He looked at Gray and asked, “Are you sure Bester knows where we are?”
“I was very clear about it,” answered the telepath.
The commlink on the wall buzzed, and the closest officer answered it. After a moment, he called out, “Is there somebody named Gray here?”
“That’s me!” called the telepath.
“There’s a shuttlecraft on its way for you,” reported the man, and he returned immediately to watching the news.
Gray and Garibaldi smiled at one another.
Because of Mars’ thin atmosphere, every shuttlecraft had to dock with an air-lock, and most small shuttlecraft had a hatch at the bottom for that purpose. So Gray and Garibaldi had to climb up a ladder through the air-lock in order to board the black shuttlecraft through its underbelly. If Mr. Bester was surprised to see Garibaldi, he didn’t say so, and Garibaldi certainly wasn’t surprised to see him.
“I hope you two are proud of yourselves,” he sneered. “I ought to arrest you for collaborating with the enemy.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Garibaldi. He and Gray looked innocently at one another.
“Thanks to you, there is no way we can handle this quietly now. The whole Alliance will know… .”
“That you made a mistake,” offered Gray. “That you’re fallible.”
“No,” muttered the Psi Cop, “that Psi Corps is vulnerable to attacks from within. That’s the one place we fear the most, attacks from within. And that’s why we Psi Cops are so important to the Corps.”
“Aren’t you forgetting one thing?” asked Garibaldi. “If it hadn’t been for me and Gray, by this time tomorrow you would’ve been out of a job! I’ll have second thoughts about that for a while, I can tell you.”
Bester narrowed his eyes angrily. “I know what you want from me, and I’m not going to give it to you. Ms. Winters will remain a suspect and a rogue telepath. I imagine she will soon go on the list of known Martian terrorists.”
Garibaldi nearly jumped out of his seat to strangle the pompous twit, but his inner voice warned him to keep calm. This was the only man who could remove the most damning of the charges against her—rogue telepath.
“I will testify in Ms. Winters’s behalf,” vowed Gray. “And when we capture Malten, he can testify.”
Bester chuckled humorlessly. “Do you think I would let Arthur Malten go on the stand to testify? His trial would become a trial about Psi Corps itself, and the Mix would get destroyed in the process. To save us all a lot of embarrassment, we’re negotiating with Arthur Malten.”
Garibaldi sat up in his seat. “You know where he is? Why don’t you bring him in?”
“Yes, bring him in!” echoed Gray.
“Well, we don’t exactly know where he is. Mars is a big planet, and he’s very clever. The Mix has a private underground transmitter, and we’ve been communicating over that. So we have a vague idea what area he’s in.”
Gray was sputtering with anger. “How … how can you negotiate with Malten? The man tried to kill you, remember, and he succeeded in killing two dozen innocent people!”
Bester scratched his nose. “There is that, of course. But we have some things we need from Mr. Malten. We need him to sign a confession, thanks to your loose lips. It’ll have to be worded carefully to make it clear that he, Emily Crane, and those other two were the only telepaths involved from the Mix. His supporters in the Senate will have to officially condemn him. Then Malten will have to address the Mix employees—give them a pep talk and appoint a successor. We have several good candidates in mind.”
The Psi Cop paused in thought. “In exchange for saving the Mix, there will be a plea-bargained conviction, and he will be paroled to some distant planet.”
“Then you’ll kill him,” said Gray.
Bester smiled but did not correct that assumption.
“What about Talia?” insisted Garibaldi.
Bester was distracted by his pilot, although she hadn’t moved or said a word. “What did you just receive?”
“Finch is reporting that Malten broke off negotiations. He may be running. There was an echo on his last transmission, and we think we may have pinpointed his hideout. I have coordinates—we can be there in fifteen minutes.”
“Go!”
Chapter 21
Garibaldi stared out the starboard window of the shuttlecraft and watched the barren terrain of Mars streak by. Mars never looked real from the air, he thought to himself, with all those lifeless and craggy hills, broken up by the occasional dusty habitat, monorail tube, or factory dome. Mars was a place that couldn’t possibly exist, yet here it was, a monument to humanity’s determination to bring life to a dead planet. No matter how many buildings they put up, the edifices of man always looked tenuous on Mars, like vines trying to cling to a smooth metal door.
The terrain didn’t look real from ground level either, he recalled. From that perspective, the mountains, chasms, and sheer cliffs looked too large and too vivid to be real. They rose at odd angles out of the pockmarked, reddish soil, like crystals growing in a culture. The mountains looked like sand castles, as if they would crumble in a strong wind.
“I hate this place,” muttered Gray beside him.
“Yes, Mars is an acquired taste,” agreed Garibaldi. He looked at Bester. “Psi Corps has certainly acquired it.”
Bester was ignoring them as he leaned forward intently. “Status?”
“I’m running sonar,” reported the pilot. “The readings indicate that there is a structure where we picked up the echo. It’s the size and shape of a bunker.”
“Underground?” asked Bester.
“Yes, but not too deep. I can hover over it and turn on the thrusters. That might blow away some of the camouflaged covering.”
“Do it,” ordered Bester.
Garibaldi braced himself as the pilot—who was damned good, he had to admit—positioned the craft directly over a small mound between two jagged mountains. The mound looked like a mogul on a ski slope, and he had seen hundreds of similar protrusions on Mars, formed by the pressures of lava flow. The pilot came so close to the mound that she nearly landed, then she popped the thrusters. The shuttlecraft rose like a shot between the two mountains, shuddering and rattling until she could regain control of it. Then she banked the craft away from the peaks and swerved around for another view.
True to her word, she had blasted a star-shaped hole in the artificial surface covering the mound. Under the singed material, sections of gray metal shone dully in the sun.
“Can you raise anybody in there?” asked Bester.
“I’ve been trying,” she answered. “So has Mr. Finch. Malten has either left, or is keeping quiet.”
“Damn,” muttered Bester, “if we’ve lost him—if he ran for it—well, there will be no more negotiations!”
“I can land on the mound,” the pilot offered. “We might be able to cut through, or find a hatch.”
“If you’ve got a suit,” said Garibaldi, “I’ll go out and take a look.”
“They’re in the storage bin in the back,” answered Bester. “Right beside the air-lock chamber. You can exit there.”
Garibaldi started off, then stopped. “You won’t leave me out here, will you?”
Bester scowled. “Leave you alone with Malten, or maybe a batch of his secret files? Not bloody likely.”
Garibaldi found four environmental suits in the closet, and he was glad to see they were all roomy and optimized for use on Mars. With the low gravity, nobody had to worry about carrying around too much weight, so a Martian environmental suit could carry the maximum amount of high-grade insulation, plus cooling and air-processing equipment. He stripped off his uniform, figuring the pilot had seen it all before, and squeezed into the suit.
He lowered the helmet onto his head, locked it, and waved to the pilot. She set them down carefully on top of the camouflaged bunker, but they could still hear the grinding of metal against metal. There was a scary moment as something crunched and the ship shifted, but it settled down at an angle that wasn’t too terribly dangerous. Garibaldi guessed that a few more pieces of the camouflage material had broken away under the weight of the shuttlecraft.