The Last Aerie

  But just as a storm has its calm “eye” at the center of the tumult, so the numbers vortex obscured and protected its sentient core: another mind, which Trask felt warm against his own as soon as he touched it. Except it wasn’t simply that he felt it, but also that he felt he knew it!

  “Who … ?” he said, dismissing his posthypnotic mind-guard and opening himself to the other’s probe. “What … ?”

  A friend, came back the answer. Or one who would be your friend, if you will have me.

  And despite that the telepathic voice was warm, uncertain, and even a little afraid, still Trask shuddered in his sleep. It was as if someone had walked on his grave—exactly like that—and for the first time in his life he fully appreciated the meaning of that old cliche. For this was how it must feel to be dead and have someone talk to you! A single word, thought, idea, floated to the surface of Trask’s mind:

  “Necroscope!”

  For a moment there was a hushed silence. Then: And is that such a dreadful thing to be? I can feel it in your voice that you think so.

  Even drugged, asleep, Trask knew whom he was talking to—the only one he could possibly be talking to—so that before considering or attempting to curb his reply, he found himself answering, “But your father was a dreadful thing, in the end!”

  Ahhh! You knew my father? My real father? There was hope in the voice, eagerness and excitement, but all fading away in a moment. And I see that you feared him, too, just like everyone else in this place.

  “In the end we all feared him, yes,” Trask repeated. “But in the beginning, he was my friend.”

  And you … can tell me about him? Something of hope had returned.

  “Oh, yes, I know about him,” Trask answered. “I know a lot about him. More than most men. Most living men, anyway.” Which seemed to say it all.

  Ahhh! Again that strange, sad sigh. And in another moment: We’ll talk again. But not now. There are mentalists here. They watch and listen. I see you have a mind-guard. Use it!

  The voice faded away, leaving Trask to cry out after it, “Wait, wait!” But it was useless; the numbers vortex snatched him up again and dragged him into its whirling wall. Buffeted this way and that in a spiral of mad math, Trask was rocked, shocked, shaken … shaken awake!

  “Easy, Ben! Easy!” Ian Goodly’s worried expression loomed into focus. The precog sat on the edge of Trask’s bed, gripped his arms, and continued to caution him. “They think we’re still out for the count. And as long as they continue to believe it, we can talk.”

  “Ian!” Trask grasped the other’s wrists, stared up into his pale face. “I was dreaming.”

  “Nightmaring, more like!” Goodly retorted. “Who were you calling after?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you!” Trask struggled upright, gently fingered his brow. “God … headache!”

  “That mousse, or whatever it was supposed to be,” Goodly nodded. “Or rather, what was in it.” He stepped through into his room, ran water, returned with a fizzing glass. “Good old American know-how.”

  “Eh?” Trask drank.

  “Alka-Seltzer.”

  “Ah!” Trask looked at him, focusing a little more easily now. “So what happened to your precognition?”

  “Nothing, it worked fine.”

  “You knew they’d mickey us?” Trask’s jaw fell.

  “But not until it was too late, after the first spoonful.”

  Trask tut-tutted his disgust.

  “And your own faultless talent?” Goodly raised an eyebrow.

  Trask’s expression changed, grew rueful. “Much the same as yours, I suppose: it came too late.” He sighed. “I guessed Tzonov’s ‘tiredness’ was a lie, but what the hell, ‘obviously’ he wanted to be alone with Siggi! So I wasn’t seeing or thinking straight. Something was—yes, I have to admit it—distracting me. But by the time I was a couple of mouthfuls into that pudding …”

  “That’s when you knew.” Goodly grimaced. “Because by then she was able to relax. We’d taken the poisoned bait. Except … well, we only took a little of it. I expect the dose was carefully measured; a full portion of that pudding would probably have put us both down for the entire night.”

  Trask frowned. “Run that by me again? About Siggi, I mean?”

  And Goodly said, “That’s what she does, and it’s why she’s here. Siggi Dam’s no ordinary telepath, Ben. It’s my guess she carries as much mind-smog around with her as any of the undead you ever went up against. What makes me think so? Simply that I can’t read a damn thing of her future. Nothing!”

  Trask stroked his chin. “Mind-smog? Static? She produces it?”

  “To order. That’s my bet, anyway. It throws the talents of other espers out of kilter. It’s why my advance knowledge went into reverse and your instinctive lie detector blew a fuse.” He nodded and managed to look more mournful yet. “As if she wasn’t a big enough distraction already. Physically, that is.”

  Trask got up, crossed to his washbasin and ran cold water, splashed his face with it. “Certainly it would explain why she isn’t listed,” he grunted. “A new player we know nothing about. Her telepathy warns her when another esper is near, and then she hides behind her mind-smog. Turkur Tzonov’s secret weapon. We had too much of an edge, so he shipped Siggi in to blunt us down a bit. I knew there was something I should ask myself the first time I saw her, namely: what the hell’s a nice girl like her doing in a dump like this? Keeping Tzonov company? Maybe, but she’s no bimbo. Given that she has a mind, there have to be ten thousand better places to be!” Squinting in the room’s poor light, he glanced at his wristwatch.

  “You were out for an hour and forty minutes,” Goodly told him. “You still would be, if I hadn’t woken you up. Myself … I was out for half an hour.”

  “You’re resistant?”

  “I only tasted that stuff.” Again Goodly’s grimace. “But you know, the Bulgarians were expert ’chemists’ all of thirty, forty years ago. Designer drugs? Old hat to them and the Opposition. Anyway, I went down fighting it and kept fighting it. If I hadn’t, my drugged sleep might well have merged into normal sleep. But I knew what had happened and wanted desperately to be awake! I used my mental alarm clock: that’s a trick of mine to wake myself up at any hour of the day or night. Before going to sleep, I just tell myself when I want to be up. Which is what I did. But as I was coming out of it, someone entered the room. So I just closed my eyes and mind and lay there. Whoever it was must have been satisfied. After he or they left I tried to wake you but couldn’t, so I took a look around on my own.”

  “You did what?”

  Goodly shrugged. “Why shouldn’t I? We’re not prisoners. And if Tzonov can play dirty tricks, why shouldn’t we? So I went walkabout.”

  “In the Projekt?”

  “Here and there.” The precog’s face wasn’t so much gaunt as grim now, and Trask saw things in his eyes that worried him.

  “So what did you find?”

  “I saw a lot of stuff you’re not going to like, Ben,” the other told him. “Stuff that you won’t like one little bit …”

  3

  Nathan … Kiklu?

  “Tell me about it.” Trask sighed his relief as the pounding in his skull receded a little.

  “It’s night now up top,” Goodly told him. “The very dead of night. And down here, except for essential duties, everyone is asleep. Also, we’re ’guests’ as opposed to interlopers—or we’re supposed to be—with no special orders attaching to us. And anyway they think, thought, we were out of the picture. So I wasn’t interfered with as I did my rounds. Well, not until I descended through the magmass levels to the core. That’s where I was picked up and escorted back here. But before then …

  “Ben, what do we know of this place? I mean, in connection with Harry Keogh, the last time he was here?”

  Trask shrugged. “We had pretty good liaison with the Reds at that time. They were ‘Reds’ then, just waking up to the fact that they were in it up
to their necks. Harry Keogh had become a vampire: he carried a plague in his blood that could run rampant across the face of the Earth. And using this thing called the Mobius Continuum, he could travel instantaneously from one place to another like you and I go from room to room. He could be, and was, in the Greek islands, Hong Kong, Nicosia, Detroit, Macau, and here in Perchorsk, all in the space of an hour. Our locators—Russian and Chinese locators, too—were out of their heads trying to follow his movements …” Trask paused. “But why am I telling you this? You were with the Branch and know it as well as I do.”

  “Tell it anyway,” Goodly urged.

  Trask struggled into his jacket. “Very well, but on our way.”

  “We’re going to see Tzonov?”

  “Damn right!” Trask growled. “And to find out what he’s up to with his visitor.” And to himself: With my visitor? The one I spoke to in a dream? Or was it just a dream?

  “This place is a maze,” Goodly warned. “How do we know where they are? How will we find them?”

  “Wherever the action is—where they’re not sleeping—that’s where we’ll find them,” Trask answered. He led the way out into the corridor, which was even dimmer now and yet more eerie, and headed for the core. “But you asked me to refresh your memory on Perchorsk, at the time when Harry went through the Gate.” His voice fell to a whisper:

  “Well, we were the ones who told Soviet E-Branch that the Necroscope would probably try it. He’d already used the Romanian route and so was stuck with this one. The Russians assured us he wouldn’t make it; forewarned, they would be waiting for him with a lot more firepower than he or anyone—anything—could possibly handle. Since we couldn’t be sure exactly what that signified, we were obliged to take their word for it. One thing for sure, though: they really believed they could stop him.”

  “Except they didn’t,” Goodly took it up. “He tried to go through on a motorcycle—first through the Möbius Continuum, then through the Gate—with that poor vampirized girl, Penny, riding pillion. He made it but … the girl was shaken loose on this side. She came down on electrified steel plates under an acid rain. A terrible way to go, even for a vampire.”

  Trask nodded. “Eventually the Russians told us what had happened. They had to, for they were scared to death he’d come back again! After what Harry had done to them in earlier times—the havoc he’d wreaked with their E-Branch—they wanted to ingratiate themselves. It could be they were going to need our help … badly! And so they told us the whole thing. But they also told us about their new ‘fail-safe’ system. My God! Talk about Chernobyl!

  “But on the other hand, who could blame them? They’d had more than enough of things coming through that Gate. The next time anything stuck its ugly face in here, they were going to blow its head off and close the Gate for good! But it was the way they were going to do it. Two nuclear warheads, one timed to explode inside the Gate, close to the opening into the parallel world of the vampires, and the other set to go off just beyond that portal, on Starside itself! It was just typical of Russian thinking at the time: destroy the invader if possible, wreck his lines of resupply, devastate his home ground. Also, with any luck the Gate itself might be destroyed at the same time.

  “When we heard about it and after we asked our scientists what sort of side effects there might be, all hell broke loose! What, set off a nuclear device inside a black hole—or a grey one—right here on Earth, right in the earth? Unthinkable! We could be playing with the forces that hold the very universe in place! We started negotiations … but too late. Harry had been gone for some time by then, and it seems he’d been keeping busy on Starside. What happened here in Perchorsk that fateful night … no one knows for sure. Most of the survivors were out of it before the missiles were actually fired. But the story they had to tell … well, it was the work of the Necroscope, all right. It had to be him, for who else could return Perchorsk’s dead to life?”

  The two had penetrated the upper magmass levels into an area where neither of them had set foot before. Visible in the distorted matter-melt of walls and floor, weird moulds had been scooped from metal, plastic, and the very rock itself as if by fire or furious acid. Blow-torch scorching and the discoloration of chemical reaction were everywhere apparent.

  Goodly paused, his gaze hardening in the poor light. With a nod of his head, he directed Trask’s eyes to these inarticulate yet vaguely frightening shapes in the magmass. And despite that Trask’s last words had been a statement of fact as opposed to a question proper, still the precog answered them in his fashion, by taking up the story again:

  “The dead woke up, that’s what happened. The dead of Perchorsk in their glass, rock, or metal cysts—the magmass dead, fused with machinery, tools, whatever they’d been working with; rotting or mummified semimechanical things, who’d been melted and sealed up in the original explosion—broke out! Dead men, whose warped composite bodies might just fit the twisted shapes of these terrible magmass moulds. And they fired the missiles into the open Gate!”

  Trask nodded, his voice hushed as he answered, “According to the Russians, anyway. But it could only have been Harry who gave the orders. He was dying on Starside—he even gathered us all together to watch him die, that time at E-Branch HQ in London—but his deadspeak voice bridged the gap from another world to this place, and called up the dead just one more time in an attempt to close the Gate. That sort of dead, yes …” He looked again at the magmass moulds, then quickly looked away. “Mercifully, our scientists were wrong. Whatever the Gate is—whatever it’s made of—it was too tough for the Soviet nukes. It seemed to eat them up: no repercussions whatsoever. We can’t even be sure that they went off. There was no blowback, nothing. Perhaps they should have anticipated that; after all, the Gate is a one-way ticket.”

  Goodly took his arm, turned this way and that, said, “We must have missed a turning. Somewhere back there … is something you ought to see. And anyway, I don’t think we’ll find Tzonov and his visitor along here.”

  As they began to retrace their steps, Trask asked, “So why did you want to go over all of that again?”

  “To get it straight in my head,” the other answered. “I’m pretty good with the future, but the past sometimes eludes me. And anyway, you skipped the most interesting part. I’m talking about when Chingiz Khuv was in charge here, and sent Jazz Simmons through into Starside.”

  The magmass was behind them now. The tunnel ahead looked more than ever like some old London underground, with several confusing, branching passageways. Finally they drew level with a recess on the left, containing a bulkhead door marked with a radiation hazard sign. “Ah!” Goodly nodded. “This is it.”

  Trask glanced at the warning, looked again, and shook his head. “A barefaced lie to keep out the incurably curious, such as you and me,” he said. “But radiation? It would suffice for most people, certainly!” And as Goodly spun the wheel to free the hatch, and pushed it back on squealing hinges: “What about when Jazz went through?”

  Goodly stepped into darkness, turned on the lights. Trask followed him into … a storeroom? The place was like a warehouse, with other rooms leading off and stacked steel shelving on every hand. Then Trask saw what the shelves contained, and Goodly said:

  “E-Branch didn’t get much out of Jazz Simmons when Harry Junior brought him back. Can’t say I blame him, not after what Intelligence and the Branch had done to him. We had to send a man out to Zante just to speak to him! But he did say that—”

  Trask cut him off: “That Chingiz Khuv had been planning an invasion of Starside?” He looked again at the shelves. “Yes, he did say that. And now?”

  Goodly shrugged and joined him in examining the armaments stacked on the shelves, a stockpile of small and not-so-small arms: flamethrowers, grenades, automatic rifles, handguns, and ammunition. “What do you think?” he said.

  “If you can’t destroy the Gate,” Trask answered, “first secure and defend it, and then prepare to invade it! Who knows what y
ou might find on the other side? Something to swing the balance in your favour? A means of achieving your ambition: to even the score and grow Big in the world again? But is this the Russian Premier’s philosophy … or is it just Tzonov’s? Is he trying to work this trick on his own, do you think? I know he was lying when he said that up until the visitor’s arrival his interest in this place was purely academic.”

  “Whichever,” Goodly said, “I think this visitor from Starside has come through at just the right time. If he hadn’t, we wouldn’t have seen all of this …”

  “Which might seem to beg a further question,” Trask added. “Who was it who really wanted us in on this? Turkur Tzonov, or Premier Gustav Turchin? Were we invited merely on the whim of the one, or on the command of The Boss Himself so that we’d be in on it and just as much to blame if it went wrong?”

  “Probably the latter,” Goodly answered, “and Tzonov has to make the best of it. It would explain the lack of security: we were supposed to see everything, and Tzonov daren’t hide that fact. So from the technicians’ and scientists’ point of view, we appear as free agents. But in reality Tzonov’s keeping us on a leash, only letting us see what he wants us to see.”

  “Until now,” Trask growled. And: “Let’s get out of here. I don’t want to be found in this place, and I don’t want Turkur Tzonov to know we’ve seen it …”

  They left the storeroom with no time to spare; a technician, yawning, bespectacled, barely awake, came into view around the curve of the corridor, probably going on night shift down in the core. As they drew level Trask stepped in front of him and said, “Er, Turkur Tzonov?”

  “Uh?” The other looked at them, blinked sleep out of his eyes. “You looking for Tzonov?” He nodded. “But not here. Back there, er, fifty steps? Passage on right. Is there. But could be dangerous. The intruder.”