She grasped his mind in a steel fist, ripping through the feeble protection of the psych blocker like it was tissue paper. He cried out and dropped the gun. She forced his brain to haul him upright, every muscle painfully rigid, his body barely balanced on his toes.
They were dead. This morning all of them had eaten a spare breakfast in the commissary. They shared coffee. Liz hid her new nails. Now they were dead. She had protected them for so long and he'd put a gun to their heads and murdered them one by one.
"Why?" she snarled.
"The war is over," Courtney whispered. "We lost."
"What?"
"We lost," he repeated, his voice a hoarse squeak. "The Headquarters sent out an emergency bulletin five minutes ago. Melko is occupying our continent. The surrender security protocol was initiated. I have to terminate you. You know too much."
She seared his mind. Death was instant. He didn't have the time to scream.
As his lifeless body dropped to floor, Claire turned and pushed the dimmer switch on the console. The room turned dark. Her fingers flew over the keypad.
The opaque window in the wall before her faded, revealing the interior of the Intelligence compound below. People dashed back and forth across the floor.
She pushed a key, letting the audio feed filter into the room. Gunfire punched the silence. Massive shredders whined, crunching electronics and slicing pseudopaper into atomic dust. Chaos reigned.
The war was over.
Her heart hammered in her chest. Her pulse pounded through her head, too loud in her ears. Claire stared at the four corpses in their chairs. She wanted to hug Liz and cry.
She couldn't give in to panic and shock. She had to think.
She was a Type A Psycher. An imminent threat. If Melko Corporation found her, she would be killed immediately. When you lost a war, you didn't get to keep your guns. She was infinitely more dangerous than a loaded gun.
Claire shut off the audio feed and dimmed the windows. She checked the door. Courtney had engaged the electronic lock. Not enough. A heavy life support unit sat in the corner, for the times when psychers suffered an attack but held on to life. She put her shoulder into it, pushed it across the doorway, barring the door from the inside, and walked past four heads dripping blood back to her seat.
She had to log into the bionet for the last time to erase herself from Brodwyn data systems.
"Step onto the platform," a Melko soldier ordered.
Claire obeyed, stepping onto the raised circle in the middle of the room. Six high-caliber gun turrets swiveled on their mounts, locking onto her. To the right and left, two Melko soldiers took aim at her head. Across the room an older woman behind a crescent metal console studied the digital screen.
Three weeks ago she had escaped the Intelligence building and returned to her mother's apartment. It was vacant, like many others, and during her last foray into the Brodwyn bionet, Claire had assigned it to herself. She had resurrected her mother's data and took on her identity, keeping only her name and her date of birth intact. Only her neighbors could have betrayed her. This morning she was arrested with the rest of the residents of the building and marched down to this depot. Nobody spoke out against her.
The older woman peered at her.
"Name?"
"Claire Shannon."
"Occupation?"
"Secretary."
"Do you have any implants, modification, or kinsmen abilities to declare?"
"No."
Claire's mind was hidden behind four layers of solid mental shields, enclosed in a hard outer shell, accreted over the period of the last four weeks as a result of constant mental strain. Her surface thoughts coated this shell, as if it were a mirror. Her defenses would withstand a concentrated probe from an adept. To the outside world, her mind appeared very much alive, but completely inert psychically. Precisely the way she liked it.
"Place your hands on the rail in front of you."
Claire locked her fingers on the metal rail.
Pale green light slid over her. Two dozen scanners recorded her temperature, pulse, and chemical emissions, assessed the composition of the sweat and oil on her fingertips, and probed her body for combat implants.
A cold male voice announced with robotic precision.
"Implant scan, class A through E, negative. Biological modification negative."
"Initiating psycher pressure probe," the woman said.
Beneath her mental core, fear washed over Claire. Pressure Probe, PPP, meant pain to a psychic mind. The stronger the psycher, the worse the agony. She had to bear it. Her pulse couldn't speed up. She couldn't wince.
It began as a soft buzz in the back of her skull. The buzz built, ratcheting up to deafening intensity, louder, louder, LOUDER. Pain pierced her mind, as if a drill had carved through the bone, grinding, widening the hole with each rotation, turning her neurons into mess of human meat. The world dissolved in agony.
She was gone, drowning in pain. Her reason melted. Her mind dissolved.
She gave herself away.
It was over.
The pain vanished, suddenly, as if sliced by a knife.
"PPP negative," the male voice announced.
"Subject cleared the security evaluation," the woman said.
She passed. Somehow she had passed.
The soldiers lowered their weapons.
The woman faced Claire. "You are being deported."
"I'm sorry?"
"We don't want your kind on our planet." The woman grimaced. "You cost us billions and forced us into a three-hundred-year war. If things were fair, we'd line the lot of you up and put you out of your misery, except that the Interplanetary Right to Life Act gets in the way."
That's right, flashed in Claire's mind. She was a civilian and under the protection of the Right to Life Act. Breaking it meant instant trade embargo. For a planet like Uley that imported most of its food, it would mean a slow death sentence. The Melko retainers couldn't kill her or any of the Brodwyn civilians. They couldn't load them into spaceships and kick them off planet without a definite destination either.
"Melko Corporation made arrangements with other planets to deport you," the woman said. "In your case, you're going to Rada to some kind of flower province. It's one of the merchant planets. Many kinsmen families all competing for their territories. They are cut-throat on Rada and they're only taking the duds like you, no kinsmen allowed. I don't except you'll last there long, which is just as well. Exit through that door."
Chapter Two
"PPP Negative," the computer announced.
Claire held onto the rail of the platform. She was swimming up a deep well filled with blinding pain. Negative. Negative. She had passed through the screening again.
Please, please let it be for the last time.
"You may leave the platform," Rada's Immigration Officer invited.
She kept swimming. Almost there. Finally she surfaced and her vision returned in a rush. Claire stepped off the platform. The Immigration Officer took her measure. He was lean, dark-haired, and older, his skin either naturally olive or tanned by the sun.
"Come on," he said. "Let me give you your orientation."
She followed him to a small office and sat in the cream-colored chair he indicated. The officer took his place behind a light glass table. A narrow crystal vase sat on the edge of his table. Inside it flowers bloomed, whirl upon whirl of bright petals, some blood red, some yellow, some deep purple near the root of the petal and white at its end. So vivid, almost painful.