Cosmopath (2 page)

He
was now a necropath, once again. He sat back in his seat and stared
through the screen, wondering what the next two weeks might bring.

“Quite
a view, isn’t it?â€

A JOB OFFER

Sukara
dropped Pham off at school at nine that morning and was strolling
back through the Level Two park with Li when her handset chimed. A
cheerful European woman smiled out at her. “Chintara
Sukarapatam?â€

CONFLICTING FORCES

Kali’s
Revenge
powered silently through the
void. They made love well into the early hours, then slept till late
the following morning. They had breakfast in Rab’s private
suite high on the nose-cone of the ship, the arching dome above them
showing the depthless opalescent grey of void-space.

After
breakfast Rab excused himself and worked at his softscreen, and
Parveen took the opportunity to wander around the ship. She activated
her tele-ability and decided that now was the perfect time to probe
the individuals she had earmarked for further investigation during
the meet-and-greet session in the spaceport lounge. These included
Jeff Vaughan, the scientists Kiki Namura and David McIntosh, and the
surly Sikh security chief Anil Singh. She didn’t relish the
prospect of confronting Singh so soon after their last encounter, but
she was determined not to let his threats get to her. She was pretty
sure that his suspicion of her was based on prejudice rather than
intelligence, but she wanted to make absolutely sure.

Perhaps
half the team had elected to be sedated for the duration of the trip,
while the rest opted to follow the day—night pattern of Indian
standard time they had left back on Earth.

She
learned from a steward that Vaughan was sedated for the duration of
the voyage. She found an observation nacelle close to the individual
team cabins, settled down, closed her eyes, and pushed out a probe
towards the sleeping telepath.

She
told herself that she was doing this for Rab, but wondered if she
were deceiving herself. She had liked what she had read in Vaughan’s
mind back on Earth, and while Vaughan had his vices - a blanket
prejudice against his fellow North Americans, for one thing, and a
mistrust and resentment of intellectuals because of his own lack of
education - these were more than counterbalanced by his attributes:
he was honest and loyal and... this was what Parveen found most
attractive about him... he loved his wife.

She
swam through his dreams, a mixture of erotic visions of Sukara
interspersed with his fear of reading the dead engineer, and immersed
herself in a deeper strata of his unconscious mind. She dipped into
his past, reliving the horrors of his time with the Toronto Homicide
Department, and then the years spent running from the assassin called
Osborne, right up to the point of his confrontation with the killer,
and his acceptance of his death at Osborne’s hands... And his
salvation, when Sukara had shot Osborne dead, and Vaughan’s
subsequent slow turning away from a life of solitude as he came to
place his trust in his wife-to-be.

She
read his political apathy, which she found appalling. She was
reassured that his mistrust of Rab was not so much based on anything
he knew about the tycoon, but because it was in his nature to despise
those with power and influence. It was the one aspect of his former
cynicism that maintained in his current, more mature worldview.

She
could tell Rab that Vaughan was to be trusted in the role he had been
hired to carry out: he wanted nothing more than to get the reading of
the dead engineer out of the way and return home to his wife and
daughters.

Parveen
withdrew her probe, slipping from his mind not without regret. A part
of her, a guilty part, wanted to access his memories of his time with
Sukara, and share in their love-making. She would have liked to meet
his wife, to probe her and read what it was like to be the object of
such affection... She told herself that she did not feel jealous: she
had Rab, after all, and she knew what she felt for him. It would have
been reassuring, however, to know for certain what Rab really felt
for her.

She
deactivated her tele-ability, left the observation nacelle and its
hypnotic view of the swirling void, and moved to the bar.

This
was where the majority of Rab’s team had congregated, sipping
beer and coffee and chatting about the forthcoming landfall.

She
found Namura and McIntosh poring over a softscreen laid flat on a low
coffee-table; they were paging through a set of moving images showing
the Expansion’s only other fungal world, Tourmaline, Bellatrix
III.

She
fetched a beer from the bar and approached the table. “Do you
mind if I join you?â€

ULTERIOR MOTIVES

Sukara
and Dr Rao left the café, crossed Himachal Park, and eased
their way through the surging crowds on Chandi Road. They passed
Nazruddin’s, the restaurant where she’d first met Jeff,
and came to Dr Rao’s favourite coffee house where he had
informed her, what seemed like a lifetime ago now, of her sister’s
death.

They
hurried inside, and Sukara passed the very table where she’d
sat, a naive and ignorant child herself, while the doctor had covered
her hand with his own scaly claw and broken the news. The memory
brought a sudden blockage to her throat.

Dr
Rao led her through a bead curtain at the back of the coffee house,
past a calamitous kitchen, and into a tiny white-tiled room on the
facing wall of which was a steel door.

“My
private access to the elevator to Level Twelve B,â€

ABDUCTION

Vaughan
was woken by the soft chimes of a bedside communicator. A soft female
voice said, “Landing in thirty minutes. If you would care to
gather in the observation lounge... I repeat-â€

A TURN FOR THE WORSE

Sukara
woke suddenly, snatched from a terrible dream in which she was
falling.

She
sat up, crying out, and found herself in a strange bedroom. It was
not the hotel, but smaller, more minimally furnished... Then she had
it. She was in the guest room at St Theresa’s.

Li...

She
rolled out of bed and dressed quickly. She grabbed a bulb of coffee
from a dispenser, decided against having a shower, and hurried into
the corridor.

Last
night on the way to the hospital she’d made a detour to drop
Pham off at a friend’s on Level Three. Kath took Pham in
without a second thought and said she could stay as long as Sukara
was at the hospital. They had hugged for a long time after Pham had
run off to play with Kath’s daughter, and Sukara thanked the
gods she had such a good friend.

Then
she’d hurried to St Theresa’s and the consultation with
Dr Grant.

Now
she moved along the corridor to Li’s room and slipped inside.

The
bed was empty, and something lurched sickeningly within Sukara. She
felt a solicitous hand on her arm. “It’s okay -â€

REVELATION

Vaughan
was woken early by Sukara’s call. He chatted to her, cheered by
the illusion that she was close by, then cut the connection, slipped
from his cabin and left the ship.

Delta
Cephei rose at his back, sending his long shadow sprawling before him
across the fungal valley floor. His earlier curiosity about the
coloration of the fungus at night-time was now answered: by some
effect of photochemical synthesis it had reverted to its default
cream hue during darkness. Now, with the appearance of the sun, it
began the slow change, turning chartreuse as he watched.

The
landscape had undergone a transformation while he’d slept, too.
The valley floor had hunched itself, so that, instead of providing a
flat plane between the
Kali
and the
Mussoree,
a slight hillock had appeared. A thousand smaller growths had
sprouted across the plane; these resembled conventional Terran
mushrooms, but knee high, with thick boles and gaudy crimson
parasols. The drones had been busy during the night, cropping the
fungus from around the ships to create two deep, waterless moats.

Vaughan
walked up the hillock between the ships. A mushroom, much taller than
the others, had sprouted on the crest, and he sat down with his back
against its sturdy trunk, sick at the thought of what the day would
bring.

He
thought of Namura’s abduction, and wondered if he were in
danger here. The aliens had used their knowledge of the fungal
terrain to snatch her and escape. They could do the same now, he
thought, create an opening, take him, and vanish down the aperture
before it closed up. He slipped a hand inside his shirt and gripped
the butt of his laser.

As
he sat, a tall hatch in the side of the
Kali
opened, and seconds later a flier
hovered out. Six security guards sat in the open-topped vehicle, each
one gripping a rifle. The flier settled on the ground and from the
ship trooped a procession of drones. One by one the silver spiders
crawled over the flier, retracted their telescopic limbs and clamped
themselves to its flank like so many metallic barnacles. The flier
rose ten metres and set off away from the ship; it made a circuit of
the cordoned area, then headed towards a distant range of what might
have been mountains or just another fungal outcropping. Vaughan
watched as it dwindled to a dot in the distance and was lost to
sight.

He
saw movement behind the viewscreens along the flank of the
Kali:
the tiny figures of the crew
going about their business. A team of scientists came down the ramp,
accompanied by armed guards, and set up a spindly drilling rig.
McIntosh was with them, though he stood off to one side and cast a
long glance around the area as if searching for clues to his lover’s
whereabouts.

Vaughan
watched as the scientists bored through the fungal mantle, reading
from softscreens and making hushed comments to their handsets as the
experiment progressed.

He
wondered about the dead - or, technically, the dying - engineer
aboard the
Mussoree.
He’d lain awake during the long night thinking about reading
her mind. The thing to do, to preserve his sanity, would be to skim
her most recent memories as her consciousness dwindled away to the
terrible end-point of oblivion. Her last recollections of her time on
Delta Cephei VII were what Chandrasakar was eager to know about
anyway; Vaughan would avoid delving too deep, miring himself in her
personality, her memories of family and loved ones, her joys and
regrets.

He
closed his eyes as the sun warmed him, and after a sleepless night he
must have dozed. He lucid dreamed of Sukara and the girls, and was
startled, some time later, by a voice calling his name.

“Jeff?
When you’re ready...â€

SLAUGHTER

He
stood at the foot of the
Kali’s
ramp, hands in the air. Delta Cephei was climbing into the bright
blue sky, a fulminating fireball. Sweat trickled from his hairline
and dribbled down his neck.

Five
minutes had elapsed since the communiqué from the colonists. A
stasis had overtaken the scene, with the drilling halted and the
scientists and techs standing beside the rig like a redundant Greek
chorus. Chandrasakar and McIntosh stood beneath the wide parasol of
the mushroom high on the incline. As Vaughan watched, looking for the
first sign of the colonists, Chandrasakar moved off down the incline
towards the
Kali,
followed by McIntosh. The former was speaking surreptitiously into
his handset.

They
came to a halt five metres from Vaughan, and Chandrasakar lowered his
handset and stared across the plain towards the
Mussoree.
From the ship emerged half a
dozen drones, mincing on silver scissoring legs across the fungal
terrain to take up positions on the perimeter of the cordoned area.
Next came a scientist and a technician, who crossed to the
Kali
and climbed the ramp.

Vaughan
looked at Chandrasakar. “You’re not going to give them
the ship?â€

A TERRIBLE
COINCIDENCE

Parveen
Das woke late, found the bed beside her empty, and vaguely recalled
Rab getting up a couple of hours earlier. She’d had too many
beers the night before, in the aftermath of Kiki Namura’s
abduction, and her head pounded as she sat up. She moved to the
bathroom, drank a lot of water, then showered and dressed.

She
couldn’t face breakfast, but decided she could manage a coffee.
She took the elevator-plate to the observation lounge, considering
Vaughan and his actions yesterday. She still couldn’t decide
whether his racing after Kiki had been brave or foolish. She’d
scanned him after the event, and read that he didn’t know
either. She supposed it was just the impulsive, selfless action of
someone who cared about other people. He had been armed, but even
so... Had Parveen been in his situation, she would have left well
alone.

She
entered the lounge and saw a group of scientists and crew gathered
before the viewscreen, staring aghast and exclaiming. She hurried
across the room and eased her way through the press. Many of the
scientists were turning away, retching, but all Parveen could do was
stare out in shock.

The
scene between the starships was a battlefield strewn with lasered
body parts. She made out the corpses of what appeared to be humans
daubed in green - and then saw the remains of McIntosh and Namura.

But
who were the green men? The aliens Vaughan had seen earlier?

She
touched her handset and sent out a probe.

She
came across a guttering consciousness on the cusp of death. The green
men were not aliens, but FNSA settlers. She concentrated, at first
reading only intense physical pain and the terrible awareness of
approaching death; beyond, deeper, she caught fleeting images,
desires. The colonists had been attempting to board the
Mussoree,
to get back to Earth to tell
the FNSA about something they’d discovered underground... She
concentrated, chasing the secret as the man died: she saw the image
of what must have been an alien city, and then no more.