When that door closed, the rest of him, maybe the best of him, never came back.
Lyta Alexander, The Paragon of Animals
"Are you insane? That's a suicide mission!" Emotion pushed words from his throat, and he didn't care if she thought him rude. She had shown him her plan, playing it out carefully in his mind, orchestrating every detail exactly the right way, letting all the chance events fall in their favor. Every thought she cast was calculated to make the scheme attractive and successful. Just in case that wasn't enough, she had nudged a little at his emotions.
But he could see through her. No one in the telepath underground had any doubts that Lyta Alexander was the most powerful of their number. No one outside would doubt that either. That's what made her such a target for PsiCorps, and what made her plan so dangerous. But as good as she was, he could see through this trick. A former PsiCop himself, he had used it more than once.
He continued to speak aloud, to emphasize the vehemence of his opposition. "I can't allow you to do this, Lyta. Yes, you're stronger than any one of them. Maybe you're stronger than several of them in concert. But if you're captured, they'll shoot you up with sleepers, and what does that do to the balance of power?"
"I can fight the sleepers."
"You don't know that." He stopped to calm himself. "Don't let arrogance make you foolhardy, Lyta," he chided. "Don't do this."
She didn't answer, and he knew what that meant.
When she was captured, she was carrying six charges, each of them large enough to do significant damage to the facility. What seemed to worry the Corps most was the size of the bag in which she carried them. It suggested there had been many more, already planted, and she wasn't providing locations. There were lights, long into the night, flashlights, searchlights, and the fluorescent in her cell. Inspections and interrogations both aimed at finding the other charges, until morning when they turned their charge over to their superiors, embarrassed by how deeply she had penetrated before they seized her. Rumor was she put several men down before they took her, but no one would admit to it.
They moved her the same day, strapped to a gurney, shot full of sleepers. No one wondered about the hours before the drug, about her sending or receiving, about how easily she was controlled. No one doubted the dosage, the need to dull her senses into sleep, or the effectiveness of the drug. She slept, bound to a board, through the trip to an undisclosed location, by an evasive route, so that she could never show the way, if ever they released her. Or so it seemed.
A new cell, in a new place, but a buzzing breaking through the silence. Little P3s flitting around her, checking vital signs, making notes, brushing against the edges of her mind, curious to know if she was all they had heard, but too timid to test her. Except for the one who administered the sleepers. He was a little stronger, a P6 she guessed, equally curious, but bolder. He dared deeper, showing her his defiance and his dreams. He would turn if she could reach him.
Those leaders not already present soon assembled. The decrease in the dosage of the sleepers was her second sign of that. Gradually, so that they could watch, they eased it down. They would want her alert for the interrogation. Alert, but not assertive. The balance was delicate.
A single chair, the first she had seen since her capture, stood in the center of the room to which they brought her. They would stand, she knew, and move about, but she would be constrained, restrained if necessary, her world proscribed to this one chair. That was fine. The world within was so much bigger than the world without. She sat, and noted no restraints in evidence. The edges of the room were dark and glassy, watery looking in the half-light, concealing the black suited inquisitors.
They began in voice, although she did not answer. Instead, from under drooping lids, she eyed the ones who showed themselves. The old man she remembered; the others were young pups, immensely pleased with their own powers and prowess. But the old man had never been that strong and now age was eroding what ability he had. He was here to gain her trust, to ease down her guard that the others might enter.
They moved quickly to a scan, two of them, bracketing her, pushing past her superficial thoughts. She threw up the expected blocks, and enjoyed their fussing about her resistance. The old man tried to push in. It took only an instant to advance what aging had begun. He wandered in her mind, unable to remember why, until the pain grew too intense. Black suited aides came to quiet his screams and to lead him away.
The pups began again, all four of them together, believing that would help. She let a few blocks crumble for them and waited to see where they looked. No diversion was attempted, no finesse used. They rummaged through her memories, the four of them, a hunting party searching for the resistance. She let them see the location of the base, each of them, a location of different base, all of them long since abandoned.
She let her head loll forward as they pushed on. It helped to hide the amusement she felt as she imagined their debriefing. Fools, not to communicate with one another. Arrogant, assuming success. Now they wanted names and faces. She would have to give them some.
Past the watery edges of the room she reached, slithering under the shadows with only a tiny piece of her mind. The pups wouldn't notice she was gone. From the minds on the other side of the glass, she drew names and faces for them, carefully, gently, from the edges of the memories, half-remembered friends, and nearly forgotten colleagues.
Something in her jumped at the touch of a familiar mind. Frozen, she pushed the pups back, eliciting a squeal from the frailest of the group. She touched again just to be certain.
The pups regrouped, began again, and she returned her attention to the dance. She gave them blocks and let them break through, showed them wide avenues of fact dead-ending in fantasy. They pushed again for names, and she returned to her hunting excursion, skipping over him, mining each of the others for a name or two, and a face, sometimes matching, sometimes not.
Time to move on now, she knew. She gave them a new set of blocks, sturdier, more imposing, something they could work on for a while. While they were busy, she sent the signal. The others might be listening, she realized, but it would not matter.
The charges they had taken from her blew first. Tucked almost safely away in what until now had been a weapons locker, they provided a comfortable diversion. The pups were shaken, and the minds on the other side of the mirrors distracted. That was when she touched him.
Are you afraid, Mr. Bester?
He threw up blocks, pitiful papery protectors that she punched through in a breath. Pro forma, they both knew, but who was listening or looking now, now with the blasts coming faster and closer?
You're not running like the others.
There was no challenge, no resistance, no pretense greater than those perfunctory blocks. He wanted the contact as much as she did. Alarms sounded and the pups scattered, not waiting for the guards to secure her. She made no move on the physical plane.
You've always wanted to see inside my mind.
He did not deny it, could not, not in this place of harsh truth. Sounds of fighting reached his ears as images of Vorlons reached his mind. She teased him, tempted him, tantalized him with images just illusory enough that he had to doubt their truth.
So look, Mr. Bester.
He considered the dangers without, and she could sense the deliberation. He gauged the distance of the fighting, the size of the explosions. He was not as analytical about the dangers within.
I won't stop you.
He came at her with a fury, an uncontrolled passion wholly out of character, to the extent she credited him with character. Rage she could have understood in him, but this was a lust, an appetite wholly unsatisfied, too long denied, out of control. He fed his hunger with her memories, ripping away the bones of mundane experience, gorging on the flesh of her power. Childhood, the Corps, all her early experience, he tossed aside like bruised fruit, lingered on Babylon 5 just long enough to experience the Vorlon, and then pushed on.
True to her word, she didn't stop him. The violence of his entry made her stagger; the vehemence of his search left her smug. She knew, even more certainly than he, how improbable it was that she would leave here alive, and she knew, even though he didn't, how inevitable his own end was. That which he envied and would never have, she let him see, in its power, its pleasure, its price and its pain. All her memories of the Vorlons and the Vorlon homeworld she spread out before him, a feast he would not have time to finish. All that she could do and all they did to her she offered to his mind.
Neither of them really heard the blast that shattered the wall behind her, only the terrible crackle of its elements disassociating. In far deeper parts of her being, she felt his savage, self-protective recoil as the structure disgorged its substance, vomiting rock at her, heaving steel. Within her, the door opened, as she had known it would, and she did not fight the forces that swept her over that threshold. She smiled as she felt his wonder, watched him lean back in again, for one more look.
He felt the pain before he saw her, felt it grow more intense as the homing beacon led him to her. Pain was all that was left. He pushed away the debris and straightened her broken body. He wanted to reach out, to try to pull her back, hold her here, but there wasn't time to let his mind wander, not even there. The second wave of them would come, as soon as the confusion and the flames died down. They'd come, but he would be gone by then, and their prize would be gone, carried carefully in his arms.
It wasn't easy to be invisible in the midst of all that mayhem, walking when he wanted to run, cradling his comatose comrade. When they were safe, hidden deep in the unnamed places of the underground, he eased her broken body into the bed they had prepared, part cradle, part coffin. Fugitives have no medical centers, outlaws, no infirmaries. They counted among their number a few compassionate professionals, doctors and nurses who did what they could, with the little they had, to treat her and temper her pain. When they had done all they could, he called out to her mind, but was rebuffed. Powerful blocks, thick psychic walls, left him no access. He wondered if they were remnants of the mission or protection from the pain.
She lingered there, lost between alive and alone, for many months. The cause could not die, so missions carried him away, but each time he returned to safe house that sheltered her, he made time to visit with her. He spoke to her, with mind and with voice, but saw no reaction, no response, except a smile. That strange, subtle smile that fluttered on her face from time to time seemed to speak of a wicked satisfaction. The doctors, he was certain, would say it was just an accident, random nerves firing, without significance. Still, he fluttered around the edges of her mind, wondering what she knew.
Black suits scrambled like ants in the grey dust, collecting the carcasses of fallen colleagues. They were stunned when they found him, standing, staring. He was bloodied, but the only concession to his injuries was a hunching to his right. He had not fallen, nor had his gaze left the chair, though that target lay in splinters on the floor. They struggled to remove him from the ruins, and when they reached the trauma center, the doctors called it catatonia. His physical injuries, while significant, were not life threatening, but his stupor persisted. The doctors gave assurances that such reactions were common after trauma, but when they exhausted their treatments, what was left of the Corps leadership stepped in.
They entered Bester's mind with the respect due a legend, tapping apologetically on the door of consciousness. They got no response. Tiptoeing forward, they found the door open. No blocks, no resistance, and to their horror, no one home. They had entered the minds of unconscious subjects before. The landscape was somewhat surreal, the activity subdued, but this – this was different. The silence was terrifying, the vacancy disorienting. They called out to him but no answer came, no moan of pain. They stumbled, tumbled, suffocated in the vacuum, until, fearing for their own sanity, they ripped away.
He had taken to giving her updates when he visited, although no one thought she really heard. He shared news of his work, of the war, of the world.
"…The Narn really made the mission possible. I don't mind telling you I don't think we could have done it without them, but still… They creep me out. It's unnerving being around people who want your DNA…"
He looked at her, but he had stopped hoping for a response. He shifted his chair a bit to face her.
"The Corps is crumbling now. The lower levels have all pretty much deserted, either to join us or just to escape, try to hide or to blend in. The remnants of command are still trying to bluster, but rumor is EarthGov is going to shut them down."
That smile again. He wanted so much to believe it meant something, meant that she heard him.
"There's been no sign of Bester, but there's talk. If the Corps is disbanded, there may be a move to have him charged with war crimes. Even the mundanes would see him for what he is, if we could put him on tri…"
His own words caught in his throat, and as he searched her face for some sign of connection, he realized the hairs at the back of his neck were rising. He pushed out a breath and rose from his chair, shaking his head to clear his mind as he bid her goodbye. As always, he promised to return as soon as he could.
As he paused in the doorway, he wondered if he would. A chill ran through him as he looked back at her, and well beyond that threshold, beyond the house and the hour, her voice echoed in his mind.
I'll never let him go.