meaning for him, a huge book written in a foreign tongue. He found he did not entirely dislike the feeling. It was fright ending, but it was a challenge, as well.

He found Lara Brazg the old-fashioned way, by walking up the train until he spotted her. She sat pressed against the glass like a fish in an aquarium, seemingly oblivious to the interior of the train. Al was not deceived; even with his blocks as tight and subtle as they could be, he sensed that she was watching quite carefully through the eyes of those around her.

He passed on through the car at a measured pace, trailing a faint hopefully “normal” - feeling that he was in search of an unoccupied toilet.

Two cars up, he relaxed a bit. Teeps could often sense each other over great distances, especially if they wanted to, but it required a mutual and cooperative effort to exchange any real information without line of sight. Well, he knew where she was, what now?

The safest thing would be to call the Corps station in Paris and have cops waiting to pick her up. But that would defeat his whole purpose in following her. He wanted to catch her himself. He wanted the Corps to know that they had done a good job in training and raising him. He wanted Cadre Prime to know what he gained when he lost them-and thus what they had lost. He couldn’t bear the thought of Brett and the rest feeling sorry for him, which at the moment they almost certainly did.

But how to collar her? Psi Cops carried weapons, which he didn’t have. He might be able to subdue her physically, but his encounter with Antoine had left him a little dubious of his abilities. That left psi attacks, and he knew several that ought to work - she was, after all, only a P5. He could push her, or maybe spark out her cortex and while she was out of it, tie her hands behind her back with the cord in his backpack - While a bunch of Normals screamed bloody murder.

She would keel over and they would see him start tying her up. He didn’t have a badge or anything other than his Psi Corps ILK. Probably he would end up getting arrested himself, by railroad security. Maybe he should just have a talk with security first, explain who he was, and all of that. That seemed like a good compromise. He would still be the representative of Psi Corps, making the collar, because the train cop would be a normal, and a normal couldn’t risk going up against a Blip by himself. Even a P5 could make a mess out of a normal.

He continued toward the front of the train. The security man wasn’t hard to spot, a middle - aged fellow whose balding head was nearly hidden by his long-billed cap. Al sucked up his confidence and approached him.

“Sir?”

Watery blue eyes met his gaze.

“Yes, son?”

Al lowered his voice.

“Sir, my name is Alfred Bester. Is there someplace we can talk in private? I think there may be trouble on the train, and I don’t want to panic anyone.”

Al didn’t need surface thoughts to catch the mixture of skepticism and concern on the man’s face, but after a moment, the cop nodded.

“Up here, in my office.”

A few moments later, they closed a narrow door behind them and stood in a cabin with a coffeemaker, a surveillance camera system, a table with an AI and a half-eaten sandwich on a plastic dish, and a narrow bunk.

“What’s this about, son?”

“You have a rogue telepath on the train.”

“A rogue?”

His eyes widened perceptibly.

“Yessir. I’m a student at the Psi Corps academy in Geneva, and I recognized her from her picture. She’s been on the hunt lists for some time, and she’s considered dangerous.”

“Well. Have you called ahead to the Psi Cops in Paris?”

“No, sir. I think that two of us could take her. I’m a P12, and I can run interference with pretty much anything she might try, while you take her into custody. Do you carry a side arm?”

“I have a shock stick. Here, you know her name? Can you pull her up on my database? We need to find a match with her ticket.”

“Yessir.”

Al turned to the keyboard and began shifting to the requisite screen, hoping the cop would go along with him, rather than calling the Corps station in Paris.

Paris? This train had half a hundred stops, some before Paris, some after: How had the security man known Brazg was getting off in Paris? Al hadn’t mentioned that he even knew where Brazg was going. Without that thought, what he sensed next might have corm too late. As it was, everything clicked at once, and he buried himself to the side, crashing into the bulkhead, as a shock stick crackled through the space he had just occupied. This time, his first reaction wasn’t fear but anger. Mauled by two Normals in as many days? No.

The train cop lifted the shock stick for another try. Al noticed, with the odd clarity of adrenaline-heightened perceptions, the pucker of wrinkled skin on the cop’s elbows, the storm-tang ozone scent of the weapon. He struck. The normal had no guards at all. His mind was watery and open and - delicious. It was as if Al had been shelling walnuts his entire life and was suddenly offered a plate of them, already shelled…

What he did wasn’t fancy - he just sparked him, sent a powerful jolt into the cop’s ancient, limbic, lizard back-brain, the first rock in an avalanche that roared forward toward consciousness, gathering fears, images, and pains in an unstoppable cascade of waking nightmares that obliterated his thinking mind in an instant.

He groaned like a lost soul, his pupils suddenly became pinpricks, and he dropped the shock stick, lurched back against the door. Al grasped and lifted the shock stick carefully, and touched it to the man’s temple. The cop jerked, fell prone, and kept jerking. Al found a pair of handcuffs in the man’s back pocket and snapped them onto the unresisting wrists.

Now what? For a moment he didn’t care. He felt like the unstoppable Juggernaut of Hindu legend, an elemental force that had been contained for too long. He just stood there, grinning, hands clenching and unclenching, wishing another normal would come at him, just try something. He felt… he sipped in a deep, calming breath. He felt too good. This was exactly why Psi Corps had the rules it did. He had always considered himself controlled, strong-compared to most he knew, he was. And yet this could be addictive, more addictive than a drug. Only his training had saved him, and the strong principles taught by the Corps.

It suddenly occurred to Al that he now understood some of what it might be that rogues desired-freedom to exercise their abilities whenever and however, on whomever they wished. That could be a powerful incentive, as he had just learned - but not an admirable one. So indeed, what now?

He took off the cop’s shoes, then his socks, balling up the last and placing them in the fellow’s mouth. The cop was starting to come around, and once his eyes were somewhat clear, Al came to the painful decision that he was going to have to break a regulation. He probably had already-pushing a normal, even in self-defense. Still, at this point it would probably be for the greater good if Al Bester survived.

“Why did you do that?” he asked, aloud, and then scanned for both the willing and unwilling response.

He got it, and nodded grimly. The cop’s name was Alistor Hech, and he was a rogue sympathizer. That’s why Brazg was on this train to begin with. Even so, if he turned Hech in, the cop likely would report him for unauthorized scanning.