Final Reckoning: The Fate of Bester

Babylon 5

Trilogy of Psi Corpus

book 3

Final Reckoning: The Fate of Bester

by J. Gregory Keyes

Prologue

Joseph Begay caught the scent of monster and grinned. He fired his thruster and drifted deeper into shadow. One uneven edge of the asteroid gleamed like a thin seam of silver in the darkest of all mines. The bare suspiration of carbon dioxide he had just released moved him into total eclipse - the silver thread vanished, and the huge rock became a gaping hole in a sky full of stars, the black maw of the underworld. And in that hole was his prey, lurking.

The comlink in his helmet crackled.

“Begay. Where are you going?”

He frowned in irritation. The channel was guaranteed secure, but nothing was more guaranteed than silence. And even P12s leaked sometimes when they spoke aloud - vocalizing triggered the part of the brain that ‘cast. Only long years of Corps training enabled suppression of that tendency. It was like trying to revolve one’s arms in opposite directions - to the thirtieth power.

“I’ve made him,” he replied.

“Herbst and Cortez are already down there.”

“Yeah? Have they scented him?”

“No.”

“I have.”

“Give the position, then, but keep the high ground.”

“No way. He’s mine.”

“Begay…”

He cut the link.

The last thing he wanted now was distraction. Sure, he’d get a reprimand later, but it wouldn’t go far.

He was the best, and after this hunt no one could ever doubt it. He had come a long way from being that punk in Ganado, nothing better in his future than the leadership of a smalltime gang and an early, violent death. Whatever its faults, he owed the Corps for that. They had plucked him out of that life, given him a chance to do some good.

He drifted down into the shadows and recalled the stories of his Navajo ancestors-the ones his crazy uncle Hatathli had told him when he was a kid. Those tall tales were starting to make sense, the ones about the Monster Slayer, who had rid the People of their enemies. After years of laughing at them, he finally understood that the finest thing a man could be was a hero, one of the ones who fought the monsters, who made the Human race better.

This was an age of heroes-Sheridan, Delenn, Lyta Alexander…

He would find his place among them. Today.

There, the scent again.

Space was the perfect hunting ground. Planets were full of voices-thousands, millions-on Earth, billions. Prey could hide in those voices as a rabbit might in dense brush. But space was quiet, simple, with nowhere to hide. He knew all of his fellow hunters with the intimacy of many hunts, and he could tune out their voices until there was only silence and the breath of the hunted.

That breath was near.

He flipped on his night vision, and the asteroid reappeared. It was cold, the backside of this lump of nickel and iron, but the side facing the sun was hotter, and metal was an excellent conductor of heat. The landscape reflected that: the higher elevations were colder than the low. A firefly appeared, too - Herbst or Cortez, probably. Space suits had to shed heat or their occupants would bake alive, and no technology had been invented that could overcome the basic laws of thermodynamics.

So where were the prey and the other hunter? There ought to be three bright dots. The answer was simple enough.

The prey was hiding someplace-they already knew the asteroid was hollow.

That might also mean that one of his teammates had found the monster’s bolt-hole and was holding out. Everyone wanted to be the hero who caught this fellow.

Well, Joseph didn’t need to see him. He felt him. The others were P12s, too, but not all P12s were created equal.

The almost inconsequential tug of the planetoid gripped him now, and he let himself drift toward the surface, guided by small bursts from his thruster. He knew what he was looking for, and soon he found it-a regular, circular opening. One of the old mine shafts. He angled toward it.

The tunnel dropped down straight, perpendicular to the surface. He drew his PPG and went in feet first, the weapon aimed between them. A reddish blob of heat appeared, and again he grinned like a coyote. But only for a moment. With line of sight it was simple to read a psychic signature. The blob below was Herbst, not their quarry.

With line of sight was simple to read a psychic signature.

The blob below was Herbst, not their quarry. With line of sight it was easier to send and receive without leaking, too.

“Herbst?”

“It’s me. I thought he was in here, but host him.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. The shaft goes down another three hundred feet and dead - ends. Nobody there.”

“Where the hell did he go?”

“I don’t know! It must have been a false trail. I’ve heard spooky things about this guy. Maybe-Gott! Above you!”

Joseph snapped his head up. At the same moment a psychic attack cracked into his shields. Only yards away, a man-shaped blob dropped toward him.

The attack was strong and simple, aimed at paralyzing. Even as he tried to close the contact of his PPG, he found his finger wouldn’t move.

He had killed a boy once, before Psi Corps found him. He didn’t remember much about the fight, only that he had been losing until the anger woke in him, a fury so cold and brilliant it made him feel like a giant. When they had pulled him off the older kid, he’d already pulped in his head with a rock. Begay had been twelve, a minor, and so had been remanded to juvenile court. That’s when his psi powers were discovered, and that’s when the Corps had given him absolution, and a new life.

Ten years ago. He was a new man. Except for the anger. It came now, a sheer shuddering blast, meeting the dark wind that was slamming into him head-on and pushing it back, back. The monster was terrifically strong, but he didn’t have to win the psychic duel, he only had to move his finger. Just a little, a fraction of an inch…

The shaft lit with green light, once, twice. In the second blast he saw a nebula of ice crystals, already billowing out from one rupture. And that hideous monster’s mindwent out.

“Ya-heeeeee!” he shouted.

“I got the bastard!”

“I thought we wanted him alive, Herbst ‘cast.”

“Well, maybe ifyou d helped! He had me. In another second he would have been on me, taken my weapon, killed us both.”

“You didn’t give me time!”

“There wasn’t any time. Besides, this saves the trouble of a trial, doesn’t it? Swift justice.”

He felt Herbst’s disapproval.

“That’s not the way we do things. That’s the way he did things.”

“You were here. You saw I had no choice. “

“Yeah. He’s dead, right?”

“As dead as lead. We’ll take the body back.”

He flipped on his headlamp and the sudden illumination made him blink. His first shot had split the faceplate open, and what he could see through the mirror like surface was a real mess.

The second shot had taken him in the chest, from which mist still drifted. Moments later, they were back in open space, navigating toward the distant transport. He noticed Herbst was favoring his left hand. Joseph reactivated his link.

“-Begay, for the last time-“

“Easy, boss. We got him.”

There followed a satisfying pause.

“Really?”

“Yeah. I had to take him down, but it was him, all right.”

“Well-well done. Is that Herbst or Cortez with you?”

“Herbst.”

“He was having comlink trouble earlier. Where’s Cortez?”

“I don’t know. He was on the surface.”

“Well, he isn’t there now.”

“Must have gone around to the to the sun side.”

“He would have reported.”

“Maybe not. Or maybe…”

He didn’t want to say it. Maybe the monster had claimed one last victim.

“We’ll find him. Let’s get this stiff inside.”

“I’m starting the lock cycle now.”

By the time they had reached the transport, the outer air lock was open. They drifted in, and Joseph closed the hatch and cycled it. A few moments later the inner door opened and they were surrounded again by friendly, breathable air. Joseph unlatched his helmet. It popped out of its gasket with a sigh.

The corpse floated, ghostlike, its blood now liquid and drifting into tiny beads. Joseph remembered other stories now, of chindi - the evil spirits of the departed, which caused illness. Maybe he should arrange to have a ghostway done when he got back home. He didn’t exactly believe in that stuff, but he didn’t exactly not believe it, either.

Still, chindi or not, he couldn’t resist. While he fumbled at the collar of the monster’s suit, he heard the soft hiss of Herbst taking off his helmet.

The PPG had done a lot of damage, frying skin and cartilage, and explosive decompression had done even more. It took him a few seconds to piece together Herbst’s features.

“What?”

Chindi! his mind shrieked.

“Simple, really,” a voice said from behind him.

“An old trick, transposing. I did it the first time when I was only six, to win a game of cops and blips.”

Joseph went for his PPG, but this psi assault was even stronger than the one before. He managed to twist enough that he could see the man standing over him. Then everything froze.

It was the monster, looking much as he did in his photographs, except that his face was composed, serene. His dark eyes were touched, not by anger or madness, but by quiet melancholy. He was holding a PPG.

“I masked the switch with that earlier attack. As I said, simple. And now you’ve let me on your ship. Thank you.” Joseph felt his hand inching toward his weapon. He could do it again. He could…

“I kill filthy,” the monster said, and then chuckled, as if it were a joke instead of nonsense.

Then everything flashed green, and something hot stabbed Joseph in the chest, and he tasted fire in his mouth.

Alfred Bester considered the dead man and shot him again, in the head. You could never be too sure. Then he moved quickly to the hallway.

Their teammate Cortez was already dead of a seizure, lying at the bottom of the shaft. According to what he had gleaned from Begay, that left only two, both P12s. He looked back at the corpse and shook his head sadly. Why did they insist on sending these children after him? Maybe the other two would present more of a challenge.

But they didn’t. Ten minutes later he jettisoned the four bodies into space, disabled the tracking devices on the transport, and sat contemplating where he wanted to go.

Michael Garibaldi woke with a dry mouth, blurred vision, and a serious sense of disorientation. He cracked one eye and saw a blinking red light. He put it together with the insistent brreeep that had disturbed his sleep, but couldn’t figure out what it meant.

He sat up, and his body protested. It was a sickeningly familiar sensation, one he had hoped and sworn and prayed he would never feel again.

“God, you stupid…”

He was talking to himself. Not a good sign. He couldn’t remember drinking, not even one drink, but that was how it was sometimes, with blackouts.

His heart was pounding. He couldn’t do this again. He couldn’t.

Then the details of the day before started to return. He remembered a morning full of pushing paper, lunch with that smug CEO from Amtek, then racquetball with the same little smartass-beat him, too. More pushing paper, a call from Lise, who was on Earth for business, a movie with his daughter, another movie without her, then bedtime.

Everything accounted for. No drinks.

The noise hadn’t stopped, but at least he realized what it was now. It was his red-line comlink, which meant it was important. The clock on it solemnly and silently informed him that it was 5 A.M. Martian standard time, February 15, 227 1. Like the months on Earth had anything to do with Mars. Wasn’t there some legislation in the works to do something about that? Five o’clock? He hit the switch.

“Yeah. Garibaldi. This better be so good…”

“It’s about Bester, sir.”

The voice was Jim Hendershot, his head of very special security.

“Is he close enough for me to shoot?”

“No, sir.”

“Call back in five minutes.”

If it was about Bester, he needed to be a little more alert than this.

He went to the bathroom, splashed some water on his face, and looked in the mirror. There he saw the same handsome guy who had been looking at him for fifty-odd years. Some grey in the eyebrows and beard, sure. But he didn’t look hung over.

Racquetball. That was it, wasn’t it? Jeez, was he that old, that out of shape, that a game of racquetball against some twenty-five-year-old punk left him feeling like he’d been on a two-week bender?

That was almost more depressing than the prospect that he was in the bottom of a bottle again.

Almost.

He got a cup of coffee and settled down in front of the link. Hendershot called back, right on time.

“Tell me you got him,” Garibaldi said.

“Sorry, boss.”

“He wasn’t at his asteroid hidey-hole? I paid damned good money for that information.”