Weird Space 2: Satan's Reach (34 page)

Harper willed
Judi
to phase out. He felt a small, hot hand in his, and smiled down at Zeela’s desperate expression.

Three Weird ships advanced over the ruins of the long-house, spitting acid as they came... and seconds later the idyllic lakeside scene, marred by violence, vanished and was replaced by the soothing grey immensity of the void.

H
ARPER AND
J
ANAKER
dragged Kreller’s corpse from the flight-deck and stored it, at her insistence, in the cool-room. She said that she was going to talk to the colonists, tell them of the threat of the Weird and the fact that they were heading for Expansion territory. Harper considered what the colonists were leaving; after the Weird, he thought, anything would be preferable... even life in the Expansion.

It was something he too would have to get used to, and fast.

He returned to the flight-deck. Zeela was standing by the viewscreen, staring out. She turned when she heard him. “What now, Den? What’s happening?”

He told her about the Weird, and the threat they posed, and the Weird parasites, and how he would work with the Expansion authorities to track down those infected.

She was silent for a time, leaning against the console and gazing down at her hands. At last she looked up and said quietly, “And me?”

He took a long breath and gestured to the seats at the rear of the flight-deck. He sat down on a lounger, and she came and sat beside him.

“Remember, on Vassatta... how you asked me to read your mind, to enter your head, so that I could read what you felt about me?”

She dropped her gaze, murmured, “How could I forget?”

“I had my reasons for not wanting to do that, Zeela. Good reasons.”

“You feel nothing for me.”

“It’s not that at all,” he said.

“Well, what was it?” She stared at him, defiant.

“Something happened a long time ago, something which affected me. Something which I never really managed to....”

She stared at him, her expression pleading with him to tell her.

He owed her this, he thought. To do what he was about to do was against everything his old self had counselled, and he knew it would be hard.

“Very well,” he began. “Back in the Expansion... I’d been working as a telepath for five years, reading minds I’d rather not have read, immersing myself in the neurosis and psychosis of criminals and spies and sick, sick people.”

Life had been hell back then. He had no friends, no family. No one trusted a telepath, and he rarely met his fellow telepaths – and on the rare occasions that he did, he found that they were as wary of him as was everyone else out there. He hated his job, disliked the organisation he worked for, and dared not look too far into the future for fear of losing his sanity.

“So,” Zeela said, “you fled to the Reach.”

He shook his head. “Not right then,” he said. “First, I met a woman.”

Her name was Sabine Legrange; she was tall and dark and beautiful, and he fell head over heels. It was his very first experience of love, of intimacy, and it transformed his life. Suddenly existence had purpose; there was no longer the endless prospect of corrupt minds to read for ever and ever – there was Sabine to love, and the miracle of the fact that she loved him. He had a future, and for the first time in his life he was happy.

Sabine worked in an administration department for the Expansion, handling sensitive government material on the world of Hennessy, which was where Harper had been trained for the past five years and where he was based. Because of her position with the government, she was shielded. A few months into their relationship, she offered to discard her shield briefly so that he could read her mind – get to know her fully.

Zeela was shaking her head as she said, “I understand now. You read her, and found something in there... found that she didn’t really love you. And now... that’s why you’re so reluctant to read me, right?”

He shook his head. “Wrong, Zeela. I didn’t take up her offer. I loved her, and I believed she loved me. As far as I was concerned, nothing could make our relationship any more perfect than it was. I didn’t
need
to read her mind...” Perhaps, he thought now, he had been subconsciously afraid of finding something in Sabine’s mind that might have corrupted the perfection of his love for her.

“Then what?” Zeela asked.

He touched her lips to silence her.

Sabine had a lot of free time from her job, and they travelled the Expansion together when he was sent on missions to read suspect minds on far-flung colony worlds. With Sabine at his side, with the love she showed him, he could take the stultifying routine of reading criminal minds, of immersing himself in the psyches of people he would rather not have even
spoken
to. Sabine made his working life bearable, and his free time a thing of wonder.

“What happened?” Zeela murmured.

They had been on the newly founded colony outpost of Zindell, out by Vetch territory, and he’d read the mind of a colonial official suspected of passing military secrets to the Vetch. It turned out that she was innocent, and he and Sabine stayed on a week, holidaying in the equatorial atolls.

“One night we met a government official in a bar, someone I recognised from college, though only vaguely.”

The following day, the man contacted Harper and arranged to meet him – alone, he stipulated.

Suspicious, he met the man in the same bar... and it was there, in paradise, that his world, his future, came crashing down.

“The man told me that Sabine was a Minder – a government agent, in other words, whose brief it was to shadow telepaths, as an added security measure. She had Minded a colleague of his several years ago, until the colleague tumbled her, after which she’d vanished from the scene.

“But...” Zeela began, “but she said that you could read her...”

Harper smiled, bitterly. “Of course. She was playing my bluff. She knew me, knew I’d decline.”

“What happened?”

He’d returned to the hotel, confronted Sabine, asked her if it was true – that she was a paid government Minder tasked to shadow him and ensure that he was loyal to the Expansion.

She denied it, of course. She put up a brilliant show of disbelief that he’d take the word of a stranger over her avowals of innocence; then she was outraged at his accusations, and then pleaded with him not to leave her.

They rowed bitterly, and he demanded that she remove her shield, let him read the truth.

He still recalled the hatred in her eyes as he’d asked this, and she had replied that she refused to accede to the demands of someone who did not
trust
her.

“We lasted as long as it took to return to Hennessy. I was half deranged with doubt, veering from hatred of her to self-hatred. When we landed, Sabine just... disappeared without a further word.”

He requested a transfer, and a week later was posted away from Hennessy.

But the rot had set in. Sabine had been his future, and now that was denied to him. Her love had been no more than a sham, every aspect of their relationship a cruel charade. She had used him, the Expansion was using him. It was then that he decided that he had to get away, and three months later the opportunity arose to steal a starship and flee to the Reach.

He was silent for a time, staring across the flight-deck at the marble grey void.

Zeela said, “But... but that’s no reason to... to mistrust
everyone
, Den. And anyway...” She shrugged. “Has it ever occurred to you that you might have been wrong? That she was telling the truth?”

He stared at her. “Of course it had! I tried to persuade myself of that, even when I’d fled to the Reach. But, you see, later I found out that what my colleague had told me was indeed correct. Sabine was a Minder. More – she was a highly trained government operative.”

She was shaking her head. “But how...? How did you find out?”

“Because,” he said, and the words came with difficulty, “because a year after I fled the Expansion and set myself up on the Reach, I found out that they had sent someone after me, a bounty hunter... I faced a choice, flee for the rest of my life, or confront and kill the hunter. And I chose the latter, I drew the bounty hunter into a trap, and confronted... her.”

She stared at him, wide-eyed.

“It was over in seconds. I had one chance to shoot my pursuer, but in the second before I pulled the trigger I saw that they’d sent Sabine after me.”

And he had fired, filled with anger and rage, and killed her with one clean shot... and in the years after the event he had gone over and over the encounter and tried to relive the exact rush of emotions he’d experienced then.

Anger, and betrayal, and love... and then the desperate desire to survive.

“And since then,” Zeela said, “you’ve remained alone, aloof, entire unto yourself...”

He smiled. “That’s a rather poetic way of putting it.”

“It’s a line from a song I used to sing, back on Ajanta.”

He said, “Is it any wonder, Zeela, that I was reluctant to let you in?”

She smiled, and shook her head, and stared down at her hands.

He wanted to weep; a vast pit of despair seemed to excavate itself in his chest. He had to tell her, of course. He had to...

She looked up at him. “Den, Den... Please believe me, you have nothing to fear from me...”

He stared at her, her upturned face, the tears welling in her eyes.

“Zeela,” he began, “when we were on Teplican, we faced a very real danger...” And he silenced her murmurs of incomprehension and explained to her about the alien ship, and the parasites, and what Janaker had told him about the infected.

She listened to him in silence, her eyes wide.

“So...” she said at last, “I might be infected?”

“The chances are that you’re not.” He told her about Kreller’s reading him, finding him free of the parasite.

“Zeela... before I found out about the parasite... please believe me when I say that a part of me, the part that knew that running away from what had happened all those years ago was wrong... that part of me wanted to read you.”

“And now,” she murmured, “now you
must
read me.”

He reached out and stroked her cheek.

Her eyes were massive as she stared at him. “And... and if you do find that I’m infected?”

He shook his head, and could no longer stop his tears.

She took his hand and smiled at him. “I understand, Den. I understand that you must do it. Read me, and... and don’t be afraid of what you might find in there, okay?”

He stared at her, trying to interpret her words as he drew his ferronnière from his jacket and slipped it around his head.

She sat back on the couch, took a deep breath, and closed her eyes. “Just do it,” she said.

Harper activated his ferronnière and probed.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

J
ANAKER FOUND IT
hard to believe that just two weeks had passed since she had left her ship at the spaceport, taken the monorail to the government headquarters, and received her orders from Commander Gorley. So much had happened in that time; she had killed a hell of a lot of aliens... and brought the errant telepath back to the Expansion.

Now it was starting all over again. She was due a fortnight off, and then she would be sent on her next mission. This time, she hoped, not accompanied by an irascible telepathic Vetch.

She took he exterior upchute to Gorley’s penthouse office and, as usual, was kept waiting.

She wondered why Gorley wanted to see her now. She’d made a long written report of her mission, detailing the chase and eventual capture of Den Harper. She wasn’t due to embark on the next mission for another two weeks, and Gorley had set a date for the meeting prior to her departure to go over the details.

Twenty minutes later Gorley deigned to see her, and she strode into his office and stood over his desk.

Gorley sat back in his seat, steepled his fingers before his chest, and smiled up at her. “Sit down, Janaker. A drink?”

She sat down, wondering at his sudden hospitality. “I’m fine.”

Gorley gestured at his desk-screen, presumably at the report she’d sent him. “Excellent work, Janaker... The telepath,
and
his ship.”

She glared at him. “It would have helped matters if I’d been told about the ship before we set off.”

He spread his hands. “One of the provisos the Vetch stipulated when sharing the information about the ship with us was that as few people as possible should be told. In the event, things worked out well. You located Harper, and he proved his worth by detecting the parasite in Helsh Kreller.”

She relived the frantic seconds as they hurtled towards the Weird portal. “It was touch and go, Gorley. If it hadn’t been for Harper’s last ditch efforts...” The mere thought of it brought her out in a hot sweat.

“And you had the foresight to put the Vetch’s corpse on ice so that his people could perform an autopsy, and so back up your report. All in all, Janaker, excellent work.”

“Pity that the fucking super-weapon didn’t turn out to be so super after all.”

He frowned. “Our scientists are working on ways to... improve its efficacy,” he said. “But that in no way devalues the success of your mission.”

“Is that why you dragged me all the way here, Gorley, to pat me on the head?”

“Just as sarcastic and bitter as usual, Janaker. I’m glad to see that your little sojourn to the Reach hasn’t done anything to change you.”

She smiled at him, mock-sweetly, “As if.”

He leaned forward, “What I’d like to know,” he said, “is how you found Harper?”

“Do you mean literally,” she asked, “or on a personal level?”

“The latter,” he said, “I have your report of the capture, after all. I’m curious... What is Harper
like
?”

She sat back in the chair and stared at the commander. “According to what you told me, he was an evil killer, a ruthless criminal made cynical from years of reading human minds.”

“I sense a ‘but’ coming.”

“But you were wrong. He wasn’t like that at all. I found him quiet, reserved, but oddly sophisticated, cultured even. And compassionate.”