Voices

Chapter 13

Talia screamed new nodules on her vocal cords as she felt the sudden sensation of weightlessness. At first she thought the ship had stopped until she heard the whistling of wind all around them. Deuce cut forth with a litany of swear words, and their voices were quickly drowned out by a rush of air against the Dumpster-like cargo container. They weren’t just weightless—they were plunging through planetary atmosphere! Massive gravity had its grip on them.

Then the naked bulb burst, showering them with glass fragments, and the air ventilators stopped working—and both of them were screaming! Talia hardly noticed the way the cargo boxes banged against her, threatening to crush her in the free-fall. She just spun around in the darkness, her body a rubber ball cascading from one wall into another, swiping Deuce and the boxes in the process.

When she realized she might as well die calmly, Talia wrapped her arms around her head, tucked her legs in, and tried to still her galloping heart. Then the floor of the container abruptly rose up and crashed into her! She lay sprawling, gasping for air, as the big crate righted itself and shifted around. Now she heard groanings and creakings of a weirder sort, and air roared around the exterior of their strange vehicle.

“Damn,” muttered Deuce in the darkness, “I wish they’d warn us before they cut us loose.”

Still gulping air, Talia wheezed, “You expected that?”

“Old smugglers’ trick. They plot their trajectory over the desert in North America and slow down just enough to push us out. With a parachute. It’s not very accurate, but the federales are none the wiser that they dropped something.”

Talia listened to the air whizzing past them, and she marveled at the fact that she was taking a parachute jump, albeit inside a box with bruises and welts all over her body. Blood was running through the hair on her scalp from a nasty cut.

“The chute is open?” she croaked.

“It had better be,” mused Deuce, “or we’ll be coyote dinner. But what if they would never find our bodies. We could be legends! Everyone would think we ran off together, you and me, and are living the good life on Betelgeuse 6.”

“Yeah,” said Talia with a gulp. “So where are we, anyway?” For all she knew, it could be Betelgeuse 6.

“You’ll see,” answered Deuce. “Brace yourself. I hear the wind changin’.”

She had a second or two to curl up in a ball before the giant crate hammered onto something solid. She caught her breath, thinking they were safe, when the Dumpster began to move again. This time it tilted radically to one side and slid down an incline like a house on skis. She tried to scream, but her voice was too raw; she could only stare into the darkness and feel the rattling bumps beneath her. They thudded to another abrupt stop, and this one held, at least until Talia could start breathing again.

“Are we alive?” she rasped.

“Yeah,” answered Deuce. “Cover your head—I’m gonna shoot my way out of here. Sometimes the metal starts to melt.”

She didn’t know Deuce very well, but she had learned to heed his warnings. Talia covered her head, but she kept one eye open to see what he was doing. She gasped when several plasm streaks shot through the darkness and punched holes in the lid of the container. Using the light from the discharge to aim, Deuce worked the smaller holes into a jagged hole about half a meter in diameter, or just big enough for a smallish person to climb out.

Talia squinted her eyes, expecting blinding sunlight to flood through the hole. Instead, soothing darkness greeted her eyes, plus the sight of nearly as many stars as a person saw in space. A city girl, she wasn’t sure what all this meant.

“Where are we?” she asked.

“I told you,” muttered Deuce, “you’re gonna die here real soon if you don’t stop asking me questions. If you’re going to be useful to me, you’ve just got to obey me, and that’s it.”

“Sorry,” she answered. Talia knew she had a secret weapon in her ability to scan him, but she had a feeling that Deuce had been scanned before and would know it. Behind the rough exterior was a cagey and cool intellect, and she had every reason to believe that Deuce was as ruthless as he claimed to be. He would kill her for a slight provocation. So she opted to lie low and pick the time and place to scan him, knowing she might only get one chance.

In the dim starlight, she could just see Deuce scrounging around in his crate, the one in which he had been smuggled aboard the methane-breathers’ ship. He finally pulled out a black briefcase and a dirty duffel bag. He opened the duffel bag and took out a crowbar, which he used to pound down the ragged edges of the hole he had shot open. His pounding turned the crate into a tin drum, and Talia had to cover her ears. Deuce finally stopped and took a flashlight out of his bag to study his handiwork.

“There,” he drawled, “at least we’ll have air. Want to go out and take a look around?”

Talia shook her head worriedly. She was beginning to feel that terrible panic she had felt upon waking up after the bombing—the shock, the disorientation, the feeling that she was stuck in a nightmare.

In fact, she told herself, she was stuck in a nightmare of the worst sort—reality. There was no waking up, so she might as well deal with it. She was in a shot-up Dumpster in the middle of the desert, chased by everyone, in the company of a murderer. No matter where they were, she was dependent upon this criminal for the time being, and it might get worse before it got better.

One thing Talia knew would never be the same—she would never again be smug about her life. Right now, being the lone human telepath on an out-of-the-way depot for aliens sounded just fine, the dream job. She would never again knock it or quest after anything higher. And if she could get back to that life, she would be eternally grateful. Right now, she wondered if it was even possible to recapture any shred of that past.

While she was musing in the dim light given off by a holeful of stars, Deuce turned on his flashlight again and began searching for something else in his duffel bag. He drew out a small electronic device, checked to see that it hadn’t been damaged, then pulled out its antenna. He pressed a button on the device, and a red light began to blink on and off.

Talia was about to ask him what it was, but then she remembered: No more questions. Perhaps she should just stop talking altogether. Hobnobbing, being charming and gregarious, had only gotten her into trouble in the last few days. And when it had mattered, when she kept telling everybody the truth, nobody would listen to her. Maybe she should adopt Deuce’s motto: Ask me no questions, and I’ll tell you no lies. If she said nothing at all, she couldn’t say anything wrong.

She was startled by a thud as Deuce turned one of the crates on end. Then he proceeded to climb up and peer out the hole. He made a low whistle.

“We are really in the middle of nowhere. I hope my boys have some decent coordinates.”

Talia started to ask if this was really Earth, then she remembered not to talk. That device was some kind of homing beacon, it was clear, so somebody was out there, looking for them. She suddenly had a strong instinct to get out of the crate, and she pounded on Deuce’s calf.

“Hey!” he shouted down. “What’s the deal?”

She tried an experiment and told him telepathically to get off the crate.

He blinked at her and smiled. “All you had to do was ask.”

Deuce climbed down and Talia climbed up. By standing on her tiptoes, she could just get her head, the top of her shoulders, and one arm out through the hole, but she was glad she had made the effort. Their little vessel was parked at an angle at the bottom of a dry wash, buried halfway under the sand, and surrounded by scrubby desert. Trailing behind them like a tattered bridal veil was the parachute that had saved their lives. It was ripped and streaked with dirt from the tumble down the wash.

In the blue starlight she couldn’t see very far, but she could see gnarled trees at the rim of the wash and other ghostly shapes. Mesquite trees, Joshua trees, chollas, yuccas, prickly pears—she tried to remember all the spiny, weirdly shaped flora that grew in places like this. She was glad this desert wasn’t just sand dunes but had some vegetation to it, even if the plants did appear stunted and misshapen.

She suddenly had an overwhelming desire to stand on the ground. After the nightmarish events of the last three days, she just had to get out and stand on firm ground. She began to squirm out, and Deuce put a hand underneath her foot to give her all the leverage she needed to get her hips through.

Talia screamed as she slid down the tilted side of the crate and plummeted into the sand. It got into her mouth and hair, but its grittiness felt wonderfully real, and the air smelled like perfume after that stifling container. After her scream, the desert was silent, but as she sat without moving for a few minutes, the twitters and chirps came back. She heard a distant howl. Unaccountably, Talia felt relaxed and unafraid for the first time since that awful morning of the conference.

The telepath was startled a moment later when a black briefcase landed in the sand not far from her. She reached over to open it, but the clasps were locked; it was a solidly built case. She pushed the briefcase away and ducked when the dirty duffel bag came flying out of the hole a moment later. The bags were followed by Deuce himself, squirming through the small opening. Like Kosh, he was an unlikely savior, she thought, but if she would ever end this nightmare and get her previous life back, she needed him. She would leave him his blood money in the briefcase. He had probably earned it.

She scrambled out of the way as she saw Deuce getting ready to slide down the crate and hit the sand. He rolled athletically off the edge of the crate and landed on his feet never losing his grip on his PPG.

“Ah,” said Deuce, “that’s better. If we haven’t been found by midday, we’re going to regret getting out of there. But maybe we can crawl under it for shade.”

He plopped down in the sand and fished a hat out of his duffel bag. “So,” he drawled, “know any good jokes?”

She looked at him intently for several seconds, and he nodded. “You’re not going to talk anymore, huh? Are you, like, suffering from some kind of trauma?”

Talia nodded, and it was the truth.

“So, when my friends show up, you’re a mute, right? And you ain’t no telepath.”

She nodded again. “Not a bad cover,” agreed Deuce, “because you can still communicate if you want to, with certain people. This ain’t new to me, you know. I’ve had experience with telepaths before.”

Talia nodded. She was almost certain of that.

Despite his best intentions to ignore the telepath, Garibaldi found himself peering over Gray’s shoulder at his stack of files. As the transport Starfish made its way to Earth, Gray began to explain his documents in a conversational tone that the security chief found he could tolerate.

“These are the photos and dossiers of all the people who died in the hotel bombing. Twenty-seven of them, according to the reports, although not all the bodies were recovered.”

“That’s not uncommon on Mars,” said Garibaldi. “In that atmosphere, an unprotected body can get desiccated very quickly. And the winds are strong enough to blow a body clean away, or it could fall into a crevice and disappear. Not to mention the difficulties of mounting a real search outside.”

“At any rate,” said Gray, “the police didn’t investigate these people too thoroughly, because they think they’re victims. They also found tracks outside the hotel, so they assumed the bomber came overland. This plays into the stereotype of the usual Martian terrorist, a madman who lives in the wilds and would be spotted immediately in polite company. But what if it was an inside job, like the bombing on B5?”

“You mean, the bomber is one of the missing employees?” asked Garibaldi doubtfiully. “That’s pretty farfetched, without some evidence.”

“I’ve got some evidence. Remember, Mr. Bester and I were at the site when it happened. When a person is going through a psychic trauma, their mind sends out a sort of SOS—a telepath can hear it for miles. And these people were dying as they were being sucked out of the hole in the side of that hotel. We could hear their voices, screaming for help, just as well as I can hear your voice now.”

“Mr. Bester told me that he counted twenty-six voices, and I think he’s right. But the reports list twenty-seven deaths, or should we say, dead and missing. I trust Mr. Bester’s talents, and I think one of those people lived.”

Gray leaned forward in his seat and eagerly explained, “All they had to do was to carry a suit and a breathing mask with them when the blast went off, and they could just walk away! Maybe they would leave one or two footprints going in both directions to fool the police. It was night, and somebody could’ve had a rover waiting for them.”

Garibaldi rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I can see the advantages,” he admitted. “You’re working inside, and you have your leisure to plan it all, get the bomb in, and detonate it. They don’t investigate you, because everyone thinks you’re one of the victims.”

“There is a modus operandi match, too,” said Gray. “Ms. Winters would have been a victim, too, if she hadn’t walked out when she did. Plus, that bombing on Mars made everyone take the Free Phobos group seriously, even though nobody knows anything about them. It was a setup for the B5 bombing.”

Garibaldi smiled and asked, “Can I take a look at the photos of those hotel employees?”

“Certainly,” said Gray, looking pleased with himself.

He handed over a stack of colored transparencies, and Garibaldi studied them intently. Most of them were what you would expect hotel waiters, cooks, and buspersons to look like—young, disadvantaged, with the pale pallor and surly expressions that typified people born on Mars. It was a hard place to live, and a lot of Martians resented having to bow and stoop to wealthy tourists to bring home a few credits. None of the employees’ photos showed smiling faces, eager to prove themselves.

On his second pass through the photos, Garibaldi stopped. There was a young, dark-skinned woman in a hairnet, an assistant cook. He looked at her eyes. They were not sullen eyes like the others, but they were guarded, as if she were trying not to reveal anything. But she didn’t fully succeed, because he knew he had seen her somewhere before.

More importantly, she had worked at the hotel for only a week when the bombing occurred.

“This is a possibility,” said Garibaldi. “Do you recognize her?”

Gray turned the photo several different angles. “I’m not definite, but she bears some resemblance to the woman we flew to B5 with, the one who accompanied Mr. Malten.”

“Do you know her name?”

Gray shook his head. “She was a mousy type—didn’t stick in the brain too well.”

Garibaldi sat forward and whispered, “If she’s the one who flew in with him, then she’s probably the one who flew out with him. I think her name, as a telepath, is Emily Crane.”

Gray gave him a sidelong glance. “Is that the name you have?”

Garibaldi nodded. “Yep. She borrowed a data crystal from Talia Winters, and she returned it to her the morning of the bombing.”

“Does anybody else know about her?”

The security chief shook his head. “No one.”

“Uh-oh,” said Gray with wide eyes.

“We can find her,” said Garibaldi. “I promised Talia I would check her out myself. Besides, we don’t want the regular cops or the Psi Cops shooting her, or spooking her, before she can clear our suspect.”

“No, that’s not what I meant.” Gray pointed down the aisle.

Garibaldi followed his finger and saw the six Psi Cops slouching their way down the aisle. In their black uniforms, they looked like a motorcycle gang from twentieth-century visuals Garibaldi had seen. Before he even had a chance to unfasten his seat belt, the six were leaning over him and Gray.

“You let our people get killed,” snarled one. “And then you let that murderin’ bitch get away.”

“Leave Mr. Garibaldi alone,” ordered Gray huffily. “He did the best he could.”

“Shut up, worm,” snapped another. “We don’t think he did the best he could. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll stay out of our way.”

One of them grabbed Garibaldi’s collar and tried to hoist him out of his seat, but his seat belt held him fast. So instead he slapped the security chief hard across the face.

As Gray stared at him with concern, Garibaldi massaged his inflamed cheek. “Is it going to take the six of you to beat me up?”

“Yep,” said another one. He put his foot on Garibaldi’s toes and tried to grind them into the deck.

This time, the security chief yelped with pain and jerked his foot back. Gray was still staring at him, wondering what he would do.

“Keep your belt on,” he whispered to Gray, “and hang on to your papers.” The little man did as he was told.

“You’re hot stuff on your own turf,” said one of the Psi Cops. “but off it, you’re nothin’. You’re yellow.”

“No,” said Garibaldi, “I’m just smart. For example, did you fellows know that there’s an emergency pull cord under the seats of this kind of transport? If you didn’t know, there’s a little sign over on the bulkhead that explains it.”

But they weren’t listening. A brutish Psi Cop gripped his collar again. “Now it’s time to send you to the medlab.”

Garibaldi reached under his seat and yanked on the emergency cord. At once, alarms went off inside the cabin, and another thing happened. The ship began to slow to a stop. With the absence of acceleration, the simulated gravity inside the cabin stopped also. The six Psi Cops, and anyone else who had been moving around the cabin, began to float weightlessly.

“Help!” screamed one, as he floated past Garibaldi, who was still strapped safely in his seat.

“Let me help you,” said Garibaldi. As the man floated helplessly past him, the lanky security chief reached up and grabbed his collar. Holding him steady, he smashed him in the nose. Globules of blood went floating out of his nostrils. Clutching his documents, Mr. Gray watched all of this in amazement.

When the man tried to retaliate by swinging his fists, Garibaldi just gave him a shove, which sent him spinning into the bulkhead. There was a loud clang as his head hit the metal. The chief then calmly grabbed the leg of another Psi Cop who was floating past and pulled him down just far enough to punch him in a very sensitive spot. The man howled with pain, and Garibaldi sent him crashing into the ceiling.

By now the other four Psi Cops were trying desperately to get away from Garibaldi, but all they could do was float. They were saved by the captain’s voice on the intercom.

“What’s the matter back there?” she asked. “Who pulled the emergency stop?”

“I did, Michael Garibaldi, Security Chief of Babylon 5,” he reported. “There was an altercation, and this was the simplest way to end it.”

“I hope it’s over,” said the pilot. “Because you’ve cost us at least half an hour. That’s the time it will take to get us back up to speed. Anybody floating will just have to keep floating until then.”

“Too bad,” said Garibaldi. A Psi Cop floated overhead, and Garibaldi flicked a long arm up and punched the man in the stomach. The Psi Cop groaned and rolled over.

The chief smiled at Mr. Gray. “There’s a lesson in this—it’s not good to be overconfident.”

“I never am,” Gray replied somberly.

The first rays of sunlight brought the slate-colored clouds to life, and they looked like the underbellies of a herd of buffaloes, slowly stampeding across the sky. Talia could see their woolly heads, their massive horns, their hooves, and the steam which shot from their nostrils. The crest of rugged mountains to the north was like a fence that penned them in, with the sun chasing them from behind.

Talia watched, fascinated, as the fiery dome of the sun rose over the desert floor. The vast desolation of this land was both frightening and soothing. It reminded her too much of her present life—drained and shot to hell, but filled with a strange promise of light that could chase away the darkness.

Deuce was asleep in the sand of the dry wash, clutching his briefcase and his PPG pistol across his chest. She could easily wrench one or both away from him now, but what good would that do her? Where could she go without Deuce and his friends, whoever they were? She did steal a few sips of his water, though, after she found a canteen hidden in his duffel bag. With Deuce’s well-developed sense of self-preservation, he had failed to mention that he had any water.

Talia climbed out of the wash and watched the sun thaw the dew off the flat leaves and thistles of the plants which grew along the wash. It had been a long time since she had seen a sunrise on Earth, and the woman couldn’t help but to feel a bit sad and homesick. She fought the temptation even to think about going to see her family. They would be watched. They would be hounded by newspeople, police, and the curious. Her family was undoubtedly going through hell, and that was just more incentive, if she needed any, to clear her name.

The distant mountains were taking on a reddish hue, and they reminded her of all the lakes, plains, and forests of this magnificent planet. Talia wondered if she would ever see those natural wonders again. She had thrived on an artificial satellite in a distant part of space, so maybe she could thrive anywhere, without her friends and family. Maybe she could be an expatriot of Earth. In truth, Talia wanted to join the migration of clouds across the sky, just a nebulous being who never had to worry about people, death, or detention cells.

She didn’t know how long she stood there, watching the ragged horizon, before she saw them. At first, it seemed they were just another copse of misshapen trees in the distance, but the black specks kept coming closer. It was their unerring march through the wilderness that made her certain they were coming for her and Deuce. But who were they? What were they?

As the specks drew closer, she decided they were Hovercraft. She counted four of them, small ones. Talia supposed that a Hovercraft was a good vehicle for this type of terrain, which was treacherous but mostly flat. She heard some footsteps crunching the sand behind her, and she turned to see Deuce. He was drinking from his canteen, and he offered it to her without comment. She took a long drink this time. They were saved, so to speak, and there was no reason for Deuce to hoard his water any longer.

Talia glanced at the criminal, and he shook his head. “No, they’re not like me. And they’re not like you. Unless you lived about five hundred years ago, they’re unlike anybody you’ve ever met. This is their home. Don’t make fun of them, okay?”

Talia shook her head. She was not in any position to make fun of anybody, especially people who would consider this wilderness their home.

With reluctance, she removed her white linen gloves and folded them in the pocket of her jumpsuit.