by Eric Brown
So that was clear, then; she would be allowed to conduct an affair with Chandrasakar, but at the same time she must remember that she worked for India, and that anything she learned of potential use to the State would be very helpful indeed.
A couple of days ago Chandrasakar had zipped a message to her handset: That trip to the stars, Parveen... are you still interested?
She said now, “He suggested I come along.”
“And will you take up this most generous invitation?”
She smiled. “What do you think?”
He beamed. “Wonderful. I’m sure the trip will be more than worthwhile, on many levels.”
She laughed at her controller’s lack of tact. “What do you want, Anish?”
“Mr Chandrasakar is embarking upon an expedition to Delta Cephei VII,” he said. “It isn’t an established colony.” He produced a data-pin from his desk. “There’s more about the background of the planet in here. Digest and destroy, Parveen. Among his team, so far, are a pair called...” He leaned forwards and peered at the screen on his desk. “Dr Kiki Namura and Dr David McIntosh, a biologist and a geologist respectively. Now, Mr Chandrasakar doesn’t know this - his security is shamefully lax - but they’re both embedded spies, working for the Federated Northern States of America. I’d like you to keep an eye on them - you know the routine. Also, Chandrasakar is in the process of hiring the services of another telepath, one Jeff Vaughan. He has no affiliations. He is what they call in the business a loose cannon, and they can be dangerous, Parveen. If you could ascertain his loyalties and the like...” he beamed, “that would be splen-did.”
She nodded. “I’ll do my best, Anish,” she said.
He went on, “We have a cloaked voidship in the vicinity. I want you to report to the ship with whatever you find on Delta Cephei VII. Also, if things become difficult down there, and your cover is compromised, then the same ship will be on hand to effect your evacuation. The data-pin contains the ship’s code.”
She took the pin and slipped it into an inner pocket.
“And,” he finished, “I wish you every enjoyment in your... assignations with your bourgeois paramour. I can rely on you not to allow your heart to overrule that considerable intellect, can’t I?”
“Anish, how long have I been working for the party?”
“Ex-cellent!” He clapped his hands before his bulging belly and beamed at her as she rose.
“I shall be in touch, my dear,” he said. “Bon voyage, as they say.”
She smiled and took her leave, dropped to the street and decided to walk home rather than hail a taxi.
On the way through avenues crowded with street-vendors and performers - snake charmers with extraterrestrial eels, the latest fad - she considered Anish, and how she might handle the mission he’d handed her. For years she’d managed to walk the tightrope between party loyalty and her own interests, and she didn’t want to fall off the high-wire now. She knew what she felt for the party, and for Chandrasakar... and recently she’d woken in the early hours, sweating, caught on the horns of what she considered an ethical dilemma.
So far, she’d let her heart rule her head - pushing aside her objections to her lover’s politics - but how long might that be able to continue before she allowed her position to be compromised?
She felt sick at the thought and pushed it to the back of her mind.
* * * *
Later, she would come to the realisation that she owed her life to the fact that her handset pinged as she was passing her favourite restaurant, the Montaz. She subscribed to a channel that filtered news stories dealing with telepaths to her handset. She glanced at the screen - read that a third telepath had been murdered on Bengal Station - saw that she was passing the Montaz and decided rather than go to the bother of cooking for herself she’d have an aloo dhal and a beer while reading about the latest killing.
She found a table beside the window, ordered, and called up the story on her screen.
A telepath called Patel had been killed while investigating a murder case for the Lewis-MacBride Agency. There were no witnesses and the police had little to go on, though they did say that they thought it likely the murder was linked to the killings of two other telepaths that week.
She’d taken an interest in the case not just because it involved her line of work: she’d known one of the victims, Connors, when he’d worked for the Police Department in Kolkata before moving to Bengal Station.
The killings so far, she knew, involved telepaths working on different cases for three different agencies... which made it hard to pin a motive on the killer. The only thing that linked the three dead men was their psi-ability.
She knew that, rationally, she had no reason to worry - but she worried.
Her aloo dhal arrived and she ate hungrily while watching the kaleidoscopic flow of citizens in the street outside.
Her handset pinged with an incoming call. The sender’s name - Chandrasakar - flashed up, and she accepted it with a fluttery sense of excitement.
His well-fed face smiled out at her.
“My dear, delighted you can come along!”
She laughed. “Try keeping me away, Rab.”
“I’ll be on Bengal Station for a few days from tomorrow, overseeing the refit of a liner. Would you be able to get across? You can stay on the ship with me.”
“Term’s just ended. I’m a free agent...” She tried not to smile at the terrible pun.
“That’s wonderful. I’ll be in touch tomorrow. Everything okay with you?”
She considered mentioning the murders and telling him not to worry, in case he’d heard about the killings, but decided against it. “I’m fine. Relieved that the term’s over for summer. No more lectures to prepare and dull papers to mark.”
“And a vacation to look forward to,” he finished. “I must rush. See you soon.”
She smiled. “Bye, Rab.”
She finished the dhal. She thought about the mission to Delta Cephei VII, and then her thoughts returned to the killings. She was telling herself that she had nothing at all to worry about when she looked up and saw, striding past the restaurant, the tall Chinese guy she’d noticed in the café earlier.
She thought it best to err on the side of caution. She paid for her meal and slipped from the restaurant through the rear entrance.
She was in a narrow alley packed with citizens. If, in the unlikely event that the guy was an assassin, he would be unlikely to strike in the crowded streets of downtown Kolkata.
His natural course of action, she reasoned, would be to make his way to her apartment, wait there, and strike when she returned.
Her apartment was in a tenement block half a kay from here. She reckoned she could get there, do what she had to do, and get out again in minutes. She took a shortcut through the back alleys and reached her apartment five minutes later. She was sweating, and it had nothing to do with the stifling humidity that suffocated the city.
She activated her security cams, both inside her rooms and out, circuited the signal through to her handset, then slipped out through the back entrance and down the fire-escape.
A minute later she was sitting in a bar across the street, sipping a Blue Mountain beer and watching the streets for any sign of the Chinese guy.
She was being paranoid, she told herself; and yet, mixed with the fear, she had to admit to feeling a frisson of excitement.
She’d been recruited to the party in her early twenties, tested psi-positive, and given the cut five years later. At the time, she’d hoped that the augmentation would prove to be a way out of the cloistered groves of academia; she’d dreamed of thrilling missions and derring-do, especially after being sent on training courses to hone her self-defence... But her expectations had been based on too many sensational holo-movies as a kid. The work she’d been given had been routine surveillance, snooping and snitching, as she liked to call it.
Her academic work had continued as before and she’d visited colony worlds friendly
to the Indian cause, where reality was just another version of that on Earth, despite some interesting local variations and some genuinely bizarre aliens.
Her life, for so long, had been uneventful... and then she’d found a lover, and now she was being followed by an assassin.
Except, she told herself, she was imagining things.
She drank her beer and thought about visiting Rab on Bengal Station.
And then she saw the Chinese guy, and her heart juddered.
He eased himself through the press in the street, stood on the sidewalk looking up at her apartment, and then pushed through the revolving door and disappeared inside.
She activated her screen and stared at the revealed picture. It showed an empty landing, the top of the stairwell, and the elevator door opposite her apartment.
Holding her breath, she waited... Ten seconds later the man appeared on the landing.
The camera looked down on him from above the door of her apartment: it showed a lean-faced man in his early thirties. He looked fit, agile, but something in his dark eyes was dead.
The eyes of an assassin, she thought.
He took something from the pocket of his jacket, applied it to the lock, and a second later slipped into her apartment.
She tapped her handset and the image on the screen flickered and switched to one showing her lounge. The man moved quickly, stepping through to her bedroom to check for her in there, and then into the bathroom. He returned to the lounge, checked the sliding door to the fire-escape, ensured that it was locked, then drew the drapes and looked around the lounge. He selected a reclining chair, dragged it to the centre of the room and positioned it facing the door. He sat down, drew a slim pistol from his jacket, and waited for her to arrive home and meet her death.
She raised the bottle to her lips. She was shaking so much that she dribbled beer down her chin. She replaced the bottle on the table and stared at the screen. She had a sidewise view of the killer, sitting calmly in her chair, and she wondered at the psyche of someone who could willingly accept the commission to end another’s life.
She smiled to herself. She had the guy where she wanted him; she was angry, and she wanted to know why she was being targeted. She also wanted him to know that he had failed, that she had been equal to him; that the hunted had become the hunter.
The assassin knew that she was a telepath, so he would be shielded. She wouldn’t be able to approach the building, send out a probe and read his motives. She would have to take him alive, rip out his shield - wherever that might be - and then read him.
But how to go about that?
She finished her beer and left the bar, shouldering her way across the crowded street to the tenement. She stepped through the revolving door and came to the stairs. She decided to climb them rather than take the lift.
On the first landing she checked her handset. The guy was still seated, silent, impassive. She hurried up to the fourth floor and stepped lightly across the landing, leaning against the wall to the left of her door and drawing her laser.
She watched the killer on the screen, then hunkered down to wait.
There were three other apartments on this, the top level; one was owned by a businessman who she knew was out of town at the moment, one by a cop who worked till midnight, and the third was vacant. She wouldn’t be disturbed by neighbours asking what on earth she was doing squatting outside her own apartment.
She watched the screen and settled down for a long wait. She knew she had the advantage; sooner or later he would move, slip to the loo, or decide to help himself to a snack. She’d be ready when he returned.
The man had obviously done his homework. He knew she arrived home between six and six-thirty weekdays, without variation. Even when going out with Rab, she always arrived home, changed and left around seven. He must have known that she never brought home friends, or Rab, at this time... She wondered how long he’d been watching her, and the thought filled her with fear and rage.
She shifted slightly, to ease the cramp in her left calf, but never took her eyes off the screen.
It was a long wait, but eventually, as she knew he would, he stood and moved to the kitchen.
She patched the image from the kitchen through to her handset and watched the guy. He was hauling open the door of her cooler, squatting to select a beer... He gripped his pistol in his right hand.
She moved fast. She stood, slipped her card into the lock, and eased open the door without making a sound.
She stepped into the lounge, watching the screen.
He made his choice - a Blue Mountain, so the bastard had good taste - stood and looked around for an opener. He found it, screwed into the wall, and eased the cap from the beer.
She cat-stepped across to the open door and looked through. The guy had his back to her, still gripping his pistol. He hadn’t yet taken a chug from the bottle. Her heart was thudding. She felt, she would admit later, elated.
She raised her pistol and shot the assassin through the small of the back. He fell with more noise and commotion than she’d expected; a high cry of pain, a thrashing of arms and legs; the crash of the beer bottle. On his belly on the floor, he tried to turn and fire. She stepped over him and lasered his weapon from his hand, removing three fingers in the process. She kicked the pistol across the floor.
She knelt, patted him down for weapons, and found a small, oval bulge in the inner pocket of his jacket.
She hauled him onto his back, not only to get at his shield, but so that he could see that it was her, his intended target, who’d got to him first.
His eyes were wide with pain, or it might have been shock at seeing her, and she smiled.
She reached into his pocket, pulled out the shield, and tossed it through the door into the lounge. She activated her tele-ability, aimed the pistol at his face, and probed.
She didn’t remain in his head for very long, not liking the images of the dead he had racked up in ten years of hiring himself out as an assassin. She scanned for what he knew about her - which was surprisingly little. She did learn that his paymaster was Chinese, and that he suspected he’d been hired by the government in Beijing. She also learned one other very interesting fact.
A week ago the killer had been fitted with a program - and not just your run-of-the-mill psi-program.
The assassin was a necropath.
She read his instructions, sent to him via a soft-softscreen needle. He was to assassinate one Parveen Das and read in her dead or dying mind any information pertaining to the Chandrasakar Organisation’s imminent mission to Delta Cephei VII...
She quit the cloaca of his mind and killed her program.
She looked at the guy’s injuries, the neat hole to the left of his spine, the bleeding stubs of his fingers... It was touch and go whether he’d live.
She stepped over him, retrieved the bottle of beer from the floor. A third of its contents remained. She moved to the lounge, dragged the recliner into the kitchen and sat down.
She got through to Anish and reported the situation, then sat back and tipped the remaining beer into her mouth as she watched the killer squirming on the floor. He looked up at her, something almost beseeching in his eyes. She stared at him without saying a word, without the slightest expression on her face.
She tried to assess what she felt, now. The anger was gone, the rage at the thought that he had intended to take her life.
She felt...
After the elation, after the rage, she felt not so much avenged at what she had done, but almost ashamed.
The man might die, and she had done this.
The party had turned her into a very efficient killer, and as with so many aspects of her life at the moment she was in two minds about the fact.
* * * *
THREE
COVER EVERY ANGLE
Sukara clutched Li’s hand and stepped from the elevator into the busy foyer of the St Theresa Hospital, Level Two.
The little girl toddled alongside her, c
hattering away about puppy dogs and kittens and grasping the certificate of bravery awarded her by the medic. Sukara heard nothing, lagged in a layer of insulation that numbed her to sensory impressions from the outside world. All around her people came and went, citizens absorbed in their own illnesses, staff intent on their duties, but Sukara felt as if she were locked into a wrap-around holodrama that meant nothing to her.
Dr Chang, a fat Chinese man in his sixties, had told Sukara his findings after examining Li. He had gone over the facts, and then again, accustomed to having to repeat himself to patients and loved ones in shock. Li had leukaemia, Dr Chang had told Sukara; but with the latest medical techniques available there was a seventy per cent chance of Li making a full recovery in a matter of weeks.