Aces High

  Gulgowski, his top sergeant, squatted next to him in the underbrush.

  “It’s late,” Gulgowski hissed.

  Brennan shrugged. “Choppers are always late. It’ll get here.”

  The sergeant grunted noncommittally. Brennan smiled into the night. Gulgowski was always the pessimist, always the one to see the gloomy side of things. But that never stopped him from doing his damndest when the going got rough, never stopped him from picking up the others when they felt everything was hopeless.

  From faraway came the whupping sound of a chopper. Brennan turned to him, grinned. Gulgowski spat silently onto the jungle floor.

  “Get the men ready. And hang onto that briefcase. It cost a lot to get it.”

  Mendoza, Johnstone, Big Al … three of the ten-man picked squad that Brennan had led on a raid on regional VC headquarters were dead. But they had achieved their objective. They had captured documents proving what Brennan had suspected for a long time. There were men in both the Vietnamese Army and the United States Army who were dirty, who were working with the enemy. He’d only had a chance to glance at the papers before stuffing them in the briefcase, but they had confirmed his suspicions that the biggest thief, the vilest traitor, was the ARVN general Kien. These papers would hang him.

  The chopper landed in the clearing and Gulgowski, clutching the evidence that would damn a score of men as traitors, chivied the others to their ride home. Brennan waited in the underbrush, staring down the trail from which he expected pursuing VC to come at any moment. Finally satisfied that they had shaken the pursuit, he backed into the clearing as a withering hail of bullets burst unexpectedly into the night.

  He heard the screams of his men, half-turned, and felt a searing flash of pain as a slug creased his forehead. He went down and his rifle spun away from him into the darkness. The shots had come from the clearing. From the chopper.

  He flopped silently on the ground, staring into the clearing with pain-misted eyes. His men lay sprawled in the starlight. All of them were down. Other men walked among them, searching. He blinked blood out his eyes as one of the searchers, dressed in ARVN-style fatigues, shot Gulgowski in the head with a pistol as the sergeant tried to stand.

  A flashlight beam picked out the killer’s face. It was Kien. Brennan bit back curses as he saw one of his henchmen pry the briefcase from Gulgowski’s death-grip and hand it to him. Kien rifled through it, nodded in satisfaction, and then methodically burned its contents. As the papers burned, Kien stared out into the jungle, looking, Brennan knew, for him. He cursed the paralytic shock that gripped his body, making him shake like he had a fever. The last thing he remembered was Kien striding toward the chopper, and then shock drove him into unconsciousness.

  There were no lights in this darkness, but sudden hands of cool fire on his cheeks. They burned with a soothing touch. He felt all his pain and grief and anger drawn outward through them bit by slow bit, taken away from him like a worn-out cloak. He sighed deeply, content to remain in the healing darkness, as a sea of ineffable serenity washed over him. He was done, he thought, with strife, with killing. None of the killing had ever done any good anyway. Evil lived. Evil and Kien. He killed my father, but I can not, should not, harm him. It is wrong to bring harm to another sentient being, wrong.…

  Confused, Brennan forced open his eyes. He wasn’t in Vietnam. He was in a hospital. No, the Jokertown clinic of Dr. Tachyon. A face was pressed close to his, eyes closed, mouth screwed up tightly. Young, feminine, beautiful in a serene way, though now touched by extreme pain. Mai. Her long glossy hair enveloped his face like bird’s wings. Her hands were pressed against his cheeks. Blood trickled down their backs from between the spread fingers.

  She was using her wild card power to take his damaged body to herself, make repairs, and order Brennan’s body to do the same. They had mingled minds and beings and he, for a moment, became something of her while she became something of him. In a confused meld of memories, he experienced Mai’s grief at the death of her father at the hands of Kien’s men.

  She opened her eyes and smiled with the serenity of a madonna.

  “Hello, Captain Brennan,” she said in a voice so low that only he could hear it. “You are well again.”

  She took her palms from his cheeks and the mingling of minds ended with the breaking of physical contact. He sighed, missing her touch already, missing the serenity that he could never in a thousand years find again on his own.

  The man who had been with Mai in the corridor came to his bedside. It was Dr. Tachyon.

  “It was touch and go there for a moment,” Tachyon said, a look of concern on his face. “Thank the Ideal for Mai…” He let his voice trail off, regarding Brennan closely. “What happened? How did you come to possess the singularity shifter?”

  Brennan sat up gingerly. The numbness was gone from his body, but he still felt light-headed and disoriented from Mai’s treatment.

  “Is that what it’s called?” he asked. Tachyon nodded. “What is it?”

  “A teleporting device. One of the rarest artifacts in the galaxy. I thought it was gone, lost forever.”

  “It’s yours, then?”

  “I had it for a while.” Tachyon told Brennan the story of the peripatetic singularity shifter, at least what he knew of it.

  “How did the Egrets get it?”

  “Eh?” Tachyon glanced from Brennan to Mai. “Egrets?”

  “A Chinatown street gang. The Immaculate Egrets. They’re also known as the Snow Birds because they control a good deal of the city’s hard-drug trade. They were apparently using this shifter device to smuggle heroin. I took it away from them, but was wounded by one of their more … extraordinary operatives.”

  “It vanished when we landed in Harlem,” Tachyon said. “Perhaps an Egret was in the crowd that gathered around us?”

  “And took it, realizing what it was? Not likely,” Brennan said softly, his gaze turned inward. “Not likely at all. Besides, Harlem isn’t Egret turf. They have agents there, but not many of them.”

  “Well, however it turned up, I’m glad it did,” Tachyon said. “It provides the possibility of a splendid alternative to Lankester’s foolish plan of attacking the Swarm in space.”

  “The Swarm?” Brennan had been aware of the semisentient alien invaders that had been trying to get a toehold on the Earth for the past several months, but the fight against them had so far bypassed him. “What use could this, this shifting thing be against the Swarm?”

  “It’s a long story.” Tachyon sighed and ran a hand across his face. “A man from the State Department named Lankester is in charge of the Anti-Swarm Task Force. He’s been pestering me for weeks now to use my influence with the aces to convince them to attack the Swarm Mother—the source of the Swarm attacks—that’s in an eccentric orbit around the sun. It’s a nonsensical idea, of course. It would be suicide for even the most powerful aces to go up against that thing. It would be like gnats flinging themselves against an elephant. The singularity shifter, however, presents some interesting possibilities.”

  “It can teleport a man that far?” Brennan asked, seeing some of them himself.

  “Someone totally unfamiliar with it, as, say, yourself,” Tachyon said, “could use the shifter to teleport short distances. It would take a powerful telepath to reach the Swarm Mother. But it could be done. A man could shift himself into the interior of the thing. A man armed with, say, a tactical nuclear device.”

  Brennan nodded. “I see.”

  “I was sure you would. I’m explaining all this to you because, pragmatically speaking, the singularity shifter is yours.”

  Brennan looked from Tachyon to Mai standing silently at the side of his bed, back to Tachyon again. He had the feeling that Mai had told Tachyon something about him, but he knew Mai would tell the doctor only what she had to. And only because she trusted him.

  “I’m in your debt,” Brennan said. “It’s yours.”

  Tachyon gripped Brennan’s forearm in a wa
rm, friendly manner.

  “Thank you,” he said. He glanced at Mai, looked at Brennan again. “I know that you’re involved in some sort of vendetta with people here in the city. Mai told me something of it in explaining her own background and abilities. No details. None were necessary.” He paused. “I know all too well about debts of honor.”

  Brennan nodded. He believed Tachyon, and, up to a point, trusted him. Tachyon probably wasn’t connected with Kien, but one of the aces who had been with him—Turtle, Fantasy, or Trips—was. One of them must have stolen the shifter and given it to Kien. And Brennan, someday, somehow, would discover which ace it was.

  ii.

  BRENNAN LEFT THE CLINIC a little before midnight and went home to the one-room apartment on the fringes of Jokertown that was his base of operations. There was a sense of organized clutter about the apartment, which consisted of a bathroom, kitchen area, and living area with a sofa-bed, ancient rocking chair, and an obviously handmade workbench overflowing with equipment any bowyer would recognize. And some that a bowyer wouldn’t.

  He pulled the bed out of the sofa, stripped, and flopped down with a bone-weary sigh. He slept for twenty-four hours, completing the healing process that Mai had begun. He was ravenously hungry when he awoke and was fixing himself a meal when there came a light knock on the door. He peered out of the peephole. It was, as he had expected, Mai, the only person who knew where he lived.

  “Trouble?” Brennan asked, seeing the worry on her usually-placid features. He stepped aside to let her into the room.

  “I don’t know. I think so.”

  “Tell me about it.” He went behind the counter that divided the kitchen area from the rest of the apartment and poured water from the pot whistling on the stove into two small, handleless teacups. They were porcelain, hand-painted with the colors of a dream. They were older than the United States and the most precious things Brennan owned. He handed one to Mai in the rocking chair, and sat down on the rumpled bed opposite her.

  “It’s Dr. Tachyon.” She sipped the hot, aromatic tea, gathering her thoughts. “He’s been acting … strange.”

  “In what way?”

  “He’s been brusque, demanding. And he’s neglecting his patients.”

  “Since when?”

  “Yesterday, since coming back from his meeting with the man from the State Department. There’s something else.”

  She balanced the precious teacup on her lap and took a folded newspaper from the purse that she had set beside the rocker.

  “Have you seen this?”

  Brennan shook his head.

  The headlines screamed TACHYON TO LEAD ACE ASSAULT AGAINST SPACE MENACE. A picture below the bold letters showed Tachyon standing with a man identified as Alexander Lankester, head of the Anti-Swarm Task Force. The accompanying article stated that Tachyon was recruiting aces to follow him in an assault against the Swarm Mother orbiting the Earth beyond ballistic missile range. Captain Trips and Modular Man had already agreed to go along.

  Something was wrong, Brennan thought. Tachyon had hoped the singularity shifter would end the request for such a useless assault. Instead, it seemed as if the opposite were happening.

  “Do you think the government is blackmailing him into doing this?” Brennan asked. “Or is controlling his mind somehow?”

  “It is possible,” Mai shrugged. “I only know that he may need help.”

  He looked at her for a long moment and she calmly returned his gaze.

  “He has no friends?”

  “Many of his friends are poor, helpless jokers. Others are hard to reach. Or may not be inclined to act swiftly if the government is somehow involved.”

  Brennan stood up and turned his back to her while carrying his teacup back to the counter. The network of human relationships was reaching out, ensnaring him in its sticky grip once again. He dumped the dregs of his tea into the sink and gazed into the bottom of the teacup. It was the blue of a perfect, depthless pool, the blue of an empty, endless sky. Looking into it was like contemplating the void. It was pleasurable in its utter peacefulness, but not, Brennan realized, his particular pathway to enlightenment.

  He turned around to face Mai again, his mind made up.

  “All right. I’ll check it out. But I don’t know anything about things like mind control. I’ll need some help.”

  He reached for the phone and dialed a number.

  Brennan had rarely been in the public rooms of the Crystal Palace, though he had spent more than one night in the rooms on the third floor. Elmo nodded as he came in, without commenting on the case he carried. The dwarf gestured to the corner table where Chrysalis sat with a man wearing black jeans and a brown leather jacket. He had handsome, regular features, except for his bulging forehead.

  “You,” Fortunato said as Brennan came up to their table. He looked from Brennan to Chrysalis. She regarded him with a level gaze, the blood pulsing steadily through the arteries of her glass-clear throat. She looked at Brennan and nodded coolly, showing no sign of the passion that Brennan knew from the time he spent on the Palace’s third floor.

  “This is Yeoman,” she said as Brennan took the third seat at the table. “I believe that he has some information you might find interesting.”

  Fortunato frowned. Their last meeting hadn’t exactly been cordial, though there was no actual animosity between the two.

  “Word has it that you’re looking for a way to get at the Swarm. I know something that could help.”

  “I’ll listen.”

  Brennan told him about the singularity shifter. He told no lies, but he shaded things skillfully, having been coached by Chrysalis as to the approach that would most likely sway Fortunato to help him investigate Tachyon’s strange behavior.

  “What can you do besides making your mind go away?” Fortunato asked when Brennan was done with his story.

  “I can take care of myself. And most others who might try to interfere with us.”

  “You that crazed killer the papers been speculating about lately?”

  Brennan reached into his back pants pocket and withdrew a card. He dropped it face up on the table in front of Fortunato. The sorcerer-pimp looked at it, nodded.

  “Me and the Black Shadow are the only aces of spades I know of.” He looked up at Brennan. “But I guess there’s room for one more. The only thing I don’t understand is what you get out of this,” he said, turning to Chrysalis.

  “If this works out, whatever I want. From both of you…”

  Fortunato grunted. He stood up.

  “Yeah. You always do. Well, come along. We’d best be checking if that alien Beau Brummell’s still got all his brains.”

  Brennan drove them through the early-morning darkness to Tachyon’s apartment. Out of the corner of his eye he occasionally caught Fortunato studying him, but the ace chose not to ask any questions. Fortunato hadn’t accepted him yet, Brennan realized, and he was still wary and watchful, if not openly distrustful. But that was all right. He wasn’t sure of Fortunato yet, either.

  He parked the BMW in the alley beside Tachyon’s apartment building. He and Fortunato got out and looked up at the building.

  “We go in by the front door,” Fortunato asked, “or the back door?”

  “When there’s been a choice, it’s always been my policy to go in by the back.”

  “Smart man,” Fortunato murmured, “smart man.”

  Fortunato watched with a dubious expression, but said nothing as Brennan took his case from the BMW’s trunk, opened it, slung his compound bow over his back, then attached the quiver of arrows to his belt.

  “Let’s go.”

  They made their way to the rear of the apartment building, and Fortunato burned a bit of his psychic energy in bringing down the fire-escape ladder. They cat-footed along the fire escape until they came to the window of Tachyon’s apartment, and peered inside his bedroom.

  The room, lit by the light from an overturned bedside lamp, was a shambles. It had been tossed
by an impatient searcher who hadn’t bothered to set things right again. Brennan and Fortunato glanced at each other.

  “Something weird is happening,” Fortunato muttered.

  The window was locked, but that wasn’t an obstacle to Brennan. He removed a circle of glass from the lower pane with his glass cutter, reached a hand in, unlatched the window, and silently slid it up. He put out an arm, stopping Fortunato from entering, and laid a finger across his lips. They listened for a moment, but heard nothing.

  Brennan went in first, leaping down from the windowsill as silently as a cat, his strung bow in his left hand, his right hand hovering near the quiver velcroed to his belt. Fortunato followed, making enough noise to cause Brennan to stare at him accusingly. The ace shrugged and Brennan led the way through the room. In the hallway that led to the kitchen, living area, and guest bedroom, they heard a series of crashes, hollow thumps, and occasional shattering sounds, as if a careless or uncaring searcher were rummaging through the rooms deeper in the apartment.

  They went quietly down the hall, passing a closed door to a guest bedroom. The hall opened out into the apartment’s living room, which looked as devastated as a trailer park after a tornado. A slight, short man with long curly red hair was methodically pulling books off their shelves, looking behind them.

  “Tachyon,” Brennan said aloud.

  He turned and looked at the two in the hallway, totally calm, utterly unstartled. He started toward them, no expression at all on his face.

  Fortunato suddenly put a hand in the small of Brennan’s back and pushed, sending him sprawling to the carpet.

  “That’s not Tachyon!” he shouted.

  The next few seconds seemed to Brennan as if he were viewing a videotape on fast forward. Fortunato was doing something to time. He became a blur rocketing through the air toward the Tachyon look-alike, but was just as quickly thrown aside as soon as the two of them touched.