The D’neeran Factor (32 page)

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She sprang straight for his throat. The edge of her hand nearly broke his forearm, thrown up just in time to save
his life. Her foot smashed into his groin and he went down in agony with a strangled animal sound. Through the roar in his ears he heard running feet, Visharta, Morisz's man, he would be too late, she was fast and skilled, one more blow—

There was no other blow. He managed to unfold himself. Visharta stood over Hanna, the snout of an armed laser handgun pointing at her head. She lay face down and limp, dead or unconscious. Visharta began to talk into a communicator on his wrist.

“Stop that,” Jameson said. “Shut up. Not on an open channel.”

“But Mr. Morisz—”

“I'll talk to him myself. Tell him to wait.”

He eased painfully to a sitting position. It hurt to breathe too deeply and he was weak and nauseated. He said, “Is she dead?”

“Nossir. I didn't touch her. Found her like this.”

Hanna suddenly rolled over in a single convulsive surge. Her eyes were open and unfocused. Visharta shifted his aim.

Jameson said, “Is that all you've got?”

“I've got a stungun, sir.”

“Then get it out, for God's sake. She's no good dead.”

Hanna's eyes focused on Jameson. Visharta said behind her, “Don't move.” She swiveled to look at him and when she turned back to Jameson he saw she was breathing unevenly, gasping, eyes wide, an animal in the extremity of panic. She tried to say something and nothing came out. Her hands made erratic movements that went nowhere.

Flight reflex, Jameson thought dispassionately. Dangerous as hell.

He got slowly to his feet. The pain was bearable now and he could ignore it, with some effort.

“Back off,” he said to Visharta.

“Nossir,” the man said stolidly. “My orders were to protect you.”

Jameson went slowly across the little space that separated him from Hanna and dropped to one knee in front of her. He was not interested in arguing with Visharta and would chance getting stunned. He looked into Hanna's terrified
face and saw that it was, at least, her face. Perhaps he had only imagined that half-formed distortion.

He said, “Hanna?”

She still gulped for air in irregular sobs, but the convulsive efforts to move had settled into tremors. She nodded in jerks: Yes. I am Hanna.

“What is it?”

“One of, one of them.” Her voice was thick. She took another breath. “Inside me. Alive.”

“Impossible.”

She shook her head and reached for him in the gesture she had not finished before. After a second, unwillingly, he put his hands on her shoulders and drew her closer to him.

“What does it want?” he said in her ear.

“It wants to go back,” she whispered. “It came to find out what I didn't tell it. It knows now. It wants to go back.”

“Back where?”

“I don't know. Where it came from.”

“How did—never mind.”

He patted her back absently, holding her close and looking past her at nothing. This was worse than even he had thought. She said, still against his shoulder, “It's gone now. Hiding. Inside me.”

“But it can come out whenever it wants? Control you? Do what it wants?”

“No, not—” She lifted her head a little and let it fall back. Her breath was warm through his shirt and her voice was calmer. “Not whatever it wants. It wanted to kill you. I stopped it.”

“But who's in control?” he said, and discovered with profound shock that he was rubbing the back of her neck. The skin was silken under his fingertips.

“I don't know. I don't know. I knew it wanted to kill you and I stopped it. I don't know how.”

“Can you feel it inside you now?”

“Yes, like—” She fumbled for words. “Like carrying a stone around inside me.”

“A physical entity?” he said, incredulous.

“No. No, I don't think so. It's been there all along. I didn't know what it was.”

“Can you communicate with it? Try,” he said, and deliberately held her more closely, reassurance against panic.

Another tremor went through her and she said, “It doesn't want to. I can't make it. It said so. It's afraid—”

She lifted her head and he saw the fear was gone from her face; there was only a look of wonder.

“It said so,” she repeated. “It's gone again now.”

He felt her curiosity, so strong it left no room for fear. She met his eyes, inviting him to share it. He could not afford the luxury. He said, “It only comes out when it wants to?”

“I guess—yes.”

“You can't get at it unless it wants you to.”

“No, I don't think so.”

“Well,” he said, “that settles that.”

He touched her hair once, regretfully, and let her go and got up. She looked up, startled.

“What are you going to do?” she said.

“Call Morisz. Get the experts started on you.”

“What do you mean? What are they going to do?”

“I don't know.” All his aches had started up again. He said tiredly, “Maybe we can get to it if we duplicate the drugs. That must have had something to do with it.”

“But—wait.” She stood up too, a little unsteadily. Her eyes were anxious again. “What do you mean? What they gave me?”

“Yes. If—”

“Oh, no. Please. I remember. I remember what it was like.”

“If it is the only way—”

“No!” She was frightened again. She came a step closer and looked up into his face. “They said that too,” she said. “The only way. It's like dying. It's worse than dying. It was the worst, the worst of all. You can't. You can't do that to me.”

He said with finality, “I'm sorry. I have twenty billion human beings to think of.”

Her hands closed on his shirt. “No,” she said. “No. Please.” Horror blasted him, and a silent, powerful plea for help. She had trusted him, still trusted him, wanted to trust him. The flood of mental intimacy revolted him. He got hold of her hands and nodded to Visharta, and the contact ended, leaving him empty. Visharta drew her away.

Jameson said thickly, “Arrest her. The assassination attempt, for now. Maybe espionage, I don't know—”

“But I didn't! I didn't know!”

“It doesn't matter,” he said, and turned his back on her outstretched hands and walked away. His footsteps were loud on the polished floors and he thought he heard her call to him. He did not look back.

He went on through the house to his private communications module and plowed through the identification routine, moving stiffly. He thought she still begged him, distantly; but it was only the aftershock of that assault on his emotions. He cursed all telepaths, Hanna above all.

Morisz was waiting for his call and said, “I'll send more men over.”

Jameson thought of Hanna being taken away by a squad of armed men. He said, “That won't be necessary. The less disturbance, the better. Visharta can put her under light stun.”

“I'll be waiting at the complex,” Morisz said, and signed off.

Jameson leaned back wearily. The light in this little room was too bright, as always. He hurt in places where Hanna had not hit him, and he was more shaken than he had thought. He had done his duty—and he thought flatly that it might have been more difficult if he had not been fueled by fear and revulsion and pain.

It was time to put out of his mind forever the vision of Hanna as the fragile survivor of shipwreck, because she was not going to survive this one. The charges they would hold her on were a joke, but they would serve to keep her while they studied her, poked her, probed her, drugged her, took her apart to the bone to find the real prisoner, the alien spy.

She knew it, too. The look of betrayal on her face was clear in his memory. I have no choice, he thought, but the deep blue eyes accused him and he thought: Perhaps when this is over I should resign. I do not think I could do this again.

He would have to face her sooner or later. It might as well be now. I will tell Visharta to stun her, he thought, and went slowly back to the room where he had left them.

He had waited too long. The utter silence told him before
he stepped through the door that something was wrong, and as he did so he felt the cold draft from another door open somewhere to the winter.

Visharta lay on his back near the fireplace, alive but unconscious and looking peaceful as a baby. His weapons were gone, and so was Hanna.

H
er skull seemed full of voices. They would shatter it. And all of them were right. She could not murder humans but she had to, if she had to, to escape.

Drifted snow sucked at her. She floundered, going no where, and sank to her knees. The pressure in her head was everywhere, it was going to burst. But she hadn't killed Visharta, though the thing inside her had urged it. Calculated tears, eyes swimming, body lax, a fake collapse, he had come to see if her heart still beat and then—

All hers. The plan and calculation were all hers. And the restraint, above all, at the end.

She was not going mad. She wasn't insane. Relief swept over her, all her own and so great she cried out aloud in gratitude. Alien-seeming reality, body, thoughts, dreams—they were all
his.
The presence that haunted her had been not the watchers but
him.
Now that she knew he was there he could be resisted. Her present danger seemed almost insignificant.

She stumbled to her feet with difficulty, possessed by an urge to run. Hers? Leader's? Both.

Leader gabbled in soundless terror. She tried to think where to run to.

Hopeless. Nowhere to go.

Another wave of panic nearly blacked her out. She swayed where she stood and screamed at him.

Stop it! Stop! I have to think!

The terror eased but she was shaking, gulping for air. It was easier to start these things than stop them and Leader, feeding on her terrors, feeding her his, for days, for weeks, was near breaking.

An oblong of light showed a hundred meters away: Jameson's front door opening. Trees and shrubs showed against reflected light with the vividness of hallucination, black and knife-edged. Her first flight had carried her halfway down the long hill before the house, and her footprints were clear in the dim snow-light shimmer. She cowered at the end of them.

“Hanna!” Jameson was silhouetted against the light, a target-practice cutout. Her hand tightened on the stungun.

“Hanna! Come back! You can't get away!”

Kill!

“Not him!” she said violently, but her hand jumped. The stungun dropped to the snow and she was holding the deadly laser. She cried out to Jameson:
Get back!

His shocked comprehension mixed with Leader's rage.

Fire! What he will do to both of us!

I will not harm him! I will not!

The pressure suddenly was gone, given up, relinquished. He'd given her body back to her. She shivered on her side in the snow, half-buried. She struggled to her feet. Snow resisted her, heavy as sand. There was a hot trickle of blood down one ice-slashed leg. The door was closed and there was no sign of Jameson.

She was vulnerable, visible, her trail a pointing finger. Animal running. Easy to find. She would use the laser on herself before she let them have her and burn out her brain, she would burn it out herself, her own way, let them reconstruct her body but they could not reconstruct—

Snow stung her and glittered in the wind. The Questioner's Assistant came toward her with the shining veil, a palpable figure, companion forever. She cried out in horror and fell again.

Go on, or it goes on forever. You will live in dissolution every instant of your life
—

Not that either. She would not give herself to the humans; but not to the aliens either.

She grasped the laser and tried to turn it on herself and—could not. It twisted in her alien hand.

She retched, racked with convulsions. A merciless eye impaled her and ice chips flayed her hands. She could not face the fear again, fear of helplessness and pain without end, not that, never again, and he controlled it, recreating it at will. If there were grounds she could fight him on, there were some where she could not. He would not die, and all the force of his refusal went into The Questioner's promise.

I run, then
—

She could move. She gathered her battered body and ran. For what good it would do. Toward the house.

Not back!

He tried to turn her flight and she staggered.

It must be this way! Nothing behind but the river, and Enforcers
—

She made him see her caught between the river and well-armed men, and he wrested the image from her. It took substance and the Enforcers were a ravening horde, more savage than sentient. The laser flared and cut them down, food and sustenance. Leader thought with satisfaction:
Succulent.

The vision faded. She caught at a substantial wall to keep from falling, tasting foulness. This succubus that fed on pain was part of her, loathsome. She would never escape it.

Escape. Escape. Run!

No, she thought, grasping at slippery wood. They will follow.

In a disconnected moment of clarity she saw that she had stumbled to the back of the house and was leaning against a bay built into it. It had no windows and was surely a hangar for an air-land car. There were few private permits for flight over Terra's dense-packed cities, but Jameson would have one of them. Leader suddenly was silent.

Footprints. I could fly—for a while
—
till they find me.

It would open only to Jameson's personal code, perhaps only to his voice. Unless she cut her way in.