Voices - Vornholt John - Страница 20
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Malten checked his timepiece. “About ten minutes, although I suppose you could go in and sit down now.” He looked worried. “You aren’t scared of Bester, are you?”
“No,” she continued to lie. “The only control he has over me is what I choose to give him.”
“That’s a healthy attitude,” agreed Malten with a smile. “The commercial sector had such a banner year last year that he has to give us something. Let’s just be polite, and keep hammering away.”
“Hammering away,” Talia repeated, holding her head. She looked around. “I think I will go in and sit down. Number nine, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Malten, glancing over his shoulder. “I’ll see you in a few minutes. I have some hand-wringers out here who need to be reassured.”
Talia managed a smile. “Go ahead. I can take care of myself.”
She walked to the door of conference room nine, expecting it to open at her touch. But it didn’t open. Then she remembered and pulled out her identicard. When she pushed it into the slot, the door slid open, to her relief. Talia slouched into the well-appointed conference room, expecting to find no one there. But she was wrong.
A chair swiveled around at the head of the amber table. Mr. Bester smiled at her and formed his gloved hands into a triangle.
Talia tried not to look surprised. She almost set her portfolio down at the opposite end of the table, but then she remembered what Emily Crane had suggested. So Talia walked slowly to the head of the table and took the seat to the immediate right of Bester, setting her bag on the floor.
The Psi Cop nodded approvingly. “I figured you to be a punctual person, Ms. Winters.”
“I try,” she remarked.
“You know,” said Bester, “before telepaths came along, people used to do studies on body language and spatial relationships—to find out what people were thinking. For example, there were many studies devoted to the way in which people would arrange themselves in a room, when given free choice in seating.”
He smiled. “It tells me something that you would take the seat beside me when there are all these empty seats.”
“What does it tell you? Besides the fact that I don’t want to shout across the room.”
“It tells me,” said Bester, “that you wish to be close to the seat of power. We need to see if your colleague, Mr. Malten, will take a seat at the foot of the table, thus showing how much he opposes me. That would also demonstrate how much he wishes to keep his distance.”
The Psi Cop motioned to the closest seats. “The military will gang up and surround me. They would have taken your seat, so I thank you for taking it first. My own people will sit to my right, and there’ll be two people from Corps Administration. You and Malten alone will represent the profiteering side of things. Do you know, Malten could bring more people to this meeting, but he prefers to do everything on his own. To be honest, Ms. Winters, your presence is just a subterfuge.”
If that wasn’t a kick in the teeth, thought Talia, she had never had one. So she asked him point-blank, “Do you know how this meeting is going to turn out? I mean, do you have an open mind, or is this all a facade?”
Bester narrowed his eyes at her. “I don’t know what will happen any more than you do. I’m always prepared for the unexpected.”
The door opened, and three military telepaths entered, looking very important, grim, and ready for battle. One sat beside Talia, and the other two sat across from her, taking the three seats closest to Bester.
The Psi Cop looked at her and smiled.
Mr. Malten, however, did not sit at the foot of the table. He sat to the left of Bester, about four seats away, and nobody sat directly opposite Mr. Bester. Despite his nonthreatening seat, Malten was doing most of the talking in the early part of the meeting.
“You want long-term?” he asked. “Look at what we’ve done. We have managed to infiltrate more cities and planets than you and the military could ever dream about. Bester, while you try with pathetic results to keep what you’re doing on Mars a secret, I have a dozen offices there. I have nearly as many people as you have. Because we can work openly, we will always have the advantage.”
Malten leaned forward. “Commercial telepaths work among the people, and they’re not afraid of us. When they receive their first scan in a nonthreatening commercial situation—and it doesn’t hurt—then they’re more receptive for a security scan later on. We do a lot of good for Psi Corps. We want to keep a bigger percentage of what we make, that’s all. We’re pulling the load, but we’re not getting paid for it.”
One of the military liaison officers began to sputter, but Bester held up his hand. The Psi Cop wasn’t angry, thought Talia; he seemed to be enjoying the banter with Malten.
“Granted,” he said, “our services are not as popular as yours. But which are more necessary to the safety and security of the alliance? When telepaths go rogue, nobody but us can bring them down. What should we do afterward—stand on streetcorners and pass the hat?”
The other Psi Cops at the table laughed, but Talia felt another white flash in her brain! She screwed her eyes shut to fight the headache and the dizzy sensation. Luckily, no one was paying the slightest attention to her, because Bester was still speaking:
“When you work in secret, Mr. Malten, as we do, you cannot expect support from the public. You and I are like two different fortune-tellers. One of us gives the customer good news, and the other one gives them bad news. You will be paid well, while we work in ignominy. Don’t begrudge us a little handout.”
“I’m crying for you,” Malten scoffed. “If your budget is too tight, at least look at some of that huge research and development slush fund in the military.”
“One moment!” blustered a military liaison. “We must always be ready in the event of war, not to mention the Martian separatists, and one or two new threats. If any of these cold wars become hot, psi weapons may turn the trick. All of our enemies are using them.”
Talia sat up in her chair and blinked to stop the pain. Blast it, she didn’t know what was happening to her, but it felt as if her head was becoming unhinged! She kept thinking of Ambassador Kosh and the strange scans she had been performing for him.
“Gone, like the pickled herring,” came Kosh’s words.
Malten had turned his attack on the military. “While you go out of your way to antagonize other races, including the Minbari, I’m opening up an office on Minbar. Who is in a better position to do intelligence, you or me?”
Bester rapped his fingers on the table and asked, “You would perform intelligence tasks with your people?”
Malten smiled enigmatically. “Let’s see what we get out of this budget. If you will stop and look, I think you will find that the commercial sector is poised to be very useful. We have the grass-roots organization which both of you lack. We’re everywhere, even Babylon 5. If we had the right facilities and support, all of you could be in commercial jobs, purely as cover, and still be doing exactly what you’re doing now.
While Bester and the military liaisons digested that one, Talia Winters bolted to her feet. It was overwhelmingly oppressive in the conference room, and she had to get out!
She thought she was quite calm as she said, “Excuse me, I have to go to the bathroom.”
Bester looked at her thoughtfully. “Yes,” he agreed, “you had better take something for that headache.”
“Thank you,” she muttered, but Bester had already turned his attention back to Malten.
“I’ve heard this before,” said the Psi Cop, “vague promises that your people would start doing intelligence work for us. But when it comes time to implement it, they’re too busy with their regular jobs! Well, let me tell you …”
Talia staggered to the door and pressed the panel that opened it. She couldn’t get out quickly enough, and she beat on the door to make it open faster. Then she squeezed out before the door had even opened all the way.
Although it was exactly the same remanufactured air in the corridor, it smelled so much better than the air inside the room that she almost skipped with joy. Maybe she was having a reaction to the fresh paint, she thought with a burst of realization. That was probably it. A thing like that might curtail her conference activities.
Just as she was about to stop and catch her breath, a monstrous explosion ripped through the doorway of the conference room, and the concussion hurled her off her feet! The corridor filled with acrid smoke, and alarms and people started shrieking at the same time. It was bedlam in the corridor, and she was nearly trampled by people rushing to see what had happened.
It was finally a security officer who dragged her out of the way and propped her against the wall. “Medical emergency!” he shouted into his link. “Explosion on Green-12, conference room nine! Injuries and possible dead! We need medteams! Bomb squad!”
“The hull is secure!” somebody was yelling. “Everyone just stay calm. This was a localized explosion!”
People ran through the corridor with fire extinguishers, and they shot streams of foam into the smoldering remains of conference room nine. Talia looked down at her sleeve and could see drops of blood, although she wasn’t bleeding. It was somebody else’s blood! The stench invaded her nostrils, and the sirens and voices of the dead and dying split her senses.
Talia covered her ears and screamed! But that scream was more than her mind could accept, and it shut down. The voices stopped, and she toppled over into oblivion.
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