by Marc Everitt
The distant sun splashed its colour over the bleak terrain, almost reluctantly, as if it had better things to do and nicer places to brighten up. There seemed to be no way in which such a puny star could do anything to make the surface of Graves’ World any more hospitable. Maybe if it decided not to bother at all, then at least it would mean that Taylor wouldn’t be able to see the sparse lifeless surface of the world. He was not the sort of man who was really too bothered about how aesthetically pleasing things looked, but this place really made him feel depressed. It was a common response to seeing the desert plains around Taylor. People often commented that the sight drained their soul.
***
Eight o’ clock came and Eli made his way towards the stores to make his rendezvous with his mysterious correspondent. The corridors were quiet and he couldn’t see many people about; that worried him a little. He had a suspicion that he would turn up at the stores and find himself in rather too close proximity with either Lana Maxwell, which would cause a problem sexually, or her husband, which would cause a problem violently. He did not trust either of them, even less than he trusted the rest of the research team, and did not fancy finding one of them in the stores with him.
With this in mind, he reached the door to the stores, took a deep breath and stepped inside. The first thing that hit him was the darkness, someone had obviously covered the lighting fittings and this made Eli very nervous.
As if in answer to this, a quiet voice said, “Don’t be afraid. I just need to talk to someone.” A small hand-held light flickered into life a metre or so in front of him, and he became able to see, as his eyes adjusted to the low light levels, the small frame and pale face of Sara Crick. She looked nervous and furtive as if she herself were being watched at the same time as she was watching Eli. His face must have betrayed the sense of surprise that he was feeling at seeing her, of all people, in front of him in the dark. A situation he could have wished for, but not I these circumstances and not for these reasons.
She saw his surprise and spoke again, “I know it seems strange, but I felt there were things you ought to know.”
“Go on,” prompted Eli gently, trying to look concerned but not too soft. He wanted to perpetuate a myth of toughness and rugged-ness that he hoped would turn her on. Although, deep down he knew this was unlikely.
“You two,” she said, referring to Eli and Taylor, “are investigators, aren’t you?” taking his silence and total lack of response as agreement she made a mental note and continued. “Things are very complicated here; people are at each other’s throats constantly. It’s….” she paused, “difficult to know who I can trust.” She moved closer to him, and now he could see that she was really nervous, a light sheen of sweat dappling her brow.
Strangely, Eli found this made her more attractive to him. She was uncomfortably close to him now even though she was still only just within arm’s reach. He was unsure how to react to her manner and decided his best bet would be to try and be as cool as possible and let things happen as they would. Her eyes met his and she smiled delicately. “I feel I can trust you though. I feel we are all in a great deal of danger. You and your friend should try and get away from here as soon as you can. It’s Chris, he’s unstable. Did you know Hanley? No, well, no loss personally for you if you didn’t. But anyway, he and Lana were having an…. what’s the best way of putting it…. an affair for some time.”
Eli arched his eyebrows in surprise, then after a few seconds realised that he shouldn’t be. After all, he had seen Lana’s seductive demeanour for himself and knew how potent it was. Sara was continuing, finding her stride after a somewhat spluttering start. “The slag. Well, anyway Chris found out. We all knew, but he finally caught them ‘in flagrante’ as it were and that was it. He couldn’t ignore it anymore. Next thing we knew it’s a week later and Jeff is dead, torn to pieces by some….” She tailed off, obviously not wanting to see the images which Eli knew had to be flitting through her mind at that point. Eli’s heart ached, he wished there was something he could do, but knew there was nothing except listen.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled ineffectively and instantly wished he hadn’t as the simple apology seemed to harden Sara up to her professional self again. “Well, it’s done. But I thought you should know a little bit of the history. Get out of here while you can.” The warmth he had felt from her not thirty seconds earlier was almost completely gone now, and he could only hope circumstance and good fortune would allow for its return. He thanked her for what she had told him and she looked away shyly and left the storeroom, switching the lights on as she did. Eli stood, alone, surrounded by various foodstuffs and mechanical spare parts thinking about what Sara had said. He would have to tell Taylor as soon as possible, but this investigation, as their postings often turned into, seemed to be becoming more cut and dried every hour they spent here.
While he walked back to his room, around the circular main structure of the research station, he found himself feeling as if he could deal with the situation without Taylor. It was not often he felt like that, and he wanted to savour it as long as he could. ‘Come back when you like, Tay’, he thought, ‘I’ll take care of everything here for you. You just enjoy yourself.’
Taylor was enjoying himself quite a bit now. He had his sample and was heading back at a brisk pace towards the compound, which was some two hundred metres away. The reason for his good humour was very simple; he felt he was getting to grips with the planet and its occupants. The only fly in his ointment was the fact that he had no inkling as to the originator of the simple yet intensely powerful message he had received earlier in the evening.
There was no way deadly Rodlean Swamp Creature could have generated the mental power to have sent such a telepathic impulse over any distance whatsoever. The fact was the creature shouldn’t even have been on the planet and he had accounted for all the research team and still he couldn’t locate the mind he needed. His psychic powers were by no means extraordinary, and he never claimed them to be. Certainly, he was in no way able to compete with the professional psi-techs that worked in the Company’s employ. These were people, a great many of whom Taylor knew and respected who could use their minds to great effect. Moving small objects, sending instructions to dumb animals’ brain centres, reading minds even when their owners wanted them unread. The science of telepathic experimentation was still in its early stages of development, but the use of drugs and, in some cases, surgery had caused many of these psi-techs to have fearsome powers.
As a result of this power, they were some of the most valuable members of the Company’s structure supplanted only in value to the high echelons of the administration by the mysterious secret service agents who were spoken of in hushed tones as the men from Social Control. When the Company needed any sort of uprising quelled or started you could be sure that one of these shadowy figures was manipulating events from behind the scenes. Assassins, spies, warriors and agents, these were people who you could never suspect of being from Social Control. Taylor suspected a couple of people being from Social Control but couldn’t prove it.
Of course, he would not want to prove it, as that would surely lose these people their jobs or, more likely, their lives. Best not to know and try and deal with what could be affected within his sphere of influence. Although naturally curious, Taylor West was also a great believer in letting sleeping dogs lie. He was only sure about one thing, he was not from Social Control (although he had heard rumours about brainwashing which made people work for Social Control without even knowing it themselves) and he was not a psi-tech.
However, he could act as a receptor for strong telepathic contacts if he were in a finite and fairly restricted proximity to the sender. When he had felt the impulse earlier that evening there was no-one within several hundred metres of him. Of that he was sure. But that beggared the question as to where the message came from. “Where are you?” he muttered under his breath as he neared the perimeter fence. This time, he received no response at all.
Strangely for him, he was somewhat glad of that.
***
Executive Arlen leant back in his large, plush chair in a manner that was almost relaxed. The chair he sat on, desk he sat behind and office he worked in dwarfed his puny frame. However, much as he would have liked to be allowed a more proportionally adjusted office to suit his taste and personality it was out of the question. Many people who knew him would have said that a room tailored to suit his personality would have been small, dull, colourless and a little odd.
The Company, however, felt that he was an Executive and as such be accorded with all the trappings of business success. It made little difference to them that Arlen would find it difficult to make any sort of business decision even with his adjusted environment. The fact of the matter was that Executive Arlen had risen to his role by being a lackey and a toadying one at that, and this suited the Company down to the ground. They needed someone to be in charge of the potentially dangerous department devoted to nucleonic engineering. If it was a man with no moral integrity, they could use him as they saw fit and dispose of him if need be with little harm to themselves.
This situation should have made people feel sorry for Arlen, but the fact that he was aware of this and actually seemed to enjoy it made him all the more loathsome. A slimy little toad of a man, he made his way through life acquiring little in the way of respect and less in the way of friends. Again, though, it should be noted that Arlen knew all this and not only did he not seem to care he actually seemed to like it. He wasn’t ever going to be popular; he knew that and so dedicated himself to making himself the annoying little whiner people always despised.
He knew from the moment his classmates voted him ‘least likely to be anything, ever’ when he was only twelve years old. His parents were alcoholic losers and his brothers were the types of bookworm headcases who, he felt, should be restricted from reading on account of their tendency to spout useless knowledge at anyone who cared to listen to them.
All this made Arlen what he was, but no-one cared much either. He was simply not popular. This particular day he was very self-satisfied and generally pleased with himself. He had got to the office nice and early, missing all the hassle of the peak-time travel pods. He had had a great conversation with his secretary, a young attractive girl who had not yet learned to hate him, and felt he had gone a long way to persuading her that he was a lot more important, and therefore sexy, then he really was.
Finally, he seemed to have both the Graves’ World situation and the on-going Taylor West worry in some sort of suspension. All was quiet from his agent on the planet. Maystone had communicated several hours ago that he had made planetfall and had set up a holding pattern, or some other such militaristic mumbo-jumbo the like of which you would expect to hear from a Social Control wannabee like Maystone, quite some distance from the compound.
He said he would report regularly but didn’t see the need for such secret actions. If Arlen wanted this West bloke dead, he only had to ask and he could be in and out of the station before anyone knew anything about it. Arlen had assured Maystone that wouldn’t be necessary just yet, but that he would keep it in mind. Executive Arlen was a stupid man, despite his big chair in his nice office, but wasn’t stupid enough not to know a little about the extraordinary background of Taylor West; and the fact that the same past made him a very difficult man to kill for many reasons. Some of them were political reasons, as Taylor West seemed to know many influential people who a man like him had no real business being aware of.
A simpler reason was that West’s physical ability to defend himself transcended his modest frame and virtually silent persona. A very keen eyed individual could have picked out the signs from the way West moved, the way his eyes were never still or the way that he seemed to act within himself at any given time. Unfortunately for Arlen, he was not a keen eyed individual and so picked up none of these signs, relying instead on reports from certain peoples who had taken the time to look into West’s murky past at a greater level of detail then the ordinary man.
At this time, though, it seemed to Executive Arlen that he had Taylor West where he wanted him – on a far off world out of harm’s way. There was always the remote chance that the usual West-ian extra-vocational activities would lead him to a sore spot for the Company, but that was a negligible chance which the presence of Maystone should reduce even further. Was he doing the right thing placing such a volatile individual so close to a man like Taylor West? Should West even be there at all? This was a question and a subject about which he had very little choice in any case. The orders for West’s relocation, along with his colleague Jackson, came from senior executives he had rarely even spoke to.
Apparently, or so the rumours went, the orders had come from even higher in the echelons of the Company. Maybe even from members of the Board of Directors themselves, those seldom seen, often talked about people who lived in high towers and rarely appeared in even the better news stories. The nearest thing to a monarch which could exist in the post-republicanised, supposedly democratically run society that was humankind would be a member of the Board of Directors of the Company. In the all new, all-improved society fashioned in the late 22nd century it was supposed to be impossible to acquire the kind of wealth that was found in the swollen coffers of these directors.
Arlen would never, of course, go hungry; but he could only dream of living the lifestyles of his superiors. He was happy just as he was at that moment, sat in his plush chair surrounded by all his executive nomenclature. ‘Small things please small minds’, they say, and Executive Arlen was pleased enough with his minuscule role in life. He was unaware that his actions had sparked off what would become an incident of interstellar importance.
***
While Arlen was unaware of the consequence of his actions, there was another person considering them in some depth at the same moment. He sat in an office not unlike an upgraded version of the one Executive Arlen sat in, only with far more in the way of creature comforts. The shiny surface of the enormous desk the man sat behind parted and a screen rose up from within to display live pictures from the surface of Graves’ World.
The man could see up-to-date images from inside the research station and used a small control device to flick from one room in the station to another, searching for the one man he was interested in. He was pleased; the pictures from the covert cameras fitted into the station at the early stages of its construction at his personal request were working perfectly despite months without usage. He had not had a need to use the cameras since their installation, but now he had someone he wanted to keep an eye on.
The man smiled as he finally found the camera he was looking for, on the screen in front of him he saw a figure pick his way through the perimeter fence of the research station and approach the entrance of the station. As a Senior Executive reporting directly to the Board of Directors the viewer was used to being privy to images and information that others would never have seen, but the details he had on the man he was watching defied belief. Senior Executive Daniells had followed the career of the man so many light years away with great interest. The interest Daniells had was not impersonal, he was desperate to make sure that the man came to no harm and was in the right place at the right time to allow the Board of Directors’ plans to come to fruition.
Daniells leaned back in his chair and drummed his fingers against the veneer of the desk. All things considered, he was pleased with where matters stood. His cretinous subordinate Arlen acted on his instructions to place the people he wanted at the location he desired. An unfortunate eventuality of this was that Arlen had also sent a Security Officer to the planet and this could cause a problem. If the Officer interfered with the subject of Daniells attention, then it could mean that the Board of Directors’ plans were delayed. Daniells could not let that happen but was at a loss to see what he could do about it. His influence, while far-reaching on Earth, was negligible out in the far colonies unless he sent an operative himself. He did no
t want to do this, it would upset the Board and even he couldn’t do that.
He watched Taylor West let himself into the Station and felt a sense of pride; this one had turned out so much better than his classmates. He had seen so many good reports about the talents of West and was looking forward to seeing how he was going to cope with what the best scientific minds reporting to the Board were certain was to come. In his opinion, if things went the way they were likely to over the next couple of weeks, God help anyone who was not prepared.
Chapter Six
Storm Clouds Gather
The day woke Taylor kindly, seeming to creep unannounced into his consciousness and let the idea of it grow slowly on him. Rather than scare him by suddenly pouncing on him and declaring his cosy nocturnal sojourn at an end, it preferred that day to adopt a softly softly catchy monkey approach. As the cold light of day flooded through the window and drenched his still opening eyes, his mind was already past waking up, getting up and ready for the day. It was trying to unravel a particularly knotty problem.
Taylor had seldom met such a wealth of possible murderers; he had already noted that the station was a psycho-analyst’s treasure trove. He had risen from his bunk, stretching his shoulder muscles tight and thought to himself that it was entirely possible that they all did it, like the ancient fictional murder on some train or other. Or, possibly, Shanks killed Hanley and then himself as everyone else seemed to believe.