"Lumley, Brian - Vampire World 3 - Bloodwars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

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PART ONE
Earth
I
Outside, Inside
Returning from an early lunch at an Indian restaurant just a five-minute walk away from E-Branch HQ in the heart of London, Ben Trask sweated inside and out. Inside, from the curry which was still searing his mouth and throat; outside, from the unusually warm May weather. The noonday sun blazed down on him from a sky as vast and blue as the Ionian which he hoped his visitor from another world was enjoying, because Trask sure as hell was not! In fact, ever since Zek Foener and Nathan Kiklu (or Nathan 'Keogh', as the Necroscope preferred to be called now) had gone off to the Greek Islands a few days ago, Trask had been right out of sorts with himself, and with everyone else in his top-secret ESPionage organization.
He thought about the two, worried about them equally ... but for different reasons. About Nathan, because he was probably the most valuable and certainly the most - what, unique? - man in the world; even in two worlds. And about Zek, because he loved her. At his age (Trask snorted), finally to have fallen in love! Not that he was ancient, and he certainly wasn't 'past it', but ... it compJicated matters. And with Zek in the Greek Islands, things seemed even more complicated. That silly old saw which has it: 'out of sight, out of mind', had it backwards as far as Trask was concerned. She was out of sight, all right, but she'd never been more in his mind than right now .. .
And even as he thought it, the thought itself was like an invocation:
Deep water ... the salt sea .. . weeds and sediment
obscuring Trask's vision - no, Zek's vision/ - and the pain in his/her chest . . . heart hammering, vision bJurring, lungs screaming for air! Sweet Jesus, she was drowning! And she was Jetting him know about it in the onJy way she could ... for Zek was one of the world's finest telepaths.
BEN! The word exploded into his mind like a bomb. TRY NOT TO FEEL .. . TOO . .. BAD .. . ABOUT ... IT.
'Zek!' he yelled out loud, and could actually taste the water flooding into his/her mouth.
GOOD... BYE... BEN...!
Trask staggered, whirled, fell, and felt his knees slam down hard on the dusty pavement. But it didn't hurt. Nothing hurt except the fact that Zek's telepathic voice was dead in his mind. And that Zek herself-?
Across the road, people were staring. A car's horn blared and its astonished driver gazed down at Trask where he kneeled half-on, half-off the road. Then the car swept on by and people came running, questioning. Someone asked if Trask had been hit. He shook his head, got to his feet and staggered again. A young couple grabbed him, held him upright, and the girl asked, 'Are you all right?'
Numb, he nodded. He was all right, yes. But Zek -?
It was mid-May 2006, and under the hot sun Trask was cold. Sweat rivered his face and stuck his shirt to his back, yet he was cold. Cold in his mind, from the feel and the taste of the deep salt water, but far colder from the memory of Zek's telepathic voice, crying there and dying there, in his mind. Cold from the sudden emptiness of ... everything. 'Zek!'
He shook the young couple off, shouldered people aside, started to walk along the pavement and ended up running, and ran sweating and shivering down the sidestreet to the back of the hotel whose top floor housed E-Branch HQ. He found the private door; after the sunlight it was like night in there; there was only the darkness until he used his pass-card to enter the elevator with its electric ceiling light. And even then it was dark; but that was in his mind, and he
knew that the darkness was only the absence of Zek. In which case, it might last forever.
Then the elevator shuddered to a halt, the doors hissed open and Trask stumbled out into the main corridor ...
. .. Which was -- flooded?
An inch of water went sluicing into the elevator! Now what the hoJy . ..?
There were espers in the corridor. Trask recognized faces without considering the amazement -- the relief, the .. . what? . . . triumph, jubilation? -- written on every one of them. There was a smell of ocean, seaweed, salt. The smell matched the taste of Zek in Trask's mind. So that once again he asked himself: now what the holy . ..?
The tall, cadaverous, usually melancholy figure of the precog lan Goodly loomed into view; but now his eyes were alight with elation. He grabbed Trask's arm, husked, 'Ben -- he's done it! Nathan's done it!'
'Done it?' Trask found it hard to gather his thoughts, concentrate his mind. Goodly was wet, splotched; he smelled of sea-water just like the entire corridor smelled of it. His trousers were drenched from the knees down and clung to his thin calves. And now David Chung, Branch locator, had arrived on the scene; he, too, was soaked from head to toe, and grinning like an oriental lunatic.
'Done what?' Trask demanded, looking from one to the other. 'What has Nathan done? And, anyway, he's somewhere in the Ionian with ... with Zek.' And finally losing it: 'Why doesn't someone tell me what the fuck - is going -on - here!?'
They were in the Greek Islands, Ben,' Goodly suddenly saw how close Trask was to shock. But he also knew how difficult it would be to shock a man who always knew the truth, a human lie-detector like the current Head of E-Branch. And, looking at him, Goodly thought to himself, he's improved, hardened with age and time. Oh, Ben has soft, human edges, too, but the man inside - the mind, soul and personality, the id -- is diamond-hard.
Trask was about five-ten, just a pound or two overweight, mousey-haired and green-eyed. His broad shoulders sloped just a little, his arms dangled somewhat and his expression was - what, lugubrious? Or maybe that was a direct result of his talent; for, in a world where the simple truth was increasingly hard to come by, it was no easy thing to possess a mind which could not accept a lie. This was an election year, and Trask's current gripe was with politicians. Watching party-political broadcasts, he would frequently burst out: 'The trouble with these people is that they never lie! But they never tell the truth, either!'
And now he was staring hard at Goodly, asking, 'What was that you said? They were in the Ionian? What the hell do you mean?'
Goodly knew there was only one way to tell it, and so answered, They were there, yes, Ben. But just a few minutes ago, Nathan brought them back!'
Trask's jaw fell open. Not without an effort, he closed it and said, 'He brought them -- ?'
' -- Brought them back here, yes,' Goodly nodded. 'Through the Mo'bius Continuum.'
And now Trask's jaw dropped open all the way, so that once again he must close it before gasping, The ... Continuum?' At which the truth finally dawned on him; if not in regard to Nathan, certainly in respect of Zek. The fact that she was alive! He'd known it was the truth, of course, even as Goodly said the words, but it seemed so far beyond his wildest hopes and dreams that even Trask had held back from letting it register. Just a moment ago he'd known that Zek Foener was dead -- he had literally heard and felt her die - and yet now .. .
As Trask's feet touched earth again, he snapped out of it and demanded to know: 'Where are they? Are they okay? And Zek - is she okay?'
David Chung answered him. They're sedated. We've fixed up a couple of beds in the Ops room. But it was a close thing. They were in the sea. And when they came through
... I thought half of the Mediterranean was coming through with them!'
Trask grabbed him, said, 'But how did it happen? Don't we know anything about it? Christ, I take an hour off for lunch, everything goes mad!'
'Nathan said a few words before we put him under,' Chung answered. 'But we had to put them out of it for a while. They were exhausted and in shock - especially Zek -and it might easily have developed into something worse.'
'So what exactly did Nathan say?' Trask headed for the Ops room with the others in tow.
'It seems it was a party of Tzonov's thugs,' Goodly took up the story. 'Nathan's Special Branch minders were taken by surprise - and murdered! Nathan and Zek ran for it, into the sea. More of Tzonov's people were waiting for them; they had wetsuits and spearguns and were already in the water; for all we know at this stage, the entire operation was launched from the sea. But when the chips were down and there was no other way out, Nathan did his thing. Except. .. there was probably a lot more to it than that.'
'Oh?' Trask glanced at him, and pressed on into the Ops room, where a small knot of espers was gathered around a pair of six-foot tables.
Goodly followed on behind, nodding. There had been some pretty weird stuff going on here. Stuff that told us these two were in trouble.' He gave a shrug. 'So we did what we could for them.' Goodly was wont to understate things: his British phlegmatism. But the precog's 'pretty weird stuff statement told Trask a lot: namely, that there was still a lot he hadn't been told.
'All of this in an hour?' he said, as the espers around the tables moved aside to make room for their Head of Branch, and Trask came to a halt between a pair of prone figures apparently asleep in hastily made-up beds.
'In a lot less than an hour,' David Chung put in. 'Let me tell you about it...
'Myself, lan, Geoff Smart, we all got the message at the
same time: that something was wrong. With me, it was Nathan's earring -- the thing came alive in my hand! I can't say what it was for Smart, but he's an empath and he's done a lot of work with Nathan; maybe he sensed the trouble they were in even at that range. And of course lan reads the future, and apparently he'd "seen" me plugging in the computer in Harry's room. So we went there, and I plugged it in. Then -- it was the same as before: the numbers, equations, whatever; I'm no mathematician, so you tell me! But it was all on the screen. Except it wasn't quite the same. This time, the numbers came together, fused, formed into something else. Something that was ... I don't know, solid? Well, almost solid.'
Trask had taken Zek's wrist; feeling the steady pulse, he issued a sigh of relief. ZeJc, you spoke to me. When you thought it was aJJ over, I was the one you spoke to! It meant an awful lot to him. Then, as if it were his first breath in a week, he filled his lungs to bursting; finally, frowning, he looked at Chung. 'Something solid, you say? On the computer screen?'
Goodly took up the story again. 'Do you remember those golden darts, Ben? I mean, when Harry died?'
'Of course I remember them.'