Voyagers III - Star Brothers (23 page)

No, Stoner decided. I want to know who these people work for, and why they want me so badly. You were right: why deal with the hirelings? It’s their masters I want to get my hands on.

The picture of Cathy came unbidden to his mind once again. Even before his star brother could clamp down on the tidal wave of grief and guilt that gushed from his glands, Stoner saw his daughter ripped apart by their bullets, flung into the pool, her young life torn from her by the intruding murderers.

The lava-hot surge dwindled, ebbed, nearly disappeared altogether. Stoner still saw Cathy die, still felt hatred for the men who had done it and the person who had sent them. But the emotion was gone. The alien presence within him damped down the inner fires almost completely. Left in its place was a cold implacable determination to find who was responsible for Cathy’s murder.

The white-uniformed silent men and women left him alone in the room. There was only the one door, a conventional wooden door with an electronic lock. Not a star-given energy portal that could be solid wall one instant and an open doorway the next. I could pick the electronic lock in a couple of seconds, Stoner knew. Maybe that’s what they want to see me do. It looks like they want to test me.

Instead, he kicked off his shoes and stretched out on the cot, hands behind his head, and pretended to sleep. The light panels in the ceiling dimmed. Yes indeed, I’m being watched and tested. Angrily he asked himself, So what else is new?

He thought about Jo. She had seen her daughter, her firstborn, slaughtered. And she had to bear that grief without him. Jo was tough, he knew, but could she stand up to this? He wished he could reach her, communicate with her, at least tell her that he was alive and unharmed and trying to track down the people who had killed Cathy. She’s strong, Stoner kept repeating to himself. Jo is the strongest woman I’ve ever met. The strongest person, man or woman. She’ll handle it all right. She’ll come through it.

He told himself that her Italian thirst for vengeance would help to sustain her. The blood is strong. The age-old instincts boil to the surface and wash away all the veneer of polite civilized behavior. Jo doesn’t have an alien brother inside her to clamp down on the emotions and control the heat that burns through the blood. She won’t leave it to law and order. Her daughter’s been killed; she’s going to move heaven and earth to find the killers. God help them when she does.

Rickie. He’s the one who needs help. It’s a shattering blow to a ten-year-old. Strangers breaking into his home. His sister killed before his eyes, his father abducted. The poor kid’s had almost every emotional prop knocked out from under him. All he’s got left is his mother. Will Jo pay enough attention to him, or will she be too busy seeking out her revenge?

When I get back home, Stoner promised himself, I’ll keep him close to me. I’ve got to rebuild his feelings of security and trust. All the psychologists and neural programming in the world can’t do that for him. It’s up to me, I’ve got to make him feel safe and certain of himself again. That’s more important than anything else.

When I get back home.

CLIFF Baker walked along the magnificent beach and watched the surf pounding up onto the sand. Hundreds of bathers were in the sparkling blue water, diving into the waves. Half a kilometer up the beach the surfers were riding their boards on the big breakers. Further out windsurfers leaned out from their sails and cut along the swells like oversized waterbugs.

Once these beaches had been preyed upon by “the men in the gray suits,” vicious, swift, voracious sharks that could take a man’s leg with a single snap of their powerful jaws. Now a flimsy net of electrical wires protected the beaches and kept the sharks away. Hasn’t been a shark attack at a protected beach since I was a teenager, Baker thought idly.

The sun was high and Baker’s ragged cut-off shorts and flapping unbuttoned shirt were wet with perspiration. Soak some of the booze out of me, he thought. On the other hand, a cold Foster’s would feel very good right about now.

He turned around and headed back toward the beach house. One of the advantages of being chairman of the International Investment Agency: a marvelous twelve-room house on the most expensive beach in the Sydney area. Rank hath its privileges.

Sunday’s meeting had gone exactly the way he had thought it would. The regions hardest hit by the plague needed money immediately for medical services. The ecologists and the representatives of areas not so badly threatened by the Horror wanted to spend more money on research. The bastards from the corporations, who had the goddamned money, didn’t want to spend their precious loot at all.

They hadn’t accomplished a bloody thing. They had argued and called each other names and agreed to nothing more than appointing a bloody committee to study the problem. Study it! While thousands were dying in agony every day and the plague spread across Africa and into Europe and North America.

Baker grinned, a lopsided smirk that was far from pleasant on his bloated reddened face. Let them argue, he told himself. Let them delay. Soon enough the Horror will start to pick them off, one by one. The women first, and then the men. They all deserve it.

As he trudged barefoot through the sand he wondered about Jo Camerata. She had been strangely silent at the meeting. Usually she took charge and made things come out the way she wanted them. But she had barely said two words. It was hard to tell when you were looking at holograms instead of live people, but it seemed to Baker as if Jo spent the whole damned meeting staring at Hsen instead of paying attention to the business at hand.

Baker shrugged off his puzzlement. He had reached his house and padded up the smooth wooden steps, heading for the kitchen fridge and a cold Foster’s.

In another week, he thought, the first members of the IIA will start to get their guts torn out by the Horror. And I’ll be up on the Moon, safe as houses, watching the world tear itself apart.

The medical tests they had done on Stoner were ruthlessly thorough. He thought of the stories he had heard as a youngster of the “experiments” performed by Nazi doctors in concentration camps.

His captors were extremely wary of him. No human being entered his room after the first few days. Everything was done by robots under remote control. Each morning began with a short cylindrically-shaped robot carrying in a breakfast tray of juice, cereal, and coffee. The machine was spotless and gleaming, obviously new, obviously being used for the first time.

“Good morning Dr. Stoner,” the robot would say. “I trust you slept well.”

It was the robot’s own voice, part of its interactive programming. Immediately after breakfast another voice, human, would issue from the speakers set into the ceiling.

“I slept about the same as usual,” Stoner would reply. “Where are we? What is our geographical location?”

“I do not have that information,” the sturdy little robot would answer, with complete transistorized honesty.

The first two days were standard medical tests. Blood samples. Cardiac stress testing on a treadmill carried in by another robot, a taller, many-armed machine of matte-dull carbon fiber composite skin. Its long arms were of stainless steel, jointed and extensible, capable of carrying very heavy loads.

It was the blood samples that worried Stoner. He felt he could hide his star-gift abilities from his captors well enough; he had been careful not to show them anything except a normal, healthy human being. But analysis of his blood would show that it was infected with myriad particles the size of viruses. His star symbiotes.

They may think that they’re nothing but viruses, Stoner told himself. But he doubted it. That many strange particles in a blood sample would set their curiosity atwitter. Chemical analyses wouldn’t prove much; the symbiotes were made mostly of organic elements. But if they start photomicrographing the particles they’ll realize right away that they’re something no one on Earth has seen before.

At the end of the second day of medical tests it seemed to Stoner that the robot left the door unlocked when it rolled noiselessly out of the room. Stoner sat on the edge of his cot for nearly half an hour, considering what he should do. Obviously they were observing him. If the door were left unlocked, it was because they wanted to see what he would do.

There were no clocks in the room; he had no way of telling what time it was, or even if it was day or night outside. Like a Las Vegas gambling casino, Stoner thought grimly. With a shrug, he got up from the cot, wearing nothing but a pair of briefs, and padded to the door.

He turned the old-fashioned knob. Sure enough, the door was unlocked. Hesitating only for a heartbeat, he pushed the door wide open.

A very large robot stood immobile just beyond the arc of the door’s swing. Its base was a pair of heavy, tanklike treads. From there it rose in a single massive column of gleaming chromed metal. Four long arms were clamped to its sides, each of them ending in metal pincers. The dome at the robot’s top was studded with sensors that made it look more like a spider’s many-eyed head than a human’s.

“You must stay inside your room,” said the robot in a voice that sounded like a top sergeant growling from inside a concrete mixer.

Stoner smiled at the machine. Obviously meant to frighten people into obedience. Probably built for military security or police patrol work.

He took a step forward. The robot rolled slightly toward him and raised one arm to block his path.

“You must stay inside your room.”

For several long moments man and machine confronted each other, motionless. Stoner tried to probe the robot’s computer brain to see if he could alter its programming enough to get by, but he sensed that the computer was too simple to be influenced by outside forces. There was no way to talk it into bending to Stoner’s desires, as he could do with most human beings.

“You must stay inside your room,” the robot repeated in exactly the same tone of voice as before.

Stoner understood that the test had been psychological more than physical. His captors wanted to see how he would react to having his hopes raised and then dashed. Also, they were testing to see if he could somehow get past the simple-minded security robot.

Acknowledging defeat, Stoner retreated back inside his room. The robot shut the door. Stoner heard the lock click as distinctly as the slamming of a jail cell’s barred gate.

The third morning the voice from the ceiling asked, “You slept well?”

“Yes,” Stoner lied. He had not slept at all. He did not have to. He had spent the night trying to sense the location and number of the people around him. He still had no idea of where he was. If his captors were not going to deal with him face to face, Stoner realized, he would have to go out and contact them, one way or another. And get past the security robot outside his door.

“No stomach cramps or other discomfort?”

“Should there have been?”

The voice did not answer. Stoner realized that they had poisoned his dinner. Not to kill him, just enough to give him obvious symptoms. His star brother had automatically neutralized the poison, broken down its complex molecular structure into simpler, harmless chemical components.

He wished the voice would say more to him, because it sounded oddly familiar. Even through the low-fidelity ceiling speakers Stoner knew it was a man’s tenor voice, not a woman’s. A voice that he thought he had heard before.

Two of the tall many-armed robots entered the room that morning.

“We have established a baseline of your physical profile,” said the voice from the ceiling. “Now we must see how far from that baseline you can be driven and still recuperate. The next few days will be rigorous, but we will try to make them as painless as possible for you.”

In short, they tortured him.

They began with electric shocks. One of the robots clamped Stoner into a chair with its many arms while the other applied electrodes to various parts of his naked body. At first Stoner tried to stand the pain without help from the alien symbiotes. But they kept increasing the voltage until he was screaming and his star brother intervened to shut down the white-hot messages of agony that blazed along his nerves.

He sat in the chair, the stainless steel arms gripping his bare flesh, and watched the electrodes burn away his skin. Saw tendrils of smoke rising from his chest, his stomach, his thighs. Smelled the odor of his own meat roasting.

“Remarkable,” uttered the voice from the ceiling microphones. “He is able to handle intense physical pain.” It was muffled, indistinct, as if the man had placed a hand over the microphone so that his victim could not hear what he said. Stoner made out the words, though, and even the slightly ragged breathing of the speaker. Was he enjoying what he watched, or did it upset him? Stoner could not tell.

“Is this necessary?” another voice asked. It was blurred even more, as if the speaker were several meters away from the microphone. “Can’t you…”

“It
is
necessary,” snapped the first voice. “We will proceed to the next step.”

“Without giving him time to recuperate?”

Do they
want
me to hear what they’re saying? Stoner wondered.

“No recuperation time. Not yet. The next test is a combination of physical and psychological pain,” said the man’s voice. “We will see how he reacts to having his manhood threatened.”

“But that’s inhuman!”

“We are hardly dealing with a human being here.” The man’s voice was cool, detached. “Don’t be so sentimental. This is an experimental subject, nothing more. You must stop being so squeamish.”

The other said nothing, but Stoner sensed a turmoil of emotions. And something more: the other person was a woman.

The robot held Stoner’s legs apart and applied the electrodes to his penis and testicles. Stoner closed his eyes but otherwise gave no reaction. His star brother cut off all sensation, all emotion. It was like being encased in a block of ice, like being frozen again, no longer alive, inert, apart from the world of the living.

And his star brother told him, You know that whatever physical damage they do will be quickly repaired.

Sure, Stoner replied silently, his teeth clenched so hard they seemed to be fused together. Wonderful news.

After what seemed like hours the robots released him and rolled silently out of the room with their equipment. The voices from the ceiling fell silent. Exhausted, Stoner crawled to his cot and pretended to fall asleep.

They did not feed him. No robot entered with a dinner tray and the following morning there was no breakfast.

I’ve got to get out of here, he told himself in the dead of night.

But his star brother soothed his growing anxiety. Not yet. Wait until we can learn who they are—and who they work for.

So Stoner lay on the cot and waited for the next session. They know that whatever powers we have, we still need energy input. Without food we won’t be able to heal our wounds.

We can go for several days, his star brother assured him. There is enough stored fat in the body to keep going that long without input.

The lock clicked and Stoner sat up on the cot. The tall many-armed robots came through the door. One of them pushed a gurney, the other a table full of electrical equipment.

“Today,” said the voice from the ceiling, “we test the electrical patterns of your brain.”

The robots strapped Stoner down on the gurney and attached electrodes to his head. In the weirdly distorted reflection from their stainless steel arms he saw his naked body, ugly red burn marks scattered about his chest, abdomen, groin.

For hours they mapped the currents flickering in his brain. His star brother remained silent as they sent tickling probes into various lobes of the brain. Stoner tried to stay completely relaxed as the electrical currents stimulated specific groups of neurons. He saw colors bursting before his eyes, heard the rushing roar of the sea, tasted bacon and then the cold metallic tang of the oxygen fed into his pressure-suit helmet. He could feel the suit encompassing him and for a fleeting moment, as in a dream that shifted like the melting scenery on a rain-streaked window pane, he was back in space helping to construct the mammoth telescope that had first detected the approaching alien starship.

The telescope glittered in the hard unfiltered sunlight, a gleaming spiderwork of bright metal against the cold black background of infinity. Stoner reached out to touch it.

And it was gone, replaced by an absurd childhood memory of trying to maintain his balance on a two-wheel bike.

Blinding white pain! Stoner could not breathe, he felt his heart stop, then start up again with thumping spasms that rocked his whole body.

“Again,” he heard, as if from a trillion miles away.

The blast that shockwaved through his skull was beyond pain. Even his star brother was stunned momentarily, but then swiftly shut down the pain centers in his brain.

“There, did you see it? That blip in the EEG?”

Another powerful bolt of agony exploded inside Stoner’s head, but this time he and the alien within him were ready. He knew exactly what they were doing to him: electrical shock treatments. Christ! Next they’ll start lobotomies!