Branegate (23 page)

“I can get proof,” said Nicolus.

“Fine, but otherwise you must compete with them for followers. That is also the law.”

“I respect that,” said Nicolus, then paused, averting his gaze from the eyes of his emperor.

“There’s one thing I can say for Azar Khalil. He inspires attendance of services by example. He openly professes his faith.”

Rasim put a hand on Nicolus’ shoulder. “I don’t have to prove my faith to you, old friend, or anyone else. I choose to show it in the way I live my life, and the way I treat those who depend on me for leadership. My ego does not require I appear holy, and to openly espouse one faith is to denigrate others. That’s not a part of our teachings.”

Nicolus smiled. “I must say I agree with you, but I suspect The Church on Gan does not share your views, or mine. I think they have a mission to convert everyone to their particular faith, and will not be tolerant of other beliefs.”

“That is Gan’s concern, but it will become my concern if it spreads beyond their borders. You must be my eyes and ears on this matter.”

“I will,” said Nicolus. “I was also wondering if you’d heard anything about Zylak’s son. We’ve had no contact with him since he left here, and his task was to free his people on Gan. Now that it has happened I wonder if he’s returned there.”

“I’ve heard nothing,” said Rasim. “He’s likely with his own kind, now.”

“Connected to us by faith, yet distant. The Immortal ones are strange; they are not of this world.”

“Indeed,” said Rasim, “but they are friends.” He sipped the last of his tea. “It’s good to talk to you, Nicolus. We don’t do it often enough. Your presence warms me.”

“As does yours for me,” said Nicolus. “And as you said, I will be your eyes and ears.”

They stood, and embraced. When Nicolus closed the door behind him, Rasim pressed a button beneath his table and in seconds a servant arrived. “Bring me a telephone,” he said, and the man returned quickly with it. Rasim punched in four numbers linking him to his Defense Secretary, and the call was answered instantly.

“Sorry to disturb you, Nadir, but there’s a matter that needs to be discussed. Right away. I’ve just heard something that makes me think we need to monitor closely the policies of the new government on Gan. No, it’s not an emergency, but come as quickly as you can. I’ll be in chambers.”

He hung up, gave orders to a servant for more tea and cookies, and relaxed. It would only be a moment before his Defense Secretary arrived.

CHAPTER 24

M
yra heard the gunshots from her second floor office, and rushed to the window to look down at the street. A company limousine was standing at the curb, its back door open. The driver was leaning over a prostrate form by the door, and shouting something. Three men ran from the building, two of them security officers, and they were looking down at something else she couldn’t see because her view was obscured by a short hedge. The driver stood shaking, still shouting. A security officer knelt by the man at the driver’s feet. The man’s back was covered with blood. The officer rolled him onto his side, and Myra gasped when she saw his face.
TRAE!

She bolted from the room, past the elevator, raced down the stairs and outside past an astonished guard who tried to stop her. Meza was already there, kneeling beside another body, and beyond it were three others. By the time she reached the limousine she was crying, and her head pounded behind her eyes. She knelt by Trae, her knees in his blood, and saw his glazed, dead eyes. Her chest was tight. For a moment, she couldn’t breath. She reached out to touch him, but an officer grabbed her under her arms, stood her up and pushed her back.

“Pardon, ma’am, but the ambulance is coming in.”

Her vision was blurred. She felt numb, stood helplessly by as ambulance attendants gently placed Trae in a body bag on a gurney and zipped it up. His body and three others were loaded in one ambulance, a fourth man still alive went into another. Meza talked to both drivers, and the ambulances sped off in different directions.

Meza spotted her, then. He came over and put an arm around her. She buried her face in his chest and sobbed for what seemed like a long time, but was not. Her heart had never ached so, crushed in the grip of some invisible hand.

“There, there, let it out. It’s a shock for me, too. I never imagined this could happen. You can be sure we’ll find out who’s responsible. You’ll see. There, there. Be patient, dear. You know he isn’t gone forever, but it will be a while. Your secret is safe with me. I won’t tell anyone how you felt about him. I’m sure Trae knew. And he’ll know it again.” Meza squeezed her gently, and she looked up at him.

“Where are they taking him?” Tears came again when she looked down at the pool of coagulating blood near her feet. Trae’s blood.

Meza whispered like a fellow-conspirator. “Around the block to the other side of the complex, both of them. It might be difficult with the bodyguard; the back of his head was blown away. Trae was shot in the chest, so we should save something. Scans are being done in the ambulance. We have all their other records, Myra; you know we’ll do the best we can for them.”

“I know,” she said,
but it won’t be the same. He won’t be Trae anymore.

“The first medical report will come out later today. Do you want to be there for it?”

“Yes.”
He won’t remember me.

“Let’s get some tea and quiet, let our hearts calm a bit.”

She nodded numbly. Meza led her to the basement cafeteria where they sat silently in a corner booth a while before he finally spoke. “It’s a strange thing, this field of energy binding us together. The resonance we experience, even at vast distances without time lapse, and all of our science has not yet explained it. One is tempted to say we’re a group mind, but we’re not. We’re individuals, attuned to one another by choice, even at short distances. Do you ever wonder why that is?”

“I’ve never wondered about it,” said Myra, knowing he was only trying to distract her from her sadness, her grief. “I can speak to any of my own kind at short distance, and they to me. Thoughts can be masked, of course, but that’s a learned process.”

“Everyday interactions,” said Meza. “That’s not what I mean. I never felt a part of anyone except family until the day I met my wife, and it was a second lifetime for both of us. After that day she was constantly in my mind and I in hers, but as far as I know we didn’t meet in our previous lives. It makes me wonder if we had lives we’re not even aware of. There was an instant connection, a resonance, if you like.”

Like I felt for Trae.

“It takes no effort to communicate, and distance isn’t a factor. Perhaps it’s an heriditary thing.”

You mean like being related?”

“No, no, but it could be a specific coding in our DNA. I even asked Wallace to give it some thought as a project for our medical people, but he just sighed at me. Dear Wallace. He’s going to be very upset by this. Trae was his most important information source. The delay will be agonizing for him; they were close to the field testing phase.”

“How long?” asked Myra.
Not that it matters. He’ll be a new person. Anything we had between us will be gone.

Meza took a sip of tea, then, “Months, years, I don’t know. It depends on the genetic material on hand, and how developed we want the clone to be. The stock for the Zylak family is quite complete. And we need Trae soon as possible to continue what he was doing. Do you want to pick an age?”

“No—well—adulthood, of course. He’ll have to be changed. If the people who had him killed know who and what he was, they’ll be looking for his reincarnation.” Trae had not just died, but had been foully murdered. For the first, and not the last time she felt a surge of anger within her.

Apparently it showed in her face. Meza reached across the table to put a hand on hers. “Only a dozen people knew who Trae was: you, Wallace, myself and our Board of Directors. That narrows things down a bit, and hopefully the one assassin who survived will live long enough to answer some questions. I suspect whoever plotted this might well anticipate a reincarnation. Trae will have to be returned secretly, and will be known to only three of us. I have my suspicions about who might be involved with the assassins, and our medical people aren’t among them. They’ll also be sworn to secrecy.”

He patted her hand. “You and Trae had unfinished work. Finnish it for him. Be ready. When he returns you must never acknowledge who he is, either verbally or mentally, at least not until we eliminate the criminals behind this assassination.”

“I can do that,” she said softly.
I will never open myself to anyone, ever again.
She pulled her hand away from his as she thought it.

Meza noticed the move, and smiled a thin smile. “I have to leave, now. Security is waiting for me; they’ve either questioned the surviving gunman by now, or know when it’s possible. If you like, I can take you to the clinic tonight and we can get a prognosis on Trae’s cloning possibilities.”

“I’d like that,” she said, tried bravely to smile, and failed.

Meza touched her under the chin. “Chin up. Meet you here at seven. We’ll have a snack after.”

He left her, and the booth closed in on her. The cafeteria was empty, the entrance barred closed while the staff prepared to put out the evening buffet. She smelled fish cooking.

Trae’s face wouldn’t leave her mind: his sparkling eyes, an eyebrow raised in a question, the way he chewed at his lower lip in thought. She’d been a part of him and he hadn’t even noticed, had been too shy to say what he felt for her, but getting closer to doing it day by day. A body could be cloned, rejuvenated, but personalities so often did not survive the process. She was living proof of it, the iron maiden in her previous life, dedicated to work, no involvements, dying alone in a dark apartment after a century of personal isolation. So why had she been cursed by being born again as a person wanting to love, only to find it and then lose it again so quickly? Oh, Trae . . .

Myra came out of her reverie only an hour before she was supposed to meet Meza again. She went back to her office, sat down and stared at her monitor. Scattered fractals, a pattern emerging as she moved the mass sims around, looking for a symmetry that refused to come. She tried large masses, planetary size, still no good. Only with the masses of several suns could she achieve a stress topology remotely resembling the portal she was after.

Trae would have had it figured out in minutes.

Myra turned off her computer, and began to cry again in the darkness.

Meza took the elevator to third floor and walked the long hallway to the clinic. Security met him in east wing. One look at their faces, and he knew the surviving assassin was gone.

“Too late?” he asked.

Martin Emmerich was the chief security officer for the plant, a round man with coal black eyes and a beak of a nose. He cocked his head to one side. “Mmmm, maybe something. He was alert for a few minutes, cooperative, said they were hired for the hit. All of them were normals, all with records, mostly smuggling. Hired locally, all by telephone, but he did say they were being paid from off-planet. Had to wait weeks for their money, and the job was delayed because of it.”

“Did he say who hired them?” Meza asked anxiously.

“Yeah—said they were paid by The Bishop. That’s all he knew, We have the address for these guys; they lived together. We’re searching their apartment now. Do you want us to bring in the police?”

“Absolutely not,” said Meza. “Outside of our gates, nobody knows what happened today. Understand?”

“Got it,” said Martin. “Figured you’d want it that way. Think it was someone in the family?”

“I do.”

“Then we’ll just have to ferret ’em out for you.”

“Do that,” said Meza, and shook the man’s hand.

“I know who he was, you know. The kid, I mean. His bodyguard told me.”

“Keep it quiet,” said Meza, and Martin nodded in agreement. As he walked away, Meza thought,
and just how many other people knew about Trae’s identity? Terrific news.

He took the elevator back down and went to the cafeteria, Myra was waiting there in the same booth where he’d left her. Her eyes were red and puffy, her cheeks flushed. He wanted to hug her, but didn’t. A few people were eating there, near the end of dinner hour, all of them scientists who marched to nobody’s beat but their own. Some even slept in their labs on occasion.

“Hi,” he said. “Want something to eat before we go up?”

“I’m not hungry,” she said.

“Okay, let’s get out of here.”

He took her hand briefly, then let it go. Boss holding hands with the assistant could start rumors even among scientists who normally wouldn’t notice such things. They took the elevator up to third floor again, but went left this time and over the enclosed bridge into west wing. Even being well known and wearing their badges they had to walk through the scanner at the security station there. The armed guards did not smile or show any signs of recognition of the man who paid their salaries.

A thumb-scan let them into ‘Lab C’, now empty but well lit. Another station opened the door to ‘Special Projects’. A guard in an enclosed booth watched them come through, and gave them a nod.

Floor and ceiling were silver plas-steel polished to a mirror finnish. Ceiling panels glowed a restful, light green. At first glance the walls were red, until one noticed the tier after tier of chambers separated from the room by clear polymer, all filled with a viscous red fluid swirling slowly in vortical plumes accented by bubbles the size of a human fist. A man sat at a concave console in the center of the room, watching row after row of small video screens and monitoring the life-signals coming from each chamber in the walls. He only glanced at them, quickly focusing again on the screens in front of him to watch the first movements of new human beings now only inches long, humans who would grow at astonishing rates in the enzyme-laden, oxygenated nutrient they swam in.

They walked past him to an open doorway and down a hall past clear windows of other laboratories, some dark. Technicians hovered over what looked like a corpse on a gurney, attaching electrodes to its skull. The corpse was alive, and ready to be reborn. In another room two technicians chatted with a young woman in a hospital gown. Her body and head bristled with fine wires connected to a panel atop the throne-like chair she sat in. As she chattered away, the technicians were taking notes, and when she saw Myra looking at her she smiled beatifically. The joy in her expression was the joy of being alive again, and Myra wondered if Trae would feel the same way.