Necropath (8 page)

“Come on, think about it.”

“He’s shielded, right?”

“As ‘port Director it’s within his remit to demand that he’s shielded at all times. Who knows what sensitive information us teleheads could get our hands on, otherwise. Damned convenient for Weiss, though.”

Chandra nodded. He looked eager, the ambitious law enforcement officer faced with injustice. “So we’ve got this guy going under a false identity running the ‘port and letting ships in without the usual checks. Where do you go from here?”

Vaughan refilled the cop’s glass from his own bottle and called for two more. “There’s another ship from Verkerk’s World due in at midnight tomorrow. I’m on duty, though no doubt Weiss will find some excuse to get me out of the way. Of course, if he wasn’t at the ‘port...”

“Wouldn’t he make sure the ship was manned with guards under orders not to let you near?”

“He might, but that’s no problem. It’s Weiss I need out of the way, just for a few hours—say, from ten tomorrow evening until two in the morning.”

He stared across the table at Chandra. “You have enough on him to take him in for questioning, Jimmy. So haul him in, don’t make a big deal of it straight away—maybe don’t even let him know you know about his false identity. I don’t want him spooked yet. I don’t want him calling off whatever he’s doing here. Make it look routine, so he doesn’t suspect we’re on to him.”

Chandra was nodding slowly, mulling over Vaughan’s words. “I could do that easily enough. I could pull him in on his forged flier licence, say we’re having a sweep. It’s routine; he won’t suspect a thing. I’ll book him for driving with invalid papers and let him go at dawn.”

“I’ll do my best to get aboard the ship. I’ll let you know if I find anything.”

They shared another beer, but Vaughan’s silence must have spooked the cop. He quickly drained his glass and said he’d be in touch.

Vaughan watched Chandra hurry from the restaurant. He glanced at his handset. It was almost time to be setting off for the ghats.

* * * *

THE PRICE OF INTIMACY

Vaughan made the edge in five minutes and shared a downchute cage with a dozen Taipusan cultists, a Hindu sect that practised self-mortification as a means of purifying the soul. They were naked and emaciated, old men with stick-limbs and long hair matted into stiffened hanks. They had anointed their limbs and torsos with grey ash and painted their foreheads with Hindi script. Six of the group had arms or legs missing. One sadhu, reposing in a plastic tray on castors, was a limbless torso, his huge member slung across his abdomen. They were making their way to the burning ghats to eat the flesh of the Hindu dead.

Vaughan turned his back on them and stared through the mesh gate as the cage descended. He was aware of their minds behind him. The collected energy of their thoughts hummed at a low threshold, a deep, vibrant note sustained serenely without fluctuation.

Through the mesh, which cut the scene into a grid pattern, he watched the ghats come into sight. The dark margin of the stepped platform, raised above sea level, encircled the Station like a plinth. Countless fires burned on the broad upper step, a succession of roseate beacons diminishing into the distance. Each pyre illuminated a knot of mourners, dark figures washed in the ruddy glow of the flames. Vaughan counted fifty individual fires before they merged into one long, unbroken line.

The cage clanked to a halt and Vaughan hauled open the gate. The sadhus filed past him, pushing their limbless compatriot in his cart and murmuring an eerie, monotone chant as they stepped out onto the holy ground. A crowd of hawkers and beggars swarmed outside the cage. They allowed the holy men through without hassle, then surged at Vaughan, thrusting everything they had to offer—joss sticks, images of Buddha and Kali, holy relics, and amputated stumps—into his face. He pushed through the crowd, ignoring their cries, swatting away the more persistent hands that tugged at his jacket.

The fires extended in both directions, north and south, each pyre located in a narrow strip cordoned off from the next by a length of white tape. On the sheer, polycarbon fa
ç
ade of the Station bold black numbers were painted on circular white backgrounds. Vaughan stood before a massive numeral Sixty-Seven. For a period of perhaps thirty seconds, disoriented by the unfamiliarity of the place, drink, and chora, he searched his memory for the number the funeral director had given him over his handset. It was something in the forties. The ghats numbered from one to fifty were Buddhist, he realised; from fifty-one to one hundred, Hindu. He set off at a hurried walk along the crowded ghats. It was almost one o’clock.

His progress was impeded by the passage of mourners crossing his path from the many funeral parlours set into the wall of the Station. On biers they carried their dead, swaddled in crimson, white, or saffron winding sheets, to the waiting pyres beside the sea. From the cremations already in progress came the stench of petrol fumes and burning meat, and the ululating cries of prayer. The heat from the fires swept the ghats like a desert wind.

He paused before the great painted number Forty-Five. The parlour beneath was deserted but for a tiny, orange-wrapped figure laid out on a trestle table. Slowly, his steps retarded as if he were walking through mud, Vaughan approached the cut-price catafalque. The tightly wound material robbed Tiger’s body of individuality, reduced her to just another anonymous corpse-shape.

An old woman in funeral whites appeared from the shadows of the parlour and prattled at him in Thai.

“I’m sorry...”

She switched to English, “You here at last. Come to collect...” She rattled off a Thai name of many consonants. Vaughan was nonplussed for a few seconds. Tiger had told him her name, years ago, but he had always known her as Tiger.

“Take her.” The woman waved meanly. “Monk waiting.” She scurried back into the parlour to prepare the next corpse.

Vaughan reached out, removed the cloth from Tiger’s face, and gazed at the sleeping girl. Her expression was composed, serene. Her eyes were closed, her lips parted in the hint of a smile. Her dark skin held a waxy sheen, where fuel had been injected to accelerate the combustion of the corpse. Leaving her face uncovered, Vaughan bent forward and slipped his hands beneath shoulders and thighs. She was so light that, when he lifted her, he almost fell backwards. He turned with her in his arms and stared across the deck. The funerary area between him and the sea was deserted but for the Buddhist monk standing beside the stacked pyre.

He was conscious of his isolation as he carried Tiger’s body across to the pyre and laid her atop the stack of wood-substitute. The monk surrounded the body with a barricade of the material, obscuring the saffron sheet and her clean profile from sight.

Vaughan backed off as the monk pressed a touchpad with his sandaled foot, and the pyre ignited with a roar like a jet engine. The heat beat Vaughan further back and he stood with his forearm protecting his face, squinting to see the dark outline of the body in the orange heart of the leaping flames as the monk intoned a monotonous chant. Vaughan sat cross-legged, hung his head, and closed his eyes.

Seconds later he became aware of sad mind-emanations. He opened his eyes. Gathered around the pyre were perhaps ten young boys and girls, quietly watching Tiger’s body burn in the raging flames.

Dr. Rao, Vaughan noted, was not present. As if he’d really expected the rapacious doctor to pay his last respects...

From time to time the monk added fuel, and the pyre exploded as if in anger. The sound of the flames, the cracking and popping of bones, lulled Vaughan to the edge of sleep.

He awoke suddenly, jerking upright, disoriented for a second. He was the last mourner at this funeral: the children had departed. To the east, the sky was gradually lightening: it was almost dawn. Before him, the monk was sweeping the remains of the pyre into the sea with serene, measured strokes of his broom. Only a dark, oval stain remained on the deck to mark the position of Tiger’s pyre.

Vaughan climbed uneasily to his feet, hung-over, his head throbbing. The monk called to him in Thai, waved at him not to leave. The old man hurried over to Vaughan and pressed something into his palm, patting Vaughan’s fingers shut around the gift like a magnanimous uncle. Vaughan watched the monk scurry across to the funeral parlour, and only when the holy man passed from sight did he open his hand.

A small vial, containing a portion of Tiger’s ashes...

Vaughan moved towards the edge of the ghats and climbed down the deep steps until he was standing before the slow swell of the ocean.

He unscrewed the lid, then scattered the grey ashes into the sea. When it was empty, he tossed the vial in after them. He stood and watched the ashes turn the colour of the brine and disappear, and then he climbed the steps and crossed to the upchute.

He rose to the fourth level and walked the rest of the way to his apartment. Ten minutes later he opened the door, closed it behind him, and locked out the world. 

He pushed his armchair into position before the window that comprised the entire out-facing wall, then slumped into the chair and stared out at the two-tone view, the blue of the sea and the lighter blue of the dawn sky.

He reached out, and from the table took the bag of red powder, the rhapsody, that had killed Tiger. He opened the bag and stirred the contents with a finger. It would be so easy to take the drugs in a glass of beer and end it all, to go the way of Tiger.

Then he considered what Jimmy Chandra had discovered, and what Weiss might be doing, and as ever he postponed the decision to terminate his existence. He had a sudden flash vision of the minds he’d read back in Canada, and the truth that experience had given him. Anything but
that,
he thought to himself. He could get lower, he knew from experience, much lower than this. He was in the situation he was in now through his own stupid mistakes. He should never have allowed Tiger to get close to him—he should never have allowed
himself
to get close to
her.

But it would never happen again. He told himself that he would allow no one to penetrate his defences from now on.

Vaughan replaced the rhapsody on the table, lay down on his bed without undressing, and slept.

* * * *

THE PRIDE OF VANDERLAAN

Vaughan stood on the windswept deck of the spaceport, his stomach knotted with apprehension as he waited for the freighter to complete its transfer from the void.

It was all very well planning to board the ship in the comfortable safety of Nazruddin’s, but the fact of what he was about to do—the danger he might face aboard the ship—only became real as the time to act approached.

As he watched, the
Pride of Vanderlaan
appeared briefly to the south of the ‘port, a grey ghost in the darkness, and then disappeared. For fifteen seconds it flickered like an image on ancient film, before it mastered the slippage and appeared finally, solid and substantial, in this reality. The ship engaged auxiliary burners and moved in slowly across the sea, a wasp-like shape garish with the silver and electric blue company colours.

Across the ‘port the loudspeaker system relayed orders, the bored woman’s voice duplicated in Vaughan’s earpiece. “Okay... twenty-three hundred hours. This one’s ahead of schedule. Coming in due south, estimated docking: four minutes, Berth twelve prepare lines. Hauliers at the ready. Emergency services on stand-by. Class-3 freighter out of Verkerk’s World, Vega, terminates at the Station. It’s all yours, boys and girls. Out.” The drawl clicked off abruptly, the silence immediately replaced by the dull drone of the freighter’s engines.

Vaughan stood beyond berth twelve, an oval crater of raised steel flanges. Fuel lines, coloured cables and leads, turned the berth into a snake pit. The freighter swung in over the superstructure of the terminal building, its stanchion legs braced akimbo, landing lights sequencing along its sleek flank. Behind lighted lozenges of viewscreens, crew-members could be seen chatting casually around tables or leaning against the rails and staring out with the relaxed postures of travellers at journey’s end.

Around the berth, one by one, ‘port authority vehicles drew up: a fire truck, an ambulance, a tanker to siphon off unused fuel, and three or four other specialist juggernauts. Their personnel climbed down, stood around in bored cliques, chatting and mopping their faces in the relentlessly humid night. Vaughan could not help but read their thoughts, just as he would have overheard music played loud. Without concentrating, he caught only fragments of verbalised cognition from a nearby engineer:
Last one this shift, thank Allah. Home... Parveen...
Then non-verbal thoughts of security, warmth, sex, and accompanying mental images.

His handset chimed. He accessed the call. “Jimmy?”

Chandra’s smiling face looked up at him. “Mission accomplished.”

“You took your time.”

“Weiss was a bastard. He kicked up a fuss when I hauled his flier down and demanded to see his papers. Called the odds—you know these big shots. He nearly gave me an excuse to arrest him for abusive behaviour to a police officer. He’s in interrogation now and demanding a solicitor. He’s here for a good three, four hours. Hope that gives you long enough. Catch you later.” The screen blanked.

The first job would be to assess the level of security around the ship, and then put his plan into action. He doubted that Weiss would have overlooked the possibility that he would not always be on hand to shunt his telepaths to other duties; he would have posted guards.

The
Vanderlaan
came in over the berth and turned slowly on its axis, lowering itself gradually to the deck. Muscular, ramrod stanchions took the impact and the ship dipped a quick, hydraulic curtsy.

Minutes later the ramp came down, hitting the deck with a clang like a bell tolling the hour. Two big Sikhs in the light blue uniforms of a private security firm ascended the ramp and positioned themselves on either side of the exit.

Vaughan scanned. The men had been hired by Weiss and instructed to let not a living soul aboard the freighter. Weiss had used some vivid language to get his message across, and the guards had taken notice. They were tensed-up and vigilant, as if expecting a terrorist strike at any second.

He strolled casually around the freighter. From the minds of the ‘port workers gathered in the berth beneath the ship he detected not the slightest flicker of suspicion at his presence. He paused on the lip of the berth, staring down at a group of three engineers as they accessed the emergency exit cover.

One engineer was consulting a screader, reading off a reference number to his deputy. Vaughan scanned.

Twenty minutes should see this through—small ship, no maintenance work reported. Where’s that damned code?

The engineer found it on his screader, and Vaughan memorised the code.

A roadster veered around the ship and headed towards Vaughan. He felt the power of the driver’s mind, the thoughts strengthening as the car drew up alongside him.
Fuck Weiss having me do his running about. What the hell’s he doing... should be here by now. Don’t like these damned sneaking teleheads... unnatural. Don’t trust the bastards.

The security officer leaned through the roadster’s open window, an olive-skinned southern European. “Vaughan—just got word from Director Weiss. Don’t bother with this ship—just cargo, anyway. He wants you to go over some files at terminal three.”

If the bastard’s reading me...
Followed by nebulous images of violence.

“Fine. I’ll make my way over now.”

“Look, don’t ask me why... Weiss told me to make sure I delivered you there.”
Don’t know what you done wrong, telehead, but Weiss doesn’t trust you.
Thoughts of uneasiness, the desire to be elsewhere.
Can’t say I blame him...

Vaughan climbed into the roadster, doing his best to ignore the miasma of unease leaking from the driver, the irrational urge to strike out at Vaughan because of what he was. As the car set off, he leaned forward and disengaged the augmentation-pin. He had no desire to be corrupted by the thug’s primitive mindset.

“Relax,” he said. “I’m no longer scanning.”

The officer glanced across at him, smiled uneasily. “Hey, no sweat. I can handle the idea of ‘heads. Just doing your job, after all.”

Vaughan smiled. He recalled the words of a fellow psi-positive at the Ottawa Institute ten years ago, “Prepare yourself for a lonely life, bud. No one likes a telepath.”

The officer dropped him off at terminal three. Vaughan climbed from the car and began walking towards the building, and the officer watched him all the way. Just carrying out orders.

He entered the office and, ignoring the three clerks busy at their screens, crossed to the bank of terminals ranked beneath the windows overlooking the deck. He accessed the report files he’d been completing over the past week and feigned diligence. From time to time he glanced over the screen and watched the activity in the glare of halogen lights around the freighter.

The numerous service teams performed their duties and departed; the bowser finished first, sucking the excess fuel from the tanks and then trundling off across the ‘port, lights flashing. Teams of engineers came and went, disappearing beneath the underbelly of the freighter to perform their routine checks. Technicians swarmed over the carapace of the ship, expertly utilising the purpose-built footholds in the sloping flanks.

As he watched, a shuttle beetled out from the terminal building beneath him and zipped across the deck, pulling up before the ramp and waiting patiently. Minutes later the crew disembarked, ten men and women in the stylish black and silver uniforms of the Vega Line. They boarded the shuttle and it looped around the ship and headed back towards the terminal.

Vaughan stood and stretched, then casually left the office.

He strolled across the deck, heading away from the Vegan freighter. To his right, the officer’s roadster was parked outside the security wing of the terminal building. Vaughan increased his pace, putting the bulk of a voidliner between him and the terminal.

He turned and made his way towards the freighter. As he walked through the humid night, he slipped his pin from its case and inserted it into his skull console. Although he often strolled around the deck between jobs, and his presence here tonight would not be considered amiss, he nevertheless felt self-conscious—as if the few engineers and security guards he passed were aware of his intentions. Swift scans told him that their thoughts were as banal as ever.

He approached the freighter, becalmed now in the aftermath of its landing. He made sure that he went unobserved—it was not within his remit to board ships through their emergency exits. The coast was clear. There was no one in the vicinity, other than a team of engineers busy working on a nearby ship, and they were too engrossed in their work to notice him.

He hurried to the lip of the berth and descended a ladder into the shadowy pit beneath the belly of the freighter. He paused, regaining his breath and his composure. That was the first stage of the operation successfully completed. All that remained now was to board the ship. He scanned, probing behind the sleek curved lines of the freighter. He detected a single mind, too high up in the ship to be read with any clarity.

He found the emergency exit cover and tapped the entry-code into the lock. The cover sighed open, extruding steps.

He climbed into a small, darkened compartment. At his presence, sensors activated and a hatch above him slid open. Low lighting came on, illuminating a corridor. He hauled himself into the ship and stood. He was in the working end of the freighter: the corridor was spartan, uncarpeted. He set off in the direction of where he judged the cargo hold to be. First, he would inspect whatever goods the ship was hauling; later he would investigate the source of the distant mind-noise in the crew-cabins high above.

The cargo holds were situated on either side of the corridor. He pressed the sensor panel on the hatch to his left, and the hatch eased open to reveal a small, dimly lit hold, empty but for hauling trolleys and lifting equipment. He closed the hatch and crossed the corridor, palming the sensor on the opposite hatch. The dull steel cover slid open and Vaughan saw that this hold was occupied.

He stepped into the vaulted chamber, poorly illuminated by sporadic strip-fluorescents. A bulky, oval case stood in the centre of the bare steel floor. The case was the approximate size of a flier, shoulder high at the rear, sloping to around waist high where Vaughan stood. It seemed to be constructed of some brass or copper-like material, engraved with an intricate pattern of spiral and curlicue striations. He walked around the case; the random design of whorls was repeated on every facet, and nowhere could he make out a seal, lid, or hatch.

The most remarkable aspect of the casing, however, was the fact that it was shielded. When he scanned, he detected the signature static that denoted a powerful mind-shield. He touched the cold surface of the case; laid his cheek against the inscribed patterning surface. He scanned again, read nothing.

He backed off a pace, contemplating the case and wondering what it contained. If Weiss was transporting illegal immigrants to Earth from Vega, why do so like this? Why not just have them travel as foot passengers?

Animals, then. Was Weiss smuggling some proscribed species of fauna to Earth—but, if so, why?

There had been two earlier freighters Weiss had warned him off. Vaughan wondered how many shielded containers Weiss had successfully smuggled into the Station.

He recalled the mind situated high above him. As he hurried from the cargo hold and took the elevator to the upper-decks, it occurred to him that he should have felt pleased that he had uncovered the illegal operation—satisfied that a hunch had hit the jackpot. Instead, he experienced a subtle uneasiness at the discovery and its ramifications.