Cosmopath - [Bengal Station 03] by Eric Brown Read Free Book Online

without variation. Even when going out with Rab, she always arrived home, changed and left around seven. He must have known that she never brought home friends, or Rab, at this time... She wondered how long he’d been watching her, and the thought filled her with fear and rage.
     
    She shifted slightly, to ease the cramp in her left calf, but never took her eyes off the screen.
     
    It was a long wait, but eventually, as she knew he would, he stood and moved to the kitchen.
     
    She patched the image from the kitchen through to her handset and watched the guy. He was hauling open the door of her cooler, squatting to select a beer... He gripped his pistol in his right hand.
     
    She moved fast. She stood, slipped her card into the lock, and eased open the door without making a sound.
     
    She stepped into the lounge, watching the screen.
     
    He made his choice - a Blue Mountain, so the bastard had good taste - stood and looked around for an opener. He found it, screwed into the wall, and eased the cap from the beer.
     
    She cat-stepped across to the open door and looked through. The guy had his back to her, still gripping his pistol. He hadn’t yet taken a chug from the bottle. Her heart was thudding. She felt, she would admit later, elated.
     
    She raised her pistol and shot the assassin through the small of the back. He fell with more noise and commotion than she’d expected; a high cry of pain, a thrashing of arms and legs; the crash of the beer bottle. On his belly on the floor, he tried to turn and fire. She stepped over him and lasered his weapon from his hand, removing three fingers in the process. She kicked the pistol across the floor.
     
    She knelt, patted him down for weapons, and found a small, oval bulge in the inner pocket of his jacket.
     
    She hauled him onto his back, not only to get at his shield, but so that he could see that it was her, his intended target, who’d got to him first.
     
    His eyes were wide with pain, or it might have been shock at seeing her, and she smiled.
     
    She reached into his pocket, pulled out the shield, and tossed it through the door into the lounge. She activated her tele-ability, aimed the pistol at his face, and probed.
     
    She didn’t remain in his head for very long, not liking the images of the dead he had racked up in ten years of hiring himself out as an assassin. She scanned for what he knew about her - which was surprisingly little. She did learn that his paymaster was Chinese, and that he suspected he’d been hired by the government in Beijing. She also learned one other very interesting fact.
     
    A week ago the killer had been fitted with a program - and not just your run-of-the-mill psi-program.
     
    The assassin was a necropath.
     
    She read his instructions, sent to him via a soft-softscreen needle. He was to assassinate one Parveen Das and read in her dead or dying mind any information pertaining to the Chandrasakar Organisation’s imminent mission to Delta Cephei VII...
     
    She quit the cloaca of his mind and killed her program.
     
    She looked at the guy’s injuries, the neat hole to the left of his spine, the bleeding stubs of his fingers... It was touch and go whether he’d live.
     
    She stepped over him, retrieved the bottle of beer from the floor. A third of its contents remained. She moved to the lounge, dragged the recliner into the kitchen and sat down.
     
    She got through to Anish and reported the situation, then sat back and tipped the remaining beer into her mouth as she watched the killer squirming on the floor. He looked up at her, something almost beseeching in his eyes. She stared at him without saying a word, without the slightest expression on her face.
     
    She tried to assess what she felt, now. The anger was gone, the rage at the thought that he had intended to take her life.
     
    She felt...
     
    After the elation, after the rage, she felt not so much avenged at what she had done, but almost ashamed.
     
    The man might die,