The Beauty of Our Weapons

by Jilly Paddock

  “What should I use?”

  “Trust and friendship. That’s Chandre’s way, and I’d go down into Hell for her, but I wouldn’t straighten my little finger for you!”

  “There weren’t any codewords.” He tried to look hurt and just about scraped sulky. “Nobody tampered with your Zenith, Anna. How could you distrust us so?”

  I looked him right in his eyes, which were insincere and Limpopo-coloured, and watched him squirm as I spoke the words of his spell. “No magic words, huh? No incantation to strike my computer dead? Was it just a memo that you left in his memory banks then, that jumble of nonsense words—quaestor, fibonacci, melissant? They don’t work anymore, Michael-dear. I included them out of my Zenith.”

  “You don’t have the training to do anything that sophisticated.” Guilt flushed his cheeks. “I’ll lay odds it was that hippy musician of yours, the one who fucks you!”

  I grinned at the insult. “Oh, he does, and very expertly too, thank you! Mikey, sweetheart, I do believe you’re jealous!”

  Blush pink to livid scarlet in one easy move—the man was too easy to bait. “Anna, don’t be ridiculous!”

  I fluttered my eyelashes at him and simpered sweetly. “I don’t understand why you suspect Jeb. Whatever would a humble but talented musician know about programming?”

  “I had his rather colourful past checked out. Did you know that his mother was insane and died in an asylum, or that he spent almost a year in prison for drug-related offences, or that he has a doctorate in computer technology from Dhantechni?” Collins played his ace. “Lucas was the other person on board Brimstone, I’m sure of it!”

  “Your data is faulty, but I suppose that one out of three isn’t a bad score when you’re dealing with a master hacker like Jeb Lucas. And you’re out of date.” I was determined to spoil his triumph. “He’s better qualified to work on Zeniths than all of your maintenance crew—he’s Aneeta Freeberg’s son, and that clever lady is neither mad nor dead. He’s also my husband, so if you or any of your agents lay one finger on him, I will personally take this organisation apart!”

  Collins faltered. “Your husband?”

  “Uh huh. Sewn up tight and neat, legally ironclad. You did ask me to make sure Delany Corp was in good hands if I were to die.”

  “I think I’d prefer Transyst-Interworld!”

  “No you wouldn’t, not when its president’s niece is very probably an active member of the Sisterhood of Grace.”

  “The Cluster assassin cult?” Michael swallowed hard. “Anna, I’d like you to tell me what happened on Tambouret.”

  “I might, if you apologise for being so unpleasant about Jeb.”

  “Don’t be so childish!”

  I turned my head away. “Dr Ayres, I think I’m too exhausted to answer any further questions.”

  A sudden rainbow of amusement wreathed Beth’s mind, while her face remained serious. “Perhaps we should let her rest, Michael. After all, she’s been through quite an ordeal—”

  “I give in!” Collins spread his hands wide in defeat. “I’m sorry, deeply sorry! I swear I’ll never insult the inestimable Dr Lucas again. He’s a paragon of virtue and I wish he’d married into my own family—”

  “Don’t overdo it!” I warned. “As for Tambouret, I wish I’d had time to send you a postcard—food wonderful, scenery gorgeous, oh, and, by the way, there’s one heavy rebellion brewing. An off-world messiah is preaching a gospel against technology, and the Tambou might be just weird enough to buy it. Transyst is definitely involved, and maybe rebel influences from other colonies as well, and the Sisterhood have a passing interest in the proceedings. It’s ripe to explode and there’ll be carnage if it does. I’d advise mopping it up before the flood rises.”

  “You were there. Why didn’t you sort it out?” Michael demanded.

  “I got Chandre out, along with Lyall and the Jansens. Wasn’t that enough? The movement had kidnapped them and was asking a ransom of Delany stock—Chandre and Meeka have a fair-sized chunk of it between them, it seems.” I paused, wondering if I should go on. What the hell, why not? “That isn’t the all of it. This messiah has a pet demon, or maybe it’s the other way round. We all faced it, and doing so pushed 4013 into instability, damn near killed me and left the others in coma. It has horrendous power—I’m not sure that all of your agent-pairs combined could overcome it. With backing like that, we may not be able to touch the rebellion.”

  To my surprise, he laughed. “Beth, I think she’s finally cracked! A demon, Anna? With horns, a tail and cloven hooves yet? Things like that exist only in fable and in the minds of children!”

  “It was real. I stood in front of it—I know.”

  “It was in your mind, Anna,” he insisted.

  “Michael’s right.” Beth echoed. “Demons don’t exist. Whatever you think you saw, it must have been an illusion.”

  “You really make me sick! You turn people into psychics to use in your games, but you don’t understand, do you? You can’t appreciate what psionics or true psi power can do.” I sat up and parted company with my IV line. Beth winced as the fluid dripped monotonously onto the floor, in counterpoint to my heated outburst. “If anyone’s qualified to draw the line between reality and fiction, I am. That demon was genuine, as real as a rock or a rainbow. If the label ‘demon’ upsets you, call it an ‘elemental power source’ or a ‘well of psi energy’ or anything else you damn well care to! Don’t dismiss it as illusion, because even illusion can kill!”

  Collins smiled his contempt. “I find that hard to believe.”

  My temper finally got the better of me. I crafted a seeming out of the empty air at the end of my bed, the Tambou tiger-construct. I built so well that I felt the weight of the beast on my feet and smelt the musky cat-scent of it. Beth squealed and backed against the wall, but Michael stood his ground.

  “Very pretty,” his voice cracked as he said it. “It isn’t real.”

  “No, it isn’t.” I agreed, stroking the simulacrum’s velvet ears and filling the small room with the thrum of its purr. This was dangerous ground and Zenni would have told me to hush my mouth, but Zenni wasn’t here and I was angry. “It’s an illusion, a mere figment of my imagination, and if I told it to tear your throat out, it would. I could make you feel its teeth in your flesh, put the pain of it into your mind and let you watch your lifeblood leaking away. If you believed it, you might really die. You see, it’s all a matter of belief—my belief against yours. If, for one microsecond, you allowed yourself to doubt, then this pretty phantom would kill you!”

  “It isn’t solid.” Collins protested, struggling to appear calm, although he must know that his panic was plainly visible to me. “How could it hurt me? It isn’t there!”

  “I believe in it.” I patted the striped flank and the tiger hopped down from the bed. Spitefully I made it stalk Collins, its ears pressed flat to its skull and the white tip of its tail twitching. “Well, Michael? Do you think that your will is stronger than mine?”

  Sweat stood out on his brow. “Anna, don’t be stupid!”

  “Stupid? You’re the fool, you and all of your staff. You think you know all the ins and outs of your agents’ minds, and perhaps you do know enough to twist them to your purposes, but you don’t even try to understand what pairing is like from the inside, what it’s like to walk along the edges of the twilight zone.” I snapped my fingers and the tiger vanished. “I never wanted to be your enemy, any more than I wanted to be Erik’s, but your inflexible attitude makes me seem to oppose you. Our relationship could make it all the way up to a friendly level, if only you’d let it. Do you still want to throw me out of EI?”

  “More than ever!” That was honesty, all pretence discarded. “You’re way too dangerous, always running rogue, always beyond our control. You want everything on your own terms, and Chandre foolishly panders to your every whim. Luck’s carried you a long way, all the way down to this final failure. The pity of it is that three others paid the price. If yo
u have a conscience, which I doubt, consider that!”

  I slid over the side of the bed and stood up, feeling silly in the skimpy hospital gown.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Beth demanded.

  “Anywhere I damn well like! I’ve nothing further to say to Dr Collins. No amount of talk will bridge over the chasm between us.”

  “You are no longer in the employ of EI!” Collins snarled. “You will be excluded from Merope and this part of the Delany site. You will make no attempt to contact any of our agents who are known to you, nor will you reveal any of our secrets to outside agencies. Any breach of security will be attributed to you and will be dealt with severely. Do you understand?”

  “You aren’t in a position to threaten me!” I almost laughed at that. “And I don’t consider myself fired until I get Chandre’s say-so.”

  “You will receive proper notification from the acting Head of Operations—”

  “What makes me think that’s you?” I said archly.

  Collins worked up a smile. “We shall also require you to return our property. You will bring 4013 back to us for reassignment.”

  He thought he had me there; smugness gilded his dull grey aura but, however hard he tried, Michael would always be an also-ran in the villain stakes. Beth edged fractionally towards the door, wary of the explosion she expected in response to her superior’s show-stopping line.

  “Return my Zenith? The hell I will!”

  “You have no choice. The machine is ours.”

  “Yours? I think not!” I chuckled, glorying in his dawning dismay. “This project is very expensive to keep going, and although the government funds it generously, we at Delany plough in a substantial contribution of our own. Ask your lawyers; they drew up a very nifty agreement between the two parties, and they’ll tell you that the Zeniths are no different to any other large lumps of Delany hardware—you lease them from the Corporation.” I took a pause, purely for effect. “All except one.”

  The blood drained from his face. “4013?”

  “Got it in one.” It had cost me dearly to buy Zenni’s lease and I’d raised the capital from selling Firebird, parting with some of my mother’s jewellery and even borrowing from a friend or two. The price had been steep yet I’d paid it gladly, goaded by a premonition of just such a scene as this. “I’ll send you a copy of the documents, if you like, but you can forget challenging them. They were witnessed by no less than three serving members of the High Council.”

  Collins stared at me as if I’d placed a noose around his neck and was about to open a trapdoor at his feet. “You can call on a quarter of the Council for support? That’s Lune’s doing, no doubt?”

  “My father always said that if you want results, cut out the middleman and go straight to the top!” I winked at him. “Goodbye, Michael, and behave yourself!”

  I didn’t teleport far, just into the corridor, to gauge my replenished strength and to get my bearings for the next hop. I wanted to see Chandre before I left, but it took me three jumps to find the right place. I hadn’t realised that EI had a hospital on site, but I found one spreading out around me on the sixth floor of the building, complete with two operating theatres, a pocket-sized lab and three wards.

  What can you say about people in intensive care? They’re simply extensions of all that complex machinery, lumps of meat intruding into the stainless steel and plastic perfection of the ward. Meeka looked frail and so very young under her burden of tubes. Lyall really did look ill, with deep, waxy shadows under his closed eyes. Chandre seemed older than I’d ever seen her, all her vitality extinguished and wrinkles savagely carved into the slack planes of her elfin face. In spite of their coma they were certainly not dead, although their minds were oddly inactive. The spark of life glittered deep within all three of them, and for that I was grateful.

  “Who are you?” One of the staff spotted me and moved purposefully in my direction. “What are you doing here?”

  I cast my unfortunate friends a silent farewell and teleported out.

  ***

  Aiming to land inside the cabin, I materialised within the circle of Merryweather’s Dance. As my bare feet touched base a jolt of energy sparked up from the earth, a thrill of welcome. I frowned, unaccustomed to being misdirected through limbo, but as Jeb had warned me, this was a magical site. When I placed my hand on the keystone her ley-field spun out around my shoulders in a ghostly swirl and the last of my headache blew away.

  “Friends?” There was little need to ask it—no malice had ever sullied this place. I left the henge and climbed onto the porch. The door of the cabin was locked, carbon-steel bolts shot home, all its alarms up and running. Jeb must have been expecting unwelcome visitors. I teleported around the barrier to get inside.

  The house by the nameless lake was empty, shrouded in that ear-aching silence only the early hours of the morning can bring. So much solitude, the great width and depth of it, an ancient pool of quiet that eased my aches, soothed my troubles. The planking of the living room floor was cool beneath my bare feet as I paused in a vivid slash of moonlight to catch my breath. Despite multiple jumps in a short space of time I was unwearied, which was just as well as the blast-doors were down and the caverns sealed against attack, so I had to teleport down to the hangar level.

  As I’d guessed, Brimstone was here, her outer hatch wide open. I entered, noting as I made my way to the heart of the ship that Jeb was in the master cabin, lost in a maze of dreams. I walked blindly through the dark passages, not needing sight to find my way to the flight deck. Even here there was little light. A scattering of dim green tell-tales gave the status of all operational ship systems, and a single white light on the face of his console betrayed the fact that my Zenith was on power.

  “Zenni?” I smiled at his photoeye, speaking aloud as our link was dead, expecting his fascia to explode into a blaze of brilliance. There was no reaction.

  “Zenni? Do you hear me?” I waited for his reply. None came. Michael’s story of a babbling, lunatic machine which I’d dismissed as a trick on Zenni’s part, now began to worry me. Perhaps my Zenith had been damaged in our brush with Tambouret’s demon, or maybe Jeb had disconnected the vocal circuits in the course of repairs and Zenni was unable to speak to me. I turned to leave the flight deck, determined to wake Jeb and have an answer to my questions.

  “Anna!” There was a sob in the name. “Don’t go!”

  “You can speak!” I whirled back to face him, in floods of relief. “Why didn’t you answer before?”

  “I couldn’t.”

  An intermittent fault? “Whyever not? Is there something wrong?”

  There was an uneasy pause and I waited it out, itching with frustration at this unnatural exclusion from my partner’s throughtstream. At last he spoke, his synthesised voice low and flat, sounding as a man might if he was trying to keep a lid on his misery. “I failed you, Anna. You were in mortal danger, facing that... that monster... and as for me, your faithful, loyal partner, what did I do? I ran away!”

  “You had no choice,” I said gently. “The demon pushed you out of my head. If you hadn’t left, it would probably have destroyed you.”

  “But I ran!” He was still incredulous at his reaction, the amazement intact despite time and distance, full of contempt and self-hate. “I’m programmed never to do that, never to abandon the human half of my pairing. I don’t know how I could have done it—ignore one of the cardinal directives in my primary rule-base and run away! I was afraid... Can you believe that? A machine afraid? I deserted you, betrayed you, left you alone, unprotected, to face that thing! I abandoned you to die, running away to save my own worthless circuits! God help me, Anna, I don’t know what possessed me to do such a thing!”

  “It was the evil in that place. It forced you to leave me.”

  “But you stayed. You had the guts to face it!”

  “Believe me, I didn’t want to. I was just as scared as you.” I assured him. “Given the choice, I would ha
ve run too—a lot faster and further than you did, I’ll bet, but it didn’t give me that option. I had to stay, just as you had to flee. There was nothing else either of us could do.”

  “Yet you survived unscathed.” Something of his habitual calm was seeping back. “How did you pull off that trick?”

  “I wish I knew. It had power enough to kill me ten times over and yet it let me live. Perhaps the dawn came and banished it from our reality, perhaps Draoi relented and called it off, or perhaps it had pressing business elsewhere.” I sighed, recalling the beast running from me and certain that nothing I’d done had caused its fear. “I woke in the clearing and it had gone. I managed to get all of us back on board Brimstone and you know the rest.”

  “You have Jeb to thank for getting us back to Earth. All of you were out cold and I wasn’t much better.” Zenni confessed. “He handled all of the first-aid, then talked me out of my helpless state and into flying the ship. The child woke up after a few hours, but none of the rest of you so much as stirred. Jeb coped with all the routine medical treatment and kept the little girl amused all the way down to orbit—he’s surprisingly good with children, you know. Our secret arrival at SanFran was his idea, and also the double-cross we pulled on Collins. Our Dr Lucas is made of sterner stuff than his appearance would have you believe.”

  “I know that.” I moved to his console, pressing my left palm against its warm surface. “Let’s re-establish our link, Zenni, so we can catch up on information quicker.”

  “No.”

  For a moment I was taken aback. “What?”

  “No link.”

  “Why? Were you damaged on Tambouret?”

  “No, but you might so easily have been.” His voice was shaking again. “You have the talent to work on your own—what do you need a cowardly, unreliable computer for? Leave me, leave EI and put all these dangerous games behind you! Just look at what I’ve done for you over the years; turned you into a fugitive wanted clear across the galaxy, kept you from seeing your home, dragged you through deadly intrigues and into lethal traps! Because of me trouble has hounded your every step. Because of me you’ve suffered horrific injuries and almost died! I’m no good for you, Anna. Go out and lead your own life. Go out and be safe, running Delany Corp, learning to be happy, being a good wife to Jeb and even raising a family, if that’s your dream. Lead a long and healthy life—forget EI and forget me! You don’t need me—you never have. I’ve brought you nothing but pain and sorrow, and I’m not going to compound that crime by linking with you again!”