When discarnate, Hephaestion always felt the pull of his body. He could be with his body, normally, in a swiftly flying instant.
This time, he was lost, stranded, halted in space. The raising of the security net with his name on it had the effect of dislocating him from the echo essential to reunification.
He simply could not find himself.
A tact of the Holland-Tchey, he supposed.
He recognized the tact and accepted it. There were no periods of wandering panic. True, this had not occurred in all the epochs of his existence. Yet there was no reason why it could not. This type of thing was the grit of Kinder's research and in front of him. Unfortunately for the Kinder Group, the aliens were ahead in the field, which meant that he was at the mercy, temporarily, of Zoa.
Moreover, his psychic apparatus had alarmed too soon, as he had (apparently) healed well ahead of time. When the mechanism of death involved significant tissue damage, he could remain in limbo a long period.
No mystery there-- the aliens' mastery of tissue regeneration was amply documented. Of course, he had good reason to want to wake in four days, not twenty.
Meanwhile, he located the Kinder ops team outside Skaja-Volz, warned it through John Manegold that Volod officials were getting word from the Holland-Tchey that Manegold was alive. Fortunately, and perhaps only for a short time, Skaja-Volz's military higher-ups applied logic to the intel, thereby corrupting the message's content. The Volod troopers stationed in and around Skaja-Volz were supposed to be looking for a fugitive, not a corpse. Instead, the Skaja-Volz hierarchy assumed an error in the encryption and were in all earnest searching for a body. At checkpoints, the soldiers were tearing apart centimeter by centimeter vehicles that could haul cargo while passing smaller conveyances with just a peek in the trunk.
Still, Hephaestion wanted Val to wait at the farmhouse. When Hephaestion was sure he knew everything Val knew, and when he was reasonably assured of the ops team's cooperation, he turned his mind to finding a way to deal with the Holland-Tchey.
* * *
"Did you locate the weapon?" Zoa, the interviewer, clutched her machine, her little computer, pointing it at him.
The way she did this, the way she held her machine and studied its data screen was different, although her computer was not. Zoa, somehow, was different too. Her appearance. The long drape with the high collar. Her hair down around her shoulders.
She had things to tell him.
Excuses, explanations.
Why her promises had gone awry.
But she was not talking, not in any true sense. Her mouth moved, and out came these tight, offending questions, as though he would keep the location of the weapon from her if he knew it.
They let him find his body, turned off the net that kept him from himself, then closed around him their security barrier. It was beyond them to understand that as long as he could sense the net, once he had been in his body long enough he could disrupt the technology. Clearly, they had no understanding of what they were dealing with.
It mattered greatly to Hephaestion what came next. Besides wanting to help Zoa, he was concerned about the weapon. She was, it seemed, quite concerned about the weapon, and he figured with relative certainty that if it had an energy signature he could find it. The fact that she'd involved her people made things a trifle uncomfortable. Alas, the Holland-Tchey still knew him as Bojidar Rambach, a Borazji native. If under the alien's scrutiny his alias was going to fall apart, it would have fallen apart by now.
Several hours had passed since he woke. He decided to let a few more hours go by.
Zoa left at one point, and he sighed, using the span to go over his options. The last time he'd stretched within his power, he'd killed a large number of people. He didn't like the memory, but there it was. His memory, and he owned it. A long time ago, he would have considered being what he was, doing his thing, the most potent expression of joy. Well. If he lived, he supposed he ought to tell that to the new one, to the boy. Or maybe the boy already knew the power wanted to be used. Perhaps. Not every affarite ended up in a six-century binge of destruction.
Five hours, now, since he woke. Zoa was beside him, speaking pointlessly, in circles. He could not yet extend upward with his power-- the security shield was there --but he could reach just beneath it and follow its signature. The net was for his life force, his consciousness. It had nothing with which to contend with his power. And he was very nearly at full charge.
Following the net to a set of controls was a start, but not good enough. He wanted, too, the system that stored his energy signature, the file labeled Rambach, Bojidar. It lived in a massive room that housed the alien equivalent of mainframes. He didn't understand the power source. The shielding, too, was impressive. Replacement equipment would have to come from a transport ship-- he wasn't sure he wanted to disable the embassy. He didn't want it to look like he'd raided their artificial intelligence either. Ah, crystal boards. Good enough.
Now, the problem of the people. He couldn't sense any of them.
"Why can't I sense you?" Hephaestion interrupted the interrogation. He lay restrained on the table clothed in dark supple trousers and a pullover. His feet were bare.
Zoa hesitated, so that even without his telepathy he knew she was considering lying. "We are a telepathic species."
Good answer. "So are we."
"In what way?"
"In what way? I haven't proven that, then."
"I assumed we were communicating telepathically through my link."
"Turn yours off. I think mine is better."
She had a reaction that confounded him. She almost looked as though she was about to break out in a sweat. "That's inappropriate."
"We're not getting along again?"
"We are fitted with a regulator that allows us to have privacy when we want it. Our public mode allows the kind of interchange you and I have experienced. If I do as you want, if I turn it off, the most inappropriate communication could occur."
"If I'm telepathic, you mean."
"Yes, of course. If you're not, then ... nothing would happen."
"Turn it off. Let me see you. And turn off your hand-held. You'll be able to hear me without it, I promise you."
She glanced at the hand-held, at him, up at the monitoring station above them, and back at him. She nodded once, perhaps (he supposed) to acknowledge a command from a superior at the monitoring station. Then she put down her computer.
He shuddered. Didn't mean to. It just happened. A blossom of sound, except it wasn't audible. He heard it somewhere inside, where he'd feel the most intimate of caresses. His body shivered again, and his lips parted. Okay, there she was, and he recognized her. When he'd found John Manegold, he'd found her. She was like this then, a note of pure energy, and she'd played it for him. She'd moved through him without a word, and she'd taken something like an imprint of his essence. This time, he moved forward and hesitated. She touched him with her mind. It's all right. He tried to fashion thought, tried at first and failed. It was all elemental now, just the moving back and forth, all feeling, a feast of sensation. But somewhere in this he had to possess himself. He had to. So, he tried again, and was able.
"You have an internal switch that allows this to happen?" he asked.
"Yes. We've done this before."
"Not something I'm likely to forget. You are so incredibly beautiful. How many people are nearby?"
She shut it down, shut down the sharing, and picked up her hand-held, regarding him coolly. "Why do wish to know?"
"Well, we are on what's called an unleveled field. I must make it level, so I can get some work done. Tell your people to step away from their consoles, and to stay out of the room with the mainframes."
Her eyes only widened a little, showing almost no alarm.
He wasted no more time. Floating a charge along the nearby systems, he was perhaps more than thorough. He detected a flare, and snuffed it. The mainframes were more challenging. To obliterate them he would have had to destroy the chamber. He only wanted to snap the crystal boards. They'd have replacement boards nearby. Meanwhile, he sat up on the table. The mechanical restraints had been easy to do away with. He hung his legs over the edge, observed Zoa as the room's illumination altered, failed, and faded. Emergency lighting, now. He could feel the presence of a massive generator, and, now that the main artificial intelligence chamber was dead, the resonance of back-ups flaring to life. He crippled the redundant system, but left the generator alone. He twisted his head to look up at the blank monitoring window, made sure Zoa wasn't holding a weapon, and realized someone had asked the holding room's life support to go to off. They still did not understand, he realized, what they were dealing with. If they were all set to exterminate Zoa along with him, subtracting oxygen from the atmosphere might be phase one of a very lethal package. He needed to breathe, and he was going to win this contest even if meant he had to rip a chunk of the building from its foundation.
"Sorry, darling," he murmured as he stood up.
The chamber door complained bitterly, then gasped and fell outward. That took care of the oxygen problem. He suspected lethal gas was next.
"Zoa, just for a moment, please get down."
The monitor window shattered outward. He attacked it from his side but controlled the explosion so that the damaged viewscreen fell toward him and not on top of the room's occupants. It jerked back as one crumbling piece, which he bundled neatly as it tumbled mid-air and flung aside. He was looking, now, at security people and dignitaries surrounding a tall, handsome female aristocrat. The aristocrat held a portable computer. He brought up a knuckle to blot a bead of blood that had blossomed under one nostril, then inclined his head to her. Sorry. And cracked the power crystal in her hand-held.
A mental scan showed that the area was under automatic containment. No one was leaving, except him, and no one was going to get through the magnetically sealed containment doors unless he took the doors off for them. No matter. The one he wanted was standing just above him, looking down her pretty nose at him.
She fashioned her query like a blow. "What are you?"
"I'm someone who needs your attention."
"You might have tried asking for it."
Zoa stood beside him. "Excellency, he did-- try."
The older woman flicked a glance at Zoa before adjusting her gaze to Hephaestion. "You have my attention now."
-- Next Chapter
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