Reunion (23 page)

He had already decided that he had no choice but to challenge them directly. At the mere anticipation of forthcoming confrontation, Pip stirred against his shoulder. The pistol he had brought from the
Teacher
hugged his duty belt. He would be outnumbered and very probably outgunned, but he had surprise on his side. A great deal of surprise. The last thing anyone from a trespassing vessel like the
Crotase
would expect to encounter deep within an AAnn system would be a fellow obtruding human.

With luck, the interlopers from the
Crotase
would split up to examine their surroundings. That would enable him to confront one or two of them apart from their colleagues. If that failed to produce the information he needed, he could use those he had questioned as hostages to compel the necessary data from their companions. Though no stranger to threat and violence himself, he was uncomfortable at the prospect of playing the role of enforcer instead of victim. The intruders from the
Crotase
wouldn’t know that, however. He believed he had enough personal experience of individuals who positively delighted in the use of intimidation and violence to maintain an appropriately threatening facade until he had gained what he had come so far to acquire. As he walked, he tried out a few hopefully intimidating expressions, regretting the absence of a mirror. He knew that his youth would work against him. When you are twenty-one, even if you are taller than average, it is very difficult to terrify anyone on the basis of looks alone.

The exotic creations surrounding him had been constructed to a strapping but not cumbersome scale. Large arrays of cylindrical structures and their chaperoning conduits and connectors were at once majestic yet stylized in design. Passing through several wide portals as he tracked the continually fluctuating emotions of those ahead of him, he noted that the openings were designed to accommodate beings far larger than himself. Five full-grown terrestrial brown bears could have strode abreast through the narrowest of the doorways. Similarly, other components of the artifact’s construction hinted that in the past, large, heavy bodies had once occupied and made use of the spaces through which he was presently roaming.

Who had built the artifact, and to what purpose? Was its obscuring cloud cover natural in origin or a deliberately acquired attempt at dissimulation? He drew no inspiration from what he saw. The artifact was imposing, sturdily built, and ancient beyond belief. Whether it was functional beyond its ability to react to the presence of and provide support for oxygen-breathing life-forms was not a question that interested him as much as did the location of the missing sybfile.

He continued to advance with heightened caution. From the strength of the feelings he was sensing, he knew he had closed the gap between himself and the exploration party from the
Crotase.
Unlike him, they were not tracking a particular target and so had advanced more slowly. With practiced hand he silently drew the pistol from his waist. A flick of one finger cleared the safety and powered up the weapon’s coil. One or two crew members isolated from the rest was what he hoped to encounter. One or two he could keep separate for a few moments while he questioned them in peace.

But Fate dictates little in the way of serenity for those whose thoughts are encumbered by weighty questions. Pausing, he found himself staring in the direction of muted voices. Ever since he had begun shadowing the group, he had apperceived and discarded more than a hundred of their conflicting emotions. A lifetime spent surviving similar unavoidable encounters allowed him to sift through and ignore nearly all of them.

Now, suddenly, he had become aware of something else—something so unique, so extraordinary and unexpected, that Pip extended her upper body to peer anxiously into her companion’s face. Flinx did not see her. He saw very little, being at the moment wholly occupied with newly perceived feelings that made no sense, no sense at all.

In his twenty-odd years of intuiting and analyzing the emotions of other people, he had sensed love, had sensed hate and joy, despair and triumph, gladness and dismay. Symphonies of suffering had washed over him in waves, and in crowded cities he had been forced to fight off the overwhelming feeling of ennui that so dominated the lives of most human beings. He had assimilated the exotic, outlandish, and sometimes grotesque emotions of intelligences that were not human, and the simple straightforward emotional utterances of the subsapient.

But only once before, he knew as his fingers tightened around the haft of the pistol, had he ever sensed anything that was so alarmingly like himself.

Chapter 15

It changed everything. At first he thought he had imagined it. He had, after all, a very vivid imagination, prone to dreams of exceptional range and depth. Anyone seeing him at that moment could have been excused for thinking he was caught in the throes of some kind of mild paralysis—but he was merely concentrating.

There—there it was again! No dream, this. Insistent and unmistakable, pounding inside his head, demanding to be recognized. It was like viewing a cracked, badly distorted image of himself. While similar, it was also sharply different. He had never felt anything like it before.

Or—had he?

Visuals. He needed visual confirmation. The urgent need to isolate and question one or more members of the
Crotase
’s crew as to the whereabouts of the syb he sought had suddenly taken a backseat to identifying the source of the remarkable and disconcerting emotional projections he was now perceiving. Admonishing Pip with a gesture to remain on his shoulder, he advanced in the direction of the voices, keeping low and out of sight, utilizing the singular internal components of the artifact to conceal his rangy form. The voices grew louder. Discussion was in progress. By the time he had drawn near enough to see, peering out from behind a silvery sweep of metallic glass, it had progressed to argument.

There were nine of them, all human. Three women and six men; all custom-suited, all armed. No, he corrected himself. Six men, two women, and an adolescent girl. They were gazing at what appeared to be an enormous translucent membrane that stretched between two arching, tapering pillars of opaque electricity. The pillars hummed at the threshold of audibility while compliant streaks of gold-and-pink energy chased one another across the surface of the film. It looked like a razed segment of electrified soap bubble.

Two of the men standing side by side were carrying the bulk of the debate while their companions stood and listened, weapons at the ready. A couple of them kept glancing nervously about, as if they expected something fanged and ichorous to come leaping out at them from the depths of alien shadows, but for the most part their companions stayed relaxed. Competent professionals, Flinx concluded, hired for their skills and most probably a collateral talent for keeping their mouths shut. Uncommon feelings continued to press upon his mind even as he observed and analyzed. Eventually, his attention was drawn to the blossoming figure of the youngest member of the party. She stood off to one side, away from the ongoing argument, conversing quietly with two other members of the group. As she did so, she turned away from the glistening wall of anomalous light and came more fully into view.

The stab of recognition that pierced him could not have penetrated any deeper had it actually been fashioned of sharpened duralloy. Though changed, matured, and grown more beautiful than ever, he knew that face. No longer did it present the visage of an innocent child, though the mind behind it had never been innocent. It belonged now to an adolescent emerging into womanhood. She would be about fifteen, he decided. The only other Adept he had ever met. No wonder the distinctive, uncommon emotions he had picked up had sent a thrill of apperception through him.

Mahnahmi.

Abused ward of a wealthy merchant named Conda Challis, Flinx had first encountered her many years ago. Back then, he had just begun to try and seek out information about his parentage, only to find himself diverted into the matter of the ill-used Janus jewels. Eventually his searching had led him to a world under Church Edict, the remarkable home of the astonishingly ingenuous, childlike, and cerebrally advanced Ulru-Ujurrians. There, among others, he had been forced to deal with the unobtrusively precocious girl who had finally fled from them all: avaricious humans, rapacious AAnn, and curious Ulru-Ujurrians alike. The then nine-year-old had piloted her own escape in a fortuitously voice-responsive shuttlecraft—had fled shouting that she didn’t know what she was, a cry Flinx had uttered aloud and in silence a thousand times himself in previous and subsequent years.

She had declared that she needed time to grow into herself. Corporeally, at least, she had certainly done that much. Flaxen of hair and ebon of eye, she stood on the cusp of stunning physical beauty. Her appearance was enough to disarm anyone unable to sense the cold, methodical, emotional depths beneath. The external shell was exquisite, glistening and pure—but the yolk was corrupt.

As he recalled, she had fled Ulru-Ujurr full of hatred at the way she had been treated while growing up, at the inability of others to appreciate her, and at a universe that had condemned her to such a life. He had watched the shuttle she had so unexpectedly commandeered shrink into the sky, and then he had turned his attention to other matters of more immediate import. Soon thereafter, she had been forgotten.

Now she was here, the only other unmindwiped Adept like himself that he knew about, on this colossal and cryptic alien artifact. The implied connection with the missing sybfile eliminated one, but hardly all, of the questions that had been bothering him since the file had vanished from Earth. By itself, that recognition did not explain what she was doing here.

Her talent, or talents, differed from his own in ways he had not been able to explore. To the best of his knowledge and as near as he could remember, whatever abilities she possessed were not nearly as developed as his own. They might be comparable, but were more marginal. Or they might merely be different. He had not come to know her well enough to be sure. He had not wanted to.

Now, it appeared, he might have to.

The first time she had set eyes on him she had asked her adoptive father, Conda Challis, to kill him. Challis had refused. She had sensed the depth of the anomaly that was Philip Lynx, and had been afraid. But her range of apperception had been more limited than his, and like him, her aptitude erratic. Certainly she was not aware of his presence now, whether because her own peculiarly individual skills were not functioning, because she was preoccupied, or because of something as simple as the physical distance between them.

Fascinated, he watched as she conversed with the other members of the crew from the
Crotase.
Having identified her, he now knew who was in charge of the expedition. Not the two burly men who continued to argue vociferously, gesturing and thrusting their hands at the pillars of energy and the coruscating transparency held in stasis in front of them, but the beautiful young woman standing off to one side. Oh, they might
think
they were in charge, but Flinx knew better. Completely unbeknownst to him until she had confessed to it, for years the child Mahnahmi had manipulated the merchant Conda Challis. It had served her purpose to pull strings from behind the scenes of life, to play the simple, trusting juvenile. Having perfected the game, he doubted she had abandoned it now.

What would he do if she sensed his presence? Once alerted to his proximity, he might not be able to hide from her. Had her talent matured, developed? If so, it might possibly have advanced in another direction, one he could not imagine. The Meliorares, the criminal gengineers who had meddled with his DNA before he was born, had been inconsistent in their experimentation. As far as Flinx knew, he and his abilities were unique. Because of that, the young woman standing before and slightly below him, chatting with her companions, was akin yet different.

While he stood watching, perceiving, and trying to decide how best to proceed, the others were not idle. Having apparently settled their argument, the larger of the two men who had been arguing addressed the others. Then he stepped forward, removed something from his service belt, and tossed it into the center of the glossy, glittering membrane that hung like a psychedelic spiderweb from between the two pillars of inscrutable energy. Flinx ducked down farther into his place of concealment, and a couple of the onlookers from the
Crotase
flinched, but all the blazing slice of transparency did was swallow the cast object whole. There was a soft crackle, a brief blaze of golden sparks to show where insertion had been made, and then nothing.

Triumphant in both debate and demonstration, the thrower turned to the others and took a few moments to harangue the man with whom he had been arguing. Flinx started to rise slightly from behind the ribbon of metallic glass to resume his earlier, clearer view. Mahnahmi had moved off to one side in the company of one of the men she had been talking to earlier.

Something impinged on the corner of Flinx’s consciousness. It was not an emotion, but it was a feeling. He often experienced such sensations in the presence of other sapience. Usually they were a consequence of afterthought, random projections sloughed off by thinking minds without reflection on their meaning, the way dreams regularly disposed of frivolous material that collected like psychic garbage in the distant recesses of the subconscious mind.

This was different. He had felt something like it only once before, long, long ago, before he had encountered the pernicious entity known as Mahnahmi, so he knew it did not originate with or stem from her. He could not identify it. In any event he did not have time. His body and mind reacted, and he threw himself to the floor. As he did so, he caught the barest glimpse of Mahnahmi whirling around, unmistakable shock showing on her face, as she reacted to the same stimuli.

The shimmering, resplendent patch of bubblelike film imploded. The twin pillars of dusky energy were transposed from relatively benign towers of humming radiance into fiery lances of ferocious purple splendor. Shrieking and screaming, kicking frantically as they flailed and failed to find a grasp on something solid and immovable, one by one the crew members from the
Crotase
were sucked inexorably into the now feral translucent conflagration that filled the space between the wildly blazing pillars.

Screeching for help, one woman hung onto something that looked like a milky, semitransparent cable. Her body hung out behind her, feet kicking frantically, her hips and legs flapping up and down like a taut but tattered flag caught in a strong breeze. Ripped free from her torso by the power of the howling portal, or whatever the phenomenon was, first her duty belt, then her boots, and finally her coveralls were peeled from her body. Fingers bleeding from the effort of trying to hang on, she ululated a last cry of despair as her weakened fingers lost their grip and she, too, was sucked into the lethal maelstrom.

The raging, bellowing alien vortex showed no signs of losing strength. Flinx clung tightly to one of the supports of the silvery glass monolith whose bulk shielded him from much of the cataclysmic intensity. Her coils constricted around his upper arm, Pip was as firmly attached to her companion as he was to the immovable alien apparatus. Her eyes were shut tight as she kept her head turned away from the relentless pull. If her companion succumbed to it, she would, as always, go with him.

Hanging on for dear life, Flinx felt his feet rise slightly off the floor as the vortex tugged at him. Able to just peer beneath the convolute argent column, he saw Mahnahmi clinging with intractable determination to a dull metallic upright near where she had moments ago been standing and chatting easily. Clinging precariously to her right leg was the man she had been conversing with. The emotions that were chasing one another across the desperate crew member’s face were manifold, but Flinx was able to read them as easily as words in a book. Or read
it
, because a primal fear utterly dominated everything else the doomed individual’s psyche was experiencing.

He was a robust young man, and his grip was strong. He was doing as well as could be expected until Mahnahmi drew back her free leg and kicked him square in the face with the heel of her boot. It was enough. Grip lost, eyes glazed with the acquiescence that comes with approaching annihilation, he fell into the vortex and was swallowed up.

Then, as abruptly and indifferently as if someone had left the room, thereby activating the switch that turned off the lights, the eddying conflagration subsided. In slightly more than a minute it was once again a tranquil, innocuous membrane whose perfect transparency was broken only by the occasional transmuting golden discharge dancing across its surface.

Released from the maelstrom’s pull, Flinx’s feet dropped back to the floor. Breathing heavily, he took stock of himself and his surroundings. The terrible gravity that had been sucking at his lower body was gone. Though she eased the pressure of her coils, Pip remained firmly entwined around his arm. Slowly, he released his grip on the segment of glassine monolith that had kept him from being drawn into the vortex. His breathing slowed, steadied.

Except for the steady twin hum of the energy pillars, now restored to their original appearance, all was silent. Carefully, he rose and peered around the bulk of the glass mechanism. Everything was as before on the surface of the film. Of all those who had come adventuring from the
Crotase,
there was no sign of any of them save for the slim shape of a single survivor: nothing to indicate what had happened to the others, nothing to suggest where they had gone. The vortex might have been a transportation device of some kind that sent those who were drawn into it to another part of the artifact—or another part of the galaxy. Or it might be a storage device that was simply holding onto those it had inhaled for an indeterminate period of time. Or it might be a garbage disposal. Or something whose alien purpose he could not begin to envision.

Pip was up and off his shoulder the instant she sensed his reaction. He felt the rush of freshening animosity before he turned, but by then it was too late. Up and down, in and out, his talent had waned just long enough under the pressure of the preceding tragedy for the unseen individual to steal up behind him. The flying snake drew back her head sharply as she prepared to strike—and went down, enveloped in a mass of binding, sticky threads. As the fibers dried, her struggles grew feebler and feebler, until she lay motionless on the floor, wings stuck to her sides, her mouth sealed with pale white astringent matter. Only her slow, steady breathing showed that she was still alive.