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.
Flinx found himself confronting someone as tall as himself, but differently built. The woman was clad in a jet-black jumpsuit whose legs were sealed, not tucked, into black boots that came up just over the ankles. On her head she wore a black skullcap foiled in crimson. A biting chill went through Flinx as he recognized the ensemble, which was complete to the singular belt buckle cut from a solid crystal of vanadium and inlaid with gold skull and crossbones.
A Qwarm.
The professional assassin was perversely attractive despite her hairlessness. Together with the intricately laden weapons belt that encircled her waist, total depilation was another hallmark of the members of the assassins guild. She held two firearms. One was the wide-muzzled pistol that had caught Pip with the glob of smothering restraint. The other, at once less imposing and more intimidating, was a phonic stiletto. A particular favorite of the Qwarm, it employed ultra-high-energy sound waves that could cut through almost anything. Eyeing it, Flinx was acutely aware of the vulnerability of his unarmored body.
Though Flinx was an experienced empathetic telepath, able to read the emotions of others, a very few humans were difficult to detect even when his talent was fully functional. Such uncommon individuals were hard to perceive because they functioned at a very low emotional level. The woman staring back at him was not emotionless: She had simply been trained to exercise exceptional control over her feelings. Only when she had been about to fire the semi-liquid, congealing restraint at him had he been able to detect her presence. When Pip had risen to his defense, she had been forced to unload the weapon on the minidrag instead.
Stalk complete, her liberated emotions were now easier for him to read. He decided he preferred to think of the tall, muscular woman as an emotional blank.
“Move.” Her voice was unalloyed ice, absolute zero, the nadir of compassion. She gestured with the stiletto. “That way.”
“My companion . . .” He indicated Pip, who continued to struggle, albeit weakly, with the now hardened restraints.
“Forget your pet. It will not die. Only rest. You go forward, slowly. Go any other direction and I will cut the Achilles tendon of your right leg.” She gestured meaningfully with the stiletto. The movement momentarily stirred air and sound together to produce an audible warning.
There was nothing he could do. With a last reassuring look and burst of empathy, he left the minidrag grappling with her bonds and started off in the indicated direction. He wanted to confront Mahnahmi anyway—though not like this.
The beautiful blonde had picked herself up and was staring thoughtfully at the flickering film that had swallowed all but one member of her escort. As she approached with her captive, the Qwarm spoke in a tone of voice that was slightly more respectful than the one she had used to address her prisoner.
“Madam Mahnahmi, I have found a male human intruder.”
“Someone else is here? Maybe someone who’s responsible for what happened to Jellicoat and the others.” She started to turn. “Bring him over. By all the states of matter, if we’ve been preceded by a competitor in spite of all the precautions I’ve taken I’ll—” She broke off as she caught sight of her bodyguard’s charge. Years had passed, and time had wrought significant physical changes in them both, but the way her eyes widened showed that she recognized him instantly. Her emotional reaction, Flinx noted, was as unpleasant as could be expected.
“You! Here, now,
in this place!” Her pert mouth, so adept at the childhood pouting he remembered well, contorted into a twisted grimace of hatred. “You spoiled everything for me years ago. I was some time recovering from your barging in then. Don’t think I’m going to let it happen again!”
Unwavering pistol pointed at the exact center of her captive’s back, the Qwarm was politely puzzled. Flinx sensed the phonic stiletto hovering dangerously close to his spine.
“You know this one?” the assassin asked.
Mahnahmi’s flaxen hair shimmered in the internal illumination provided by the artifact, forming a lustrous, red-tinged nimbus around her head. Flinx knew it was no halo.
“Know him? Better than anyone else could.” Walking over until she was within arm’s length, she stared up into his face. “You meddling redheaded bastard. This is the second time you’ve intruded on my labors. What did you do with the rest of my crew?”
“Nothing,” he replied calmly. “I was as taken by surprise by the device’s activation as you were. Of course, it didn’t take everyone. You squandered the life of one individual yourself.”
“Kenboka?” His implied rebuke upset her not in the slightest. “He was starting to make it hard for me, hanging on my leg like that. Where the hell did you fall from?” A sudden thought made her look past him, past her bodyguard. “Briony, the last time I had the misfortune to encounter this one he had a pet with him. A dangerous aerial endotherm.”
“Neutralized.” The Qwarm gestured backward without shifting her eyes from her prisoner’s shoulders.
Mahnahmi nodded once. Superficially, she was exquisite. Her emotions, however, plumbed the deepest depths of the disturbing. “Good. Do you remember, Flinx fellow, my last words to you before I was forced by your interference to flee Ulru-Ujurr and everything I had fought for years to bring about?”
“That was a long time ago.” Could Pip gradually extricate herself from her bonds? It depended how resistant to her corrosive poison the polymers of the hardened restraints were.
“Not so very long ago, I think.” Approaching closer still, she put a hand on his shirt and ran a finger up and down the center seal. “ ‘Some day, I’ll even be strong enough to come back for you.’ Remember that?” She uttered a short, unpleasant laugh. “I never expected you to come back for me.”
“I didn’t come here for that. Believe me, I never expected to see you again. Ever.”
Cocking her head slightly to one side, she took a step back and regarded him with unwavering curiosity. “Then what are you doing here?”
“Maybe the same thing you are,” he theorized tentatively. “Having a look around for my real self.”
She hesitated, then laughed amusedly. “Really? If you don’t know where it is, you must find the continuous absence of yourself very disconcerting. Fortunately, I don’t have that problem. And soon, you won’t either.” Her expression darkened. “Since you don’t remember the last thing I said in your presence I don’t suppose you remember the first, either?”
He shook his head. “I was involved with the Janus jewels. You were a little girl.”
“I was never a little girl!” Her mental blast of mingled fear and fury took him aback. “Never! Conda Challis saw to that, may his bloated, arrogant, deviant carcass rot in whatever hell the theologically resourceful can invent for him!” Her voice fell, but her expression did not change. “What I said was, ‘Kill him.’ ”
Flinx thought he felt the phonic stiletto make contact with his upper back, just beneath the left shoulder, aiming for his heart. The imminence of death struck him like a heavy hammer, obliterating all other thought, wiping his mind glassy clean. Several times before, he had found himself in such situations. Each time, something had happened. Each time, his mind blanked as something highly reactive that constituted a mysterious, unknown part of his brain responded to the threat.
This time, it seemed as if nothing could be done to prevent his impending demise. The Qwarm was too close, her reflexes too quick, the stiletto too lethal, the order too swiftly given. His hasty attempt to project disrupting feelings of fear and helplessness onto the assassin collapsed in a melange of mental chaos and confusion. A blackness descended over him, and he wondered if it was the duskiness of death drawing nigh. Only—there was no pain. Clean-killing as the phonic stiletto was, it still seemed as if there ought to be some pain.
When he opened his eyes, the Qwarm Briony lay crumpled on the ground four meters behind him, the stiletto still clutched tightly in her right hand, pistol in the other. Dazed and bemused, he stood swaying unsteadily, his vision more than slightly blurred. As it cleared, he saw a bewildered but not awed Mahnahmi gazing back at him.
“How did you do that?” She was staring straight into his eyes, as if trying to physically probe the mind beyond and the depths within. “You knocked her out. No—you knocked her out and off her feet. No hidden flashpak, no whirling martial arts high kick, nothing.” Her gaze dropped to the simple, comfortable, everyday jumpsuit he favored when traveling aboard the Teacher. “I can sometimes do things like that, when I’m really, really angry. And I’m angry a lot of the time. But not right now. Right now I’m just curious. What did you use? Your inner, innate Talent? Or something more prosaic, some kind of charged repulsion field that automatically reacts to any attempt to inflict an unauthorized bodily infraction?”
“Yes, that’s exactly it. You didn’t think I’d come exploring into a place like this without some kind of defense, did you?” In point of fact he hadn’t a clue to the specifics of what had happened. Something unknown and unrecognized had saved his life—and not for the first time, either. There had been a number of incidents, several times in his past when it seemed that his existence was about to be terminated, when something strange and unrevealed had intervened on his behalf. He was no wiser after this latest incident than he had been on previous occasions, no more enlightened as to the nature of whatever unknown self-defense mechanism continued to watch over him. That it had something to do with and was somehow related to his erratic, unpredictable abilities he had no doubt. It was immensely frustrating to possess such capabilities without having the vaguest notion of what they were or how they functioned.
Not that he was ungrateful. “Stay where you are,” he warned her, “or the same thing will happen to you!” Would it, he wondered? Or would she, given her own singular, inexplicable abilities, be able to walk right up to him in spite of anything he could do and punch him in the mouth? Given the wildly variable nature of both their veiled aptitudes, anything was possible.
Now that he had gained a moment or two, he made a conscious effort to project fear and concern onto her, as he had once projected feelings of love and affection onto the mind of a security guard named Elena Carolles. She just stared back at him. Whether his failure meant that she was immune to his efforts or that his talent was simply not functioning at that moment, he had no way of telling.
He knew only that the imminence of death triggered something buried deep inside him, something designed to ensure his survival. It would be really nice, he mused, to know what the hell it was. For now, though, he would have to be satisfied with the knowledge that it existed. If it was by nature as variable as his other abilities, he knew he could not count on it to watch over him every time doom came courting.
His warning was enough to make her pause uncertainly, though she looked longingly in the direction of her motionless bodyguard. Her momentary hesitation provided all the time Flinx needed. Keeping his eyes on the indecisive younger woman, he retreated until he was standing next to the powerful but inert body of the professional assassin. Kneeling, he reached first for the phonic stiletto. Even while unconscious, the Qwarm’s grip was so strong that he had to use both hands to pry first one and then the other weapon from her grasp. Searching her forbidding equipment belt, he found an assortment of restraints. Selecting one, he used it to secure her wrists and ankles. Mahnahmi looked on in silence, glowering at him as he worked, probably wondering if she ou
ght to contest him for possession of the weapons. Even when sporting an immutable sulk, she was beautiful.
Carefully applied, the tip of the phonic stiletto made short work of Pip’s adhesive bonds. Once freed, the flying snake began to clean herself, releasing minuscule amounts of toxin to dissolve away the last clinging bits of hobbling material. Leaving the minidrag to her toilet, Flinx deactivated the stiletto and attached it to his own duty belt. Then he returned to confront his pale, fair-haired nemesis. Habitually even-tempered, he was seething with exasperation and resentment.
Tracking him as he strode deliberately toward her, her gaze flicked from his face to the pistol gripped in one hand. She made no move to run or retreat. Was she, too, convinced that as a mutated Adept some inner mechanism would preserve her? Hadn’t she just said as much? He remembered what she had done that last time he had seen her on Ulru-Ujurr, ripping up rugs and furniture with the power of her rage. Or was she simply the coldest, most self-confident individual he had ever met?
“I’ve been studying you,” she murmured appraisingly. “If your suit contained an integrated defense mechanism, there would be indications. Understated, but discernible. I would have identified them by now. Whatever it was that overpowered Briony, it wasn’t your churlish attire. It must have been something within you. Something very much like that which resides within me.”
“So what?” he shot back defensively. “All you need to know is that it worked, and will work again if you try anything.”
“Will it? Will it, Philip Lynx?”
Names, he thought. Random combinations of letters, signifying what? A person? A specific individual? Stars had names, and nebulae, but of what significance was the name of a single living being? Frustration surged within him. He had spent too long trying to cope with names.
She wasn’t finished. “You really don’t know what you did to Briony, do you? Or even how you did it?”
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