Prisoner of the Mind

by Kal Spriggs

  “Which means?”

  Colonel Givens smiled slightly. The smile held nothing human in it. “That means that at some point after you explain this ‘acceptable failure’ those people will round up every member of your staff, their families, their families’ friends, and maybe even their dogs… and have all of you shot in a secure basement sublevel in the Bureau of ESP Security’s Beijing Headquarters.”

  Despite himself, Halving felt a measure of his confidence waver, “Is that a threat?”

  Colonel Givens’ smile grew wider, “No Doctor, that’s a quote from my orders.”

  ***

  Chapter 25

  Normal… that’s what most psychics seem to call those who lack our abilities. Normies, Funs, Blanks… there’s a host of slang for it, but all of them are reflective of a truth: most psychics envy those who lack this curse. I can hear a constant dull roar, thoughts, energy, sensations… my mind is never still. I wish I could be normal… yet I can’t help but wonder if I have these powers for a reason?

  --Memoirs of Shaden Mira

  It is interesting to me now and then when I hear of some “moral code” for the use of psionics. Most often this is forced upon those of us with abilities… often by those terrified of our abilities. As if most of us with telepathy want to examine the pathetic fears and worries of normal people. Yes, I could easily understand the opposite side of the coin, were I not so talented I would live in terror of someone manipulating my thoughts and emotions. Yet such is the way of power. Those without it must live upon the whims of those who possess it.

  --Dr. Jonathan Halving, Project Archon Notes

  The car that Janis pulled up in had clearly seen better days. A dinged and scratched utility vehicle that rattled and clattered, Shaden wondered if it were stolen or simply abandoned. The tan and brown paint job had mostly flaked away with rust. The hulking vehicle looked like some ancient elephant on its way to its burial ground.

  He didn’t need to ask if the heater worked. His mother sat bundled up in the driver’s seat, barely recognizable for the heavy layers of clothing and wool mittens.

  Shaden tugged the door open and climbed into the passenger seat. “Interesting ride.”

  His mother might have shrugged, Shaden couldn’t say. For all he could tell, she could have broken into dance for all the clothing she wore. Then again, it was cold. He reached out with his mind, ready to warm the air temperature.

  “Don’t,” his mother snapped.

  “What?” Shaden asked. “I thought you had distractions in place?” He had hoped that the other psychics she’d contacted would enable him to use his abilities without ESPSec’s tame psychics homing in on him.

  “I do, but…,” she trailed off as she considered how to explain it. “Every mind has its own unique feel. Most psychics learn subtlety or they get caught. You’re noisy and sloppy. Normally there’s enough noise to drown things out, but with this distraction we’ve got planned, most psychics in town are saving their energy. With how unique your mental impression is, they’ll home in on us.”

  “Okay,” Shaden said. He felt embarrassed for how he had nearly ruined things, yet again, because he didn’t understand them fully. I need to learn as much as I can, he thought, lives depend upon me, now.

  “You’ll learn,” His mother said, answering his thoughts.

  The grumbling engine rose in crescendo as his mother pulled out into traffic. Despite the early hour, considerable traffic traveled the streets. Shaden felt conspicuous in the large, noisy, vehicle, but they drew no particular attention beyond the smaller vehicles which tried to squeeze around them.

  Shaden found something peculiarly lulling about the crowded streets. Much of the city seemed abandoned, but there remained enough people to constrict the main roads. Those clogged arteries showed that some life remained. The dense traffic reinforced his initial impressions of the city, one of life and color.

  “Fucking asshole!” His mother shouted as she leaned halfway out the window and held the horn down. Shaden snapped out of his reverie immediately to watch a sleek little black car cut them off. Well, he knew where he got his temper at least.

  “So, do you think we can trust him?” His mother asked.

  “What? The driver?” The question caught Shaden off-guard.

  “No,” she responded, "Primus.”

  Shaden looked over at his mother. She hadn’t taken her eyes off the road. Something about the set of her hands on the steering wheel and the fixed expression of her eyes on the road suggested the gravity of her question. “I’m not sure. I think so.”

  “You’re staking a lot on ‘I think,’ you know.”

  “I know,” Shaden closed his eyes. He wondered why he felt suddenly certain he could trust the other man. “Logically, he’s got plenty of reasons to want revenge against Halving. Also, he can’t feel too comfortable about the experiments Halving has done.”

  “Logically, he could get quite a reprieve for turning you and me over to ESPSec,” His mother said. “Or if that bothered him, just walking away. He worked for a crime boss; at best he’s a mercenary and at worst he’s a criminal himself. There’s precious little money in personal revenge… and less in justice.”

  Shaden sighed, “I can’t say why I trust him… I just do.”

  His mother didn’t answer for a moment, “Well, so do I.” She sighed, “And that’s something important to take away. It’s not a psychic ability, it’s just being a judge of character. Some people say they’ll follow through on things, some will really believe they will, but something you need to do is learn to judge people, as accurately as possible.”

  “So why do you trust Primus?” Shaden asked.

  I slipped into his mind. I wasn’t going to risk your life without anything less.

  Shaden heard his mother’s thoughts in his head, despite the mental barrier she’d taught him to keep. He looked over in surprise.

  “Like I said, psychics learn subtlety,” His mother said.

  ***

  The lumbering behemoth rumbled off into the night as Shaden sprinted into the shadows of the overgrown park. Dressed in black cargo pants and a dark jacket, he faded into the darkness. Ideally, he would go unnoticed as one more shadow in the quiet suburb.

  The suburb had a large, heavily forested park that shared a border with Jonathan Halving’s facility. Since Shaden didn’t know how closely ESPSec watched the two roads into the facility, the park made for the best route. Granted, it still left him with a five mile jog along the winding overgrown trails. He gave a mental thanks to Angel for how hard she’d driven him in his physical training. It had hurt at the time, and it still took a lot of effort to keep up, but it proved essential.

  Shaden hadn’t told his mother about her. Mostly, he wasn’t sure what to make of Angel's help. He had no idea why she’d helped him, whether it was some guilt over what she’d helped Halving do to him, or… something else. That was just one more of many questions he hoped to answer soon.

  He soon became bored of the run. The city’s glare off the overcast sky cast sufficient light for him to see the trail without needing to augment his vision with his mental abilities. Shaden kept those locked down tight to avoid detection, even as he jogged onwards.

  His mind went suddenly to Primus and his gang. He hoped they’d stay safe. He also hoped that whatever they did, it wouldn’t cause too much damage.

  ***

  Chris Sommerkorn was loud. He laughed loud, talked loud, and on the few occasions he cried, he cried big loud tears. A large, heavy-set man, he’d worked as a truck-driver, a longshoreman, and even a tour-bus driver until New York’s tourism industry finally dried up. He liked being loud, it was genetic, he thought, when he bothered to think about it. He was part Pacific Islander, part Nordic, and he mostly just liked being loud and having fun.

  Right now, he sipped at his beer on his normal stool in Mal’s Bar. Or at least, normal for when he came to New York. “Stupid whiteheads,” Chris muttered to himself. They�
��d been waiting for him when he showed up to drop his cargo. They had confiscated his truck, roughed him up, and left him with nothing.

  “I hear you,” his drinking partner said. “They closed us down last week. It’s them taxes, done in the shipping industry, and then the rich folk all moved off.” The big black man had bleary, red-rimmed eyes. As far as Chris knew, Henry hadn’t left the bar in a week.

  “What I want is a fight,” Chris muttered to himself. He had nearly fought the whiteheads when they took his truck, but they hadn’t given him the chance to start anything at the time and they had taken his weapons before he realized that they planned to take his truck.

  “The city council says they don’t want a space-port, too noisy they said, now look, everything’s headed down to Norfolk! We ain’t got half the shipping in we used to!” Henry said. “And then Amalgamated Worlds lays on another tax! I remember—”

  He broke off as the door opened and a pair of men in Security uniforms stepped into the bar. The other conversations in the room died out almost instantly. The two men swept their heads back and forth. Their gaze lingered on a group of five men seated at a corner booth.

  “What the hell are they doing here?” Henry asked, in his same loud voice.

  His question might have come out at something approaching a normal tone of voice if he had drank a little less. As it was, it came almost as a bellow. The two uniformed officers immediately turned to face him.

  “Excuse me?” One of them asked, his voice neutral. The elder of the two, he looked grizzled enough to garner some respect from Chris. Of course, he thought, that just means he’s stolen more stuff in his career.

  The bar’s lighting being dim and Chris’s eyesight being poor, he could be excused from not noticing the white ESP lettering on the men’s shoulder patches.

  The two security men became an instant center for Chris’s anger. “He said: what in Hel’s name are you doing here?” He invoked the goddess’s name deliberately, a curse more nasty to him than anything else.

  “Citizen, I don’t like your tone,” the other officer spoke. He was younger and he looked like he had just transferred in from Beijing. Shorter and squatter than his assigned partner, he looked uneasy at being surrounded by the large, rough-looking men in the room. Chris might have felt sorry for him if he hadn’t just spoken up like an idiot.

  Henry, drunk and belligerent, escalated things without any further effort. “He said: what the hell are you doing here you fucking chinks! We were fine without your kind in charge!”

  The room should have gone quiet with shock, not filled with growls and mutters. The older agent knew that, just as he knew that the big black man had crossed a line. No one talked to police like that. That was why he didn’t stop his younger partner when he stepped forward to swing his nightstick into Henry’s stomach.

  The big man went down with a grunt of surprise. But before the younger officer could step back Chris grabbed him by his shoulders to lift him forcibly off the ground. Chris Sommerkorn glared angrily at the man who’d struck his new-found friend, “You shouldn’t have done that.”

  The young officer frantically swung his baton at the massive arms that held him., but he might as well have beat on a stone statue for all the good it did him. Chris drew back one arm, holding the smaller man easily with the other. He put more weight behind the punch than he had intended and he couldn’t help a roar of satisfaction as the security man went limp from the blow.

  The more experienced partner had time to shout into his radio before a thrown chair caught him and sent him into the wall behind in a boneless sprawl.

  Chris helped Henry to his feet. The big, black man looked down at the officer who’d hit him. “Think you hit him too hard, Chris.”

  Chris rolled the security man over with his foot. The man’s head lolled at an impossible angle. He spat on the corpse, “Broke his neck. Fucking whitehead got what he deserved.”

  The other men in the bar growled with agreement. All of them stood on their feet now. Here and there men still held chairs or billiard cue sticks ready for a fight. Most nights at Mal’s Bar ended that way, anyway. That was why Chris liked the place so much. This was the first night they had fought security forces rather than local police though.

  The door crashed open and a half dozen more security men piled through. They all held drawn weapons. “Nobody move!”

  ***

  Primus watched the scene from his corner seat at the booth. He could feel the anger in the working men around him. He could feel the shock and fear in the ESPSec men at the door. Half the city felt as tenuously balanced, like a perfect mix of gasoline vapors and oxygen.

  All it needed was a spark.

  He could have shouted or thrown something. Primus could have simply relied on Murphy’s Law to start the fight. At his heart, though, Primus felt exactly the same anger as the men and women in Mal’s Bar. He had never asked for a planetary, much less interplanetary government. He had never wanted a government ruled by manipulative bureaucrats. Besides… he loved an underdog.

  As the bar patrons stared at the drawn weapons of the ESPSec team, Primus drew in on his energy reserves, fanned them with his anger and rage and then shoved.

  One of the heavy bar tables, easily three hundred kilograms of solid wood flew into the tight cluster of ESPSec men in the doorway.

  The angry men in the bar surged over them in a wave. Primus looked over at his table companions, his pack. Their eyes glittered with barely controlled fury, fueled by years of hiding from an oppressive regime. “Let’s have some fun.”

  ***

  Moira watched out the window as the armored vehicles barreled down the street. Evidently, Primus's gang had arranged for accidents in the other main roads as planned.

  Good, she thought to herself, it would be a shame to have gone to all this effort for nothing.

  Despite what she'd said at the planning session, she did know quite a bit about bombs. Not that she really thought of herself as a revolutionary. It was just something she picked up along the way. She liked fire, so moving from there to explosives had felt like the obvious step, way back as a child.

  Her late brother Patrick had used that skill in his bank robbery plans, which had let her hone her skills quite a bit. Big, fiery explosions were fun, but you didn't get much money out of a vault that you vaporized.

  She giggled a bit as she remembered Patrick's expression that first time she'd "helped" him out.

  Her expression hardened, though, as she thought about how he had died. Trapped in a bank, surrounded by InSec and security forces. She'd seen where he would end up, how he kept going for bigger and larger heists. She half wished that she'd been there to help out, but she had chosen to walk away when things got more serious.

  As she watched the ESPSec convoy sweep closer, she felt a cold smile grow on her face. She had never killed anyone with one of her bombs. It hadn't seemed right. Some part of her wondered if she had been afraid to take that final step. Yet she felt it oddly fitting that the people she killed with these bombs were the same type of people who had cornered and killed her brother Patrick... and the same type of people who had turned Bernard on her. They were thugs. Goons who used authority to satisfy themselves.

  She raised the radio controlled detonator and counted off as the lead truck swept into the target zone. She had two means of detonation and as the light on her remote detonator blinked red to indicate jamming, she smiled and picked up the electrical switch attached to a set of wires. Pretty hard to jam a hardline, she thought.

  Her countdown finished and she flipped the switch.

  The simple circuit connected and the current ran down the hundred meters of copper wire to the street and then another thirty meters over to the manhole cover. Underneath it, packed tight against the underside of the hundred kilogram cast iron cover she had placed just over ten kilograms of industrial plastic explosives with two commercial grade blasting caps.

  The explosives detonated just as the
lead truck passed over the lid. The hundred kilograms of cast iron, heated to the point of being molten and deformed into cone shape by the blast, exploded upwards faster than the speed of sound. The sewer manhole confined the rest of the blast and focused most of the force directly upwards. It would probably blow out every toilet on the block as well, but Moira wasn't about to stick around to find out.

  The armored hull of the ESPSec truck might as well have been tissue paper as the cast iron projectile tore through the crew cab and right out the top, followed by a column of flame and debris.

  She took a moment to relish the perfect hit and then dropped the switch and raced out the door of the apartment. If ESPSec followed standard security tactics, then...

  She heard a series of quieter detonations and this time she winced a bit. The secondary devices she had planted were on pressure plates designed to hit dismounted personnel. Somehow it felt wrong to use those bombs against people, even though she knew she'd probably killed everyone in the vehicle she hit.

  It was even worse for the fact that she'd used small bombs, designed to injure rather than kill. It wasn't a fair way to fight or even a respectable one... but this kind of fight wasn't about fair. For the time being, she and Shaden were working together. She felt a flutter of unease as she thought about the danger that he was going into... all by himself.

  That unsettled her even more. She'd had lovers and boyfriends before, but she'd never felt the concern she felt for Shaden. Moira had always been able to walk away... only now she didn't know that she could, knowing the danger Shaden faced.

  Moira heard sirens wail in the distance as she rushed down the stairs to the back door and then pulled her motorcycle out from under the debris she'd hidden it under. The bike started with a kick and she leaned over it and hoped no one had any drones up to track her.