“Luck. And an angel.” Nothenil’s smile was almost a smirk. Lièrén let that go for now, too. Nothenil’s synaptic haze was smooth as glass, but the shape kept changing in subtle ways. It was very odd.
“Why did Talavara come after me now? Tonight?”
Nothenil rolled his eyes. “I told you, she had no one left to do it for her. She had a secret healer talent, and she knew how to make murders look like natural causes. Heart attacks, cerebral accidents… Cini was clever, I’ll give her that. Most healers don’t like death, but she lived for it.” He seemed pleased with his own joke. Lièrén continued to nudge his receptors.
“Uvay Garbey.” No wonder the unit’s late supervisor’s family was surprised by her death.
“And you, after she compelled you to spill. Or tried to, anyway. Her biggest fault was impatience, and details bored her. A needler on a sifter.” He shook his head. “Loved money, though. Not spending it, just having it. CPS will probably never find it.”
Something about the time line was bothering Lièrén, and he finally figured it out. “I didn’t download any files until recently. Why the sloppy metro platform attempt?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you were a loose end.” Lie.
Not for the first time, Lièrén wished his talent would tell him whether or not the lie was a deliberate distraction. He used to rely on Machimata for… he was struck by a wild thought. “Who are you an agent for?”
Nothenil met Lièrén’s gaze, but a corner of his mouth twitched with humor. “Myself.” Truth.
“Are you an employee, agent, or contractor of any other organization?”
“No.” Truth.
That killed Lièrén’s notion that Nothenil might work for the OII. It suddenly occurred to him to wonder why Nothenil was willing to answer any of Lièrén’s questions. The brain chemical adjustments were too subtle to make Nothenil that relaxed and disposed to be cooperative. Nothenil was toying with him.
“What do you want from me?” He was tired of the games.
Nothenil was silent for a long moment, then said, “Your goodwill.” And with that, he struck, his telepathic power blazing even as his teke talent pushed Lièrén’s hand holding the beamer toward ground.
The pressure in Lièrén’s head was nearly overwhelming, cajoling and compelling him to relax and just go with the flow. It made him mad. Lièrén was through letting anyone think for him.
He dug in behind his eroding containment walls, and desperately threw everything he had into swarming around Nothenil’s telepathic resistance and swamping his synapses with a flood of conflicting instructions. The synaptic haze had gone sharp and jagged with the attack, but now started to go chaotic under Lièrén’s assault. Lièrén concentrated on stimulating Nothenil’s gamma-amino butyric acid to convince his body and talent to ignore the brain’s orders, as if he were in a sleep state.
The pressure in Lièrén’s head was so strong, he started seeing spots, and he had to drop the beamer or have his hand crushed. Lièrén’s low-level telepathy wasn’t enough to control all of Nothenil’s body, but he compelled him to close his eyes. Lièrén hoped that without sight, Nothenil wouldn’t know where to direct the teke talent.
Lièrén felt Nothenil’s cleaner talent activate, meaning he could start ripping into Lièrén’s already damaged memory. Panic spiked. He couldn’t afford to lose any more. In desperation, all he could think to do was flare his own twist talent. He went after the first pleasant memory he could find, that of a man in a bathhouse pool. Nothenil’s telepathic assault faltered as Lièrén smashed the memory together with the recent death of Cini Talavara, twisting the bathhouse memory to leave a burning, jagged hole in the man’s chest. Lièrén pulled on a memory of a pretty woman…
STOP… Lièrén… stop… There was despair in the thoughts.
Nothenil’s cleaning and telekinesis talents deactivated. Lièrén cautiously let go of the memory, but kept his twist talent ready, not trusting.
I didn’t want it to be this way. Ineffable sadness and guilt accompanied the thought.
In the new quiet of their mind-to-mind connection, Lièrén finally saw the truth that he should have recognized a lot earlier. The man in front of him might be Henry Nothenil now, but the mind and the memories were of his former partner. His supposedly dead partner. Fiyon Machimata.
Behind his battered containment, Lièrén was rocked by a flood of impulses. Congratulate him for cheating death. Flay him alive for the years of wrenching betrayal. Find out the truth. Get away as fast as he could. Knowing he was vulnerable, he pumped Noth… Fiyon’s abused receptors with enough sleep hormones to keep him sluggish but awake.
Why did you attack me? demanded Lièrén.
I just wanted to control you long enough to get the beamer. You were getting angry.
Lie.
Fiyon mentally sighed. Okay, okay. I also wanted to clean your memories of me as I am now. I didn’t realize how strong you’d be. You’re off the CPS drugs altogether, aren’t you? No wonder you threw off the compulsion.
Lièrén ignored the attempt at sidetracking. I didn’t recognize you… not even your synaptic signature. Why not just let Talavara kill me?
Glad to know my funds weren’t wasted. When I got the full body makeover, I paid a hell of a lot extra for a permanent brain chemical change so even top-level sifters wouldn’t recognize me. Not an approved procedure. As to why I saved you… I owe you.
Lièrén remembered Fiyon’s favorite saying. And you pay your debts.
Yes. Pride accompanied the thought. Talavara and Garbey were at war. After Talavara compelled me to let that pedophile go, I knew dying was the only way they’d let me leave. I found out the flitter was sabotaged to kill me, so I used it. I couldn’t tell you to stay off that flight because you’d have asked why. You surprised everyone by surviving. While you were in recovery, I used your credentials to download the unit’s entire hypercube, in case I ever needed leverage. Talavara ordered Baretti to send Apfel to arrange a ‘metro accident.’ I don’t know how Baretti and Apfel died, but I do know Talavara had no patience for failure. I doubt she cared about the hundreds of casualties Apfel caused when she crashed that metro platform, only that you weren’t one of them.
Lièrén sent a dark, bitter thought. If she killed me, how could I be the team’s sacrificial lamb?
It was the only logical explanation for why he’d been kept on the team for so long. Otherwise, they would have had him die in an “accident” years ago.
Fiyon went completely invisible behind his containment, the way high-level telepaths could. After a long moment, he answered. It was the only way I could keep you alive. He thinned his walls a little to let Lièrén see a complex coil of selfishness, greed, guilt, and remorse. Garbey and I had a good little business going, long before you were assigned to the unit. Just the occasional “mistake” or altered record, and our cashflow accounts were fluxed. Then she was promoted, and they sent you as her replacement. I knew after the first time you and I connected that you were too… idealistic to be a part of it. Garbey made the mistake of bringing in Talavara, who brought everyone else in, even the new transfers. It went slowly chaotic after that. Cini was a binary thinker—if you weren’t her friend, you were a waste of carbon and oxygen. The only way to save you was to convince them we n eeded a scapegoat for the OII or whoever else came looking. He sent a mental wave of affection. I always liked you.
Lièrén couldn’t suppress the physical snort that statement elicited. You liked me so well you gouged gaping holes in my memory. Why didn’t you just get Garbey to transfer me?
Talavara would have killed you, anyway. Did I mention she was psychotic? I kept you as isolated as I could… Garvey kept us all… on the move…
Lièrén felt Fiyon slipping away and realized he’d kept him under so long that all his body wanted to do was sleep. Lièrén adjusted the receptors to ignore the sleep hormones. He also released control of Fiyon’s eyes, since he didn’t seem intent on doing more harm.
After a few seconds, he blinked, as if the lights had suddenly come on.
Fiyon shared his amusement with Lièrén. Weird to be on the receiving end of your sifter talent. My brain’ll be mushy for weeks. You’re top-level, better than Garbey ever was. Truth.
Lièrén hated that he still liked Fiyon’s praise. Cleaning isn’t on your record. Neither is telekinesis. I get how you hid them from me, by simply erasing inconvenient memories, but how did you hide them from the CPS?
I didn’t, exactly. My cleaning talent was so low when I was twenty that the testers thought it was an equipment fault. The CPS leashes cleaners really tight, so when my talent got stronger, I didn’t tell them. Garbey discovered it when we were still the interrogation team, and she agreed to keep it secret if I used it to make sure no one remembered us. I still wasn’t very good when you came along. I made some… mistakes with you that I regret.
Truth, but little consolation. Lièrén hid behind his containment so as not to distract Fiyon from his story.
Two years ago, I finally decided to stop taking the CPS’s bloody ‘enhancement’ drugs because they were killing me. He sent a quick bundled memory packet of increasingly unreliable talents, debilitating pain, and bad news from the medics. No one else in the field unit was taking them by then, either, except you. After I recovered from the withdrawal, the teke showed up. Bloody drug protocols had been suppressing it for fifty bloody years. It’s like your telepathy, which is a lot stronger than it was. You probably still think the CPS is all things good…
I don’t anymore. Lièrén sighed. I still believe in the mission, and a safe place for minders, but from what I’ve seen, the Service has grown… careless.
He was tempted to tell Fiyon what the local Testing Center was doing, but that would have exposed Derrit, and he didn’t trust Fiyon that far. His ex-partner had forgotten more about surveillance than Lièrén ever knew, and had obviously been watching Lièrén and the rest of the unit for weeks. He undoubtedly knew something about Derrit and Imara, but Lièrén refused to put them any closer to Fiyon’s unpredictable orbit.
Lièrén glanced at the clock and was surprised to see it had only been forty minutes since he’d followed Nothen… Fiyon down the hall.
What do you want to do now? Lièrén asked.
Get out of here, replied Fiyon promptly, then vanish, like I’d planned. I’ve paid my debts. Except for you, everyone in the field unit is dead. Truth.
Fiyon was right about needing to leave. Lièrén picked up the beamer from the floor where it had fallen and put it in his pocket. It was disconcerting watching lanky, narrow-faced Nothenil as he stretched cautiously, but feeling Fiyon’s mind.
Lièrén picked up his bag and coat. With luck, anyone finding the scarf he’d abandoned would assume it was left behind by some previous occupant of that office.
I assume you have a plan for leaving? Fiyon always had a plan. Usually plans within plans. He was admirably crafty and thorough.
I fractured the central security monitoring system, and every vid of me and most everyone else in the field office side is farked beyond recovery. If we’re out of here before someone flashes the system or finds Talavara, all you’ll need is an alibi. He sent a flash of amusement. I don’t know what you did for Yamazaki tonight, but he’s definitely a fan.
One side of Nothenil’s body sagged, and Lièrén remembered the needler shots. The needles will dissolve on their own, but I could burn out the anesthetic for you, if you’d like.
There’s the polite Lièrén Sòng I remember. Yes, please…
Lièrén directed Fiyon’s brain to flush out the anesthetic with a counter-agent. After a few minutes of annoying pins-and-needles tingling, Fiyon should be fully in control of his body again.
By tacit agreement, Lièrén led the way through the medical center’s corridors and down the stairs. With Lièrén wearing his coat, he and Fiyon… Nothenil… the man by his side… looked like anonymous mid-level admin staffers going home after a long day.
Lièrén had one more question. Did you kill the others?
Nope, they killed each other. Heavily shaded truth. Lièrén decided he didn’t need to know.
He wanted to tell Fiyon that he would never forgive him for abusing his trust for ten years, but that he was glad Fiyon hadn’t died, because he’d also been Lièrén’s only constant friend. He wanted Fiyon to feel how much he’d been hurt, but it wouldn’t change the past.
In the end, as they walked out the door together, all he said was “goodnight,” then turned and walked away.
It took Lièrén several blocks of randomly going with the pedestrian flow, looking for a secure-cab platform, to realize that if he was the only living member of the unit, no one was left to want him dead. His shoulder still hurt from the needles, but he’d be fine by morning. His stomach growled at the smell of sizzling pork coming from the street stand. Too bad he didn’t already have a reservation somewhere that would put him far away from the CPS building…
But he did. Sort of. He’d never canceled the reservation for celebrating Derrit’s birthday at his cousin’s fancy restaurant. The original reservation time was hours ago, but while Chiu might grumble, he always came through for family.
CHAPTER 20
* Planet: Concordance Prime * GDAT 3238.221 *
Lièrén read the frustratingly brief notation again. “Recruit cooperating without assistance.”
It was the first update to Derrit’s record since yesterday, when the CPS Testing Center had moved him to the alternate location, the one for which Lièrén had sent the coordinates to Rayle.
The last place Lièrén had imagined he’d be after leaving the CPS building the previous evening was in the CPS Testing Center, but an excellent meal and a few hours of sleep in a quiet luxury hotel gave him time to think.
Once again, he was temporarily adrift, between one assignment and the next, with no responsibilities other than the upcoming meeting with the regional supervisor. That left him free to do as he pleased, and he chose to spend that time volunteering to help the Testing Center, which would allow him to serve as a silent backup for Imara’s plan to find and free Derrit.
His idea had worked out far better than he’d hoped. The three-building security system was still a complete shambles. Most of the able-bodied staff had been dragooned into helping keep the peace during the TSAC march. Yamazaki had been happy to recommend him to Klarxon, the harried Testing Center manager. Evidently, she was long overdue for Mateliff’s security briefing, because she’d seized on his administrative experience and security rating as being good enough to make him the sole data manager for the day, giving him access to every record, data stream, and communication of anyone on the staff.
By mid-afternoon, the TSAC march was in full swing, with full-spectrum coverage on broadcast news. With the recent publicity from the Mabingion Purge story, the number of marchers had swelled by an order of magnitude beyond the original estimates of either the police or the organizers. Reports had begun trickling in that the police were having trouble in the Rim. The military—including the CPS—had officially been brought on board only as observers. Lièrén didn’t know about the regular military, but he knew the CPS would step in if minder talents were used, whether or not they had official permission. He thought it very likely that by the time the marchers got into High Spires, the whole situation would be chaos cubed. Imara was counting on it.
After finding his way around the Testing Center’s ridiculously outdated netware and hopelessly convoluted data streams, Lièrén concluded it was a wonder they could find any testing records at all, or even knew who worked for them. The digital clutter made it easy to add a few “auditing” routines that would send any data points of interest to an encrypted interceptor he’d set up, which was how he’d seen the record update for Derrit.
“Recruit cooperating without assistance.”
That last word bothered him. It could be benign, but he was afraid it was code for CPS drugs. As Fiyon had said, the
CPS’s first answer to most minder problems was drugs. Use of any of them required monitoring by a medic. Some of the drugs were very dangerous, meant for out-of-control adult minders, or, if the darker rumors were true, to keep powerful minders addicted and therefore leashed. The CPS didn’t put twelve-year-old children on permanent drug protocols. But as MacPenn, the field-office agent, had said, the Testing Center recruiters were a bunch of farkin’ lopars who wouldn’t even think to worry about any harm even temporary use of the drugs might do.
At least the record update gave him another name to add to the list of recruiters who might be holding Derrit. Most of the staff with that title seemed to be low- and mid-level talents. Milo Ghisolfi, the man who’d updated the record, a low-level shielder and mid-level ramper, was listed as the primary recruiter. When Lièrén looked up his file holo, he recognized Ghisolfi from Imara’s memory—he’d been the man who’d lied to her about the “inconclusive” test results. Shelo Yoo, a mid-level empath, and a genial man he’d been introduced to that morning, was listed as secondary recruiter. The record updater had been Paz Élmaléh, a mid-level shielder with no image on file. Lièrén hoped that meant they were taking solo eight-hour shifts.
Lièrén was just about to use his prepaid percomp to send that information in another encrypted packet to Rayle when he saw an incoming ping from the man himself. He took the call audio-only.
“Good afternoon, my friend.” He’d been left alone in the hub office most of the day, but it never hurt to be circumspect.
“Hi there, hansamu,” said Rayle. “I need a big favor. Remember my friend who’s moving? I promised to help, but the timetable has moved up, and I can’t do it. I was hoping you could sub for me.”
Lièrén didn’t hesitate. “When?” He’d nearly failed Imara and Derrit once before, and he refused to do it ever again. Imara wouldn’t be happy to see him, because she didn’t think it was worth his CPS career, but that was his choice to make.
“As soon as possible. She doesn’t trust the landlord’s new security guard not to damage her stuff.”
Minder Rising: Central Galactic Concordance Book 2 Page 19
