Voyagers II - The Alien Within (37 page)

“There will be no killing, Madigan,” said Stoner, “unless you want to die.”

The voice from the loudspeakers chuckled. “Not me! I’m in good health, and I’m enjoying the power of running the world’s largest corporation—and the World Liberation Movement. I’m even planning to infiltrate the Peace Enforcers. That should complete the job. I’ll be emperor of the world, and nobody will know it!”

Turning to Jo, Stoner said softly, urgently, “Get Kirill and these two back to the shuttle. Disconnect from the airlock and go onto the shuttle’s own life support system. Take the two technicians with you.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Keep Madigan busy until you’re safe. You’ve got ten minutes, maximum. Get going!”

“But—”

“Go!”

Jo took charge of Markov, An Linh, and Baker with a single glance over her shoulder. The two technicians clambered up from the interior of the spacecraft and followed them as she strode across the little bridge and up to the catwalk, where her husband lay crumpled on the gridwork flooring.

“Pick him up and take him to his quarters,” she commanded the four guards.

They stirred as if waking from a dream. They looked at Jo, glanced at one another.

“He’s obviously had a breakdown,” she snapped. “If you want to keep working for Vanguard, you’ll do what I tell you. Otherwise you’ll be in the unemployment line back Earthside tomorrow morning.”

They shouldered their guns and picked Nillson up from the catwalk floor.

“Take him to his quarters, call the chief medical officer, and stand guard over him,” Jo said.

They marched off, hauling Nillson, who seemed barely conscious.

“Now just a minute here,” Madigan’s voice boomed from the loudspeakers. “You’re not going anywhere, Jo. Neither you nor your friends.”

Jo raised her face toward the speakers, her eyes blazing fury. “You’re the power behind the throne, Archie? Well, the throne just collapsed! I’m the president of this company, and the people around here will do what I tell them!”

“No, they won’t,” Madigan insisted.

“We’ll see about that!”

“I’m warning you, Jo. If you don’t stay exactly where you are—”

“Fuck you, Archie,” she snapped. To Markov and the others she said, “Follow me.”

Through this Stoner remained standing by the side of the spacecraft, eyes closed. He pictured the loudspeakers with his mind, the electrical wiring that led from them through the maze of passageways and workshops that made up this orbiting complex. He saw where Madigan sat, at a control center crammed with desklike consoles and display screens. His mind’s eye went past that and sought out the electrical power generator, the compact metal sphere at the heart of the fusion reactor, where a plasma hotter than the core of the Sun transmuted matter into energy. From there he directed his mind along the pulsing web of electrical circuits to the life support system that sustained the complex’s air and heat.

He opened his eyes. Jo was herding her charges along the catwalk. She stopped at the door that opened onto the passageway they had come through. As if she felt his gaze, she turned to look at him.

“Hurry,” he called to her. “Your lives depend on it.”

Jo seemed to understand him. She gave a single curt nod, then pulled the door open and gestured Markov and the others through it.

“I’m warning you, Jo,” bellowed Madigan’s voice.

Stoner could see him mentally, hunched intently in his chair at the control center, staring angrily into the display screens that showed every corner of the orbital complex. Madigan had cleared the control center of all other personnel. He sat there alone, trusting no one, playing God.

There’s no way to simply shut off the air to his compartment alone, Stoner saw. No way to choke him off without killing everyone else.

Deep within him, Stoner knew that it would be a tragedy to kill the thousands of men and women working innocently throughout this complex. It would be even worse to kill Jo and Kirill and An Linh. But those feelings were smothered over by a glacial deadening of all emotion as the details of the situation came into clear focus for him.

Madigan. The master puppeteer. Pulling Nillson’s strings and, through the hands of that half-insane dying man, torturing half the world.

Madigan. Born in bloody Belfast. Raised in violence. Stoner touched the lawyer’s mind and looked into the past. Murders in the street. Bombs in department stores. Buses burning in the night. Father shot dead by British soldiers. Mother blown to pieces by a car bomb. A cold wind sliced through Stoner as he saw that the car bomb had been planted there by the teenaged Madigan himself. He had murdered his own mother. By mistake. A mistake he could never atone for.

Escaping to the south. Cutting his ties with the terrorists. Emigrating to America. To Boston. To a scholarship and a law degree and the gradual realization that the real power in the world was held by the enemy, the huge corporations that controlled national governments. And what better way to bring them down, what better way to steal their power, than to join the largest corporation of them all and work and scheme and smile and kiss your way to the top of it?

Madigan. The nexus of power. The key to it all: the war in Africa, the secret alliance between Vanguard and the World Liberation Movement, perhaps even the convulsions racking the Soviet Union.

One man. Stoner hesitated. Can one man truly be the difference between war and peace? Can one man prevent a whole world from moving forward to find the solutions to its problems?

Yes, he decided. This man could. This one man barred the way to humankind’s future. There were others, of course. But this one man was the obstacle to be cleared away. Now. Unless he could move Madigan out of the way, no progress could be made toward real peace.

Madigan had to die.

But how many had to die with him?

As he stood there by the side of the alien’s starship, its jeweled inner workings glowing and glittering with otherwordly power, Stoner saw Madigan frantically snapping out commands, punching buttons on the control consoles in front of him, trying to force the men and machines of this orbital complex to stop Jo and the others from reaching safety.

With a gentle pressure, Stoner shorted out the communications console that Madigan was using. Its display screen went blank, and the lawyer’s face twisted in anger. But he simply slid his chair to the next console and began tapping the keyboard in front of it. There were dozens of screens flanking him, row upon row, on either side of where he sat. Madigan could see every room, every passageway, every laboratory and storage bay and workspace in the complex. Stoner knew that he could short them all out, one by one. But it would take time. Too much time. Madigan would have all the airlocks sealed and guarded by then.

Perhaps a diversion will help, Stoner thought. He concentrated his attention.

The shimmering grayish wall of the energy screen vanished. In the blink of an eye it disappeared, and Stoner could look up from the edge of the alien spacecraft and see the stars staring back at him, solemn and steady as the eyes of God against the infinite blackness of space.

Klaxons hooted and emergency hatches slammed shut throughout the complex. People dropped their work and ran for safety. Stoner realized that the area where he stood was domed over by an airtight bulkhead of clear plastic. Yet his ears popped as the air pressure dropped slightly. He felt the chill of the dark void sapping at him.

Madigan stared at the screens, his face going from fury to fear.

“Let them go, Archie,” he said flatly to the microphones above him. “Let them go and I’ll let you live.”

“
You’ll
let
me
live?”

Stoner nodded, knowing that Madigan could see him in at least two of the display screens.

“You can’t kill me without killing yourself, Stoner,” the lawyer shouted.

“Are you certain of that, Archie? Are you sure that you’re safe as long as you’re not in face-to-face contact with me?”

Madigan said nothing.

“My powers are growing. Perhaps being next to the spacecraft is giving me an extra boost. Cremating the alien’s body didn’t harm me, Archie. I can see you.”

“You’re bluffing!”

“And you’re sweating, there in the control room. Your nice toast-colored shirt jacket is getting stained with perspiration. Your bladder’s giving you trouble, too, isn’t it?”

Madigan jerked away from the console as if it had turned red hot and jumped to his feet.

“Come down here and meet me, Archie. Come down here now, before I have to turn off the air and kill everybody in the complex.”

“You’d be killing yourself, too!”

“Would I? I’m not really certain about that.”

“You’re not human!”

Stoner nodded patiently. “That’s right, Archie. I’m not. Come down here and meet the ambassador from the aliens, Archie. Come down
now
.”

Madigan stood uncertainly, staring at the banks of display screens lining the control center. Stoner strained every atom of his strength, trying to control the lawyer’s mind from a distance of more than a mile. He felt perspiration dampening his face, trickling along his ribs beneath the faded blue fabric of his coveralls.

No use. Madigan’s will was strong, his ego powerful. He was not a twisted, terrified mental cripple as Nillson had been, drugged half out of his mind against the pain of an incurable cancer. Nor a pompous popinjay of small intellect and overwhelming self-esteem, as Temujin had been. For all his murderous hatred of the world, Madigan was healthy in mind. Raised in a world where violence was normal and murder was commonplace, his desire for power and his willingness to use any means at all to achieve it were perfectly understandable to Stoner. The lawyer had even rationalized his mother’s death: it was
Them
, the ubiquitous hated enemy, who had murdered his mother. The bomb had been meant for Them. If it hadn’t been for Them, he would never have touched the bomb, never have handled it, never have put it in that car.
They
killed my mother, Madigan had told himself every day of his life until he almost really believed it. Not me. Them.

Stoner could not control him. Not at this distance. Not with all the bulkheads and electrical circuits between them. He could see the lawyer, dimly, in his mind. Instead of coming to him, Madigan was reaching into a locker on the other side of the control center, pulling some sort of clothing over the shirt jacket and slacks that he wore. Something white and smooth and…

A space suit! Stoner felt a tremor of shock inside him. Madigan sealed the front of the suit and then reached into the locker where it had been hanging and pulled out a clear plastic fishbowl helmet. He put it over his head and sealed it to the collar ring of the suit. Stoner saw that the suit included a slim backpack for life support.

“I’m protected now,” Madigan said, needlessly. His laughter echoed from the loudspeakers. “Go ahead and turn off the air, Stoner. You can kill everybody in the complex—except me.”

Stoner said nothing. He shifted his inward focus to the four fleeing people. He saw Markov, An Linh, and Baker standing in front of an airlock. Armed security guards were there, preventing them from going any farther. But he did not see Jo. Where was she?

“I’ve got a deal to offer you, Stoner,” Madigan’s voice said.

He looked up at the loudspeakers. “What kind of a deal?”

“I’ll let Jo and the others live—under my hospitality, of course, in a suitably remote location. Maybe an island in the Pacific. Or a space station. Vanguard owns several.”

Stoner shut his eyes again and pictured Madigan in his space suit. The lawyer was smiling. He held the upper hand.

“In exchange for what?” Stoner asked.

“For the knowledge that the alien has put in your mind,” Madigan replied, licking his lips.

“Knowledge?”

Madigan’s head bobbed up and down eagerly inside the fishbowl helmet. “Yes! Knowledge is power, you know. I want it. All of it. Every scrap of knowledge the alien has given you.”

Stoner blinked. “I don’t think you understand…”

The lawyer’s face was becoming indistinct. Stoner’s mental image of him was blurring, fading.

“Oh, yes, I do,” Madigan insisted. “I want to pick your brain clean, Stoner. I want to know everything that you know.”

The words boomed in Stoner’s ears. He felt tired, achingly weary. Maintaining mental contact with Madigan was straining him. He could barely keep the image focused in his mind.

“Nillson taught me one important thing,” Madigan said. His amplified voice seemed to have weight, power. It pressed against Stoner’s ears, made his head throb. “Old Everett taught me that if you can’t have something for yourself, the next best thing is to deny it to your competitors.”

Why am I so weak? Stoner wondered. What’s happening to me?

“So either you agree to share your knowledge with me, or I make certain that you’ll never share it with anybody.” Madigan chuckled, and the sound echoed painfully.

Stoner shook his head slowly. “The knowledge you want isn’t mine to share. It belongs to…the other one….”

Madigan’s voice roared from the loudspeakers, “You’ve got to tell me, Stoner! Agree to it now, before it’s too late.”

“Too late?…” Stoner could no longer see Madigan’s image. His mind was drifting, drifting aimlessly. “Too late for what?”

“You’re dying, Stoner,” said the voice from the loudspeakers. “I’ve been pumping the chamber you’re in full of carbon monoxide gas. You’ll be asleep soon. And you’ll never wake up.”

“Asleep.” Stoner thought about that for a moment. It would be good to sleep. He wondered what his alien brother would do if he went to sleep, but the alien’s voice inside his mind had gone silent.

“Just tell me you’ll cooperate,” Madigan urged. “Before you die, agree to cooperate with me. Don’t let his knowledge die with you!”

It took an enormous effort of will for Stoner to answer slurringly, “Better that no one gains the knowledge than you gain it, Madigan.”

“Stoner, I’ll let you live if you tell me!”

“No.”

“You’ve
got
to!”