by David Weber
Or is it really because you think you've actually seen something like it before?
Nonsense! He snorted dismissively, but the thought wouldn't quite go away, however hard he tried to banish it, for he'd grown up on Sphinx, and he was a Harrington.
Maybe you're a Harrington, boy-oh, but you're no frigging treecat! And neither is she. And you've got no business at all thinking this way about a woman you don't even know!
All of which was perfectly true . . . and didn't do one damned thing about his problem.
He reached his dormitory, rode the grav shaft to his floor, let himself into his apartment, and crossed to the balcony. He picked up the compact electronic binoculars and looked through them, and his mouth tightened as he saw her sitting in the gazebo, still studying her computer display.
He set the binoculars down, feeling as if he'd become some sort of Peeping Tom or voyeur, and dropped into a chair. He leaned forward, bracing his elbows on his knees, and scrubbed his face with both hands before he straightened up and inhaled deeply.
This was ridiculous. Unfortunately, being ridiculous didn't seem to be keeping it from happening, and he had no damned idea what to do about it. He'd been strongly attracted to a few women in his time, but never like this. Never with the sense that he was looking at the person who was meant to be his other half. The person without whom he could never quite be whole. It was like some incredibly sappy, turgidly written, really bad romance novel—the sort his sister Clarissa had loved to read when she was thirteen. “His other half”? Where did he get off feeling something like that about someone he'd spoken to exactly once in his life? He didn't believe in “love at first sight,” and he never had, and—he told himself firmly—he didn't now, either. Whatever this was, it wasn't that . . . even if he had no damned idea in the world what it was.
Don't be so sure of that, the small voice he was doing his best not to listen to said. You've always had those “hunches” of yours, haven't you? You've always been so smug about your ability to “read” other people. Used it to win quite a few poker games over the years, too, haven't you? And your family's been hanging around with 'cats for over three T-centuries, hasn't it? What if there's a reason so many Harringtons have been adopted over the years? What if there's something “different” about you?
Nonsense. So he was good at picking up hints from body language, and reading the subliminal clues everybody gave out! And maybe he had usually known when somebody in his unit was in trouble, needed a friendly ear—or an arse-chewing—to get him back on track. That didn't mean he had some kind of “extrasensory perception,” and even if he did, she wasn't a Harrington, or a Sphinxian, or even a Manticoran!
And that, he finally admitted to himself, was a huge part of the problem.
He sighed and rubbed his face again, his expression grim. If he was . . . different, if it turned out he did have some . . . special ability, what right could he possibly have to use it on someone else? Did she feel anything at all for him? She certainly hadn't shown it, if she did. But if she did, was it because of something he'd done—done to her? He didn't feel like an evil wizard going around casting spells on people. He didn't want to be, either, and even if she did feel something about him, he wanted her to feel that about him, not about some mysterious aura he might be emanating!
He smiled crookedly as he realized just how twisted and convoluted that last thought had been, yet that made none of it untrue or irrelevant. And the smile disappeared quickly as he thought about the other side of it.
He was damaged goods. He wasn't the person he'd always thought he was, and sometimes it felt as if the veneer concealing the monster within from the rest of the world was growing thinner and more transparent. Clematis had shown him the monster, though. That was why he'd run away from the Corps, away from the sweet seduction of the killing.
He looked down at his hands as if they belonged to a stranger, and the remembered hot, intoxicating taste of blood pulsed through him again. It was a sickness, an infection, and he was afraid of it. More afraid than he'd ever been of anything in his life. A man with that monster hidden at his heart had no business getting close to others, for he was unclean . . . and he was dangerous.
He inhaled again, then climbed out of the chair and headed for his kitchen. At least someone with his metabolism could seek the solace of food without falling prey to terminal obesity.
* * *
“Well?” Giuseppe Ardmore demanded, and Tobin Manischewitz shook his head.
“You're not a schoolgirl, and this isn't your first party, Giuseppe,” he said severely, but Ardmore only snorted.
“Maybe not, but that doesn't mean I'm not looking forward to it. If it's been okayed, at least.”
Manischewitz shook his head again. That last sentence had been an afterthought, and not a terribly sincere one. Not that either he or Ardmore would have dreamed of moving without authorization; their employers had a nasty way of making examples out of people who did that.
And you are the one who came up with the idea, so it's sort of hypocritical to hold Giuseppe's . . . enthusiasm against him. So why does it bother you so much?
“Why is this so personal with you?” he asked out loud.
“Who said it was personal?” Ardmore shot back.
“The fact that you're so busy looking forward to it,” Manischewitz replied, realizing in that moment exactly why the other's enthusiasm worried him so. “I don't much care for the entire Benton-Ramirez y Chou clan myself, but you're acting like you've got a New Texas mosquito trapped in your vac helmet. If we screw this one up—if we give the Beowulfers even a hint of a chance of IDing us before we dump the body and get off-world again—we're going to be so damned dead a DNA sniffer couldn't find us, and I don't like it when somebody on an op this risky gets his head too far up his arse because he's looking for personal payback. So what is it with you and this guy?”
“I don't like him, all right?” Ardmore said after a moment. “He and his family have been busting our chops for centuries now, and I don't like it. I don't like that smug, superior attitude of his—like he's so much smarter and better than any of the rest of us—either. He's being a pain in our arse, and he's gonna be a bigger one if we don't do something about it, and I'm not going to pretend it won't be especially satisfying to squash any Benton-Ramirez y Chou—and especially this one—like a bug.”
“No, it's more than that.” Manischewitz settled into one of the apartment's chairs, his eyes hard. “You've got a personal reason to want this particular guy's balls, and I want to know what it is. Now, Giuseppe.”
Ardmore glared at him, but Manischewitz only leaned back, waiting. He didn't object to a little personal motivation if it could help get the job done, but too much motivation—or motivation that was too personal—was a good way to screw the pooch. And any unfortunate little failures here on Beowulf were likely to have fatal consequences for the people involved in them.
“All right,” Ardmore said finally, with a scowl. “Three years ago, in New Denver, I had a little . . . run in with the frigging BSC.”
“In New Denver?” Manischewitz' eyes narrowed. “The New Denver? On Old Earth?”
“No, the one in Andromeda! Of course the one on Old Earth!”
“What the hell were you doing on Old Earth?!”
Manischewitz was shaken. He and Ardmore had worked together on several occasions over the last ten or fifteen T-years before they'd been more or less permanently teamed a couple of years earlier, but never in the Sol System. For that matter, their employers normally went far, far out of their way to avoid staging the sort of operations he got handed on the mother world. Genetic slavery thrived in the underbelly of the League, hidden in the sewers of corruption that most soft, protected Core Worlders never saw or knew about, and Manpower took pains to avoid anything that might cause it to intrude into the light where they might see it.
“If Upstairs had wanted you to know about it, they probably would've told you about it, don't you thin
k?” Ardmore shot back. Then he shook his head. “Look, you want to know why it's personal with Benton-Ramirez y Chou? I'll tell you! We were in New Denver to take out Fairmont-Solbakken.”
“You were going to assassinate Aurèle Fairmont-Solbakken?” Manischewitz demanded. This just kept getting worse and worse! Aurèle Fairmont-Solbakken was the senior member of the Beowulf delegation to the Solarian League's Assembly.
“Of course,” Ardmore said impatiently. “The Beowulfers had just gotten the bureaucrats to sign off on permanently stationing a Frontier Fleet detachment in Lytton, and somebody Upstairs was pissed off as hell about it.”
Manischewitz had to think for a moment before he could place the Lytton System, then he remembered. It was a small, dirt poor, nominally independent star system within a few light years of the Sasebo System . . . one terminus of the Erewhon Junction. Had—?
“Are you saying they were trying to set up a base in Lytton?”
“Of course they were!” Ardmore snorted. “The Erewhonese are skittish as hell where anything about the slave trade's concerned. Probably has something to do with being stuck off in a corner close to the Havenites and the Manties. Hell, for all I know they've got ‘principles'! All I know is that Upstairs figured that a quiet little cargo transfer point in Lytton would let them take advantage of the Erewhonese Junction without having any . . . product on board when they went through Erewhonese Customs. They could head out through hyper, drop off a cargo at some out of the way spot like Silesia, head home by way of the Manticore Junction clean as a whistle, come through from Erewhon, pick up a fresh cargo at Lytton, and deliver it to a whole sector's worth of customers far enough out from the Core that nobody was going to ask any questions. Then turn around and head back the other way, rinse and repeat. Hell, they could even pick up extra change shipping legal cargo over the Erewhon-Manticore leg! Until the Beowulfers shoved their oar in, anyway. And apparently Fairmont-Solbakken leaned on the permanent undersecretaries pretty damned hard. I always figured there was a little blackmail involved in the horsetrading, but I could've been wrong about that. What I know for certain, though, is that the Navy put a destroyer detachment in Lytton and kept it there. So Upstairs decided to ‘send a message' to Beowulf, and my team and I were supposed to deliver it.”
“Obviously it didn't get delivered after all,” Manischewitz observed.
“No, not so you'd notice,” Ardmore agreed in a hard voice. “Matter of fact, it didn't go so well for my team. There were eleven of us, including my partner Gerlach and me; I'm the only one who got out alive. Somehow, the Beowulfers figured out what was coming and they dropped a BSC special ops team on us right in the middle of New Denver. I was out on surveillance when they hit; when I came back, it was like the rest of them had never existed. I don't know whether all of them were killed before their forensics people tidied up or if some of them got hauled back to a safe house somewhere on Old Earth and pumped dry first. I just know they were all gone, and that that little bastard Benton-Ramirez y Chou who'd ‘just happened' to be vacationing in New Denver when Fairmont-Solbakken arrived, was nowhere to be found after. So, yeah, it's kind of personal for me, Tobin. You got a problem with that?”
“I've got no problem at all, as long as you remember that I'm the senior guy on this team and you don't let the personal part of it get in the way of getting the job done. And as long as you remember that the whole object here is to not kill him. Yet, at least.”
“Oh, yeah, I'll remember that.” Ardmore's smile was ugly. “Because, you know what? I don't think it's gonna work. I think he's gonna try to get cute, instead, and when he does, both of them get dead. And that'll suit me just fine, Tobin. Just fine.”
* * *
Allison Chou breathed deeply and steadily, the soles of her running shoes crunching crisply on the gravel as she headed for the final bend in the trail before she headed back. She loved Rosalind Franklin Park, and especially its jogging trails. The park had been laid out the better part of two thousand T-years ago, and the great-great-grandchildren of the original Old Earth oaks which had been planted by the long dead landscapers were as much as two meters in diameter now, spreading their massive branches to cover the trails in deep, green shade. It was almost like running at the bottom of one of the parks' koi ponds, and the bursts of sunlight when she passed through a break in the foliage were as brilliant as they were dazzling. And on top of all of its other attractions, the Watson and Crick Boulevard entrance was less than two blocks from her off-campus apartment. It was her favorite place to run, and running was one of her favorite occupations when she had hard things to think about.
Face it, she told herself severely, you're going to have to deal with this. It's probably just a loose screw rattling around inside your skull. You always did have a vivid imagination, you know! God only knows what's caused you to fixate on this this way, but the only way you're ever going to put it to rest is to talk to him. Spend a little time actually with him instead of just sitting around wondering about him. You don't have to walk up to him with bedroom eyes, hit him over the head with a club and drag him off. You just need to . . . explore this, figure out what the hell is going on, and then either act on it or forget about it.
She shook her head and rolled her eyes. Sure. That was all she had to do. It made perfect sense—or as much sense as anything could make, under the circumstances. The only problems were that she'd never heard of circumstances like these, they weren't getting better, and they didn't scare her any less.
She stopped rolling her eyes and closed them briefly, then opened them again. It was still there. It was fainter, but she was certain she could still have raised her hand and pointed unerringly in Alfred Harrington's direction. And the fact that it was fainter actually worried her more, because Rosalind Franklin Park lay on the far side of her apartment from campus. Which meant—if she wasn't simply losing her mind and imagining the entire thing—that whatever it was she felt was distance-sensitive. The closer she got to campus, the stronger that sense of direction became, like a stray chunk of asteroid rock drifting into a planetary gravity well.
Oh, there's a marvelous simile! she told herself. Sums it up in a nutshell, doesn't it? Sure, that dark thing you feel scares you, but the real scare factor is that you may not be in charge of your own feelings anymore. It's like something is sucking you in, against your will, making you think about a total stranger this way. That's not just evidence you may be unhinged; it suggests some kind of . . . emotional dependency.
She reached the final bend in the trail and started back, trying not to grimace as that sense of someone else's presence changed bearing like some kind of homing beacon. Enough was enough, she decided. When she finished this morning's run, it was time to shower, change, head over to campus and invite Lieutenant Harrington to share a cup of tea with her. At least she'd have the chance to sit down across the table from him and find out whether or not she'd been imagining all of this.
And what do you do if it turns out you haven't been? she asked herself, but herself offered no answer to the question.
* * *
Alfred Harrington leaned back in the recliner on his apartment balcony, heels propped somewhat inelegantly on the balcony railing, a glass of Alessandra Farms 1819 on the table at his elbow. The gewürztraminer-style wine had been a pleasant surprise (for everything except his credit account) when he discovered it. It went well with the spicy Beowulfan smoked sausage and the wedge of sharp cheddar on the plate beside the glass, and Alessandra aged it in barrels of native Beowulfan red-spine oak, lightly charred on the inside to give it a pleasing smokiness to underscore the hint of peach and lychee.
His eyes—and most of his attention—were on the reader in his lap as he ran through his notes from his last lab session with Dr. Mwo-chi. A tiny corner of his awareness was somewhere else, of course. It was tracking that other presence like a compass needle, invariably pointing to wherever it was. He was doing his best to ignore it, however, and this time he was actual
ly succeeding, after a fashion at least. It helped that Dr. Mwo-chi was still very much in the process of bringing him up to speed on her existing research, and the more familiar with her work he became, the more impressed he was. Not that anything she'd come up with yet offered the solution both of them were seeking, but deep inside he knew it was unlikely they ever would find “the solution” to the catastrophic damage neural disruptors wreaked on their victims. Maybe the best answer anyone would ever come up with would be to farther improve synthetic nerves, but surely there had to be some way to convince the human body to regenerate just the destroyed nervous tissue?
Sure there is, Alfred. He reached for his wine glass again. There must be, since you want there to be one so badly, right?
The problem was that while modern medicine could regrow whole limbs for people—aside from that unfortunate but large minority of the human race for whom regeneration simply didn't work—it couldn't regenerate just specific parts of the limb in question. There was no switch to grow “only” nervous tissue or muscle tissue or bone; it was an all or nothing process. That was why an otherwise sound leg whose nerves had been reduced to mush by a neural disruptor, for example had to be amputated above the highest point of neural damage and regenerated from scratch, as it were. That was clearly the best solution for a problem like that, but what did a doctor do when it was the spinal cord which had been disrupted? Nerve transplants were the obvious solution, and they'd been used effectively for less critical portions of the nervous system. Even with the best surgical technique, though, there was always some loss of function, and what could be tolerated in an arm or a leg could not be tolerated in the spinal cord. Synthetics were another approach, and one that recommended itself for limb damage in those who couldn't regenerate at all, but they, too, were a far from satisfactory substitute for the original nerve, and all of the problems with peripheral portions of the system became much more pronounced dealing with the spinal cord.
And worst of all, a weapons-grade neural disruptor was not a finely focused weapon. It attacked nervous tissue over a wide area. Indeed, its effect actually ran along its victim's nervous system, which meant a hit on a leg could damage the spinal cord—often severely, even without totally disrupting it—as high as the thoracic cord's T10 nerve. A trunk hit higher than the hip was almost invariably fatal, and even hits which didn't kill could inflict massive brain injury.