Jack the Bodiless (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (65 page)

In the last outbound slalom, Augie hit a pole. It was an automatic penalty, costing him his position, and he was forced to throttle back until both Voli and Marc passed him. Trapped in a cage of hard-chargers behind Marc, he was no longer a threat.

“Allons, allons-y!” Rogi yelled. “Go, Marc!”

Now only a double humper and two singles remained before the sharp turnaround loop at the bottom end of the course. Marc passed Voli on the double and overtook Miko coming off the second bouncer. Rusty, Marc, Miko, and Voli were tightly bunched as they began their controlled skids around the tight curve. Augie and five other racers rode in a close group less than four meters behind Voli. The entire gaggle of ten riders was sliding through different portions of the loop all at once, their spikes flinging up clouds of sparkling ice and their bike engines howling. The small crowd of spectators gathered around the loop was whooping and whistling and getting in the way of the squad of referees and the camera ops who were attempting to record the action for the big screen.

Rogi’s imperfect farsight had lost track of Marc’s snowplastered
form in the mêlée. He switched his attention to the monitor screen just in time to see that Marc had gained the lead at last, coming out of the big skid a full length ahead of Rusty.

Rogi was jumping up and down, cheering, when the disaster happened. An unidentifiable bike moved out of the pack and traveled at tremendous speed
across
the loop, apparently out of control, heading directly toward the pair of front-runners. The announcer shouted a futile warning. The spectators in the bleachers began to wail and scream. The bikers at the back of the pack who were just finishing the final jump and about to enter the loop either heard what was happening on their helmet intercoms or saw it with their ultrasenses and hastened to steer for the sidelines even as the referees began to wave the red torches.

The wild bike struck the front wheel of Marc’s Honda, and both machines began to tumble. Rusty and Miko cut sharply left and snowplowed to a stop in the middle of the loop. There was a spurt of flame from the two machines in collision, and the shouting of the fans increased to a bedlam that even drowned out the amplified roaring of the engines. Other turbocycles were crashing, skidding, throwing their riders onto the ice. Referees with red torches darted about in the haze of smoke and icy powder. Rogi was on his feet, his eyes blind, his farsight fixed on the vision of what was taking place two kilometers up the river.

A tremendous blossom of orange and black blotted out the place where Marc and the other rider finally slid to a halt, entangled with their bikes. An instant later, the sound of the detonation reached the ears of the spectators in the stands. There was a beat of silent horror, and then the three aid cars and two fire engines that had been parked on the sidelines just beyond the bleachers went into action, tearing down the open shore corridor of the frozen river with their emergency lights flashing and sirens making a banshee din.

“No,” Denis whispered, his farsenses disabled by emotion. “Oh, God, not that.”

“I see him!” Rogi screamed. And he transmitted the vision to his stricken nephew—the wonderful, reassuring sight of a single tall young figure in scorched leather staggering and slipping away over half-melted ice from a flame-girt mass of twisted metal and plass and burning flesh and bone.

Marc!
Rogi shouted, wept.
Marcareyouallright?

Yes …

With tears streaming down his weathered face, Rogi caught up Denis in a crushing embrace of relief. “He’s all right! Dieu merci, Marc’s all right!”

A black column of smoke rose above the dark evergreens and leafless maples of Pine Park. People were running along the ice toward the accident scene. Denis stood motionless, his face white and his eyes gone hollow and lusterless. “We’d better get down there and see what we can do,” he said. “But first let me farspeak Lucille and the others, so they won’t worry. They may have been watching. The race was scheduled to be broadcast on ESN.”

“And I’ll tell Jack,” Rogi added.

But when he farspoke the child in the hospital, Jack said that he already knew and that he had warned Marc to put on the brakes just in time to avoid being struck squarely in the body by the steel-spiked front wheel of the other turbocycle.

Rogi asked: Who was that other poor devil anyhow? There hasn’t been any announcement.

Jack said: It was Gordon McAllister … Hydra.

Fury cursed. Fury howled like a demented thing. The imbeciles! The stupid fools! Because of their half-baked jealousy, one of their number was dead and the other four in mortal danger.

Oh, Hydra! You were Fivefold and Singular. You were approaching maturity. You were ready to begin the really important work, the elimination of opposing Magnates of the Concilium. Perhaps even ready to bring down Davy MacGregor, the Dirigent himself. And now the great scheme lies in ruins! There are only four of you, and those are shocked and diminished and moaning in fear behind mind-dikes of cowardice. Useless. Worse than that—liabilities! Liable to be found out, to be used as conduits.

Conduits to Fury.

Gordon McAllister’s death would be adjudged a mysterious accident, a piece of adolescent insanity, perhaps envy-fueled. If he had simply attacked Marc and died, the danger would be remote. But Gordo had not died as himself. In the instant before he expired in fiery agony, he had shown his Hydra face—and one of the persons watching in horror had recognized him and would surely deduce the identity of the
other four heads of the now whimpering, vitiated monster, knowing that Gordo had been the fifth.

This person, not Davy MacGregor, was now the Great Enemy. He would have to be killed as soon as possible, and the killing would not be easy.

The new enemy was not Marc, who had been too stunned to know who had hit him.

It was Jack.

The Great Enemy. The one Fury would have to kill himself.

M
ARC SLEPT, WOKE, AND SLEPT AGAIN
. H
E KNEW HE WAS NOT
too seriously injured, knew that he was in the trauma unit of the big Dartmouth Medical Center at the southern edge of town, knew there was an urgent reason for him to stop sleeping, wake up, and take care of some important matter. He fell asleep again anyway.

And had the nightmare of the race again.

His dream bike was a fantastic futuristic machine with wheels as tall as his body and spikes a full 30 centimeters long. The other contestants were all adult humans or exotics, and the things they rode weren’t ice-cycles at all but different kinds of clumsy armored vehicles bristling with weapons. At the starting gun of the race, Marc was off and away like a thunderbolt, leaving the freaks sucking smoked slush and blasting away at him futilely with their zappers while he laughed at them.

In the dream, Marc left the outdistanced hostile pack far
behind. His two-wheeled juggernaut hissed and roared alone down a deserted, moonlit course with jumps as high as hills. Chomping up the ice as he approached each obstacle, he would rev the bike to the max and shoot into the dark sky at the crest like a rocket, trailing diamond crystals. When he landed he touched down feather-light and charging. The monster bike was under perfect mental control, for he wore his CE helmet. After taking an awesome triplehumper that was as high as Mount Washington, he reared back and pulled a triumphant wheelie and saw the whirling spikes flash above his head in the light of the moon, clean and sharp and deadly and ready for any opponent rash enough to threaten him for the lead.

The dream replayed itself each time he drifted back into sleep, and the frustrating climax of the race was always the same.

An old black BMW T99RT coming out of nowhere behind him, looking small and ridiculous, but still gaining on him steadily. The voice in the CE helmet circuitry warning him that the upcoming rider would beat him. Would win the race if he didn’t—if he didn’t—

At that point in the dream Marc’s tall, invincible bike vanished. He was aboard his Honda again. The other rider, crouched low over the handlebars of the Beemer, drew closer, closer, until the Fury-voice was frantic and the spectators in the stands were going wild and the finish line was just ahead. The other bike came up beside him, its rider unarmored, wearing ordinary riding apparel, but enveloped in an impervious thought-screen. And now in the last seconds the rival was beginning to pull forward. Beginning to win. Would win, unless—

Fury shouted and Marc obeyed, wrenching his own bike viciously toward the enemy, smashing into him, riding over him, leaving him spinning, bleeding, torn hideously by the spikes, his face behind the helmet visor contorted in pain, incredulous, unable to believe what Marc had done.

The face. Somebody unfamiliar and familiar. Somebody Marc ought to know. Someone he couldn’t recognize,
had to recognize
before he woke up and then slept again and the dream replayed forever …

“Marc. Can you hear me? Marc?”

He heard the voice, felt the gently coercive mental touch,
opened his eyes. Saw the bronzed, high-cheekboned face of Tukwila Barnes, the longtime family friend who was now the Director of the Department of Metapsychology at the Ferrand Mental Science Center. It was Tucker who was prodding him awake, closing off the too tempting sleepway with its nightmare that still beckoned. Marc was aware of another operant, a woman in a white coat, who was doing something redactive to support Barnes. Marc knew her, too. It was Dr. Cecilia Ashe, Maurice’s wife, his aunt. Marc gave up fighting against the pair of them. The dream faded, forgotten, and he remembered the other urgent matter and tried to struggle upright in the bed.

Tucker and Aunt Cele restrained him easily. “Whoa. Stay down. Give yourself a minute or two. Or three.” Tucker was smiling, projecting vibes of relief. “We’ve got a few tubes and dinguses hooked onto you. Don’t disturb them yet. If you’re really coming out of it, we’ll get you free in a little while.”

Marc finally relaxed. Cecilia tossed an indecipherable telepathic query at Barnes and then hurried out of the room.

“Tucker?” Marc’s voice was an anxious whisper. “What day is it?”

“The day after,” said Barnes. “Sunday evening, 1840 hours, the fifteenth of February, Earth reckoning.”

“Is Jack all right?”

The metapsychologist was thrown for a momentary loss by the question. “Jack …? His condition is unchanged. Don’t you care about yourself?”

Marc managed a small smile. “Okay, what kind of shape am I in?”

“You’ve got a few third-degree burns, a sprained left wrist, and a small subdural hematoma—a little blood clot on the brain caused by landing smack on the top of your head when you were thrown from your bike. Your hard hat absorbed most of the shock, and the clot will go away by itself. None of your injuries will keep you down for more than a week or so. You were in shock. Now you’re out of it. You’ve got a tube up your nose giving you a little extra oxygen, and a couple of needles in your bad arm giving you sugar and water and stuff and monitoring your blood, and a catheter where you’d rather not have it collecting precious bodily fluids, and a batch of electrode bugs clinging to various
other parts of your anatomy. Apart from that, you’re in good condition.”

Marc was levering himself upright again, and this time Barnes’s coercion was impotent to stop him. “Tucker, I’ve got to get out of here. Got to go see Jack—”

The door to the hospital room opened. Paul came in, with Lucille and Denis and Cecilia Ashe. The woman doctor reacted swiftly to Marc’s attempt to get out of bed. Her redaction did something unexpected to the motor area of his brain, and he dropped back onto his pillow as limp as a rag doll.

“Unless you want me to administer a sedative, young man, lie still!”

Marc glared at her. Then he quit fighting.

“That’s better,” Cecilia said. “Tucker and I will leave you to talk to your father and your grandparents for a few minutes if you promise to behave yourself.”

Marc nodded.

Lucille opened her very large handbag and took out something that gleamed with a metallic luster. A trophy. “You won, Marc. The racing was halted for the day after the accident happened. Yours was the only trophy awarded.” She set the thing on the convenience unit beside the bed.

Marc uttered a raspy little laugh and turned his head away.

“How are you feeling, son?” Paul asked. He and Denis and Lucille drew up chairs to the bedside.

“No pain I can’t psych away,” the boy said. The door closed behind Tucker and Cecilia. Marc’s husky whisper fell nearly to the point of inaudibility. “He died, didn’t he. Whoever he was …”

“Yes.” Paul’s face was expressionless. “It was your Cousin Gordon McAllister.”

“Gordo!” Marc’s mental screen thickened palpably. “Of course! I thought it was someone I knew. But it all happened so fast … God! Gordo! He must have been crazy. Poor Aunt Cat.”

“Catherine’s devastated,” Paul said. “She said Gordon had been acting in a perfectly normal manner when she agreed to let him come up from Brebeuf for the Winter Carnival. He was staying at Phil and Aurelie’s house with some of the other cousins, happy as a clam with your old
bike, talking about entering the ice-cycle races himself someday. None of us can make any sense out of what happened. What Gordo thought he was doing. Whether it was some kind of idiotic prank, or whether—”

“He meant to kill me,” Marc said.

Lucille gave a small cry.

“Are you certain?” Denis asked gravely.

“His intent was clear as glass, Grandpère. I didn’t even know who he was when he came at me out of nowhere, but I sure as hell knew what he intended to do. Jack gave me a nanosecond’s warning. I hit the brakes, and the Beemer’s spikes rode over my front wheel instead of over me. The fire—I can’t understand the fire. The fuel tanks of the bikes are safety-lined. They almost never burn in a crash. Poor old Gordo.” Bespeaking Denis on his intimate mode, the boy added: Was it quick?