A surreal silence fell; Terson stood dumbfounded with a gun in his hand aimed at nothing, an unconscious cop at his feet. Virene was gone. His thoughts raced, trying to attribute meaning or context to events that simply had no precedent or connection to reality as he’d understood it minutes before.
Bragg uttered a long, piteous moan.
Something in Terson’s mind gave way like an eggshell shattering under immense pressure; the civilized attitudes and priorities he’d struggled so long to incorporate into his world view collapsed, swept aside by cold, murderous calculation. He stumbled to Virene’s roadster, fumbling with the combination strip under the lip of the driver’s door handle like a drunk until the latch released and the car’s electronics activated.
He fell into the seat and managed to shut the door without crushing any wayward appendages. Sitting down, the nausea wasn’t so bad and his equilibrium improved tenfold. He shoved the gearshift into drive and mashed the accelerator with his foot; the tires smoked as he roared out of the parking lot.
Few vehicles plied the spaceport’s main thoroughfare at that time of night. The sports car whizzed past the light traffic as he approached the first major intersection without a glimpse of the van. A right turn led back to the passenger terminal and parking facilities. Straight through opened onto the northbound lane of the freeway leading to Ipswitch, seven hundred kilometers away. The kidnappers’ best chance to escape quickly, assuming they stayed with the van, was to vanish in the nearest population center—Saint Anatone.
Terson turned left, against the light, heading for the southbound on ramp. The automatic traffic monitor at the intersection flashed as he passed, dutifully logging the car’s ID plate, speed, time and date, before adding yet another traffic violation to Virene’s record. Ahead, clearly visible in the darkness, a single set of taillights ascended a distant rise and vanished on the other side.
Terson turned off his lights and pushed the powerful engine to its limit, depending on the single half moon to cast enough light to discern the edges of the roadway and, hopefully, any wildlife that might have found a way through the fence and repellant devices. A stray thought from the same quarter that caused him to stand by as someone attacked his wife suggested that the prudent course of action was to contact the authorities immediately. Terson discarded it as quickly as it occurred; there was no telling how long it might take them to find the van. He had seen what a group of men could do to a woman in ten minutes on Algran Asta; he didn’t intend to let that happen to Virene.
Terson examined Bragg’s pistol while remnants of his civilized facet squirmed at the candor of his thoughts. It was a ten-millimeter automatic with open sights, twelve rounds in the magazine and one in the tube—a competent, powerful utility weapon. He checked the safety and wedged the gun securely between the seats by the barrel, butt to the rear, where he wouldn’t have to move his hand more than a dozen centimeters from the gearshift to grasp it.
The sports car crested the last rise in the series of rolling hills, obliging Terson to hit his brakes to avoid over-shooting the van, which appeared less than half a kilometer ahead of him. He approached as close as he dared without a reflection from the van’s taillights giving him away.
Forcing the van over was problematic. If the roadster slipped under the side skirts and caught the lift field the van might ride over it and roll, quite possibly killing Virene in the process. If he did get the van off the highway, it could negotiate low obstacles that the roadster could not. Damaging the rear field ports, however, should activate the van’s internal safeties and shut down the engine.
The van rocked when the roadster slammed into its rear skirt, throwing Terson hard against the seat belt and startling the van’s driver so badly it almost ran off the road. The skirt held and the van accelerated with a burst of speed that took the meat out of the second collision.
The van might have out run him had it not reached a sharp incline and encountered two freight trucks laboring toward its crest, blocking both lanes as one tried to pass the other. The roadster’s bumper went under the van’s rear skirt and locked. Terson hit the brakes and felt the car strain to pull away, the tires emitting short, chopped squeals as the maneuver overtaxed the ABS.
One side of the skirt gave way, exposing the rear field port and releasing the two vehicles. A wide gap opened before Terson got his foot back on the accelerator. The engine roared, hurling the sports car forward. This time the impact pushed the van into the rear of the truck ahead of it and tore off the rest of the rear skirt.
Terson reached for the pistol, intending to jump out and dispatch the driver while the other vehicle was still sandwiched between the truck and the sports car, but the truck continued forward and pulled onto the right shoulder, giving the van a narrow lane of escape. The driver took advantage of it, squeezing between the two trucks as the passing vehicle moved back to its own lane, cutting off the roadster. Terson wrenched the steering wheel to the left and punched the accelerator, throwing up gravel from the shoulder as he raced around the trucks in pursuit.
The van didn’t put as much distance between them as Terson expected, evidence that the damage done to the lift field was already having an effect. He closed on it quickly, trying his best to relax his muscles and unlock his joints in preparation for the impact.
The van’s rear doors opened as the sports car drew near. Two men appeared in the doorway, one holding Virene’s feet, the other her arms. Her limp head hung at a painful angle; dark red hair lashed in the wind, some sticking to the blood on her face, some hanging in thick, heavy, blood-matted strands. A spike of horror froze the blood in his veins.
The roadster was closing so fast that they could have thrown her onto the hood, or into the windshield, but they didn’t. They dropped her onto the roadway when Terson was less than three meters from the van—right in front of his bumper, and one of them was laughing when they did it.
The front end of the car hopped as it struck her, then plowed into the rear of the van as it came down, slipping under the frame and destroying the other vehicle’s rear field ports. The van’s weight settled on the hood of the car, trapping Virene between the undercarriage and the highway. Terson stood on the brake; the left front tire locked and screamed. Thumps and bangs rolled along the bottom of the undercarriage in concert with impacts that he felt all the way to his knees; terrible sounds that he could not fathom being produced by a human body.
The men in back of the van lost their footing. One sat down hard. The other fell out on the roadster’s hood, face pressed against the windshield. Shock at his predicament changed to fear when Terson pulled the pistol from between the seats. He put two rounds through the glass; the body left a bloody smear as it slid off the car.
Terson let off the brakes but the left fender well had buckled inward, producing a billowing cloud of stinking smoke as friction burned tread off the tire. The front of the car began to pivot to the right, swinging the van in the opposite direction. The roadster’s nose twisted out from under the van, sending the car into a four-wheel slide until the rear tires left the pavement and sank into the gravel shoulder, dragging it into a spin.
Pain exploded along the entire left side of Terson’s body. He raised his head to find the inside of the car hazed with choking dust and smoke that stank of scorched tires. The driver’s door was pushed in at least twenty centimeters. The single surviving headlight illuminated a bank of dirt and rock sprinkled with cubes of glittering safety glass.
A grunt of pain escaped his lips when he moved his left arm, the grinding sensation deep inside telling him that it was broken. The leg on the same side ached as if someone had beat on it with a large hammer, but it didn’t object to moving. He released the seatbelt and slid his behind across to the passenger seat.
The door groaned open on stiff hinges. Terson climbed out and looked back the way he’d come, where the two cargo trucks had pulled off to the side of the road with their warning lights blinking. Figures gathered around som
ething on the ground—someone—he realized, though it was hard to believe that a human being would be recognizable as such considering what had happened. His chest fluttered as a sob tried to work its way out. Terson forced it back down; now was not the time.
Red and blue flashing lights lit the sky beyond the crest of the hill, growing stronger. He had to hurry. He turned toward the van, which lay on its side in the middle of the road, headlights illuminating Virene’s second assailant face down on the pavement.
Terson put two rounds in the man’s head as he passed by.
The vehicle’s rear doors were still unlatched, one lying flat on the pavement fully open, the second swinging back and forth on its hinges above. Terson knelt to peer inside. The cargo area was empty; the sliding door panel separating the payload space from the cab was closed. Terson put three rounds through the panel in a neat vertical row where a properly belted passenger would be and five more in a loose group where an unrestrained passenger and/or driver would have fallen.
Satisfied that he wouldn’t find anyone waiting to ambush him from inside the cab, Terson stood and walked to the front to see the result of his handiwork. The van’s shattered windshield hung like a curtain, connected to the frame only on the passenger’s side. The driver lay limp with blood pooling around him, dead or unconscious. Terson used Bragg’s last bullet to ensure it was the former.
He tossed the pistol aside and turned back to the logjam of vehicles at the crest of the hill. Crouched figures moved forward cautiously, guns drawn. Someone shouted something that Terson couldn’t discern over the wail of sirens and the ringing in his ears from the gunfire. It didn’t really matter: they’d see what he’d done in a few minutes.
A sound behind him penetrated the bedlam at the same moment the significance of the van’s dangling front windshield dawned on him: it hung the same way it might if a passenger kicked at it to escape.
Someone slammed into his left side, sending him staggering against the van. Blinding pain exploded in his injured arm from the tips of his fingers to his shoulder and neck, so intense his knees buckled. A smaller pain, sudden and sharp, accompanied by a mechanical click, stung the back of his thigh before he could regain his feet.
The pain vanished. He flailed at his assailant despite the grinding bones in his arm, but a growing euphoria quickly replaced the fear and the effort no longer seemed warranted. A voice urged him to walk into the dark underbrush near the road, but the approaching lights were far more appealing. He resisted the tug, though he was more than willing to answer the questions put to him by the voice’s owner before the euphoria carried him completely away.
TWELVE
Saint Anatone: 2709:06:15 Standard
Bragg keyed his vidcom on the third ring. “Special Investigation Department, Bragg speaking,” he said automatically, although he recognized the woman at once.
“He’s stable now,” said Dr. Alsept, the head trauma medic from the Saint Anatone Community Hospital. “You can speak with him for a few minutes.”
“On my way,” Bragg said. He stood without thinking and stumbled as a rush of vertigo tipped the room on its side. He clutched the edge of his desk until it passed.
My balance isn’t any better than my—the—investigation. Bragg’s coworkers claimed that as doctors made the worst patients, so cops made the worst witnesses. Officially he was a victim of the crime, forbidden to work the case. He’d received some leeway because of the department’s low manning and his insight into Terson and Virene Reilly’s lives, but even so he’d been warned off twice already for his unsolicited—the actual term had been meddlesome—suggestions. Every investigator has his own style, Bragg thought. Just because they don’t do it my way doesn’t mean it’s the wrong way. But, damn it, he’d transferred into the department for just such challenges! He couldn’t ignore it and spent the ten-minute flight to the hospital mulling over what little they knew.
The van used in the kidnapping belonged to an 80-year-old woman who claimed it had been stolen over three years before. The report was not in the Vehicle Department’s database and the registration had been renewed every year since the alleged theft. Colonel Cai ordered a background check on the owner, her friends and relatives, and their friends rather than determine where the van had been for the last three years. Bragg earned his first warning when he urged the detective officially assigned to the case to search the archived records instead, in case the report had been mistakenly removed from the active files.
All three perpetrators were known felons who frequently acted as hired muscle. A fourth set of fingerprints had not been identified. Combined with Terson Reilly’s criminal record, those facts pushed the crime into the “poaching-related” category, a class so broad that only cases impacting innocent citizens received any attention. Apparently Bragg’s superiors did not consider Terson or Virene Reilly innocent.
Bragg urged his colleagues to consider the reproductive angle based on the Reillys’ recent entry into the queue in an attempt to get the priority bumped up a notch, but privately he didn’t buy it himself. Reproduction-motivated crimes were generally committed only by those with a stake—real or perceived—in the outcome. Hired killers didn’t generally go to the trouble of capturing their victims before witnesses if they could just as easily gun them down.
Bragg’s attempts to reclassify the case infuriated Colonel Cai, who firmly believed the crime’s motive lay with Terson’s activities and issued a second warning. Bragg knew that he risked stronger censure if he kept interfering, but he wasn’t about to permit bias to dismiss a murder. He was prepared to concede Reilly’s culpability if evidence pointed to it, but objectivity required that they concede the possibility that Reilly was innocent of wrongdoing as well. Cai might view interviewing Reilly as insubordinate, but Bragg was still the kid’s probation officer and had official authority to speak with him until she did something to change that.
The skyhopper touched down on the hospital roof. Bragg showed his ID to an orderly who escorted him to the trauma medic’s office in the intensive care ward. Doctor Alsept shook his hand firmly. “How are you feeling?” she asked, smiling at his puzzled look. “I worked on you when you came in.”
“That day is a little fuzzy,” Bragg admitted.
“Subsonics can be nasty,” she nodded. “You didn’t sustain any permanent nerve damage, but the inner ear may still be irritated. Over the counter motion sickness pills should clear up the vertigo. Come back in a week or so if it doesn’t.”
“Thanks. What’s the word on Reilly?”
She handed a file to him. “Mister Reilly is a bundle of medical curiosities. Did he ever mention that he has a bullet in his head?”
“He was shot?”
“At a very young age.” She clipped the scans against the back lighting and pointed out a bright, tiny mushroom in his brain. “There’s no sign of a wound. If I had to guess I would say it entered between the skull plates, before the sutures fully fused. Judging by the distortion, it spent its energy passing through another object before it hit him. Probably would have bounced off his skull if he’d been an adult.”
She indicated an indistinct, cloudy trail behind the bullet. “This is scar tissue. You can see that it loses definition the farther away it gets. That indicates how long ago the injury was done to the brain. The definition improves the closer it is to the bullet, which means that it’s migrating.”
“Is it operable?” Bragg asked.
“Yes, but let me qualify that,” she said. “Chances are removing it would do more harm than good at this point. Barring repeated blows to the head he can expect to lead a normal life. If migration leads to serious problems, surgery is an option.”
“What if he does get knocked in the head?” Bragg asked.
Alsept shrugged. “Impossible to predict. A strong blow could bring on myriad neurological difficulties, or he might drop dead.”
“He’s lived with it this long,” Bragg said. “I guess he came through this pretty
lucky.”
“Not entirely,” Alsept said. “You know what Rhapture is?”
Bragg nodded. Rhapture was the street name of a chemically tweaked version of victrotine. The base drug, in small doses of its natural form such as the tree gum he indulged in occasionally, offered the user a mild buzz. Refined victrotine made a potent euphoric. Refined victrotine combined with a little kitchen chemistry produced Rhapture, an insidiously dangerous substance with several times the euphoric effect. It made the user uncontrollably talkative and attacked organic membranes. Chronic users eventually died of internal hemorrhaging, jabbering away until the very end—talking themselves to death.
“Reilly and his wife were both injected with it. One in a hundred people are allergic to it; she died of anaphylactic shock a few minutes after it hit her bloodstream,” Alsept said. “We nearly lost him, too. He suffered withdrawal syndrome a few hours after the Rhapture broke down and went into seizures.
“Dependency on Rhapture doesn’t develop from a single exposure, as you know, and seizures are not associated with withdrawal from it. After some tests we found a chemical locked in his fatty tissues that we’ve never seen before and doesn’t appear in any of the major medical databases. His medical records don’t exist prior to his immigration, so I have no idea what it is or where it came from.
“Apparently the Rhapture is bonding with the second chemical, forming a substance similar to those in the benzodiazepine family. Benzodiazepine drugs aren’t normally prone to dependency unless they’re taken for more than two weeks, but the severity of his withdrawal was equivalent to an exposure of several months.
“We got him through the withdrawals this time but if he ever takes Rhapture again, or ingests some other chemical that reacts with the substance in his body fat, it could kill him.”
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