Red Shadows

by Mitchel Scanlon

  Unsettled by her strangely melancholy manner, for a moment Mortimer found he was at a loss for words. Then, almost despite himself, he began talking.

  "Project Changeling," he said. "That's what they called it." Even as he began to speak, he wondered why he was doing it. Why, having kept the secret for so long, did he suddenly feel the need to just blurt it out? Briefly, he wondered if the Judges had done something to him. He had heard that they sometimes used low-frequency sound waves and truth drugs to get a suspect to crack. It could even be that the Psi-Judge was surreptitiously using her powers on him. Whatever the cause, he found himself compelled to take a course of action that was the antithesis of everything he had learned in twenty years in the world of business. He wanted to play his cards cleanly and honestly. He wanted to tell the truth.

  "The whole cancer vaccine business was just a cover story," he told her. "The project's real purpose was to research the possibility of creating a method to allow the large-scale breeding of psychics. Suitable candidates were chosen based on their genetic profile and approached by HelixCorp with an offer of employment-"

  "Suitable candidates? You mean pregnant women?"

  "No, not pregnant," Mortimer said. "Not at first, anyway. As I say, they were chosen on the basis of genetic profiling as women who had a higher than normal chance of producing psychic offspring. At some point during the program they were given an anaesthetic and artificially inseminated without their knowledge. The semen samples used for the insemination had been genetically modified, again to increase the likelihood of psychic offspring from the union. Then, further drugs and treatments were given to them during their pregnancies, which the researchers hoped would yet further increase the chance of a successful result."

  "And what about the women? With all these immaculate conceptions going on, didn't anybody get wise?"

  "The researchers had already accounted for that. As well as fitting the genetic profile, the subjects had to fit other criteria. They had to be sexually active, ideally even promiscuous, with a tendency to believe what they were told by authority figures so that they wouldn't ask too many difficult questions. They also had to have moral qualms about abortion, and they were kept separate from each other so they couldn't compare experiences. In each case, the woman believed the father of her baby was her husband or a boyfriend. Apparently, it all went pretty smoothly."

  "All right, so what happened next?"

  "In due course, thirty of the project subjects carried their children to term. But when the children were tested to see if they had psychic potential, all the tests came back negative. By then a lot of money had been sunk into the project, so the company decided to cut its losses. Project Changeling was quietly disbanded, the researchers were bought off, and the happy mothers were sent on their way. The whole thing was forgotten, until a few months ago when a report landed on my desk and I found out about Changeling for the first time. That's when the shit really hit the fan."

  "Go on," Anderson encouraged him. There seemed a sudden urgency to her mood, as though she thought they were pressed for time.

  "At the time the project was disbanded, the company arranged to continue quietly monitoring the children just in case anything unforeseen should happen. That's where HelixHealth came in. The children were all offered free medical checks every three months, to allow their psychic potential to be covertly and continually assessed. For forty years it looked like they were just ordinary citizens. Then, a few months ago, some of them started to manifest the first signs of emerging psychic powers: uncontrolled random telepathy, minor telekinetic abilities, lucky guesses that turned out to be incredibly accurate, and so on. In each case, they were persuaded they were suffering from stress-induced mental illness and given a course of psi-blockers disguised as antidepressants. It quickly became clear that the children we thought had no psychic potential had all grown up to be latent psychics, and that meant that the company had a serious problem."

  "What I don't understand is why you became involved at all?" Anderson asked him. "Granted, we're talking about the company being guilty of multiple counts of Illegal Experimentation. The people who ran the project could be facing sentences of a hundred years or more in the iso-cubes, but this all occurred forty-one years ago, way before you could have been with the company. Why did you try to cover up something that happened so long ago?"

  "The share price," Mortimer told her. Given the question the Psi-Judge had just asked him, she either knew nothing about business or was very naïve. "It doesn't matter how long ago it happened. If word got out that the Justice Department was investigating HelixCorp over illegal experiments, the share price would have fallen through the floor. I have the stockholders to think of, not to mention that half of my salary is paid in HelixCorp shares for tax reasons. If Project Changeling had become public knowledge, the company would have had a run on its stock and I would have been ruined."

  "So that's what it came down to in the end? Money?" Anderson seemed quietly appalled. "You became involved in multiple murders because of your company's share price?"

  "I didn't think there would be any killing involved," Mortimer said. He shuddered, suddenly, as though somewhere, someone was walking on his grave. "Not at first, but I needed the whole business to go away as quickly as possible. That's when I hired Carlyle."

  "Carlyle?"

  "He's a psychic mercenary who specialises in covert operations, industrial espionage and wet-work. No one knows too much about him. Some people say he used to be with Brit-Cit Intelligence, others say he's always been a freelancer. Either way, he's the man to go to when you have an unsolvable problem that needs to be dealt with. He comes highly recommended. What I didn't realise was that I was digging a hole for myself by even hiring him." He felt the shudder run through him again. "You wouldn't believe how ruthless he is."

  "Enlighten me."

  "Carlyle is paranoid about security. So much so, that when I wanted to hire him I had to deal with an intermediary who instructed me to put all the details of the proposed mission onto a data-slug and send it to Hondo City via courier, hidden inside a Tri-D recorder. I followed the instructions, but then I heard that the courier had jumped in front of a zoom train in Hondo and was dead. Two days later, I arrive at work to find Carlyle waiting for me in my office. He tells me that rather than picking up the data-slug, he telepathically compelled the courier to read it for him so that Carlyle could read the information in his mind from afar. Then, because the courier now knew the details of the mission, he made him commit suicide by jumping in front of a train. All that just so that no one would see the courier meeting with Carlyle to hand over the slug. He said it was important to maintain 'operational security'. The man's a monster."

  "And yet you hired him anyway?"

  "I was desperate. Besides, once Carlyle is involved, you don't say no to him. By this time, of the thirty children who were born as part of Project Changeling, only twenty of them were still alive as adults. Carlyle said we should kill them as that would be the best way of keeping the whole thing under wraps. He said we should use a proxy to do the killing and make it look like the work of a random serial killer so no one would get suspicious. He even had a suitable proxy in mind. 'A young man whose career I've been following,' he said. 'The son of an old friend of mine'. He laughed about that. He said the proxy was stupid and malleable, yet a powerful enough psychic to be able to deal with any problems. From that point on he took charge of things and everything simply spiralled out of control."

  "What does Carlyle look like?" Anderson asked. "Is he blond, with a grey suit and arrogant manner?"

  "That's him. He always wears grey. The Grey Man. He said some people call him that. He laughed about that as well."

  "What else can you tell me about him? Anything that might help us find him?"

  "Find him?" Once again, it seemed to him that the Psi-Judge was incredibly naïve. "Believe me, you won't find him. I told you how paranoid he is. Before I hired him, I heard a story tha
t he will sometimes kill people just so he can use their bank accounts or homes or travel tickets. He doesn't actually need these things - he does it to help obscure his trail so his enemies won't find him. That's what I heard, and after dealing with him I believe it." For a moment, Mortimer found himself distracted by the colour of his own arms. His skin seemed to have turned grey, as though his body had become infected by the greyness all around him. Dismissing it as some strange trick of the light, he turned to Anderson once more.

  "You realise you have to protect me from him," he told her. "Carlyle would kill me if he found out that I told you all about him. Do you hear me? You must protect me."

  "I hear you." Again, Anderson looked at him with a saddened expression. "But as far as protecting you goes..." She paused as though she was about become the bearer of bad news. "It's too late for anyone to protect you now."

  Coming out of her trance, Anderson was first aware of the sounds of the Med-Bay around her: the wheezing rise and fall of the respirator beside the bed, the beeping of heart and blood pressure monitors and the high-pitched electrical whine of cardiac paddles being charged.

  "We're losing him," she heard a man's voice shout in controlled desperation. "Give me two more units of 'O' neg and thirty ccs of adrenaline! Stat!"

  Opening her eyes, she saw that the area around the man lying in the bed before her was surrounded by a flurry of activity, as Med-Judges and nurse-auxiliaries worked to save their patient's life. Suddenly, one of the Med-Judges tried to push past her with a pair of electric paddles.

  "Anderson!" he shouted. "You'll have to break contact. We need to restart his heart."

  "No, it's too late." She shook her head. "Believe me, there's nothing left for you to save. He's gone."

  "You're sure?" the Med-Judge asked her. Seeing her nod, he turned to the rest of the med-team. "All right, let's call it. Time of death." He looked at his watch. "I make it three forty-seven. Anyone know what the patient's name was?"

  "Mortimer," Anderson said. "Douglas Mortimer."

  "All right, Douglas Mortimer died at three forty-seven. Let's get this bed cleared in case we need it for another patient."

  Turning away as the med-team returned to their other duties, Anderson suddenly noticed Med-Judge Noland standing by the Med-Bay doors.

  "Things getting slow in the morgue, doc?" Anderson asked him. "Have you come upstairs to tout for business?"

  "I heard you brought in Weller's killer," Noland said. "Thought I'd come and congratulate you. Then, I heard you were scanning someone up here, a live body rather than a cadaver, this time."

  "Yeah, well, he was alive," she nodded towards the body on the bed. "Douglas Mortimer, CEO of HelixCorp. When a Judge went to his apartment to bring him in for questioning, Mortimer jumped out of a fiftieth floor window. The only thing that saved him from being instant munce-paste was that he hit a flagpole on the way down, and then landed on the roof of a car. That kept him alive long enough for him to be brought to Med-Bay so I could do a deep telepathic probe. The sad thing is that Mortimer had blanked out what had happened to him. While I was probing him, he developed an elaborate fantasy that he was in an interrogation suite and I was asking him questions. It happens sometimes when people are near to the point of death. Their minds take all kinds of flights of fancy."

  "I wouldn't know," Noland shrugged gently. "I usually only get them afterwards. So that's it then? The case is over."

  "No," Anderson shook her head. "Mortimer was the money man, but the real creep behind this was a psychic mercenary called Carlyle. He sounds like a nasty piece of work. He mind-wiped the killer Ganz, and I think he probably put a telepathic suggestion in Mortimer's unconscious to make him try to kill himself if he thought he was going to be arrested. Carlyle can be pretty extreme when it comes to covering over his traces."

  "Sounds like it. You got any leads on him?"

  "I wish. So far he's even more of a ghost than Ganz. The Justice Department has no record of him, Brit-Cit denies all knowledge of him. Everybody claims they've never heard of him. Mortimer said that Carlyle is paranoid about security and it sounds like he is." Something that Mortimer had mentioned to her suddenly rang a bell in Anderson's head. "Excuse me, doc." Heading out into the hallway, Anderson hit the transmit button on her radio.

  "Anderson to Control."

  "Control receiving, Anderson. Over."

  "Patch me through to one of the Tek-Judges analysing the HelixCorp records ASAP. Tell him it's urgent."

  "Jenkins, Tek Division," a woman's voice came over the radio after a short pause. "What can I do for you, Anderson?"

  "Does HelixCorp have a corporate account to cover business travel for their executives? If so, I want to know about any tickets that have been bought in the last six hours, using that account."

  "Okay. Hang on a minute." There was another pause. "Yeah. A ticket was purchased out of the account two hours ago for an executive named Thomas Grey. Hmm, that's funny. The ticket was purchased using Douglas Mortimer's password, but I can't find any record of an executive called Thomas Grey in the company directory."

  "This ticket, where is it for, and when?"

  "Let's see. It's for the four-thirty flight to Brit-Cit out of Kennedy Hoverport."

  "Control! I need you back on the line."

  "Control here, Anderson."

  "Contact the Senior Judge in charge of security at Kennedy and tell him to detain one Thomas Grey, due to fly out of Mega City One on the four-thirty to Brit-Cit. Tell him Thomas Grey may be an alias for Carlyle, AKA the Grey Man, a powerful and dangerous psychic wanted for multiple counts of Conspiracy to Commit Murder. Tell them to use extreme caution and be prepared to shoot if he even looks at them funny. I want him alive if possible, but whatever happens he must not to be allowed to leave the city."

  "Got it," Control said. "Relaying your request. Where will you be?"

  "Right now I'm on my way to the Sector House landing pad. I don't care if I have to commandeer an H-Wagon and pilot the damn thing myself. I'm getting to Kennedy before the four-thirty flight leaves for Brit-Cit!"

  NINETEEN

  RESURRECTION

  The Grey Man said he was his friend. The Grey Man lied to him. The Grey Man had betrayed him. The Grey Man had tried to destroy him.

  Those words were all he had left to him. Lying in a straitjacket on a gurney in the back of an ambulance as it transported him across the city, the words echoed round and round his empty skull. His name was gone. His past was gone. His memories, his personality, even his feelings. All of them were gone. All he had left were the last thoughts to go through his head before his mind had been destroyed: thoughts that, even now, repeated themselves in a desolate and unending mantra.

  The Grey Man said he was his friend. The Grey Man lied to him. The Grey Man had betrayed him. The Grey Man had tried to destroy him.

  "I don't know," a voice said. "I tell you, sometimes this job gets me down."

  He heard the words distantly, not even understanding them, dimly aware that they came from one of the men sitting in the driver's compartment in front of him.

  "I mean, first, Anderson tells us to take him to Omar House so Psi-Lab can do tests on him. Then, Psi-Lab says they're full up and we should take him to the nearest Sector House until they've got more space. Then, the watch commander at the Sector House says we should take him to an iso-block. Then, the iso-block warders say we should take him to the psych-cubes. And now, what are the odds that when we get to the psych-cubes they tell us we should take him back to Omar. I mean, it's like they think we're running some kind of glorified taxi service."

  "Not even that," a second voice joined the first one. "At least taxis get to carry people. All we're doing is transporting a vegetable."

  There was laughter. As the sound reached his ears it seemed brittle and unreal, of less substance than the words inside his head.

  The Grey Man said he was his friend. The Grey Man lied to him. The Grey Man had betrayed him. The Grey Man had
tried to destroy him.

  "What say we flick through the channels on the comm?" the first voice said. "See what's happening in the rest of the city."

  There was a confusing and indescribable noise, alternating between a welter of voices and bursts of static. Then he heard something outside his head that finally had meaning to him.

  "All units to the vicinity of Kennedy Hoverport, be on the lookout for a suspect described as male caucasian, late thirties, blond hair, wearing a grey suit. Be advised the suspect possesses psychic powers and is to be considered extremely dangerous. Suspect answers to the name of Thomas Grey, also known as Carlyle and the Grey Man. Psi-Judge Anderson is en route to the scene to aid with identification of the suspect. Be advised, the subject is to be considered extremely dangerous."

  The Grey Man. Anderson.

  Slowly, the words started to break through the idiot haze of his mind. Slowly, memory was rekindled from its last dying embers. Slowly, he came back to himself.

  The Grey Man. Anderson.

  The Grey Man lied to him. He betrayed him. He had tried to destroy him. Anderson had hurt him. She had chained him. It was her fault he was here in a straitjacket on his way to another institution. Echoes of his past flitted at the corners of his mind. Anderson. She was a Red, the light of her soulshadow like unearthly blinding fire. Red, he hated the colour. Red, it hurt him, burning through his eyelids into his brain. He hated the colour red. He hated the people who were red. The floodgates of memory opened. Suddenly he was reborn.

  He was William Ganz. He killed reds. He would kill Anderson, but first he had added a new name to his list.

  The Grey Man.

  Anderson.

  He hated them. He would kill them both. He would gouge out their eyes. He would stamp on their entrails. He would eat their hearts.

  The Grey Man and Anderson.

  They were together in the same place, the radio had said so. He would find them. He would kill them. He was William Ganz. He was a monster. The night and the city belonged to him. His voice was like thunder. All who heard him obeyed him.