Hearts and Minds: An Impulse Power Story

by J. C. Hay

  The officer sank to his knees in slow motion, his prosthetic fingers ineffective as they pushed at the ruin of his neck. She kicked him over onto his back. Her arm came around and the pistol coughed twice more, finishing the remaining soldier. Syna started down the hall then turned and grabbed the identification card off the officer’s lapel.

  The card opened the next set of double doors, taking her onto a mesh catwalk that ran the perimeter of a cylindrical room. Below, a set of transteel windows allowed a view of the space outside Proxima Thule. Three weapons consoles stood beneath the windows, their chairs empty. Syna leaned against the closed door, her heart a trip hammer against her ribs, throat on fire from exertion.

  Rest later. Move. She shoved herself away from the door and started for the nearest ladder when a voice froze her in her tracks.

  “I wondered when you’d get here. Gods, babe, you look great.”

  Galen unslung the autofléchette as he ran, the image of Syna carving through the Tse without a care in the world seared into his brain. Her gore-streaked blade and spattered face. This was her, as much as the passionate, unrestrained woman he had made love to was her. His angel of war, driving a vengeful blade through all who opposed her. Beautiful and terrible in equal measure.

  Have to keep moving forward, have to stop the Tse if we want anything like a future. He focused as much of his mind as he could out ahead of him, looking for anyone who might stop him from reaching the elevator. A strange throb pressed on the corner of his awareness, pushed in on him when he tried to expand his awareness too far. No doubt a side effect of the beacon opening into null.

  The elevator, when it opened, was mercifully empty. Astringent smells burned his sinuses as the doors closed on him and the small car began a rapid ascent to the far end of the station. Along one side of the door a small map of the station showed the location of the car as he rose. He felt the subtle shift in pressures as the car slowed to a halt and reached out again with his mind to check his surroundings.

  Pain lanced into his forebrain immediately, white-hot behind his eyes. He lurched against the door, vaguely aware of other minds beyond, tasting iron in his throat as blood filled his mouth and nose. The pain blinded him, refused to recede; he could only barely make out the shapes in the elevator car. He felt the door start to rotate open and slapped the emergency stop. The muzzle of his autofléchette pushed into the room beyond, and he yanked back hard on the trigger to flood the space with near supersonic ceramic needles. When the autofléchette stopped its coughing bark, Galen fumbled for another clip from his pocket. The spent magazine dropped from the rifle, and he slammed a new one home.

  In the near quiet, he heard whimpering. Galen blinked until his vision had mostly returned and peered out through the crack in the door. He choked back the bitter acid that flooded his throat when his brain registered the carnage in the hall. Most of two Tse soldiers covered the floor, recognizable only by the remnants of uniform cloth that stood stark among the crimson mess. A third, who must have been farther back, pulled himself across the floor towards the end of the corridor. The sounds that came from his throat had long since passed anything recognizable as intelligent, just a constant mewling cry of agony.

  Galen released the stop on the door and raised the autofléchette to his shoulder. His first shot ended the suffering of the poor wretch trying to crawl away, as much out of mercy as anything else. He raised his rifle and fired again, just as a pair of hands came around the wall. His target howled, hands perforated by the needles, while Galen charged forward. He fired twice more as he rounded the corner and the Tse dropped. Galen looked down at the corpse. Medic’s tags flashed from the dead man’s lapels. His stomach lurching, he checked the injured man he’d killed in the hall. The same Tse emblem adorned his lapels.

  A medical squad. They thought you were bringing up wounded. No. He couldn’t be certain of anything except that they had medical badges. He walked down the hall at a slower pace, unwilling to reach out with his mind again and risk rupturing another blood vessel in his sinuses.

  Hallways radiated out from the central hub of the station, connecting to the residential ring beyond. There’d be no access to the beacon out there, he knew, and looked instead for any passage that led deeper into the core of the lighthouse. No one came out to stop him. Galen started to run again, encouraged by the lack of resistance. The first door that met his qualifications gave way under his shoulder and he charged inside.

  Instantly, a dozen voices battered against his mind. The white sterility of the room added to his disorientation, and he dropped the rifle to press both palms to his temples. He squeezed until the pain cut through the confusion and he could focus. He raised wards to defend himself from the probing attacks, and they abated enough to let him concentrate on the room. Three banks of covered beds lined the walls; each accompanied by a small vitals readout and connected to the wall by a series of cables. At first glance, Galen thought he’d stumbled into the medical ward by mistake. The medical squad made more sense.

  He went to the closest bed—a child, no more than thirteen, lay inside. Skin so thin as to be transparent covered the boy, whose eyelids flittered in the throes of REM sleep. The metallic web of a psi-amplifier had been attached to the child’s bald head and to half the cables that snaked from the wall. Additional cables emerged from the boy’s abdomen, filled with fluids Galen couldn’t recognize that pulsed in and out of his body. The patient in the next bed was a woman, Tse to judge by her golden skin and near-perfect features, clad in the same white shift and head apparatus as the boy. Sores, crusted and calloused with age, showed where the clips dug into her shaved scalp. The third bed was a young man, the fourth a man gray with age. Liver spots stretched across his hands where they lay folded on his chest.

  Galen opened part of his defenses, trying to probe the minds that had assaulted him. A barrage of questions surged over him. “What’s going on? Who are you? Where am I? Why can’t I wake up?”

  A dark realization turned his blood to ice and Galen sank to the floor. The reason psi-talents couldn’t stare too long into the featureless gray of null, the strange longing that threatened to yank them into fugue states when they gazed into the abyss, what happened to those talents who were drummed out of the Tse’s savage training academy, the secret of how the lighthouses penetrated into null space at all. The room made the answer to all those questions coldly apparent.

  The beacon was nothing more than the terrified mental scream of psions, being used like giant, living transmitters to penetrate the fabric of reality and allow the Tse to expand. How many lighthouses across the Hegemony? How many psions sacrificed to feed each? Rage and grief dueled for supremacy in Galen’s mind. He dragged himself to the center of the room and sat down. Cautiously, he lowered the rest of his barriers and reached out to them. “How long have you been here?”

  As soon as he thought the words, queries poured in like a wave. He tried to sort them, to organize them, but they rushed in too fast to manage. He struggled to stay on top, then surrendered and let their questions carry him along. He began to discern patterns in their agony, the same terrified question repeated over and over. “Why won’t I die?”

  Unsure of any other way to end their pain, Galen showed them the only way he knew.

  Anbjorn stepped into view, his wolf-skin cloak draped around the shoulders of a Tse officer’s uniform like a natural outgrowth of his ego. In a sense, Syna supposed, that’s all it had ever been. He smiled at her, hands open to show they were empty. “It’s been too long. How’s Bree? Did you get the portside stabilizer looked at? I worried that they shot her up too much during your escape.” His inflection left no questions as to the reality of her flight from prison. The son of a bitch. He’d known she was there, known what they were doing, and all he’d done was arrange it so she could think she’d escaped. Fury bubbled over in her chest.

  “You let them torture me for six days! You let me think you were dead!”

  He climbed the ladd
er to her and stood just out of arm’s reach. In person, she could see what video had tried to hide—there was a softness to him that hadn’t existed before. His cheeks were jowly behind the braided and combed beard, his belly beginning to show signs of fat. “I didn’t want to. You have to understand, it was my mission. I only did it because I had to.”

  “What, the Tse held your family hostage?”

  He rolled his eyes. “I couldn’t break cover with you. It was too risky, and the Hegemony didn’t want to lose a valuable information source. I did what I could to make up for it.”

  Meaning he didn’t let them torture her too much. Syna’s eyes burned and she blinked away the tears of rage. Her hand crushed down on the safety rail, and she wished it was his throat. “How can you betray your own people?” How could you betray me? she wanted to add.

  “Easy. I like to be on the winning side. I thought you would have learned that about me, at least.”

  “But the Tse aren’t even human!”

  He cocked his head, his confusion obvious. “They’re more than human. Stronger. Faster. More streamlined. They’re the next step in human evolution. Fewer teeth, no appendix, and more importantly, no cancers. No heart disease. They’re everything we aspire to be.”

  “I’ve never wanted to be any more than I already am.”

  “Then excuse me for thinking bigger,” he said. Her hand drifted to the hilt of her monoblade and he whispered, “It doesn’t have to be like this. I know the rogue talent’s with you. Surrender him to me. We can put the blame for all of this on him. They’ll pardon you. Things will be the way they were.”

  “When I thought you had died, I would have given up anything to have you back. Avenging your death is what kept me from breaking in prison. I swore I would punish the Tse and their collaborators for taking you away from me.” She heard her voice rising, no longer caring what he or anyone else thought.

  “I told you, I had to—”

  “Now that you need something, you come crawling back to me? It can never go back to the way things were. The Anbjorn I cared about died that day. Whether or not you lived, the only part of you I respected is gone. Your honor.”

  He tugged the axe free of his belt and charged, his voice bellowing a Vanyari war cry as his cloak billowed behind him. Syna ducked under the scything blade and swept his legs out from under him. Overbalanced, Anbjorn toppled forward into the safety rail but not over. Her monoblade screamed as she brought it down for the kill.

  His axe sang a companion song as it matched her blade and turned it aside. He wore a bemused smirk on his face as he pushed himself away from the edge and stood to his full height. His chuckle sounded like distant thunder. “You’re really going to fight me? After all we’ve shared?”

  “You already showed me how much that meant to you.” She pressed in corps-a-corps and drove her knee towards his groin.

  He twisted enough to catch the shot on his thigh. “I know all your tricks, hon.” He tangled his hand in her hair and tugged her close for a kiss. “You’ve never beaten me. Why don’t you stop this before I get angry?”

  Syna resisted the urge to spit the taste of him from her mouth. Outside the windows, the Constant Perseverance slipped into view. It was returning to station at speed, no doubt to collect her and Galen. She looked back to Anbjorn and nodded, hoping her smile looked sincere. “You’re right.” She shut off her monoblade and ran.

  She was in a barely controlled fall down the next ladder around the catwalk before Anbjorn realized what she had planned. Her feet slammed into the deck plates and the shock drove her teeth together hard enough to light stars across her vision.

  He started down the ladder closest to him, while she shut off the friend-foe identification overrides that kept the station from targeting an allied vessel. The systems locked onto the Constant Perseverance with a beep.

  Anbjorn roared, his axe over his head as he came at her. Syna waited until he was close, then pulled her pistol and fired.

  The ceramic shredded the saffron cloth of his uniform, revealed the reinforced mesh beneath. He lashed out with a backhand that split her cheek and sent her sprawling to the floor. “You tried to kill me! Hells, until now, this could have been foreplay. Lucky for me I already suspected you were stupid, weak and untrustworthy.”

  Syna touched her cheek, feeling the sticky damp of blood seeping from the cut. Nothing broken, though she was certain he’d loosened one of her teeth. “I saw you die. I’m just helping your body catch up.” She spat on the floor and tried not to notice the pink tinge it carried.

  “Same old Syna. You just don’t know when you’re beaten. I used to think it was romantic, that against-all-odds streak of yours. Looking at it now, I can’t decide if it’s delusional or just sad.”

  She threw herself off the floor and charged, a weapon in each hand. He reached for her, but she cartwheeled to one side. She lashed out with the point of her boot and caught him in the stomach. Air woofed past his lips in a cough, and he brought the axe around in a clumsy arc.

  She danced away from the strike. “The domesticated life doesn’t suit you. You’ve let yourself grow soft, Anbjorn. Once upon a time, I’d have broken my foot on your stomach. Now? You’re more lapdog than wolf.”

  He roared again and charged.

  Galen collapsed against the wall of the elevator car, his face streaked with tears and blood. Untrained, unfocused, the wild psi-talents in the beacon had no knowledge of how to shut down their own neural paths, so he taught them. One by one the diagnostic panels flickered and turned red as the imprisoned psions willed themselves to die. Galen kept his mind open in spite of the pain, listening as one by one the voices that filled the room dropped into silence. The beacon’s signal died, and he wondered how many ships had been following it, now lost somewhere in the featureless nothing of null.

  Once the thought might have horrified him. Now he saw it as a fair trade. How many of his friends, secreted away by the Tse, languished in other beacons scattered across Hegemony space?

  The elevator doors opened and he lurched out into the hall. Through the transteel view ports that lined the docking ring, he could see the Constant Perseverance drawing closer. Cold fear scrabbled at the edges of his heart. The ship was still there, Syna hadn’t taken the batteries. She’d run into trouble. He resisted the urge to search for her mind with his own. If she was fighting for her life, then he couldn’t afford to distract her. He broke into a run.

  Signs of her passage became evident—his angel of war, bringing death to her enemies. He ran down a stairwell slicked with blood and corpses and charged towards the room at the end of the hall. Galen exploded through the double doors and had his ears shredded by the shriek of two monoedged weapons powering into each other. On the floor below him, he saw her—locked in close combat with a giant almost twice her size. His braided hair and wolf-skin cloak made no question of his Vanyari origins. The two of them moved with the speed of demons, feinting, striking and defending as they danced across the floor of the room, ignorant of his presence on the catwalk above. He realized too late that he’d left the autofléchette in the beacon room.

  He spotted the main controls for the battery on the far side of the room, unguarded. Waiting. Galen moved around the catwalk as quickly as he could without drawing the combatants’ attention. If either of them spotted him, everything would fall apart. He slid down the ladder and eased into one of the console’s chairs. Everything had been set up, he realized. The FFI system was disabled. All he had to do was point and shoot.

  The Constant Perseverance shuddered as high-powered particle beams hit it amidships. The next volley tore through the bridge as a secondary explosion rippled along the spine of the cruiser. Behind him, Syna shouted over the scream of their weapons. “Get back to the Quarry! Now!”

  Galen leapt out of the chair and charged towards her, not even sure what he would do. He only knew that he wouldn’t leave her. Her eyes widened as she realized he was getting closer rather than fleei
ng, and that was all the distraction her opponent needed. The Vanyari kicked her feet out from under her, and Syna tumbled to the ground. Her screamsword went silent as it clattered out of her hand onto the deck plates. With a roar of triumph, the Vanyari raised his axe for the coup de grâce.

  Time slowed to a near stop.

  He looked at her face one more time, saw the moment she realized what was coming, and threw himself into the path of the blade.

  The monoaxe tore into Galen’s shoulder, the sides of the axe head grinding against the bones as it cleaved. The rolling twist of Galen’s body turned the weapon with it, wrenched it out of the giant’s hand as he continued past Syna and collapsed nearby. The blade went inert as it left the Vanyari’s hands, becoming an awkward weight that dragged against Galen’s ribs. He lay there for a heartbeat before his body realized the extent of the trauma, and agony seared through him. Somewhere, he heard Syna scream his name in denial.

  The reek of gore filled his nose. He opened his eyes to find blood, too much blood, pouring out around him. Pink froth bubbled along the path of the axe with every breath he took. Breathing hurts so bad. Easier just to stop. No. Not yet. Not until she’s safe. The giant still stood over Syna, his face a combination of rage and confusion. The Vanyari looked down at her and then slowly panned his eyes over to Galen as though working out a particularly difficult math problem.

  As soon as their eyes met, Galen pushed.

  The Vanyari’s eyes went wide, his fingers twitching at the sudden, searing pain. He stumbled back, dropping to one knee. Syna rolled free and her monoblade shrieked into life. Galen broke the contact as the same motion that brought her up arced the monoblade around to punch through the giant’s chest.

  “Galen! Don’t you die on me, you stupid son of a bitch.” He felt her hands slapping at his cheeks, knew he had to stay awake, but it was so hard. He was so tired. Sleep would be easier.