Starblood

by Dean Koontz

  Ti moved toward the third cellar at top speed. He slammed his shoulder stump into a half-fallen beam, but he kept moving, his hatred and his fear denying the pain his nerves insisted was there. The Hound came faster.

  When he reached the entrance to the fifth cellar, Timothy found nature had conspired against him. There had been a cave-in, and the beams and rocks of the ceiling had collapsed to effectively bar his escape. With the Hound at his neck, there was no time to break through.

  He turned on his pursuer. Its sensors gleamed in the dim light, thirty feet away. It fired three pins . . .

  He moved aside as he saw its intent. The darts studded the rubble wall behind him, where they quivered like arrows. He sent his servos to an overhead beam lying in the Hound's path and had them worry its tenuous connections with the rotting ceiling. Just as the Hound passed beneath, the beam tore loose and crashed into it. The only effect was a momentary deflection in the machine's course. The Hound swerved, bobbled, recovered in only moments and swept closer, firing another three pins.

  All three missed. Ti was surprised, for he had not had time to take evasive action—and Hounds were not known for sloppy marksmanship.

  The Hound fired three more; again, they all missed.

  Ti abruptly realized he was turning them aside with his psionic power! The second time, he had been more conscious of his effort. Now he stood with his back to the collapsed ceiling, waiting the next attack. It fired, and the darts spun away to either side. Over the next several minutes, he deflected another two dozen of the slender spines. The Hound ceased shooting and bobbled gently from side to side, regarding him with its measuring devices. A moment later, it dispatched two servos for his neck . . .

  Reacting quickly, he called his own servos to him. Four feet from his face, the enemy's hands and his own met and locked, metal fingers laced through metal fingers. He set full power into his hands and tried to snap the other set of prosthos.

  His hopes for a swift triumph were destroyed when he saw the Hound had similar ideas. Its own servos wrenched at his, the four members swaying back and forth in the air, gaining and losing the same space in a rhythmic duel. Finally, when both sets reached full power and stress, they did not move at all, but merely strained in frozen tableau against each other. The grav-plates on all four hands erupted almost simultaneously in smoke and sparks. The metal hands dropped to the floor as if they were a single creature, a metal bird with shot pellets in its wings.

  Now both hunter and hunted were handless. Hunter and hunted . . .

  Timothy realized the nomenclature was no longer adequate. With both of them handless, and with Ti able to neutralize the pin weapon, the balance of power had been equalized. As he moved past the Hound, he was aware that another facet of his power had made itself known tonight. Under moments of stress and anxiety, he seemed to acquire new abilities. The hate had been valuable, and he would still need it. And with his power to influence small objects in transit as well as when they were still, he might be able to give vent to the hatred when he encountered Klaus Margle.

  The Hound stopped following him when he moved into shooting range again. It bumped purposelessly against the beams, as if its mind had been in its hands and, losing them, it had lost all cleverness. Ti floated upstairs and stopped in the hallway to listen. He could hear footsteps in the kitchen . . .

  He was prepared for them. Confidence surged through him, augmenting his hate. He drifted into the living-room just as the gunmen walked in with their weapons drawn. "Your Hound is finished," he said, drawing their attention from the areas of deeper shadow which they were cautiously exploring.

  The man on Margle's left swung and fired. Timothy deflected all but one pin, lifted that and turned it back on the gunman. The dart sank into the Brother's chest, its poison exploding into his bloodstream. He gagged, doubled over, and dropped.

  "I won't kill you if you surrender," Timothy said wearily. The hate was still there, but a deep welling sadness had joined it.

  Margle and the remaining man were crouched behind a sofa, unwilling to surrender merely because of a lucky shot. In the dark, they could not have seen that his hands were gone. "You're crazy," Margle said, his voice high and sharp, grating on the nerves. He was quiet, waiting for Timothy to speak and reveal his position.

  "Why did you kill Taguster?" Ti asked, remaining at the same place.

  "Why tell you?" Margle asked. There was a giggle in his voice, an edgy little laugh that sounded almost sadistic. Apparently, they could not see him yet.

  "You're going to kill me. Or I'll kill you. Whichever way, telling me why you murdered Taguster won't make much difference, will it?"

  "He was on PBT," Margle said.

  "What excuse does that give you for killing him?" To discover that their reason was so thin made the death seem all the more meaningless to Ti and resurrected the hatred which had begun to die in him.

  Margle chuckled, as if lax and unwatchful—although he was not. His kind of man never was. "It was getting too expensive for him. He decided to gather information on us. The Narcotics Bureau has never been able to synthesize the stuff, even with samples they obtained. Taguster was trying to get enough to give them some sort of clue so that, in return, they would make him a legal addict Then he could get PBT free from supplies the UN has confiscated. One of his paid informers informed to us. We ransacked his house while he was out, found the file he had on us. Not much, but enough to get a good many people sold down the river—which means something might leak to help the UN find out what the stuff is."

  "That shouldn't have bothered you. You could buy the authorities off."

  "Local, not UN. Did you ever try bribing a UN delegate officer, the kind they have in narcotics? Impossible."

  "So you killed him."

  Margle was still trying to pin him down, keep him talking long enough to level a fairly accurate barrage at him. "The Hound did. You were pretty clever about that, you know. Had us worried. But calling the local constabulary—now that was a stroke of pure idiocy. It made finding you much easier."

  Ti knew enough now. There had been a side to Taguster he had not known. It hurt him a bit to think the musician had not fully trusted him, but all of that was past now. Taguster was dead. He moved toward the couch, making no effort to conceal himself.

  "There!" Margle shouted. Both men rose, seeing him in the same instant, and fired point-blank into his twisted body.

  He deflected all the pins.

  Then Ti was behind the couch and on top of them. They danced backwards, opening fire. He returned the pins, getting Margle in the cheek and the gunman in the neck. They died with such precision that it seemed like a grotesquely choreographed dance.

  He left the room and phoned Creel, getting him out of bed. He asked for two reporters and two cameramen to cover all angles of the incident. Creel, true to form, asked no questions; he merely wondered if he might come over too. He smiled slightly when Timothy said yes.

  As Ti waited for his people to arrive, a weariness settled over him like a hand sliding onto a glove. He had once made a promise to himself that he would never kill. It had been a way of making amends to the gods—if there were gods— for having been the product of an experiment of war. And now he had broken that promise in order to avenge the death of his only close friend. It was going to take some time before he would be able to think this through, to learn and understand which was the most precious: integrity of one's self, or unlimited love and devotion for another human being.

  He could not cry. He wished he could—that might relieve the tension. But Taguster was dead, his mind and personality beyond retrieval, and the world still turned. The hate would have to be dissolved, burned down, disposed of. A man could not live with such hatred. No matter how he had been hurt. He decided that, after the statsheet people and the police left, he would get roaring drunk. And stay drunk for two or three days. And then everything would be fine. He was sure that would end it ...

  CHAPTER 5


  A darkly painted personal grav-plate automobile, without benefit of any chrome fixtures, drifted up the mountainside in the dim wash of moonlight that managed to filter through the relatively heavy cloud cover of the humid summer night. The craft's interior lights were off, as were its headlamps and its fore and aft warning beacons. It was nothing more than a shadow among other shadows, and its power plant had been insulated against emitting noise so that the illusion of ethereal unreality could be maintained; it was a ghost searching the night, nothing more.

  In the forest below, small animals scattered for cover into burrows and holes in rotted trees, somehow aware of the machine's presence. But the rest of the world knew nothing of it

  Farther up the cliffside, an ultra-modern house jutted from the forest, perched precariously on thrusting fingers of rock. Despite its advanced design, it seemed an integral part of the natural forces around it. The driver of the grav-car had required several minutes, at first, to make out the lines of it. Now, as he drew closer, his admiration for its architecture increased, even though he would soon take steps to destroy it utterly.

  He held the car steady as it drew level with the house, and when he was certain it was deserted but for its owner and single occupant, he took his craft up again. When the car was above the roof of the house, with the entire grounds of the mansion visible below it, the driver put his machine on hold, opened his door, and released the package he had been sent to deliver.

  The package was a cylinder three feet long, tapered to a round bullet snout at both ends, with a central diameter of twenty inches. It was featureless, its burnished coppery metal husk shimmering in the moonlight. It was quite heavy, though it did not drop any faster than a bit of dandelion fluff might have. It slid level with the house, changed from vertical to horizontal progression, and passed by the long windows of the cliffside patio. It was noiseless and efficient-looking. And though its design gave no indication of its purpose, it had an air of deadliness about it.

  Overhead, the grav-car moved cautiously along the side of the mountain, hugging the dark, jagged shapes of the trees, and slipped swiftly into the envelope of the night. Only when it was a mile away did the driver flick on the lights. And even then he phased them in slowly to avoid drawing the attention of another craft or someone on the ground. Five minutes later, fully illuminated, he picked up speed and returned to the garage from which his mission had begun.

  And all the while, the Selective Assassination Module he had left behind him was cutting an entrance portal in the glass patio doors. A jointed arm extended from the anterior end, tipped with a diamond cutting edge. As it worked, a fine glass powder fell to the flagstones. When the work was near completion and all but a perfectly circumscribed entrance had been cut, a second arm appeared, spidery but agile, and attached itself by a suction cup to the glass that would be removed. When the final cut was made, this new arm removed the circle of glass from the door, lowered it onto the patio floor, and released it.

  It moved forward and into the darkened living-room. Timothy's house had been breached once again, but with a far greater degree of subtlety than Klaus Margle had employed some two weeks ago . . .

  Though some moonlight found its way between the heavy velveteen drapes, the interior of the mansion was much darker than the night world beyond its confines. The SAM opened the receptivity of its visual scanners; two points on its anterior and two on its posterior, all the size of quarters, changed color from the fire-flecked coppery hue to yellow, emitting a slightly fuzzy amber radiance.

  The thin spindles of the tool arms had been retracted and left no trace of their exit and entry in the smooth hull. Other devices, as yet unused, could also be called forth and put away without trace. Such dexterity and heavy armament were possible through extreme microminiaturization; and the machine's power source was not contained within its housing. It gained operational energy from a broadcasting generator some miles away. It was an expensive means of murder. Weapons Psionic, its makers, charged whatever the traffic would bear, limiting its clientele but clearing excellent profits on those devices it did construct. And, though expensive, it was foolproof. Weapons Psionic had no known headquarters, files, or staff. Though massive efforts had often been launched to discover the whereabouts of the company, both federal and United Nations police had failed miserably to uncover even a trace of it. Even the purchasers of its merchandise were ignorant of company's home. But those who bought the SAM liked that, for it meant that none of them could sell out Weapons Psionic and thus destroy a valuable tool of the underworld. A SAM provided anonymity for the killer, a perfectly untraceable means of murder. And for men closely watched by the authorities, such a cold, clueless tool as this was priceless.

  The SAM's supersensitive receptors began to function now. The heat sensors directed the killer's attention toward a hallway on the right which more than likely lead to sleeping quarters. The aural pickups correlated the initial data by the heat sensors, and the assassin turned toward the hall.

  It allowed its "ears" to listen: light breathing, a ragged sound of air moving through deformed nasal passages.

  It permitted its heat sensors to probe longer: a quantity of body heat radiating from the very end of the corridor.

  It drifted quietly forward . . .

  At the end of the hall, it ceased forward progression and rose on a level with the bedroom door handle. A thread of metallic substance weaved out of the husk and disappeared into the door's automatic mechanism. The seeking filament touched the motor within, and the portal slid soundlessly open. The SAM retracted the thread, hesitated, then slid forward into the dark, seeking . . .

  It located the twisted body of the mutant lying in the sling bed against the far wall. It called forth a dart nozzle from its anterior snout and fanned the body with fifty poisoned spines. There was no sound from the form as they sank in; the poison would be too swift for that.

  The SAM used the filament to turn on the overhead lights, then drew the thread back into its husk. When it was only half a dozen feet from the mutant, the amber light was bright enough to reveal that the target was not dead. There were no darts in it. Instead, the spines prickled the wall behind and littered the floor below. The assassin stopped, fired another series.

  They were deflected.

  Timothy rose from the sling bed and set his servos after the SAM. He was quite aware that the thing might have more than one weapons systems, and that if he did not act quickly he might end up a corpse despite the advantage of his psionic powers. The assassin drifted backward toward the door, but a servo slipped past it and closed the portal. Ti wondered if it wouldn't be better to let it escape. Then he realized he would have nothing to show the authorities, no way to ascertain the identity of his assassin. He would be left waiting for their next attempt, helplessly—like a man in a stalled car on railroad tracks, watching the locomotive screaming toward him . . .

  A nozzle protruded from the SAM's husk, spewing a napalm-like chemical. But the deadly bright flames did no harm, since Timothy was able to deflect the chemicals on which the flames depended. A moment later, his servos clasped the device at each blunt end and held it still. Timothy flushed a wave of psionic power through the cylinder, flicking closed all the switches in the SAM's guts, which all succumbed to the relatively light pressure of his ESP ability. The slight yellow luminosity of the sight sensors vanished as the device opaqued its hull and was still. In seconds, it had ceased to be a flame-spouting, dangerous antagonist and had become a docile hunk of metal.

  Cautiously, he directed his servos to release the weapon. They moved away from it, and it did not respond in any fashion. Since its grav-plates generated their own power, it remained weightless, though stationary. He took the cylinder down the corridor, through the living room, into the library. On the keyboard of the Enterstat computer, he punched: REQUEST SOURCE OF THIS DEVICE. DESCRIPTION AS FOLLOWS. After the description, in which he did not ignore any detail no matter how trivial, he pushed for a full data r
eport.

  While he waited, he decided it must be the Brethren who were after him; surely his murdering Klaus Margle would have temporarily angered the man's cohorts. Then again, he had opened a position in the hierarchy of the underworld, and he could only have made a friend of the man who filled it. Yet only the money of the full organization could have purchased a device such as this; a splinter group of Margle's friends could never have financed it. His thoughts were interrupted as the data started into the receival tray.

  He picked up the sheet, startled by the brevity of the report on something so intriguing as the assassination device:

  SOURCE OF WEAPON: WEAPONS PSIONIC . . . ADDRESS UNKNOWN . . . NO MEANS OF CONTACTING WP; MAKES OWN CONTACTS WITH PROSPECTIVE CUSTOMERS . . . NO OFFICES . . . NO FILES . . . NO EMPLOYEES . . . WEAPONS CANNOT BE TRACED TO PURCHASER IN ANY KNOWN MANNER . . . WEAPONS CANNOT BE TRACED TO POINT OF PRODUCTION . . . PARTS OF WEAPONS CANNOT BE TRACED TO POINT OF PRODUCTION.

  This was all very interesting, but it put him no further ahead. Someone had been contacted by Weapons Psionic and had agreed to purchase the killer. But who? And if it was the Brethren—why? He would have to answer that before he went to the police, if he went to them at all. And to get his answers, he would need to know more about this device. He went to the comscreen and called George Creel's home number. When the screen lit, after a long wait, Creel looked like something that had climbed out of the paleozoic swamps a little behind schedule and had lain all day on the mud banks trying to decide whether it could grow legs fast enough to survive.

  "Remind me not to call you in the middle of the night," Timothy said. "I just ruined my breakfast."

  Creel grinned. His features firmed up when he saw who was phoning, and he looked halfway human again. "What is it?" he asked, the words distorted by a yawn he could not quite stifle.