Stackpole, Michael A - Dark Conspiracy 02 (31 page)

“Who the hell are you?”

“I am Rajani.” She dug in her pocket and held her left hand out to him. “I have your cufflinks.”

“Hell of a valet service the hotel has.” He snarled as he hopped toward the jeep and leaned on the hood. “Can you drive? No, wait, I saw you shoot.” He hopped around to the driver side and slid into the driver’s seat, then bashed out the rest of the windscreen. “Well? C’mon.”

Rajani ran to the passenger side and tossed the cinderblock clear of her seat. She barely settled into it when Sinclair, letting his left leg hang out of the driver-side opening, shifted into drive and stomped down on the accelerator. “Don’t know who you are, but thank you. You saved my life back there.”

“I am here with Hal Garrett.” Rajani braced herself as Sin swerved around a couple of bicycles. “We were worried about you when you were not at your hotel.”

Sin winced and pressed his head back onto the head-rest. “So, you black-bagged my room and kept my cufflinks for a prize?” His breath hissed out through clenched teeth, and Rajani felt white-hot pain stab through the link. “How’d you find me? I left no clues to where I was
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going to be.”

Rajani could sense, through Sin’s pain, that he was in no shape to understand any explanation she would give him. She also knew that he might black out at any second and, given the speed they were traveling, that would be dangerous. “This alley. Turn right and stop the car.”

“Are you nuts?”

“I found you, and I stopped them from killing you. Trust me. Stop the car.”

Reluctance pulsing through the link, he did as she asked. “Now, stay there,” she commanded. Swinging out of the jeep, she ran around through the twin headlight cones and squatted down near his bloody shin. This may hurt.”

“You mean it might hurt worse?”

With the gold nail on her right index finger she sliced down through the fabric of his trousers, then peeled the cloth back. The dark, meaty wound brimmed with half-coagulated blood. She saw flecks of white in it, and she thought most of them were little chips of stones.

She started to reach around behind his leg, but Sin shook his head. “There’s an exit wound, it’s through and through, it feels like a lightning storm knotted up down there.”

Rajani looked up and made eye contact with him. She caught his shock as he finally saw her slitted gold pupils.

Her eyes
—
they’re not natural!

«As natural as yours are, Sinclair.»Rajani reinforced the old link with him and pushed on through the stronger link.

As she had with Hal Garrett, she sent a message to portions of his brain, spurring them into action to help him heal. She also triggered the production of endorphic painkillers to dull the throbbing from his leg. A wave of contentment passed over him, causing her to smile as she withdrew from his mind.

Sin stared at her and blinked his eyes. “Lady, have you any idea what you did?” He blushed and shook his head.

”Christ, you’re better than morphine.”

“Is that good?”

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“In this case, that’s great.” Sin slid himself forward and out of the jeep. “C’mon, they’ll be trackingthis thing. We’d better abandon it.”

Rajani frowned. “How do you know that?”

“I don’t.” Sin winked at her. “But that’s what I’d be doing if I were running their operation. And the two of us are going to be damned conspicuous on the street.” He limped overto a storm-drain grating. “You’ve got a suit on.

Do you swim?”

“They have an Olympic-sized pool at the hotel.” She hooked a thumb through her suit’s shoulder strap. “I used it today.”

“Well, let’s go down into the hole then.” He pulled the grate up and waved her toward the dark opening. “You won’t get any gold for swimming down here, but chances are you won’t get any lead, either.”

Coyote stared at the Yidam as the creature reached up and unfastened the gold cloak clasp at its throat. The heavy, dark garment fell to the floor, for the first time affording Coyote an unobstructed view of his opponent.

”My God, what are you?”

The reason for the Yidam’s extraordinary height was the second shoulder girdle and pair of arms located a foot beneath the first pair. Set slightly back, the long, slender arms ended in long-fingered hands capped with gold talons, but they were not identical to the upper pair. They did not have its bulging musculature, nor did they possess the slender gold lines tracing from the talons up along the arms and over the shoulders. Coyote also noticed similar piping running from the gold claws on the creature’s feet up its legs to the yak-hide loincloth and around to its back.

Moving more swiftly than he could imagine anything that size moving, the Yidam closed. Its upper hands grabbed his wrists and pulled his arms out straight from his sides. Lower jaw agape, its lower arms came up and took hold of either side of his head. “You did not slay me when you had the chance in Storm. Now I will see if you
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are what you believe yourself to be.”

Their eyes met, and Coyote recoiled as the Yidam’s icepick consciousness pierced his brain. Coyote felt like a lock with a crude pick jammed into it. He tried to fight him, but found himself unable to grapple with the alien mind. Though powerless, Coyote tried to pull away from the contact, but succeeded only in encysting part of his conscious mind.

The Yidam used no finesse to sort through his mind—

he just pounded on in. He sorted through memories like a detective pulling all the clothes from a dresser drawer and tossing them over his shoulder. Coyote watched as the two months he could remember of his life were examined and then discarded casually. It seemed to Coyote that all he had done as Tycho Caine to thwart Fiddleback in Phoenix only heightened the Yidam’s dis-trust.

As the claustrophobic memory of waking up in a body bag enfolded Coyote, he felt the first slowing of the Yidam’s probe. The creature hesitated as it came up against a wall. Coyote knew this was the drug-induced amnesia his predecessor had subjected him to.
You even
anticipated something like this,
he thought to himself in a mental salute to the man who had made him into Coyote.

«You expect a biochemical barrier to stopme?» The Yidam’s contemptuous laughter echoed through Coyote’s skull, making his brain feel like the clapper in a giant bell.

«Behold, your body betrays you.»

Coyote suddenly saw his own mind as a complex, three-dimensional network of interconnected neurons and synapses. The blocked areas comprised an egg-shaped area outlined in red. Each nexus point into that area had a small, hard, red dot glowing on it. They pulsed angrily like hot coals beneath the kiss of a bellows.

Other areas of that neural net began to glow under the Yidam’s direct influence. In turn, Coyote felt other parts of his body respond and flood his bloodstream with hormones and chemicals. As they coursed up into his brain, he watched the embers dull, then the first of them winked out.

Coyote screamed as the Yidam burst through that first roadblock. Suddenly, instead of being trapped in the
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small world comprised of two memory months, Coyote emerged like a snake from an egg. He found himself in a dark world that slowly expanded as the chemicals the Yidam had started his body manufacturing dissolved the barriers. The Yidam, preceding him and drawing him along in his wake, gleefully threw memories at him.

Like a spectator watching someone else, Coyote saw who he had been in random snippets of his life. He saw himself as a child studying detailed anatomical texts and working with cadavers. He caught glimpses of martial arts exercises in which human bones were substituted for the wooden boards others would have been instructed to break. He relived hours and hours spent in dim chemistry labs preparing poisons and explosives.

As each nexus opened up, Coyote rebuilt his cognitive network. Cohesive bits of information linked up to form new connections both within the previously sealed area and out again to his more conscious memory. He did not feel reincorporated with what and who he had been in the past, and he took efforts to maintain that distance as more bizarre and curious events sizzled through his mind.

He watched himself study a victim through the tele-scopic sight of a custom-built, .50-caliber sniper rifle. At the same moment he realized he had built the weapon himself and had hand-crafted the slug, he felt his right index finger twitch. The woman’s head exploded like a balloon filled with red oatmeal. In the emotions that flickered past, he sought remorse or regret and he found it, but only that he’d clearly wasted three grains of powder in the shell that killed her.

Coyote went cold as he realized he had to be a sociopathic personality. Yet the second he made that judgment he rejected it because of the things he had done since he became Coyote.
A sociopath has no conscience
and thinks only of himself. An amnesiac, while possessing no memory of his past, still operates within the bound
of his normal personality. It follows that I have something
of a conscience, a loyalty to something, that guides me
and that I was able to transfer over to Coyote and his
mission.

The Yidam continued his ruthless sorting through Coyote’s lifetime.«
There is, Coyote, there is. I will find it,
and then you will see what you really are.
» The Yidam increased his pace, probing memories for bare millisec-onds before discarding them.

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As the world of Coyote’s past swelled, he began to visualize details in the darkness. Little stars began to glow in the night sky, but a dim haze made it difficult to see all of them. Below him, the world began to take shape. Off in the distance he saw the great curve of China’s coast outlined in gold. Beyond it, Korea’s daggerlike peninsula stabbed down into the black ocean and toward the islands of Japan.

Coyote began to feel vibrations from the haze. He realized it must have been the monks’ chanting about the same time he saw he had centered himself above the lamasery. He also knew, as he looked east again, that he had spent most of his life in Japan. He quickly chided himself because he had known that fact from the file his predecessor had prepared on him, but now he
knew
it and, somehow, that felt far more significant.

Then, as the Yidam cried out triumphantly, Coyote saw a green-ringed pulsar rising where the sun should have been. As its burning pupil swept around, a bolt of light impaled Japan. The pupil passed twice more, its pace increasing, then it spun up to the point where it became a green band encircling the sphere’s oasis.

Suddenly, a glowing green plane of light shot out and sliced cleanly through the haze. Coyote felt rather than heard faint screams, then the light hit him and collapsed into a single, sustained needle.It pinned him in space like an insect in a collection, leaving him powerless.«
My pet,
my pet, you have been returned to me.
» A chittering hum filled his mind, and he felt the muscles of his face contract into a smile.«
And you brought me a prezent!
»

The Yidam struggled against the energy being projected into Coyote like a game fish fighting a fishing line.

He had searched for a connection to Fiddleback and found it, then realized too late that the Dark Lord had anticipated this type of foray into Coyote’s mind. As the Yidam fought, his frustration bled into the link, and Coyote felt Fiddleback’s delight in the Yidam’s helplessness.

Coyote realized that Fiddleback had intended the trap to catch another Dark Lord and that it should have swallowed the Yidam whole.«Izthatyou, Vikram?DidInot deztroyyou when I had your wife? After all thiz time, can it be you?»

«Living proof you do not always win.»

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«I am entropy, Vikram. I always win. Mozt of your comradez welcomed me when I pozzezzed them. Your wife mozt azzuredly among them. Come to me.»

The Yidam continued his fight.« Iam not foryou, beast.

Were you as strong as you imagine yourself, you would have destroyed me by now.»

Coyote sensed the Yidam’s bluff and desperation in the link, and he bled it off into a red star that arced across the sky. The rest of the message passed unadulterated through the link like a gold spark and struck the black orb in its heart. A bar of black cycled through the band, then another gold spark raced back down the link.

«Father?»

«Rajani?»

The Yidam’s return message blasted back too strong for Coyote to control or affect in any way. It passed back through the link as a ragged gold circlet. It struck the sphere and filled the corona with gold highlights, then that color drained away leaving a blue after-image in its wake.