Deadly Relations: Bester Ascendant (9 page)

Well, that was for later. He probed a little more, but the normal didn’t know anything else, or if he did it would take a deep scan to find it. Even under the circumstances Al wasn’t willing to go that far. What Al knew was what he had started with: Brazg would get off in Paris, and from there on out only she knew her plans. The door rattled, suddenly, and Hech started making frantic gagging noises. Gripping the shock stick, Al dithered for an instant. The door was locked, but if the person on the other side had a key… He placed his fingers against the door and concentrated.

“Hech?” he heard, muffled.

He’s not in here. No one is in here

(glyph of the room, empty; glyph of Hech, walking though the aisles of the train).

No one is in here. The room is empty.

< A few paragraphs was lost :( >

…he from talking about him. Maybe, but probably not. Anyway, that would be going way, way too far. He was in trouble enough as it was. But perception could be as powerful as the real thing, couldn’t it?

“I’m planting a compunction in your mind,” he told Hech.

“You won’t feel it, or know it’s there - unless you try to talk about me or this incident. If you do that, you will find yourself having a nasty recurring nightmare each and every time you close your eyes. It won’t be pleasant.”

Then he just probed a bit, ran his mental fingers over the contours of Hech’s mind - enough so the cop could feel him. Almost as an afterthought, he touched him with the shock stick again. That should keep him quiet for the next few minutes, anyway.

He opened the door, saw and felt no one in the corridor. He went out and locked the door behind him. Then, straightening, he walked back the way they had come, trying to exude confidence.

“Act like you belong somewhere, and people will think you do.”

Teacher Diebold had told him that, years ago. Outside, city rushed by, the jumble of the industrial district, with buildings like giant pipes and vast, rusted machines-and glimpses of the skyline now and then. He made his way to where he had spotted Brazg, and his heart fell. She was nowhere to be seen.

Chapter 4

For a moment he stood rigid. Had she been warned somehow? She might have detected him the instant he walked past her on the train, gotten off five stops back while he was hiding in Hech’s cabin. Suddenly things were a lot less promising than they had been. He had assaulted a train cop and had nothing to show for it.

Once Hech figured out that Brazg was gone - and his connection to her as un-provable as his assault on Al - he could bring charges with impunity. Scans weren’t admissible in the courtroom, so it was just Al’s word against his. Any jury would favor a mundane - after all, teeps weren’t allowed to serve on juries.

The relief was almost dizzying when he realized that Brazg had left her seat only to join the impatient crowd waiting to deboard.

Got you, he thought, breathing for the first time in a significant number of moments.

And he followed her off of the train into a chaos he could never, in his wildest dreams, have imagined.

Al had read about Paris, of course, the City of Light. He had imagined it as a place of ancient, eldritch beauty, a sort of fairyland of beret-capped artists and thinkers basking leisurely and thoughtfully in the gentle glory of the past. At night it would be a city made of stars, a constellation brought to Earth. That was what he had imagined. It wasn’t what he saw.

The Gare de Lyon was a severe and spacious building, rebuilt sometime after the last World War, when it like much of the city-had been blasted by terrorists. AI’s fast impression was of a large oven full of rats, just beginning to warm up. The rodents - instinctively beginning to understand their fate - were squirming, writhing, clamoring to get out. Except their dim little rat brains didn’t know where “out” was, so they just formed a struggling mass.

He had never encountered struggling masses before - not in Teeptown, not in Geneva. He lost sight of Brazg within seconds, caught a glimpse of her moving quickly, lost her again. She was in a hurry. Al picked up his pace, trying to weave through the crowd. He cracked his blocks so he could get a telepathic whiff of Brazg. It was as if a thousand people all tried to shriek something very important at once. He gasped, involuntarily slapping his hands to his head, his head which was expanding like a balloon, stretching thinner, thinner.

The crowd became a series of vid stills, each different, the thousand motions between each unseen. The mind-roar went in and out, as if he were a radio with poor reception. Then he managed to shut it all down and realized he had slumped to his knees. People glanced at him with expressions ranging from neutral to irritated as they made their way around him.

He shook his head and stood again. That had been stupid. And he had no idea how long he had fugued. Probably only seconds, but he glanced at his watch, then remembered he had not glanced at it before, so he still didn’t how much time had passed. He looked wildly around, wondering what to do. He had two options-he could descend the escalators into the underground, or exit up to the street. If he chose the wrong direction, he would certainly lose any chance that remained of finding Lara Brazg.

He glanced at the torrent of people passing into the depths below the city and shuddered. He could not go that way, not right now. He came out of the station on the Rue de Lyon, a narrow, bustling cobblestone street surrounded by dirty grey buildings that looked as if they should have crumbled long ago. It had just rained, and a peculiar stench mingled with the tang of wet stones, a stink made of a thousand stinks, as if somehow, impossibly, the city remembered open sewers, burning diesel and petrol, the sulfur of ancient gunfire-every chemical that had ever oozed or diffused on it since the beginning of time.

It was another alien scene, more threatening by far than the countryside-and yet somehow thrilling, as well. More exciting still was his glimpse of Lara Brazg, vanishing around a curve. This time, better prepared, he telescoped a tight, tunnel-like probe in her direction and got it, an impression of her mind as individual as a fingerprint, or perhaps more appropriately, as a scent to a bloodhound. He wished he could risk a light scan, to maybe catch where she was headed if he lost her again, but he couldn’t.

A teep of Brazg’s abilities would never notice him tracking her, but anything more blatant might set off some alarms in her head. Al hurried up the street, on the hunt again. He followed her sign, crossed a deeply recessed canal on a small iron footbridge. To his faint surprise, the canal vanished into a vaulted tunnel not far to his right, running underneath a broad plaza.

An emerald pleasure boat arabesqued with gilded lilies was just passing beneath the arch. He stared into it for a moment, but had no sense that she had gone there, either on the boat or the narrow footpaths flanking the waterway.

He looked around for street signs, and realized, with the surprise of a tourist who happens upon a place he’s heard of, that it was the Place de la Bastille, where once had stood the city’s most famous prison. It was gone now, the square now dominated by the looming Opera Bastille, itself nearly three hundred years old.

The plaza seemed to have been built over the canal. Where once the prisoners of the French kings had languished, vendors hawked trinkets and souvenirs, and tacky shops and cafes looked inward to the July Column with its gilded statue of Liberty.

A small cluster of Centauri tourists-dressed in immaculate and ornate garb, and accompanied by what looked like an armored guard with a sword-picked their way through the shops. It was hard not to be distracted by them-he had never seen a live extraterrestrial before - but he tried to keep his mind on the task at hand.

Nonetheless, once again the Blip had vanished from sight. But not from mind. She was here, somewhere-he could feel her. He stood for a while trying to sort her out of the colorful crowd of tourists and entrepreneurs. He managed the roar better this time - people were farther apart, but more, he was quickly adapting to the new conditions.

He caught the catlike thoughts of a pickpocket, moving up on unsuspecting marks; the passion of two young lovers; the hatred an old woman harbored for holiday season and the locust-like swarms of gawkers it brought. The slightly odd feel of the Centauri minds, their amused disdain at almost everything they saw.

Still he couldn’t pinpoint Brazg. She was still, cocooned, probably in one of the buildings. And he must look a little suspicious, he realized, standing in the open, staring like this. He walked around the edge of the square, and when he thought he felt her strongest, he took a seat at a small sidewalk cafe. He tried to cultivate a relaxed appearance, to separate his expression and body language from his purpose.

He nearly jumped out of his skin when a fluid male voice said, “What do you want?” nearly in his ear.

It was French, harsher than the gentle dialect of Switzerland, but still perfectly intelligible.

“A cup of coffee, please,” Al said, in the same language. “And what else do you have?”

“Eh?” the waiter said. “A cup of coffee.” Al repeated, “and I would like to see a menu.”

“I am sorry, sir,” the waiter said, “I do not speak German, or whatever that is. I speak only French.”

Al frowned up at the man. He had Brazg’s scent as firm as a beacon in his mind, now, and it still wasn’t going anywhere. He could spare a moment to touch the surface thoughts of the waiter. And the waiter was lying.

“You understand me perfectly well,” Al said. “If you don’t want to serve me, fine, but I’m going to sit here, nevertheless. Play your games with some tourist - not with me.”

The waiter’s lips pinched tight, and then he twitched a Gallic shrug.

“As you say, monsieur,” he growled, and stalked back into the cafe.

AI returned his attention to the square. He gazed up at the little statue of Liberty, covered with pigeons and the white streaks of their droppings. Evening had arrived on pastel wings, and as it came lower and darker there was a vague sense of being in a city sunken beneath the waves.

Everything had a bluish tint, a sense of depth, a little melancholy. Over the rooftops and beyond, a great ivory cathedral was visible - the Sacre Coeur? It might have been an Adantean temple. Across the square, a trio of musicians started playing Peruvian music, the soft but insistent trills of their quenas twining up from a solid foundation of guitar.

The minds around him were still busy, but the city seemed to be taking a long, deep breath. As if Paris and its inhabitants weren’t quite the same thing. It seemed, too, that once he had tuned out the particular thoughts of those around him there was a sort of pattern, or series of patterns, quite beautiful in their own way. He thought once again of the moment he had spied upon, only the day before, the manting of Brett, Julia, and the others. This was so much more vast, and so much more unconscious. Geneva had always been there, in the background. Not something he had noticed, really, or thought of as singular.

But Paris was - different from Geneva, its psychic air as distinct in flavor as its physical atmosphere. Did cities have a sort of mental gestalt, a psionic fingerprint, as identifiable as a person, once apprehended? It was an intriguing thought. Beautiful, even.

His coffee came, and he sipped it. He ordered a sort of sandwich of thick bread and oysters. He waited, and like so many before him, tried to understand Paris. The waiter had begun to glare at him for overstaying his welcome at the cafe, and it was quite dark, when he suddenly became certain that Brazg was on the move again. He let the waiter credit his account, but remained sitting for the moment. The city was alive with light now, but once again, Paris didn’t meet his expectations.

That was okay, he mused He had found his fairy constellation in the subtle mind of the city, if not in its lamps. A figure passed through the shadows on the plaza and then through a streetlight. To the eye, it might have been a man or woman, in shapeless sweater and baggy pants. The hair was short and looked black. The mind was Brazg, though. He was certain of it.

He rose as she reached the far side of the square, where she vanished, bit by bit, into the ground-first feet, then knees, then shoulders, finally head. The canal. She had gone down the steps into the canal. He followed, trying to keep his pace casual, but feeling it quicken anyway. He did not want to lose her again. Centuries of feet had worn a shallow trough down the steps. He almost stopped to stare at it, astonished by the signatures of age. There was nothing like this in Teeptown. Were there such places in Geneva? Not where he usually went.

As he reached the walkway, Brazg was moving out of the circle of one of the lights picketing the canal. The shadow she moved into stretched some hundred feet or so, and beyond that lights on the ceiling of the tunnel picked up again. The ones nearest the tunnel mouth seemed to be malfunctioning. There were only a few people out, and they were walking far ahead of Brazg. He made out three small craft coasting silently down the waterway. Now was the perfect time to apprehend her. Or maybe he should wait and see where she was going? He might find an entire underground cell.

He slipped into the darkness, trying to decide. A soft sound, a whisper of mind - he whirled, adrenaline stabbing through his heart. Something weighty and fast jacked up the point of his chin, and he hurled back. The stone wall caught him. As he steadied himself against it, still amazed at the weird click his teeth had made when they snapped together, he reached for the pistol in his waistband.

Ah, no. Stay very still, or I will bleed you like a pig.

It was strongly p-cast, and Al found himself looking a bit cross - eyed down the narrow tube of a flechette pistol. Behind it, a half-shadowed face grinned at him. Though he had seen it only in photographs, he recognized it instantly by its scars, by its stone killer eyes. Portis Nielsson.

Chapter 5

“Look, Lara,” Nielsson said.

“Got ourselves a regular John Trakker, here.”