Voices

by John Vornholt

  “This trip was only supposed to cost me one diamond!” complained Deuce. “And now it’s cost me four!”

  As this was the two hundredth time he had complained about that particular injustice, Talia ignored him and pulled her wig and her hat down on her head. She guessed they were making good time for such a primitive craft, even if she was getting encrusted with sand; but it bothered her that she didn’t know where they were going. Clement? It didn’t ring a bell. They had to trust in Brother Sky’s directions.

  “You know, those kooks might not have seen anything!” snarled Deuce. “You didn’t see a shuttlecraft, did you? Me neither!”

  That thought hadn’t occurred to her before, and Talia turned to look at the gangster. “Do you think they just wanted us out of there, so they made it up?”

  “Sure, maybe they turn us in and say we stole their Hovercraft. I doubt if we’re going to live to argue about it.”

  Talia banged on his shoulder and shouted, “Stop this thing! Park it somewhere!”

  Deuce let up gradually on the accelerator, and the Hovercraft came to a stop and thudded into the sand. He wiped the sand off his face and demanded, “What’s the matter with you?”

  Talia jumped out of the craft and stretched her legs. “Stop and think about it,” she said. “They got us out of the village because they know, one way or another, somebody is coming after us. Whether they sent for them, or they spotted us, or they intercepted a message, it doesn’t matter. They know, and somebody’s coming. There’s no way to get across this desert by daylight without being spotted, so let’s camouflage this thing and wait it out until nightfall.”

  Deuce stared at her for a moment, then stared into the unforgiving sun to the west of them. He grinned foolishly and scratched his stubbly chin. “Maybe we’re doing this all wrong,” he drawled. “Why should we run in a piddly Hovercraft, when they’ve got shuttles? Why should we run at all? Let’s set a trap for them. How many of them can there be?”

  “Well,” said Talia, adjusting her wig, “assuming they’re Psi Cops and they’re after me, they won’t alert any other authorities. They like to bring down a rogue themselves, without anybody interfering. They probably have several two-man shuttles spread out over this area.”

  Deuce grabbed the bumper of the Hovercraft and began to rock the vehicle. “Come on! Help me turn this thing over!”

  “Why?” asked Talia, leaning down to grab the bumper.

  “To make it looked like it wrecked.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Talia Winters watched a scorpion scuttle across the sand about a meter away from her face. The tan arachnid blended in perfectly with the sand, and she hadn’t noticed it when she picked this place to lie down. Now its deadly tail was curving up and down, and its little pincers were looking for something to pinch. She was in horrendous fear that her nose would look delectable to the scorpion, but she couldn’t possibly move or cry out. She would just have to let the scorpion sting her and take her chances with the venom.

  Because a sleek, black shuttlecraft was about a kilometer away and swooping in for a landing.

  Talia closed her eyes as the shuttlecraft landed and its thrusters blew sand all over her. After this sojourn in the desert, she wondered if she would ever feel clean again. She held her breath, waiting for the scorpion to get blown directly into the center of her face, stinger first. When that didn’t happen, she held perfectly still, trying to look dead, or at least close to it.

  She could imagine what the scene looked like from the air: an overturned Hovercraft which had skirted too close to the ridge, and the body of a woman lying a few meters away, broiling in what was left of the late-afternoon sun. It didn’t look very threatening, she hoped.

  Talia heard the door of the shuttlecraft open, and she heard their boots crunching across the sand. As she had guessed, there were only two of them, and she felt them probing her with their minds. Even though they were P12s and she was a mere P5, she had the advantage of all that contact with alien species; she was able to disrupt a casual mind-scan with bizarre images. Talia thought again about Ambassador Kosh and Invisible Isabel, knowing they wouldn’t be able to make much sense out of that.

  “She’s alive,” said one of them, “but she’s delirious.”

  “Is that the rogue?” asked the other. “They said she had blond hair?”

  “Hair color doesn’t mean anything,” said the first. “Besides, if we leave her here, she’ll just die. Better take her in.”

  With her eyes closed, Talia wasn’t able to see if they had returned their PPG weapons to their holsters. But they couldn’t very well lift her, if they didn’t. She heard their footsteps coming very close now, and it was time for her to give the prearranged signal.

  She moaned loudly.

  That drew their attention, and neither one of them heard Deuce as he rose up, covered with sand, and drilled the nearest Psi Cop in the arm with his PPG. The cop collapsed to his knees in shock, and the other one started to draw his weapon.

  “Go ahead.” Deuce grinned. “I promised the lady I wouldn’t kill you, but I’m not great at keeping my promises.”

  Talia scrambled to her feet and grabbed the PPG out of the wounded Psi Cop’s holster. Then she very carefully took the PPG from the other cop.

  “You won’t get away,” said the black-suited telepath. “We’ll bring you down.”

  Talia said nothing. She was busy gathering up the water bag and Deuce’s briefcase and duffel bag from the fallen Hovercraft. As an afterthought, she left them the water bag.

  “Oh, please let me kill them,” begged Deuce. “Who would miss them? Even their mommas probably don’t like them anymore.”

  Talia shot him a glare, and Deuce frowned disgruntledly and began to back toward the shuttlecraft. “Well,” he said, “we are offering you gentlemen a great deal today - that perfectly good Hovercraft for this beat-up old shuttlecraft of yours. Now you just go northeast, and you’ll get to civilization. I wouldn’t go the other way, because we stole that Hovercraft from some folks, and they might shoot first and ask questions later.”

  Talia jumped into the shuttlecraft and kept her hand on the button to shut the hatch after Deuce.

  “You got my briefcase?” asked the gangster.

  “Yeah.”

  He nodded and jumped aboard. Talia quickly closed the hatch, and they scrambled into seats in the cockpit.

  “Do you know how to fly one of these?” asked Talia.

  Deuce laughed. “You think I never stole a shuttlecraft before? This is a hobby of mine.”

  Before she even had a chance to fasten her seat belt, he jammed the thrusters, and the little craft started to buck and shake. It wasn’t a smooth takeoff, but they were soon in the air, with the dusty desert fading away beneath them.

  Talia sighed and slumped back in her seat.

  “Don’t panic,” said Deuce, “but you, uh, got a scorpion in your hair.”

  Talia panicked anyway - she screamed, yanked the wig off, and threw it on the floor. The startled scorpion tried to hide, but it was out of its element on the cold metal deck of the shuttlecraft. She took her shoe oft’ to throw it at the arachnid.

  “Don’t kill him,” said Deuce. “I’ll take him with me to Guadalajara.”

  “Guadalajara,” echoed Talia. “I need to go to Boston.”

  “Then I guess this is where you and I part company.” To emphasize his determination, Deuce drew his PPG and aimed it at her.

  “Can you let me off somewhere? A town, I mean.”

  “I’d have to let you off on the outskirts. You might have quite a walk.”

  Talia shrugged, too worn out to question whatever fate had in store for her next. “I haven’t got any money,” she added.

  “Damnation,” muttered Deuce, “what do I look like, a credit machine? This whole trip was only supposed to cost me one diamond, and now it’s already cost me - “

  “Four diamonds,” she completed his sentence. “But you got a shuttle
craft out of it, and you wouldn’t have gotten that without me.”

  “Yeah,” Deuce conceded, putting his weapon away. “I guess you paid your debt. Hand me my case.”

  She handed him his briefcase, and he put the craft on autopilot as he rummaged through it.

  “Here’s a one-carat diamond,” he said. “That should get you wherever you want to go. You know, you really should’ve let me kill those Psi Cops. As soon as they get to a link, everybody on Earth will know you’re here.”

  “I know,” said Talia somberly. She took the diamond from him and tried to smile. “Thank you.”

  “You’re a tough one,” said Deuce admiringly. “If we ever run into each other again - say, at my hanging - will you tell them I’m not totally bad? That I once did a favor for somebody, and let two Psi Cops live.”

  Talia gave him a real smile. “I will. I once heard somebody on B5 say that nobody is what they seem. I never knew what that meant before, but now I know - we have lots of people inside of us. Good, bad, right, wrong, it all gets blurred together. I’ll never forget that you helped me, Deuce.”

  He smiled boyishly, and for a moment she could see the little kid who had put a firecracker in a teacher’s wastebasket. Was that the moment he had gone bad? If it hadn’t been for that incident, or if it hadn’t been for the bombing, might they both be upstanding citizens now instead of fugitives on the run? She didn’t know. She would never know.

  “Phoenix coming up,” said Deuce.

  It was almost dark by the time Deuce landed the black shuttlecraft behind a grain elevator on the outskirts of the sprawling city.

  “No time for long good-byes,” he said, opening the hatch. “This is busy airspace around here.”

  Talia straightened her wig and her beret and made sure she had her only two possessions, the diamond and Emily Crane’s address. She had thought about taking one of the extra PPGs, but shooting it out with the authorities was not really her style.

  She paused in the doorway. “Bye.”

  “Good luck,” drawled Deuce. “You’ll need it.”

  Talia jumped out of the craft and ran for cover as he shot the thrusters. A second later, the shuttlecraft and Deuce were gone, and she was alone again, surrounded by darkness and crickets. It felt soothing, like the darkness was a natural place for her these days. She saw the arcing lights of the city in the distance, and she found her way to an overgrown road and began walking.

  Michael Garibaldi stood alone on the bridge, looking at the lights of Boston Harbor as they glinted off the black water. He had rushed back to Boston, for what? His efforts to find Emily Crane’s home address had gone for naught, and he had no friends in the local police department to help him. The last thing he wanted to do was to try to explain all of this to a local cop - commercial telepaths pretending to be Martian terrorists in order to blow up Psi Cops on a space station several light-years away. You had to be there. Plus, they would keep him tied up in the squad room for days, making statements, checking statements.

  With Malten having already skipped to Mars, Emily Crane was the only lead he had. Despite Gray’s opinion that she wouldn’t skip, he didn’t trust her. As long as Talia was at large, they couldn’t move against Crane, but she wasn’t in the clear. If Talia showed up, protected and talking to the right people, Crane was in serious trouble. If only he could corner her at home, he reasoned, maybe he could throw enough fear into her to get her to confess to the police. But how could he get her unlisted address?

  He snapped his fingers just as a barge announced its approach through the black waters with a woeful moan. Maybe he should go see the receptionist at the Mix office - what was his name? It had been right there on his nameplate: Ronald Trishman! A receptionist, even a sour one like him, was likely to have a listed address. Garibaldi dashed to the end of the bridge and into a bar along the waterfront.

  The smell of booze was inviting - it always was - and the sight of all the Iowlifes made him feel right at home, but Garibaldi had chosen another poison tonight. He went to the viewer and waited for a large guy with tattoos all over his arms to finish talking to his kids somewhere in Australia, then he grabbed the link before anybody else could. He punched up the information index and entered Ronald Trishman’s name.

  There were two Ronald Trishmans, but that wasn’t bad for a city the size of Boston. The security officer jotted them both down in his electronic address book. It wasn’t all that late, about 22:00, so he decided to pay these two Ronald Trishmans a call. One of them was bound to know where Emily Crane lived.

  He knew the first one was wrong as soon as he got off the autotaxi. The place, called Flag Hill, was far too ritzy, a collection of townhouses built to look old but really quite elegant, with bay windows and a neo-colonial look. Well, he thought, maybe Ronald slummed by working as a receptionist.

  He buzzed the outer door, and a sleepy woman’s voice answered his call. “Yes?”

  “Excuse me,” said Garibaldi, “I need to speak to Ronald for a moment.”

  “He’s taking a bath. What is it? Who are you?”

  “I work with him at the Mix.”

  “Mix?” she asked. “He’s a doctor.” She rang off.

  When Garibaldi got back to the street, he saw that his autotaxi had taken off. Well, he supposed, maybe he hadn’t tipped it enough. He looked around the maze of dark streets and townhouses, all of it coated with a halo of city lights. After the sweltering closeness of Babylon 5, Boston seemed like an immense wilderness park, far too large to make sense out of and filled with exotic humans. He wondered what that said about his life - that Londo, G’Kar, and their alien brethren seemed normal compared to this mass of humanity.

  The security chief had a pretty good sense of direction, and it was a pleasant night, so he decided to walk. He knew the second Ronald Trishman lived up some street named Beacon, and he wasn’t far away from there. He would ask directions as he went. Within about three blocks, the oak trees thinned out to a standard urban sprawl of office buildings and shops, and he wasn’t the only pedestrian anymore. The others looked better dressed, more affluent, and he felt like a soldier home from leave in his uniform. As he drew closer to a casino, his attention was snagged by a row of screens in the window.

  Once again, there was Talia Winters’s face. It was a good face for the screen - angular and confident, with lovely eyes - he could see why they liked to show it so much. This time they did a computer animation on Talia’s face to turn her sleek blond hair into long, brown, curly locks. He couldn’t hear the audio, so he ducked inside to see what the report was about.

  “Based on the officers’ description,” said the newscaster, “Talia Winters was traveling with a man and wearing a dark hairstyle, probably a wig. She was last seen in Arizona, although she could be many kilometers from there by now. She and her companion are believed to have a shuttlecraft.”

  Traveling with a man, thought Garibaldi. She had found a protector. That should be me, he thought. Well, he was doing the best he could, building a case against the real bad guys. But he felt guilty about not doing more to find her. All he could think of doing was to stake out Emily Crane’s office, believing she would find her way there, eventually. But what if she was just running and not trying to find Emily Crane?

  At any rate, it was definite that she was on Earth, as he had figured. She would be lucky to escape from the planet before the Psi Cops got her. He wasn’t going to count on her being able to testify on her own behalf, so the pressure was on him to find the real culprits. He wasn’t telepathic, but he tried to send her a message:

  Keep running, Talia.

  “I have a diamond,” said the tall woman with the curly brown hair.

  She batted her eyelashes at the pawnbroker, hoping he didn’t notice how filthy she was. Then she nearly swallowed her tongue as she caught sight of herself on the viewer behind him. It was her public relations photograph, taken last year for the brochures - only in this photo she was wearing the wig she was actuall
y wearing! She gripped her beret tighter and looked down, waiting for the pawnbroker to yell for the cops.

  “Yes?” he asked. “A diamond?”

  He had been talking to another customer when she entered, Talia recalled, so he probably hadn’t seen the newscast. She sighed and took the cut diamond out of her jacket pocket. With a hopeful smile, she handed it to him, and he placed it on the velvet pad.

  “One carat,” she said. “Gem quality.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that,” answered the pawnbroker, reaching for his scanner. He passed the diamond under the light beam for a few seconds, glanced at the readouts, and nodded. “Yes, it’s top quality. Nothing like that left on Earth. Where did it come from?”

  “Do you want it, or not?”

  “Eight hundred credits.”

  She tried to stay calm. “I want to sell it, not a loan.”

  “Same price either way.”

  “I think it’s worth more than that,” Talia said slowly.

  “Then go somewhere else.”

  She took the jewel off the velvet, but he called out to her before she could put it in her pocket. “Eight-fifty, no more.”

  She looked at him and thought how weary and dirty she was. At least with some money she could get a bath. This was robbery, anyway, but at least she would die or be captured with some money in her pocket.

  “Yeah,” she said, “eight-fifty.”

  “All right,” said the man, “if you’ll hand me your creditchit, I’ll add it to your account.”

  She shook her head and looked down. “I don’t have any credits. That’s why I need to sell the diamond.”

  “All right,” said the man, eager to conclude the deal any way he could, “give me your identicard, and I’ll make you a creditchit. That’s one of our services. It adds only one per cent.”

  Another rip-off, she thought, but beggars can’t be choosers. At least she had an identicard. She handed it to the man, and he disappeared with both the card and the diamond.