The Last Aerie (3 page)

“Can you see it?” he said. “Do you have any idea what it’s all about?”

She looked at him and saw a mousey-haired, green-eyed man in his late thirties. Trask was about five feet ten, a little overweight and slope-shouldered, and wore what could only be described as a lugubrious expression. Perhaps it had to do with his talent: in a world where the plain truth was increasingly hard to find, it was no easy thing being a lie-detector. White lies, half-truths, and downright fables came at Trask from all directions, until sometimes he felt he didn’t want to look any more.

But Anna Marie English had her own problems. Finally she nodded her bedraggled mop of a head. “I see it, yes, but don’t ask me what it’s all about. I woke up, saw it, and knew I had to come here. That’s all. But I’ve a hunch the world’s a loser yet again.” Her voice was a coughing rasp.

“A hunch?”

“This thing isn’t specific to me,” she frowned. This time I’m just … an onlooker? It isn’t hurting me. I feel for him, yes, but his fate doesn’t seem to have made much impression on the world in general. Yet at the same time, somehow I think it makes the world less.”

“Do you know him?”

“I feel that I
should
know him, certainly,” she answered, simultaneously shaking her head. And ruefully, “I know that I was watching him when I should have been watching the road. I went through two red lights at least!”

Trask nodded, took her by the elbow and guided her across the street. “Let’s join them and see if anyone else has
a
clue.” In fact he already had more than a clue but was unwilling to give it voice. If he was right, then just like the ecopath he could scarcely view this phenomenon as Earth-damaging. In fact it might even be a relief.

With Whitehall no more than a ten minute walk away, the torn front page from a discarded
Pravda
seemed strangely out of place where it spun slowly in the current of the flooded gutter, inching soggily and perhaps prophetically towards the iron-barred throat of a gurgling sump. But as if in defiance of the stinging rain, the night, and all other distractions, the phantom hologram continued to display itself wherever the glances of Trask and Anna Marie English happened to fall. It was there in the tiny unmanned foyer, playing on the neutral grey doors of the elevator as if projected there from their eyeballs; and when the doors hissed open to admit them, they took it with them into the cage to be carried up to the top floor offices of E-Branch HQ.

The rest of the building was a well-known hotel; bright lights at the front, and a uniformed doorman from the Corps of Commissionaires sheltering from the rain under his striped plastic canopy, or more likely inside taking a coffee with the night clerk now that all the guests were abed. But up here on the top floor …

This was a different world. And a weird one.

E-Branch: Ben Trask felt much the same about it now as he had fourteen years ago when he was first recruited, and as every Branch esper before and since. Alec Kyle, an old friend and ex-Head of Branch was dead and gone now, (
was he? And his body, too? Was that what this was all about?
) but he had come closest to it when he’d used to say, “E-Branch? A bloody funny outfit, Ben! Science and sorcery—telemetry and telepathy—computerized probability patterns and precognition—gadgets and ghosts. We have access to all of these things … now.”

That “now” had qualified it. For at the time, Kyle had been talking about Harry Keogh. And later he had
become
Harry Keogh; Keogh’s mind in Kyle’s body, anyway …

The cage jerked to a halt; its doors hissed open; Trask and the unnaturally aged “girl”, and the hologram, got out.

Hologram or phantom?
Trask wondered.
Gadget … or ghost?
When he was a kid he’d believed in ghosts. Then for a time he hadn’t. Now he worked for E-Branch and … sometimes he wished he were a kid again. For then it was all in the imagination.

Ian Goodly, the Night Duty Officer, was waiting for them in the corridor. Very tall, skeletally thin and gangly, he was a prognosticator or “hunchman”. Grey and mainly gaunt-featured, Goodly’s expression was usually grave; he rarely smiled; only his eyes—large, brown, warm and totally disarming—belied what must otherwise constitute a rather unfortunate first impression, that of a cadaverous mortician. “Anna,” he offered the girl a polite nod. “Ben?”

Trask returned the unspecified query. “Do you see it, too?”

“We all do,” Goodly answered, his voice high-pitched and a little shrill, but not unusually so. And before Trask could say anything else: I guessed you’d be in. I’ve told them to wait for you in the Ops room.”

“How many of them?”

Goodly shrugged. “Everyone within a thirty mile radius.”

Trask nodded. “Thanks, Ian. I’ll go and speak to them. And you’d better go back to keeping watch.”

Again Goodly’s shrug. “Very well, but apart from this it’s going to be a quiet night. This thing is happening, and soon it will be finished. And then we’ll see what we’ll see.” He began to turn away.

Trask caught his arm and stopped him. “Any ideas?”

Goodly sighed. “I could give you … an “educated guess”. But I suspect you’d prefer to let it play itself out, right?” Like all hunchmen, he was cautious about being too specific. The future didn’t like being pinned down.

Someone had called the elevator; its doors closed and the indicator signaled its descent. As Goodly made to return to his watch, Trask uttered a belated, “Right,” then turned left along the corridor and headed for the Ops room. And Anna Marie English limped along behind him.

In the Ops room they found their colleagues waiting for them. In front of the briefing podium an area had been cleared of chairs where eleven espers formed an inward-facing circle. Trask and the girl made thirteen.
A witch’s dozen,
he thought, wryly
. We complete the coven.

As the circle opened up and its members adjusted their positions the better to accommodate the latecomers, so Trask saw the point of the formation. The combined awareness of the espers added to the hologram’s authentication: to experience the thing as a group was to focus it, lend it definition. And the hitherto nebulous mental projection expanded in a moment from a 3-D picture in Trask’s mind’s eye to a seemingly physical, apparently solid figure right there in front of him! But only
apparently
solid, for obviously it wasn’t real.

The ring formed by the espers was maybe fifteen to eighteen feet in diameter; the location of the smouldering corpse where it tumbled backwards, head over heels, free of the floor, as on some invisible spit, was no more than ten feet away from any individual viewer. If it were solid—if it were “here” at all—then the figure would have to be that of a child or a dwarf. But its proportions were those of a normal, adult human being. And so the apparition
was
some kind of hologram, viewed as from a considerably greater distance than was apparent. It was like a scene in a crystal ball: they were seeing something which had happened, or which was even now
in enactment
, somewhere else. And more than ever Trask believed he knew this … victim? And more than ever he suspected that this was a scene from another world, even another universe.

On entering the room, the Head of Branch had noted the identities of the eleven. There was Millicent Cleary, a pretty little telepath whose talent was still developing. There seemed little doubt but that one day she would be a power in her own right, but right now she was vulnerable—telepathy could do that to a person—and Trask thought of her as the kid sister he’d never had. Then there was David Chung, a hugely talented locator and server. He was slight, wiry, slant-eyed and yellow as they come. But he was British from birth, a Londoner, and fiercely loyal to the Branch. All of them were loyal, or else the Branch would fail. Chung tracked Soviet stealth subs, IRA units in the field, drug-runners—especially the latter. Addiction had killed his parents, which was where his talent had its genesis. And it was still growing.

The precog Guy Teale stood to the left of Trask. Like Ian Goodly, he was “gifted” in reading the future, a suspect talent at best. The future didn’t like being read and had kicked back more than once. Teale was small, thin, jumpy. Easily startled, he lived on his nerves. His sometime partner Frank Robinson, a spotter who infallibly recognized other espers, stood next to him. Robinson was as blond as Teale was dark; boyish and freckled, he looked only nineteen or thereabouts, which was seven years short of the mark. The pair had worked with Trask on the Keogh job some six or seven months ago; they’d helped him corner the Necroscope in his house near Edinburgh, and burn the place to the ground. That had caused Harry to escape right out of this world to a place on the other side of the Perchorsk Gate. Since then, everyone who knew the score had prayed that he wouldn’t be back. And he hadn’t been …

Until now?
Trask wondered.
Is this—image—is it Harry?
And he suspected that they were all wondering the same thing. And just like him, they’d all be glad that it was
only
an image.

Paul Garvey, a full-blown telepath, stood directly opposite Trask on the other side of the circle. He caught Trask’s eye through the rotation of the projection and nodded almost imperceptibly. It was his acknowledgement of Trask’s thought, which Garvey had “heard”. Yes, they were all thinking pretty much the same thing.

Garvey was tall, well-built, and had been a good-looking thirty-five year old. But then, that time six months ago, he’d tackled a murderous swine called Johnny Found and lost most of the left side of his face. Since then some of the best plastic surgeons in England had worked on Garvey till he looked pretty good, but a real face is made of more than flesh. Garvey’s was mostly tissue now, and the nerves didn’t connect up too well. He could smile with the right side but not the left, and so avoided the travesty by not smiling at all.

It had happened when they were tracking Harry Keogh, who in turn had been tracking Found, a necromancer whose specialty was to molest women before and
after
they were dead. Garvey had made the mistake of finding Harry’s quarry first, that was all. But the Necroscope had squared it; later, in a graveyard, the police had discovered Pound’s body so badly chewed up that he was barely recognizable. And despite everything else that was happening at the time—the fact that Harry had been a prime target—Garvey still reckoned he owed him for that.

As for Ben Trask, he reckoned they
all
owed Harry Keogh something, the whole world. It would have been so easy for the Necroscope to release the plague of vampirism which he carried within himself upon all humanity and be emperor here, with an entire planet for his empire. But instead he’d let them hound him into exile in an alien world of vampires, where he would be just one more monster. Harry had let it happen, yes, before the
Thing
inside him could take full control.

But whenever Trask thought back on that, on the alien passions which had governed Harry—how he’d 
looked
the last time Trask saw him, in the garden of his burning house not far from Edinburgh—then his own mixed emotions would sort themselves out in short order, and he would know it was for the best:  

The lower half of Harry’s figure had been mist-shrowded, visible only as a vague outline in the opaque, milky swirl of his vampire mist … but the rest of him had been all too visible. He’d worn an entirely ordinary suit of dark, ill-fitting clothes which seemed two sizes too small for him, so that his upper torso sprouted from the trousers to form a blunt wedge. Framed by a jacket held together by one straining button, the bulk of Harry’s rib-cage had been massively muscular.

His white, open-necked shirt had burst open down the front, revealing the ripple of his muscle-sheathed ribs and the deep, powerful throb of his chest; the shirt’s collar had looked like a crumpled frill, insubstantial around the corded bulk of his leaden neck. His flesh was a sullen grey, dappled lurid orange and sick yellow by leaping fire and gleaming moonlight.
And he towered all of a foot taller than Trask, quite literally dwarfing him. But his face—

—That had been the absolute embodiment of a waking nightmare. His halogen Hallowe’en eyes which had seemed to drip sulphur. And his … grin? A grin, was that what it had been? Maybe, in an alien vampire world called Starside on the other side of the Mobius Continuum. But here on Earth it had been the rabid slavering grimace of a great wolf; here it was teeth visibly elongating, curving up and out of gleaming gristle jaw-ridges to shear through gums which spurted splashes of hot ruby blood; here it was a writhing of scarlet lips, a flattening of convoluted snout, a yawning of mantrap jaws.

That face … that mouth … that crimson cavern of stalactite, stalagmite teeth, as jagged as shards of white, broken glass. What? Like the gates of hell? That and worse, for Harry had been Wamphyri!

Trask started massively as Anna Marie English, standing on his right, grasped his elbow and needlessly, breathlessly stated, “Sir, he’s moving away from us.”

She was right, as everyone there could see. The hologram of the corpse was getting smaller, falling or receding faster and faster towards a multi-hued, nebulous origin or destiny out of which the blue, green, and red ribbons of neon light reached like writhing tentacle arms to welcome it. The smoking, rotating figure dwindled; it became a mote, a speck; it disappeared!

And where it had been—

An explosion! A sunburst of golden light, expanding silently, hugely, awesomely! So that the thirteen observers gasped and ducked down; and despite that it was in their group mind, they turned away from the blinding intensity of the glare and what flew out of it. All except Ben Trask, who shielded his eyes and shrank down a little but continued to watch—because he must know the truth. Trask, and also David Chung, who cried his astonishment, staggered and almost fell. But they had seen, both of them: