Event Horizon (Hellgate)

by Mel Keegan

  The screens were swimming in every shade of cerulean, white, teal, silver. As each of the filaments threaded into a point on Vidal’s scalp or temples or nape, the display shifted into other hues – warm, gold, smoke – and as each filament began to relay impulses the colors began to coalesce into blurred, distorted images.

  Done with Vidal for the moment, Mark began to connect the companion filaments – fully half as many of them as Vidal wore, tagged into his own scalp, temples and nape. Half linked him to Vidal; the remainder connected him to the surgical drone which stood waiting for instruction.

  A groan issued from the depths of Vidal’s chest. “I feel … so weird.” His voice was a bass rumble.

  “It’s probably the first time in months you’ve actually relaxed,” Mark said softly as he sat beside him. His lids closed heavily over dark gold irises. “Neil, you see the handies. One of them is mine, the other is Michael’s. I want you to monitor them. Mine … what do you see?”

  The screen swirled with colors; an image came halfway into focus and was gone again so fast, Travers almost had to guess what he had glimpsed. “Was it a cat? A white cat, a fireplace, a red rug.”

  “Mmm. An old, old memory. And now?”

  Again, the swirl of color, an image tantalizingly indistinct, more a kaleidoscope of shapes which suggested to Travers an image of soaring wings. “It’s an impression, but I think I’m seeing an eagle. Blue sky, white mountain range. Damn, is it Riga Valley?”

  “Yes. One morning, a month ago. Good enough. Michael, picture a tree,” Mark said softly, in the mellifluous tone of a mesmerist. “Neil?”

  The handy displaying discrete pulses direct from Vidal’s visual cortex, in the back of his brain, swam into shades of green which drew together into a soft impression of boughs, trunk, bright sky beyond, a shadowed area beneath and before. “Got it, Mark,” Travers murmured.

  “Michael … a dolphin,” Mark crooned. “A porpoise … they’re flourishing on Velcastra now, I’ve seen them there …”

  And the colors brightened into blues and silvers, extruding into the abstract shape of a dolphin arcing out of the waves. “We’re good,” Travers murmured. He pulled the second couch closer with a soft sound of timber feet on rug. “Mark?”

  But Mark was already immersed in the process – eyes closed, concentrating so completely on the direct feed via the fine gold lines which were tagged directly into his scalp that he might not have heard Travers. He leaned so close to Vidal, their heads were almost touching, and spoke in a murmur, a low monotone.

  “Can you hear me, Michael?”

  “Of course.” Vidal was absolutely calm.

  “I’m going to ask you some questions,” Mark told him. “You must answer absolutely honestly, because only a truthful answer will let me pinpoint the physical locations of stored memories. I’m afraid you’ll have to re-experience each memory one final time, but when I’ve located the synapse clusters where the memories are stored the rest is comparatively simple. First, I must calibrate the apparatus specifically for you. The initial questions will arouse very old memories. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.” Vidal took a deep breath of the charab. “Go ahead.”

  “Neil, watch the handies,” Mark whispered. “If you see red, it’s an indication of stress. If the red shifts through to purple, tell me … if it shifts through to black, tell me immediately.”

  “Understood.” Travers balanced the handies in his lap, dividing his attention between them and Vidal as Mark began.

  “As a child you fell down, hurt your knee. Which knee?”

  Anyone, human or Resalq, would have responded instinctively to the question. Vidal said, “Someone tripped me. I never knew who – I skinned my right knee, halfway bare to the bone. I was six.”

  “You had a dog?” Mark asked.

  “I had several.”

  “The first?”

  “Rusty. A little New Ireland terrier. I was eight.”

  “Can you tell me how he died?”

  The handy monitoring Vidal’s brain flared into orange-reds with remembered pain. Travers frowned over it, and him. Now it began, the gradual paring away of a man’s masks, layer by layer, until he was stripped naked, as Marin described it.

  “He was hit by a car,” Vidal said softly. “A big groundcar came roaring through the neighborhood. I’d biked over to Aunt Lex’s place. Elstrom city – uptown. Lex and Uncle Barry backed onto the woods, they had squirrels … Rusty loved to chase them. He chased this one big red squirrel into the street, and the groundie was coming, way too fast. Clipped him. He died instantly, right in front of me. I don’t think he was hurt, just killed outright. Don’t suppose he even had the chance to be surprised, just … gone.”

  Reds flared, spiked, cooled back into greens and blues, and Travers watched a vague shape coalesce in the handy – a face with big, dark eyes, soft ears, a lolling pink tongue. For a split second he was sure he actually saw a little dog who had been dead for almost thirty years, and then, again, he was gone.

  “Who was your first passion,” Mark prompted.

  “Chris,” Vidal said simply. “Christian Brock.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Thirteen. He was fourteen. We played high school aeroball together.”

  “Did you make love?”

  “Of course we did.”

  “The first time?”

  “After a game … we’d won, we were at his house on StarCity. He had the keys to his parents’ booze cabinet and they had scotch, gin, vodka, the works. Also a nice stash of fizz and chimera. Chris and I got a little silly and the next thing you knew, we were having sex.”

  “Were you discovered?” Mark murmured.

  “Not that time.”

  “Later?”

  “Oh, yeah. Chris’s father’s valet walked right in on us. Talk about being caught red faced!”

  “Did he tell your parents, or Christian’s?”

  “Not if we paid him off,” Vidal said grimly.

  “You paid bribes? For how long?”

  “Well over a year. We were fifteen, sixteen, by then.” Vidal worked his neck to and fro, and the handy flared red. “It got bloody expensive. In the end, I just fronted up to my father and told him the truth.”

  “What did you tell him that day?”

  “That I turn on to guys, and I’d been shagging my best friend since we were so young, it wasn’t even legal, that I’d brought Chris into the Vidal family castle more than once and we’d fucked our brains out there. And one time we’d been caught at his house – we’d been paying hush-money ever since, because we figured the parents’d be mad enough to spit about kids doing the scotch and fizz, as well as the sex.”

  “And how did your father react?” Mark asked in the same soft monotone as he concentrated on the direct neural feed, constantly reconfiguring, fine-tuning, until he dared begin to meddle.

  “My Dad … Charles Vidal, the industrial magnate who was fleeced by the aeroball superstar? The old buzzard looked me square in the face and he said, ‘Top or bottom?’ I told him, both. He told me, in his father’s day I’d have been taken upstairs and leathered till I didn’t sit down for a week. But since I was already a hand’s span taller than him with my mother’s bloody Pakrani genes, and at least as strong, because I was already a college aeroball player – and since I’d paid the hush-money out of my allowance, well, I’d been comprehensively fined, hadn’t I? He asked, had I learned any lesson from the financial penance for my sins? I said, sure I had. ‘What lesson?’ he wanted to know. I told him, I’d learned how to lock a bloody door.”

  A chuckle rumbled in Travers’s chest. Even now, even here, Mick Vidal knew how to make light of his misfortunes, though the handy spiked right into purple for a moment and Neil knew the color marked the line where pain and fury brushed shoulders. The purple was gone almost at once, though the deliberate humor was short lived. A moment later Mark said,

  “Your first love?”

  Now t
he handy blazed red and purple, and Vidal hesitated. “Andre, in college after I finished my conscription hitch. Tall and dark and gorgeous, planetology student, and he left me. Walked right out on me to go to school in the homeworlds, and I got so bloody blind drunk, I didn’t know what year it was, never mind what day. Took out a car that wasn’t mine, almost killed myself on a lunatic mix of bourbon and gryphon and drag racing ... did hammer the shit out of the car, though it wasn’t a total write-off, and I paid to fix it.”

  “You were arrested?” Mark whispered.

  “No. I still can’t believe it, but I got away with it, free and clear, and I’ll never know how I didn’t either kill myself or someone else. Or spend about five years looking at a lot of bars from the wrong side,” he confessed. “Three days after I got the mess straightened out I went right back to Fleet, though my father was so furious with me for reenlisting, he threatened to disinherit me. Write me out of the will and put Trick and Ying in? Yeah, like that was ever going to happen. So I finished my formal education on a super-carrier, with good ol’ Aunt Lex. And when I made major, and CAT, he was proud enough to forgive me for it. And for being Daku,” he added quietly.

  The handy had flared fast into islands of wickedly inky black, and Travers said, “Mark –”

  “I know. All right, Michael … the calibrations are tight enough. Can you go on?”

  Vidal’s hand reached out blindly. Travers took it and watched Mark beckon the little handling drone, which was armed with the curious object Neil had never seen before, in or out of an Infirmary. It had to be a Resalq device, like a short wand with a recessed control panel in the haft and a tip glowing dully in reds and mauves. In the delicate claw hands of the drone it would be handled with surgical precision, and the drone was taking its instruction direct from Mark’s own brain. It moved into place behind the couch as Vidal shifted around as if trying to get comfortable.

  “I’m good,” he muttered.

  “He’s not,” Travers warned.

  “I will be,” Vidal insisted. “Just – just get it done, for chrissakes. One more time. I can handle one more time.”

  “Omaru,” Mark said in the familiar low monotone. “The blockade. You’re flying against the militia, over Hydralis.”

  “Flew right into a brace of missiles.” Vidal’s voice was a bare croak; his face clenched in memory. “Engines flamed out … wingman went up in a fireball. Roark died right there, just enough time to scream, then silence, and I … I put the plane down. Somehow. Fields of rubble down below – outside Hydralis, where a car factory had been before the war. The plane crumpled but she didn’t burn. I was knocked out cold. I woke – later, sometime. People were cutting me out of the cockpit. Plasma torches scorched my eyes, and … busted ribs, couldn’t take a breath without pain, but no blood in my mouth. Lungs were okay. I passed out when they lifted me out of the cockpit.”

  “And when you recovered consciousness?”

  The handy was red now, swirling with it, the colors of blood and fire. Travers’s mouth was dry as he glimpsed blurred, indistinct images, little more than suggestions of events which spoke to the dark places in the roots of his own mind. A grimacing face; a clenched fist; the inside of a locked door; a hood coming toward him, about to drop over his head; a bright light; a cane cutting downward toward him; another body – male, naked, rampant; a trapdoor slamming low over his head; blood.

  “Darkness,” Vidal murmured. “Pain … ribs, first. Then the questions. Being beaten. Needles in my neck, my ass – antibiotic, for all I knew, or something like the Triphenac, or blockers, or all of ’em. Questions, more questions. Couldn’t answer. Wouldn’t. Some stuff, I never even knew.”

  “But they kept asking, whether you knew or not.”

  And like an inquisitor, so did Mark. The handy blazed with red, flooded into purple as the memories seized Vidal tightly enough to choke him. The display spiked into black as he felt again the fury that had kept him alive through scenes he described, now, in disjointed words, often barely coherent. The tumble of lurid adjectives was filled with such fear, fury, hate, Travers’s own mouth was dry, his heart thudding heavily.

  It took less time than Vidal would have believed. Mark had fine-tuned the apparatus till he could follow every memory to source, and when he found the synapse clusters the drone would focus on them with the incredible precision of a Resalq instrument. The tip of the wand traced patterns over Vidal’s skull, but Mick did not seem to feel anything physical, and certainly not pain. By far, the worst of the process was forcing him to focus on the very memories that had tortured him for months. Speaking them aloud, concentrating on them strongly enough for hazy images to flash up into the handy, was as painful as the cane that stripped the skin off him, wire clippers that took off his fingers, pliers that pulled his teeth. His days were a dark haze of gryphon and abuse, physical, mental, sexual, until he lost track of time and death seemed the most viable alternative.

  There were other memories, just as vivid, though less personal. The death of the super-carrier, when a drone freighter, generators on overload, rammed the engine deck; the loss of the Delta Dragons in an ambush where they flew into the geocannon from an asteroid miner which had been mounted in the guts of a disused Goldman-Pataki smelter. Memory by memory, Mark winkled out the rot and the drone patiently, methodically tracked back and forth across Vidal’s skull until Mick was hoarse from talking and tears, and the handy flooded into dense shades of purple and on into black.

  “Mark,” Travers said urgently. “Mark, you better look at this.”

  But Mark was done. He sat up, plucking the filaments away with deft fingers, both from Vidal’s scalp and his own. The drone returned to its place by the table; the handies reverted to the standby hues, blues and greens. Travers set them down and dragged both hands over his own face, not surprised to find himself trembling. Vidal was barely strong enough to withstand this procedure, and Neil was rolling a combug between his fingers. “Should I give Bill a call?”

  “I think you’d better,” Mark began.

  “No.” Vidal was blind, barely half aware. He turned toward Mark’s voice and Mark caught him, held him like a child while he shook and wept in reaction.

  “It’s done now, Michael … let it go, eleen becahl, shures. Just open your hands, let it run through your fingers like water. Don’t grasp, don’t try to hang on, let it fade away.” He murmured in the old language, soft sounds almost like the wind in the trees, and little by little Vidal calmed.

  At last Travers realized he was asleep, and he set down the combug. Mark moved slowly, carefully, let Vidal subside onto the couch, where he did not stir even to rearrange his limbs. Deliberately Mark snuffed the candles and the charab, turned off the sub-etherics, and beckoned Travers out of the room.

  The door closed over and Neil leaned against the bulkhead, dragging fresh air into his lungs. He was shaking, sweated, and gave Mark a rueful look. “You do this often?”

  “Thank gods, very seldom,” Mark said quietly. “I did it for Jai Serrano, twenty years ago. Any agent is vulnerable, and the longer he does something like Dendra Shemiji work, the greater the chance he’ll be caught. Jai was, and his suffering was not very different from Michael’s. We repaired his teeth, his eyes, kidneys and … so on. You can guess the rest. It was an assignment gone disastrously wrong. When you’ve infiltrated a corporation to reach an individual, and your cover is torn apart, the consequences are always going to be dire. Curtis knew this when he joined us, and every risk he took was calculated – even, or especially, the Roy Neville sanction. Though I’ll be honest, if he’d conferred with me about that one, I’d never have authorized it. The risk factor was too high. But like Jai, Curtis was a free agent. They decide for themselves which assignments they’ll take. Training is no guarantee against error.”

  Travers had not even recalled the name of Jai Serrano in six months. He was the Resalq agent whom Jo Queneau had shot down on Saraine, not very far from Mark’s house. Serrano was brin
ging intelligence out of Boden Zwerner’s fortress on Ulrand, at a time when Queneau had no idea who she was involved with. And Serrano, Travers remembered, was still in cryogen, waiting for a whole suite of cloned organs to be ready for transplant.

  “He’s on this ship,” Mark said, as if he had heard everything Travers had not said. “The tank’s in the Infirmary, along with all the canopic vessels.”

  “The what?” Travers echoed.

  “Look it up.” Mark reached over, brushed his cheek with the backs of his knuckles as he forcibly stirred. “I performed this strange ritual for Curtis, too, and I imagine I’ll do it again – a long time in the future, I hope. Are you all right, Neil?”

  “Yeah.” Travers shook himself hard.

  “No, you’re not. You need a stiff drink,” Mark suggested, “and help that partner of yours finish packing.”

  “Packing. Lai’a. Damn.” Travers pressed one hand to his eyes for a moment. “We’re waiting for the boarding call.”

  “It’ll be very soon.” Mark looked around the familiar passageway which led forward to the Ops room and back to the engine compartments. “I’m going to miss this ship, these people. The Carellan has been like a home to me, as much as Saraine and Riga ever were. I know it’s a strange thing to say. Resalq of my generation were accustomed to … we used to call it ‘falling between the stars.’ Nowhere to go back to, no idea where we’d be next. A ship soon became home – and I’ll miss this one.”

  “You say that as if part of you believes you’re not coming back.” Travers licked his lips. “Please gods, tell me you’re not having the proverbial bad feelings about the Lai’a expedition.”

  “No,” Mark admitted. “I’m not prescient at all, Neil, and I like to think I can tell the difference between genuine foreboding and old fashioned fear and paranoia! The truth? We know enough about the Zunshu from their technology, right now, to give ourselves a very good chance of coming back. We’ve learned a lot recently. At this time, I’d put our odds at an even fifty-fifty. And those odds will get better if we can get aboard the Ebrezjim, get a line into the core AI, find out exactly what happened to my ancestors. The mistake they made … and the way they escaped,” he added. “This is our first priority, as soon as we’ve made a safe insertion through the Orpheus Gate.” He gestured Travers away. “Go on, get your things together – you don’t have long.”