“I will help you,” Tanya said quietly after the tears had passed. “Tell me what you need.”
***
“Pray to your God that I never rise from this table, doctor.” For the hundredth time, Reza tried to free himself from the restraints that held him firmly to the cold stainless steel operating table. But as his determination crossed a magic threshold, he lost his strength, his will. He sagged back before the power of the restraints, exhausted. The electrodes pressed into his skull tingled as his head thumped gently against the table. He felt like Samson after losing his hair to Delilah’s hand; he could call upon neither his psychic nor his physical powers to extricate himself from his bonds.
“This is my god,” she replied as she worked the set of consoles that encircled him like hungry, flesh-craving electronic gargoyles. She shook her head in wonder at the data pouring from her instruments. “What a magnificent specimen you are.” She turned to him and smiled. “We’re going to become very close, you and I. Closer than you can possibly imagine.”
Reza closed his eyes and tried to concentrate, but he could not channel his power. Normally, he could have simply willed himself to be somewhere else, and he would be gone. But she had done something to him, something that interfered with his most basic neural processes. He was helpless before her, and the only thing greater than his anger was his shame. He could not even commit suicide.
“I was going to do to you what I had originally suggested when you returned from the Empire,” she explained, “to give you a deep-core probe. But I’m glad that things turned out differently. That would have been such a waste.
“You see, I’ve always hoped for an opportunity like this, and I’ve planned for it all these years. A deep-core, of course, depends on the external analysts being able to interpret the data that comes from the target brain. That means you need people who know the language, the culture, and who can understand the imagery that the target brain is projecting. We never recover everything, of course, but under ideal circumstances, we can successfully interpret up to thirty or even forty percent of the core data.”
“And this is all you get for the price of the victim’s sanity?”
“It’s a small enough price,” she said confidently. He felt her hands adjusting something on his head, almost as if she were checking the ripeness of a melon. A throb filled his skull, like a noise so low in pitch that it could not really be heard, but only felt. “But I’ve done better since then. Much better.
“Now,” she explained, “instead of a gaggle of analysts struggling to understand the massive output of even the most diseased and atrophied brain, I can actually link my own cortex into the data stream as an on-line interpreter, drastically improving the recovery rate, bringing it up to nearly one-hundred percent. In effect, I will know everything you know, will feel everything that you feel. And these computers will record it all for later study in a format any qualified analyst can understand.” He saw her face above his, looking down at him with eyes bright with anticipation. She wore a tiara of cerebral implants. “You’re looking at the one person in the Universe who in a few minutes will know more about you than any other.”
“You are a fool, Rabat,” Reza warned. “You do not comprehend what you are about to trifle with. My brain, as my body, is alien. You shall not find there what you expect.”
She smiled condescendingly. “Don’t flatter yourself so much, Reza,” she told him as she made some final adjustments on the small console in front of her. “I am the one who will be in control, not you. And I will also be the only one of us who will walk out of this room when we are finished.” She ran a hand over his forehead as she looked down at him, an expression of consideration on her face. “It’s a shame, really, to use you up like this. When we’re done here, you’ll be nothing but a drooling vegetable for Thorella to dispose of.” She shrugged. “But they were going to kill you anyway. At least I convinced the senator – the president – that we could still get very valuable information from you.”
“How generous of you,” Reza hissed.
“We’re going to start now. Just close your eyes and try to relax.” Suddenly he felt a dizzying sensation, as if a thousand tiny jolts of electricity were coursing through his body. “What I’m doing right now,” she said in a very clinical voice, as if she were speaking to a patient rather than a victim, “is scrambling your voluntary nervous system. You won’t be able to twitch a muscle unless the computer commands it. A security precaution on my part, obviously. You see,” he saw her smiling above him again, “you’ve been carrying a tiny implant around inside your head since just after you came back from Erlang. I took the liberty of implanting it while you were in your coma. A rather ingenious device, if I do say so myself.” Reza felt a curious tingling behind his right ear, a scraping sound that seemed to come from inside his skull. She held up a tiny white capsule that was stained with blood. “This is what’s been keeping you under control. Any time your brain waves reached a certain threshold, this acted like a jammer, influencing the key areas of your brain to reduce your adrenaline levels and critical neural signals. It has also been busy transmitting data on your brain activity all this time, allowing me to make much better calibrations for this experiment than otherwise would have been possible.” She paused as she ran a skin sealer across the small wound, dropping the tiny device into a waiting bowl. “This is also why you were in a coma for so long. I wasn’t ready for you until now, and it gave Borge the time he needed for his own plans.”
Completely paralyzed and unable to speak, Reza silently wondered if she really believed that Borge would let her live; long enough to boil the essence of Reza’s thoughts down to data understandable by her computers – and in turn by Borge’s people – but no longer. If she did not know everything, she knew enough. She was a liability. And Borge did not tolerate liabilities.
“But when Thorella comes for you,” she went on casually, ignorant of his silent monologue, “the capsule might make things look a little odd when you’re… discovered. Not to mention that it interferes with the cerebral interaction we’re about to induce.”
Reza had no difficulty imagining a scenario. It would be much the same as when they brought him here. He suddenly had collapsed, unconscious, in his hospital room, and the next thing he knew he was here. In the near-vegetable state he would be in after Rabat finished with him, Thorella could hand him a weapon – Reza might have enough gray matter left to understand how to hold one – and put him in any setting he thought fitting. And then he could simply gun Reza down at the end of some concocted hunt, walking away with the laurels of a hero. Easy. Clean. Simple.
“There!” she said. “That’s all done. Now we can get to work.” She looked deeply into his eyes. “I’ve waited for this for a long, long time.” On impulse, she leaned down and kissed him full on the mouth. Then her hand touched a control on one of the computers surrounding him, and suddenly the cold metal and machine world around him disappeared.
***
Deliha Rabat stood at the edge of a great plain, upon which stood a city that only one human had ever visited.
“Where are we, Reza?” she asked in wonder.
“This is the Homeworld of the Kreela,” he answered from behind her. “That is the city where the First Empress was born, and where I first fought for the woman who would become my love.”
She noted with pleasure that he was not speaking Standard; he was speaking Kreelan – the Old Tongue she knew now – and she understood it. She suddenly forgot about the city as her mind began to receive the first trickle of Reza’s thoughts, his knowledge. She looked around her, at the mountains, the magenta sky, at the Empress moon above. The trickle soon turned into a torrent, filling her with all the images and memories of an alien lifetime. She felt the knowledge pouring into her, a fountain that seemed endless. She drank all that he had to offer her, and still demanded more. All that he knew was hers. Everything.
“No,” she heard his voice say. “Not everything.�
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“What do you mean?” she demanded in a tongue she had never before spoken. “Give it to me! I want it all!”
“I warned you, doctor, but you would not listen. And now you shall pay the price for your vanity. Behold!”
She whirled around. Behind her should have been the mountains surrounding the valley that was the birthplace of the Empire so many eons ago. But as she watched, the great peaks disappeared behind a veil of fire, a wall of boiling scarlet flame that looked like bloody lava. “What is it? Tell me!”
“It is the Bloodsong of my people, human,” Reza answered contemptuously, “the song of Her will. You and your machines can only comprehend the barest essence of the Way, of our lives. You can catalog the sights, sounds, smells, even the language of Her Children. But you do not understand our soul, or the power of the Empress, the power of Her spirit that dwells within us all. The Bloodsong is what unites us, all who have ever lived since the death of the First Empress. You wish to understand us? Then you must face the fire!”
“No!” she screamed as the wall of flame roared closer, devouring all that lay before it in a symphony of exploding trees and scorching rock. “I’m turning this off!” she screamed as she tried to flee back to her reality.
“Too late,” Reza bellowed, and she felt his hands pinning her arms. She saw the silvery talons of his armored gauntlets pierce her flesh, felt the warm trickle of blood running down her arms. She struggled in vain. His breath was hot on her neck. “I warned you, you fool!” he shouted in her ear. “And now shall you know the truth! You wanted everything, and now you shall have it!”
As the wall of flame grew nearer, towering in the sky to blot out the glimmering Empress moon, Rabat could hear another sound above the din of the advancing apparition: voices. Thousands of them. Millions. All calling to her. They were angry, enraged. She looked into the flames and saw their terrible claws reaching for her, their mouths opened wide to reveal the fangs waiting to tear out her throat. Her skin began to blister in the heat, and she could smell the stench of her hair as it smoldered and then suddenly burst into flame.
She screamed, and kept on screaming as her skin and flesh began to boil away. Her eyes bulged and then exploded from her skull as the flames roared over her, the ethereal claws of the ancient warriors tearing at her flesh, at her soul, devouring her spirit as the world around her turned the color of blood.
***
“Reza! Jesus, are you all right?”
He felt hands moving along his body, tearing away the monitors and probes.
“Where is she?” he rasped. “Rabat.”
“Looks like the good doctor’s had it,” Jodi said quietly. She had to look away from the body. The woman’s face was frozen in a nightmarish grimace of agony, her hands clutching her breast as if her heart had exploded in her chest. In fact, as a coroner would ascertain some time later, it had.
Shaking her head, she turned her attention back to Reza. “Come on,” she told him, helping him up from the table. She had managed to figure out how to turn off the suppressor field holding him to the table. The rest of the machines had apparently malfunctioned when Rabat died. She kissed him, then held him tightly. “I’m so glad I found you,” she whispered, trying not to cry.
He smiled as he wrapped his arms around her, holding her shaking body gently as he kissed her hair. “I am, too, my friend.”
After a moment, she unwillingly pushed him away. “We’ve got to get our asses out of here right now,” she told him. “We’re both in really deep shit.”
“What has happened?”
“You’re up on a rap for murdering the president, I’m your accomplice – helping you to get out of the hospital, no less – and Markus Thorella isn’t really Markus Thorella at all. He’s Senator – now President – Borge’s son and an impostor. That’s the scoop in a nutshell. Aren’t you glad to hear it?” Jodi helped him to his feet and handed him some clothes. “Internal Security is crawling everywhere like a bunch of ants, and they picked up Nicole and Tony for questioning.”
“What?” Reza asked incredulously as he pulled on the blue sweater and black pants that Jodi had brought for him, then some boots. Obviously, his uniformed days were over. Jodi was not wearing hers, either. “How could they?”
Jodi snorted. “Easy. Borge’s the president now. I don’t think he plans on doing anything with them except to try and lure us in, but I don’t think they’ll go for it. Anyway, he’s declared martial law across the entire continent, which makes things that much more difficult for us.”
When Reza was dressed, Jodi handed him a blaster. “Here,” she said, “you’re going to need this later. I already had to use it on the way in.” She led him out and down a corridor that was deserted except for three bodies and the stink of burned flesh.
“How did you get in?” Reza asked. “How did you even find where they had taken me?”
Jodi shrugged. “An old friend of mine is helping us. She has… connections.”
“Can you trust her?” Reza asked as they moved through a portal and into a tiny lobby. The research center where they had taken him was in a distant rural settlement that Rabat had thought would be sufficiently isolated to avoid any unwanted scrutiny. And, with Reza under her control, she had convinced Thorella and Borge that a lot of guards would just raise the visibility of the facility and the risk of exposure. And so, there had been only three guards. Had been.
“I don’t know for sure,” Jodi replied. She hopped into the pilot’s seat of the waiting skimmer, closing the hatches after Reza had climbed in after her. “She certainly has a score to settle with our friend Thorella, though.” She looked at Reza as the skimmer responded to her deft touch, quickly becoming airborne and heading east. “It doesn’t really matter, anyway,” she told him. “I had no one else to turn to.”
Reza frowned. He was missing something. “But why would Borge be after you?” he asked.
Jodi smiled. And then she told him the entire tale of the man who would be president and his misbegotten son.
Forty-Five
President Borge did not rage. He appeared calm and cool, despite the massive confusion that swirled around him as the entire security network of planet Earth worked to find and kill – Borge had decided to dispense with any remaining pleasantries – Reza Gard and Jodi Mackenzie.
But there was a slight problem: they both had disappeared. Mackenzie had not been seen since the afternoon before, and Reza had broken out of Rabat’s little torture chamber earlier this afternoon. Fortunately, her death and the deaths of the Internal Security agents there only sealed the lid tighter on the two fugitives’ coffins. He would have had to kill all of them eventually to ensure that no one even peripherally involved in his designs could ever reveal what they knew. While he had no evidence in hand, Borge instinctively knew that Mackenzie must have been responsible for rescuing Reza from Rabat. Captain Carré and Councilman Braddock had been under constant surveillance since their release and had not been caught helping either of the two fugitives. Borge had decided that there was no point in keeping them in custody, especially since there was always the chance that they might prove incidentally useful.
The problem of Mackenzie, however, remained. How had she escaped the dragnet that had been thrown over the city since his security people had been alerted by her delving into his past and that of his son?
She must have had help, he decided. But from whom? And why would anyone help her when every form of public media carried the story of her aiding and abetting Reza Gard in his bloody escape from the hospital before “killing” Nathan (Thorella had arranged to have a particular Marine lieutenant and a few of his troops die in Reza’s “breakout”)? He knew Carré and Braddock would have helped the fugitives, but they had been effectively neutralized. Who else was there? His intelligence people and researchers had combed the files for anyone who had been associated with Gard and Mackenzie, but those relative few had all been ruled out. Reza did not have any other known associations
on Earth, as most of the officers and enlisted members of the Red Legion only returned from their regiment as corpses sealed in boxes.
The search for people who had known Mackenzie, however, yielded a surprise: Tanya Buchet.
Borge shook his head. Tanya, of all people. He had known her since she was a child, and had often looked upon her as an adopted daughter. He had never known or suspected that she and Mackenzie had known each other. Borge had called her about the matter personally, and had been reassured that she had not seen Mackenzie in nearly twenty years, and if she had, she would have shot her herself.
He had eliminated Tanya Buchet from his list, leaving him a blank screen. Not a single lead presented itself. Borge silently fumed.
Colonel Markus Thorella entered the confusion of the Internal Security Command Post. Ignoring everyone around him, he made his way straight to the new president.
“It had better be important, Markus,” Borge warned ominously. Despite his outward appearance of calm, his mood was homicidally ugly.
“It is,” his secret son said quietly. “We need to talk. Privately.”
Borge scowled. He looked at the anthill-like activity swirling about him. He could do nothing but wait. And it would not really matter if he waited here, alone but for his thoughts, or talking to the Marine standing before him. His son. “Very well,” he said.
After the door to Borge’s makeshift ready room closed behind them, he said, “All right. What is so important that you had to interrupt the hunt?”
Thorella snorted derisively, but he was not about to tell the president what he really thought of the incompetent IS troops and their “hunt.” No, if Gard and Mackenzie were going to be found, he would have to do it. And he thought he had a good idea where to start. But that was not why he had come here.
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