Flinx in Flux (29 page)

A long pause ensued before the blonde responded. “We’ll think about it,” she said finally.

“Don’t think too long,” Vandervort warned her. “We might decide to leave without your permission.” Having said that, she slumped back down behind her protective crates, suddenly looking her age. Still favoring her injured arm, she brushed hair from her face and caught sight of Clarity glaring at her as if frozen.

“Oh, don’t look at me like that, my dear,” she muttered irritably. “It is quite boorish and unbecoming to you and does not affect me in the slightest.”

“You know,” Clarity said evenly, “I used to want to be just like you. I admired you for the easy way you mixed business with science. Someone who’d done it all and on her own.”

“Indeed, I have done everything on my own. I intend keeping it that way. This would have been easier with you assisting me, but even though you’re the best, I will manage by replacing you with the next best. It is our young man who is irreplaceable, not you.”

The lake blurred. Suddenly the water was not quite so clear, his floating not as peaceful. He sensed rather than saw Pip and Scrap drifting alongside and knew their tranquility had also been disturbed.

Shapes continued to float above the lake’s surface, but they were no longer placid and dreamy. Now they were angry and demonic of expression, full of tension and hatred. For the first time he sensed he was not alone in the lake. Things were moving in the depths, far below his range of vision, down where the water grew cold and dark. There was one immense green shapelessness that kept straining to reach him, impinging on his consciousness like a flint striking sparks from another rock. Forms in the void at once familiar and unrecognizable.

Though he concentrated hard, the green shape and the strangeness faded as the demonic faces hardened like glass. He felt as if he were starting to rise toward the lake’s surface, acquiring a sort of mental as well as physical buoyancy. Even so, he was not prepared when he broke through.

Nothing made any sense. When he had been drifting underwater, his breathing had been relaxed and easy. Now that he was back in atmosphere once more, he found himself choking and gasping for air. His eyes bulged, and his lungs pumped wildly. Next to him Pip and Scrap were two bundles of contorting coils.

When the coffin had been abandoned, it had drifted on its levitating grapples until it banged against the subterranean wall. The beige plasteel adjunct containing the morphogas cylinders and flowmix valves had been very slightly jarred. The result was a crack in one of the feeder lines. Monconqui would have noticed it during one of his routine inspections, but that individual had been otherwise occupied for some time.

Room air was leaking into the line while gas was leaking out. The atmosphere inside the coffin was very slowly returning to normal. While the container was airtight, it was not soundproof. The noise of arguing voices and unleashed weapons was audible within.

It was, however, black as Longtunnel’s caverns inside with the observation window shield shut.

Flinx tried to make his brain work. The last thing he could remember was sitting on the bed in his hotel room, watching the tridee with Pip curled up on a chair nearby and Scrap racing his tail around the overhead lighting. Now he found himself lying on his back in a restricting container of some kind with Pip and Scrap next to him. The ghosts of gunshots and voices penetrated the material. They sounded human; therefore, it was likely if not guaranteed that a breathable atmosphere existed outside his prison.

He explored the interior as best he could, but found nothing in the way of a release button or latch. That meant that it was designed to be opened only from the outside. That much made sense. Three thick hinges yielded their identity to his questing fingers.

He recalled his restful sojourn in the lake of his thoughts. Whether by injection or by some other means, he had been tranquilized, and judging from his aching muscles he had been unconscious for some time. Despite that, he felt healthy and alert. The long sleep had swept cobwebs from his mind. He let his Talent loose and found he could perceive proximate emotions clearly. Perhaps the combination of extended enforced rest and whatever narcotizing agent had been used on him had resulted in a heightening of his perception. Perhaps something had happened to him while he had been locked in his prison, unable to use anything except his mind. He had vague memories of powerful unseen forms, and in particular a vast greenness. Echoes of an exhilarating dreamscape.

He touched a number of hostile minds and moved on like a butterfly sampling flower upon flower. Sounds and emotions told him people were shooting at each other. Adrift amid the ocean of unfamiliar feelings were two he knew well. One was Alynasmolia Vandervort, a remarkable combination of greed, lust, ambition, hope, and hatred.

Clarity was filled with disgust, worry, fear, and something he could not lock down. That was when he whispered to Pip. Not all their communication was empathic. The flying snake was intelligent enough to learn and respond to a few basic verbal commands.

Edging as far to his right as possible, he tapped the lowest hinge of his prison with a finger while uttering the word. Pip noted the placement of his finger from the sound it made striking the hinge, waiting until her master had withdrawn his hand, and spit.

The acrid stink of dissolving metal and plasteel filled the container and threatened to choke Flinx anew. Fighting for breath, he tapped two more times, uttered the command twice more, and waited while Pip’s response ate into the hinges. No one came to see what was happening. Either the dissolving hinges were not noticeable from outside or, more likely, the combatants he sensed were busy trying to kill one another.

Choking out the fumes, trapped in the confining darkness, he began to get angry. Everything that had happened to him had come about because he had tried to help someone. His own emotions had been toyed with, and the more he tried to help, the more people seemed to want to do him harm. He was more than a little fed up and more than a little furious.

Lying contentedly in his private lake, he had learned a lot about himself. Enforced meditation had revealed things he had never acknowledged before. One was that in all the universe there seemed only two intelligences that truly understood him. The Sumacrea were one. The other was a gigantic weapon constructed by a long-dead race. The Sumacrea’s main purpose in life was to understand. The weapon’s was to destroy. So be it.

Except he was not a weapon. He was Philip Lynx, né Flinx: a nineteen-year-old orphan with an unusual history, an enigmatic lineage, and an erratic Talent of unknown promise.

Whatever he was, it was quite a shock to everyone else in the room when he shoved the ruined lid of his container off its rim and sat up. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the light. In that instant everyone else had a chance to react.

Vandervort rose halfway above her protective wall of crates and screamed, “Get them!” Dabis and Monconqui started to move. The older man squatting at the top of the stairway stared at Flinx as if he were regarding a reptilian carnivore instead of a slim young man.

“Kill the thing!” he bellowed. “Kill it now!”

The young man seated on the top step hesitated, but not the tall amazon next to him. She started to raise the muzzle of the neuronic pistol she was holding. Without being touched by any visible weapon, she abruptly slumped forward, rolling down the stairs to fall in a heap atop the dead man already there.

Pip and Scrap were airborne and ready to attack, but for the first time in his life Flinx did not need them. Having fought to break free of the lake, he found he could now break through with little effort. Using Pip as an empathic lens, he was able to project emotions as well as receive them. Maybe more than the lake and his sleep was involved. Maybe it had something to do with the shapes and forms that had tried to touch him. Perhaps he had been touched. He did not know.

Time later to find out, if he lived.

What he had projected into the mind of the tall woman had been fear and overwhelming terror. Now he sent it into her companion, who let out a quavering moan, rose to turn and run, and then fainted on the steps. The older man managed a shot in Flinx’s direction. The bolt just missed him, numbing his arm. Instinctively he responded with greater force.

The result was unintended. The elderly fanatic rose trembling, eyes bulging, and collapsed atop his younger colleague. Unlike his companion, he had not simply been rendered unconscious. Fear had stopped his heart.

Observing the collapse of their opposition, the two bodyguards had halted in the middle of the room, relieved that they would not have to try to dodge the pistols of the fanatics. At almost the same time they noticed that their prisoner was sitting up in his coffin facing them. They did not connect his resurrection to the destruction of their opponents.

An uncertain Monconqui raised his pistol. Clarity saw him, stood up, and screamed.

The two bodyguards proved harder to put down. They were familiar with the kind of fear Flinx had used to eliminate the fanatics from the scene. Nonetheless, every man has his breaking point. Beneath the barrage of withering terror they both eventually keeled over.

Then he was alone in the room except for Clarity and Vandervort. The older woman came around from behind her little fortress of crates and started toward him, a broad smile on her face, hand extended.

“Well, my boy, I don’t know how you did that, but I know you are responsible. I saw you stare them down, or whatever it was you did. First that slime on the stairs and then my own people, who didn’t have the sense to lower their weapons before they could find out we were all on the same side.”

Flinx was climbing out of the coffin. “Which side is that?”

“Don’t listen to her, Flinx!” Clarity blurted out hastily. “She’s the one who had you drugged and put in that thing!”

Vandervort whirled on her. “Just shut up, you little bitch. If you know what’s good for you, you’d better keep your mouth shut.” Still smiling, she looked back at Flinx. He studied her noncommittally.

“Dear Clarity is upset. She’s confused by everything that’s happened, and I must say I don’t blame her.” Vandervort laughed, a velvety, comfortable laugh. “I am somewhat confused myself.”

“Me, too.”

Vandervort seemed to stand a little taller. “I’m certain we can sort all this out.”

“So you’re not responsible for any of this?” His stare was level, his voice calm. Pip hovered close by while Scrap darted uncertainly toward Clarity, back to Flinx, and ended up spinning miserably in the air halfway between the two.

“I didn’t exactly say that. What I said was that it’s all been very confusing.”

That was what she said. What, emanated from her was a combination of fear and anger, not all aimed at the unconscious or dead fanatics piled on the stairway. Some of it was directed at Clarity. Some of it was directed at Flinx.

“If you want to help me so badly, why are you so afraid of me?”

“Afraid of you, young man? But I’m not.” Suddenly realization struck, and she smiled, but this time the smile was uneasy. “You can tell what I’m feeling, can’t you? Not what I’m thinking, but what I am feeling.”

“That’s it. What I’m feeling right now is that you’re not as fond of me as you’re trying to make out.”

“You mustn’t take emotions literally, young man. They can be confused, and confusing. You just knocked out five armed assailants without so much as lifting your hand. I believe I’m entitled to at least be intimidated.”

“But you’re not intimidated. You’re afraid, and that’s something else again. I think you’re feeling that as soon as I turn my back on you, you’re going to go for one of those guns that your henchmen dropped.”

All the color drained from her face. “You can’t feel that. It’s not an emotion; it’s a specific thought.” She retreated a step. “You can’t—”

“Absolutely right. I can’t read thoughts. But if I suggest something and you react to it, I can sense your reactions and thereby tell the truth of it as clearly as if you’d answered honestly. If you’d responded any other way, then I might have hesitated. I might have been unsure. I might’ve been tempted to listen to you.”

“You aren’t going to kill me,” she whispered hollowly. “It isn’t in you.”

“Hey, we don’t know what’s in me, remember? I’m the unpredictable mutant you keep warning everyone against.” He was sickened not by the look of sheer terror on her face but by the fact that he was enjoying it. He sighed. “Enough death.” He indicated the stairs. “Two of them are dead, the rest unconscious. One of the deaths was an accident, and the other the result of a needle shot. I’m not going to kill you, Vandervort.”

The older woman stopped. “What are you going to do?” She was looking past him. “What you did to them?”

“Just made sure they wouldn’t bother me for a while. Tell me: Is there anything you’re really afraid of? Anything that truly frightens you?”

“No. I’m a scientist. I look at everything analytically. I have no fears.”

Suddenly her eyes bulged like those of a fish trapped by a receding tide. Her head went way back, and she turned a slow circle. Fingers dug into hair, and she uttered a single piercing shriek before folding over in a dead faint.

Clarity came out from behind the other crates. “What did you do to her?”

He gazed sadly at the crumpled figure. “The same thing I did to the others. Projected fear into them until their nervous systems were overwhelmed. I sensed crawling things in her mind. Bugs, something else, I don’t know.” He shook his head. “Specifics weren’t required. So much for the analytical approach.”

“Flinx, I’m so glad that everything—”

He turned sharply. “I think you’d better stop right there.”

She did so, puzzled and obviously hurt. “I can imagine what you’re thinking. I had nothing to do with any of this.”

“You knew about it. Tell me you knew nothing of it.”

“I can’t. You’d be able to tell if I was lying. Flinx, I didn’t know what to do, what to think. She told me stories—” She nodded toward the motionless form of her former superior. “—stories about the Society and their work and you. About what you might become. I didn’t believe her. I didn’t want to believe any of it. But she’s so much more experienced than I. I didn’t have any choice. If I’d refused, they would have found someone else to take my place, someone who cared nothing about you.”