The Last Aerie (28 page)

But just as a storm has its calm “eye” at the center of the tumult, so the numbers vortex obscured and protected its sentient core: another mind, which Trask felt warm against his own as soon as he touched it. Except it wasn’t simply that he felt it, but also that he felt he
knew
it!

“Who …?” he said, dismissing his post-hypnotic mind-guard and opening himself to the other’s probe. “What…?”

A friend
, came back the answer.
Or one who would be your friend,
if you will have me.

And despite that the telepathic voice was warm, uncertain, and even a little afraid, still Trask shuddered in his sleep. It was as if someone had walked on his grave—
exactly
like that—and for the first time in his life he fully appreciated the meaning of that old cliché. For this was how it must feel to be dead and have someone talk to you! A single word, thought, idea, floated to the surface of Trask’s mind:

“Necroscope!”

For a moment there was a hushed silence. Then:
And is that such a
dreadful thing to be? I can feel it in your voice that you think so.

Even drugged, asleep, Trask knew who he was talking to—the only one he could possibly be talking to—so that before considering or attempting to curb his reply, he found himself answering: “But your father was a dreadful thing, in the end!”

Ahhh! You knew my father? My real father
? There was hope in the voice, eagerness and excitement, but all fading away in a moment.
And I see that you feared him, too, just like everyone else in this place.

“In the end we all feared him, yes,” Trask repeated. “But in the beginning, he was my friend.”

And you … can tell me about him?
Something of hope had returned.

“Oh, yes, I know about him,” Trask answered. “I know a lot about him. More than most men. Most living men, anyway.” Which seemed to say it all.

Ahhh!
Again that strange, sad sigh. And in another moment:
We’ll talk again. But not now. There are mentalists here. They watch and listen. I see you have a mind-guard. Use it!

The voice faded away, leaving Trask to cry out after it, “Wait, wait!” But it was useless; the numbers vortex snatched him up again and dragged him into its whirling wall. Buffeted this way and that in a spiral of mad maths, Trask was rocked, shocked, shaken … shaken awake!

“Easy, Ben! Easy!” Ian Goodly’s worried expression loomed into focus. The precog sat on the edge of Trask’s bed, gripped his arms and continued to caution him.

“They think we’re still out for the count. And as long as they continue to believe it, we can talk.”

“Ian!” Trask grasped the other’s wrists, stared up into his pale face. “I was dreaming.”

“Nightmaring, more like!” Goodly retorted. “Who were you calling after?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you!” Trask struggled upright, gently fingered his brow. “God … headache!”

“That mousse, or whatever it was supposed to be.” Goodly nodded. “Or rather, what was in it.” He stepped through into his room, ran water, returned with a fizzing glass. “Good old American knowhow.”

“Eh?” Trask drank.

“Alka-Seltzer.”

“Ah!” Trask looked at him, focusing a little easier now. “So what happened to your precognition?”

“Nothing, it worked fine.”

“You
knew
they’d mickey us?” Trask’s jaw fell.

“But not until it was too late, after the first spoonful.”

Trask tut-tutted his disgust.

“And your own faultless talent?” Goodly raised an eyebrow.

Trask’s expression changed, grew rueful. “Much the same as yours, I suppose: it came too late.” He sighed. “I guessed Tzonov’s ‘tiredness’ was a lie, but what the hell, obviously he wanted to be alone with Siggi! So I wasn’t seeing or thinking straight. Something was—yes, I have to admit it—distracting me. But by the time I was a couple of mouthfuls into that pudding …”

“That’s when you knew.” Goodly grimaced. “Because by then she was able to relax. We’d taken the poisoned bait. Except … well, we only took a little of it. I expect the dose was carefully measured; a full portion of that pudding would probably have put us both down for the entire night.”

Trask frowned. “Run that by me again? About Siggi, I mean?”

And Goodly said, “That’s what she does, and it’s why she’s here. Siggi Dam’s no ordinary telepath, Ben. It’s my guess she carries as much mind-smog around with her as any of the undead you ever went up against. What makes me think so? Simply that I can’t read a damn thing of
her
future. Nothing!”

Trask stroked his chin. “Mind-smog? Static? She produces it?”

“To order. That’s my bet, anyway. It throws the talents of other espers out of kilter. It’s why my advance knowledge went into reverse and your instinctive lie-detector blew a fuse.” He nodded and managed to look more mournful yet. “As if she wasn’t a big enough distraction already. Physically, that is.”

Trask got up, crossed to his washbasin and ran cold water, splashed his face with it. “Certainly it would explain why she isn’t listed,” he grunted. “A new player we know nothing about. Her telepathy warns her when another esper is near, and then she hides behind her mind-smog. Turkur Tzonov’s secret weapon. We had too much of an edge, so he shipped Siggi in to blunt us down a bit. I knew there was something I should ask myself the first time I saw her, namely: what the hell’s a nice girl like her doing in a dump like this? Keeping Tzonov company? Maybe, but she’s no bimbo. Given that she has a mind, there have to be ten thousand better places to be!” Squinting in the room’s poor light, he glanced at his wrist-watch.

“You were out for an hour and forty minutes,” Goodly told him. “You still would be, if I hadn’t woken you up. Myself … I was out for half an hour.”

“You’re resistant?”

“I only tasted that stuff,” again Goodly’s grimace. “But you know, the Bulgarians were expert ‘chemists’ all of thirty, forty years ago. Designer drugs? Old hat to them and the Opposition. Anyway, I went down fighting it and kept fighting it. If I hadn’t, my drugged sleep might well have merged into normal sleep. But I knew what had happened and wanted desperately to be awake! I used my mental alarm clock: that’s a trick of mine to wake myself up at any hour of the day or night. Before going to sleep, I just tell myself when I want to be up. Which is what I did. But as I was coming out of it, someone entered the room. So I just closed my eyes and mind and lay there. Whoever it was must have been satisfied. After he or they left I tried to wake you but couldn’t, so I took a look around on my own.”

“You did what?”

Goodly shrugged. “Why shouldn’t I? We’re not prisoners. And if Tzonov can play dirty tricks, why shouldn’t we? So I went walkabout.”

“In the Projekt?”

“Here and there.” The precog’s face wasn’t so much gaunt as grim now, and Trask saw things in his eyes that worried him. • “So what did you find?”

“I saw a lot of stuff you’re not going to like, Ben,” the other told him. “Stuff that you won’t like one little bit…”

III

Nathan … Kiklu?

“Tell me about it.” Trask sighed his relief as the pounding in his skull receded a little.

“It’s night now up top,” Goodly told him. “The very dead of night. And down here, except for essential duties, everyone is asleep. Also, we’re ‘guests’ as opposed to interlopers—or we’re supposed to be—with no special orders attaching to us. And anyway they think, thought, we were out of the picture. So I wasn’t interfered with as I did my rounds. Well, not until I descended through the magmass levels to the core. That’s where I was picked up and escorted back here. But before then …

“Ben, what do we know of this place? I mean, in connection with Harry Keogh, the last time he was here?”

Trask shrugged. “We had pretty good liaison with the Reds at that time. They were ‘Reds’ then, just waking up to the fact that they were in it up to their necks. Harry Keogh had become a vampire: he carried a plague in his blood that could run rampant across the face of the Earth. And using this thing called the Mobius Continuum, he could travel instantaneously from one place to another like you and I go from room to room. He could be, and was, in the Greek islands, Hong Kong, Nicosia, Detroit, Macau, and here in Perchorsk, all in the space of an hour. Our locators—Russian and Chinese locators, too—were out of their heads trying to follow his movements …” Trask paused. “But why am I telling you this? You were with the Branch and know it as well as I do.”

“Tell it anyway,” Goodly urged.

Trask struggled into his jacket. “Very well, but on our way.”

“We’re going to see Tzonov?”

“Damn right!” Trask growled. “And to find out what he’s up to with his visitor.” And to himself:
With
my visitor? The one I spoke to in a dream? Or was it just a dream?

“This place is a maze,” Goodly warned. “How do we know where they are? How will we find them?”

“Wherever the action is—where they’re not sleeping—that’s where we’ll find them,” Trask answered. He led the way out into the corridor, which was even dimmer now and yet more eerie, and headed for the core. “But you asked me to refresh your memory on Perchorsk, at the time when Harry went through the Gate.” His voice fell to a whisper:

“Well, we were the ones who told Soviet E-Branch that the Necroscope would probably try it. He’d already used the Romanian route and so was stuck with this one. The Russians assured us he wouldn’t make it; forewarned, they would be waiting for him with a lot more firepower than he or anyone—any
thing
—could possibly handle. Since we couldn’t be sure exactly what that signified, we were obliged to take their word for it. One thing for sure, though: they really believed they could stop him.”

“Except they didn’t,” Goodly took it up. “He tried to go through on a motorcycle—first through the Mobius Continuum, then through the Gate—with that poor vampirized girl, Penny, riding pillion. He made it but …the girl was shaken loose on this side. She came down on electrified steel plates under an acid rain. A terrible way to go, even for a vampire.”

Trask nodded. “Eventually the Russians told us what had happened. They had to, for they were scared to death he’d come back again! After what Harry had done to them in earlier times—the havoc he’d wreaked with their E-Branch—they wanted to ingratiate themselves. It could be they were going to need our help … badly! And so they told us the whole thing. But they also told us about their new ‘failsafe’ system. My God! Talk about Chernobyl!

“But on the other hand, who could blame them? They’d had more than enough of
things
coming through that Gate. The next time anything stuck its ugly face in here, they were going to blow its head off and close the Gate for good! But it was the
way
they were going to do it. Two nuclear warheads, one timed to explode inside the Gate, close to the opening into the parallel world of the vampires, and the other set to go off just beyond that portal, on Starside itself! It was just typical of Russian thinking at the time: destroy the invader if possible, wreck his lines of resupply, devastate his home ground. Also, with any luck the Gate itself might be destroyed at the same time.

“When we heard about it and after we asked our scientists what sort of side effects there might be, all hell broke loose! What, set off a nuclear device inside a black hole—or a grey one—right here on Earth, right in the earth? Unthinkable! We could be playing with the forces that hold the very universe in place! We started negotiations … but too late. Harry had been gone for some time by then, and it seems he’d been keeping busy on Starside. What happened here in Perchorsk that fateful night … no one knows for sure. Most of the survivors were out of it before the missiles were actually fired. But the story they had to tell … well, it was the work of the Necroscope, all right. It had to be him, for who else could return Perchorsk’s dead to life?”

The two had penetrated the upper magmass levels into an area where neither of them had set foot before. Visible in the distorted matter-melt of walls and floor, weird moulds had been scooped from metal, plastic, and the very rock itself as if by fire or furious acid. Blow-torch scorching and the discoloration of chemical reaction were apparent everywhere.

Goodly paused, his gaze hardening in the poor light. With a nod of his head, he directed Trask’s eyes to these inarticulate yet vaguely frightening shapes in the magmass. And despite that Trask’s last words had been a statement of fact as opposed to a question proper, still the precog answered them in his fashion, by taking up the story again:

“The dead woke up, that’s what happened. The dead of Perchorsk in their glass, rock or metal cysts—the
magmass
dead, fused with machinery, tools, whatever they’d been working with; rotting or mummified semi-mechanical
things
, who’d been melted and sealed up in the original explosion—broke out! Dead men, whose warped composite bodies might just fit the twisted shapes of these terrible magmass moulds. And
they
fired the missiles into the open Gate!”