The Unborn Read online

  THE UNBORN

  by

  BRIAN HERBERT

  Produced by ReAnimus Press

  Other books by Brian Herbert:

  The Assassination of Billy Jeeling

  © 2019 by Brian Herbert. All rights reserved.

  https://ReAnimus.com/store?author=brianherbert

  Cover by Clay Hagebusch

  Smashwords Edition License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER 1

  No one should have to die that way.

  Riggio Demónt recalled the lovemaking vividly, holding the attractive redhead close to him, smelling her perfume, thrilling as their bodies moved in perfect synchronization, as if this had not been the first time they had known one another intimately. Such sweet things she’d said to him, and he’d said to her in return. They’d held each other afterward on the bed, and talked far into the night. He’d cared deeply about her, and they’d fallen asleep in each other’s arms.

  At some point—he couldn’t determine exactly when—he’d heard her scream, a horrific, bloodcurdling sound. They were on the bed, and in a haze he saw a hand with a white-handled knife, coming around from behind him and thrusting the blade into the nude woman’s chest.

  Who had committed such a horrific act, and who had the unfortunate woman been? Nothing came to him, but he felt immense sadness and outrage over the incident.

  Events and their chronology were unclear. A great deal of information was missing from his memory. Riggio recalled standing by the deathbed in a hotel room that was supposed to be their secret place, and looking down on the gruesome spectacle. The killer had made good his escape, without harming Riggio.

  After he left, the victim had lain gasping in the last seconds of her life, her eyes filled with terror and recognition. She had seen her attacker, seemed to have known him. In desperation she had reached for the knife that was embedded to its handle in her chest, to pull it out. But her hand went limp and fell away.

  When had it all occurred, and where?

  Riggio didn’t know, but now he found himself looking in the rear-view screen on the console, in a car he had never seen before, a pale yellow Merkur that reeked of stale cigarette smoke. Cars and trucks receded on the screen as he passed and outdistanced them.

  With the auto-driver setting off, he was operating the vehicle by psi-link inside an environmentally sealed, six-lane tubeway. He didn’t like the optional automatic systems, preferred to mentally transmit his driving commands to sensors in the vehicle. It gave him more of a feel of the road. He rested his hands on a padded ledge in front of him.

  Traffic sped in both directions, with a divider between. His digital speed indicator hovered just below one hundred thirty miles per hour and he commanded the car to go as fast as it could. It shimmied, rattled and groaned. It was a sunny August day, and outside the clearplaz tubeway he could see farms, with non-polluting solar electric vehicles and farm implements in operation.

  Fragments of information surfaced in his mind. For half a century enclosed roadways like this had been in place all over the world, connecting the major cities, entertainment areas, and other places of interest. It was a complex arrangement involving oil companies who wanted to protect their profits, environmentalists, and the governments of Earth. In order to protect air quality, gasoline- and diesel-guzzling internal combustion engines were only permitted to operate inside the sealed highways. All vehicles were hybrids, so they were also capable of operating outside the tubeways on solargy power—using solar electric grid systems, with solar power stations to harness the energy of the sun and transmit it to vehicles within range.

  Not only did the sealed roads dramatically reduce hydrofluorocarbons and other pollutants in the air, they also enabled the oil companies to continuing making profits and to enhance them by recycling, since discharges were trapped inside the tubeways and could be recovered through air filtration and air scrubbing mechanisms. A 99.85% percent recovery rate was claimed, as the pollutants went back through the refinery process to become fuel again.

  Riggio knew all this and more, but oddly, his memory seemed to be compartmentalized. He had linguistic, social and historical knowledge, a broad range of information. But he possessed only sketchy information about himself. He felt like an observer of a man driving a car, and on his arms he saw deep scratches that he could not explain.

  He knew it was the summer of 2097 and someone dangerous was chasing him and catching up, going faster than this old car could go.

  Riggio kept looking in the rear-view screen on the console. Nothing visible yet. But soon, he sensed strongly, it would be.

  He grimaced at a lance of pain in his left shoulder. Opening his shirt, he saw a scar there, and it appeared to be completely healed on the outside. He touched it and felt a small amount of pain, which diminished quickly. Strangely, he couldn’t remember anything about this, or the scratches.

  A large purse lay on the floor on the passenger side, dumped open with a woman’s personal items strewn around. Riggio glanced only briefly in that direction in order to keep his eyes on the road. He was a skillful psi-link driver, and held in memory vague images of having outrun cars before. How many times and why? More than once, he thought, but did those incidents involve murder? He didn’t think so, did not feel like someone who would do anything like that.

  Putting the car on automatic for a moment, he leaned over and sifted through items on the floor and in the purse, wondering if they belonged to the murdered woman. There were various feminine items, including a nano-computer device that had customized makeup settings; somehow he knew that the unit was capable of crawling over a woman’s face and fine-tuning the tones and accents, making her look just right.

  Lifting the purse Riggio saw a man’s wallet beneath it, and a thick envelope with paper money sticking out. He thumbed through the money—there were thousands of dollars here, in both large and small denominations. Opening the wallet, he saw his picture on a driver’s license from the state of Florida.

  Florida? He didn’t remember being there at all.

  The name on the driver’s license was slightly different. Same first name, Riggio, but the last name was Tarizy, not
Demónt. From the date of birth, he calculated his age as twenty-eight, almost twenty-nine. That sounded about right, but he had no recollection of his own birthday. He also found a social security number in the wallet, but not on a card. It was written on a piece of paper in his own handwriting, with the notation “new SS #.” What did that mean? New? It was a mystery to him.

  The identification papers did not seem conclusive to him, and might even have been fabricated. But by whom? It all gave him an uneasy feeling.

  Now he flipped open a compartment in the center console, where he found folded sheets of crystal paper, along with pen-bots, a small box of coins, a big mag-gun, and a compact digi-cam. The gun was loaded, but the camera had no mem-card in it. He also found sealed medical patches and antibiotic ointment. Had he treated his own wound? Had the attacker injured Riggio when he tried to protect his lover?

  It was all a blank.

  The vehicle registration was inside the compartment, on a sheet of hard crystalloy. He held it near the steering bar to read it. The car was registered to William and Latrice Baldwin, with a Denver, Colorado address.

  Denver? Is that where he had been most recently? He couldn’t form an image of anything in that city. Was this the Baldwin’s car, whoever they were? Had it belonged to the dead woman and her husband? Had her name been Latrice?

  Perhaps, but none of it rang a bell. He slammed the compartment shut.

  On the back seat he also found a small canvas bag, containing what looked like a man’s toiletry bag, with a straight razor, a bottle of after-shave lotion, a sonic toothbrush and a can of generic shaving cream—shaving supplies that could be for a man’s face or a woman’s legs.

  He touched his own face, felt a rough stubble of beard. Were these his things?

  He looked at the rear-view screen again. No vehicles were behind him; at least not close enough to see. But he sensed strongly that a dangerous enemy was after him, and had found his trail.

  Were his feelings irrational? If a murderous fiend planned to harm him, wouldn’t he have finished the job back in the room? Wherever that hotel room was, maybe it had been a setup, with the killer trying to pin the crime on him—meaning cops were after him. Had Riggio touched the handle of the knife? He didn’t think so. Had the killer hit him over the head, and what about the shoulder injury, which appeared to have happened much earlier? With his free hand, Riggio explored the surfaces of his scalp, didn’t feel any unnatural lumps or pain. The fuzziness of the horrific memories bore some resemblance to a partially-recalled dream, but he sensed it wasn’t this at all. No, something really had happened in that room, and he needed to get as far away from it as possible.

  Did somebody set me up?

  A dark feeling came over Riggio that ultimately he had no one to blame but himself. Married women were dangerous. He knew that. They were someone else’s property—or at least perceived to be—with wedding rings like brands, notifying interlopers to keep their distance and approach only at peril.

  He took control of the car again. Slowing on a turn, he came out of it and again demanded acceleration. The Merkur rattled and shimmied and responded slowly, finally gaining speed on a downhill stretch. The vibration caused his shoulder to hurt.

  Riggio had no idea where he was, couldn’t recall seeing a Tube Patrol car for whatever state this was. He was speeding in what was probably a stolen vehicle, and he might as well have hung a bright orange sign on it: FUGITIVE.

  In which direction was he going? He knew only that he was rocketing into darkness, even though it was a bright, sunny day. The edge of the world could be just ahead, a drop-off at the end of the road.

  Got to slow down.

  There were more Tube Patrolmen near cities and towns, since cops needed bases of operations. He hadn’t seen any road signs since coming to awareness a few minutes earlier.

  He sent a mental command to slow down, and the digital speed indicator dropped, registering a little under the assumed speed limit of one-hundred miles per hour. Seconds later he spotted a green and white police cruiser parked at the side of the enclosed roadway, just ahead. He braked gently, dropping the speed even more, and reached into the compartment for the loaded mag-gun. It was heavy. The weapon was not his, but he knew how to use it.

  As he passed the cop he saw the red glow of a rooftop scanner tracking him. The cop didn’t flinch, didn’t give chase, and Riggio breathed a sigh of relief. Too close. He slipped the gun under his seat.

  Riggio had reached for the weapon almost instinctively the moment he saw the police car. Would he have shot the cop? It frightened him to think he might have. He envisioned a highway officer approaching his door from the side, black boots crunching on gravel, and the quick motion of hand and gun out of the driver’s-side window. Riggio’s hand and gun. Doing what he had to do, not what he wanted to do. In the vision, a burst of noise and flame issued from the large handgun’s barrel, and the cop fell backward, his face blown away.

  But I’m not a violent person, he thought. I could never do that!

  The vision ended, and a green and white sign loomed ahead:

  I-25 N / US-87 N

  He noticed a navigation screen on the dashboard, and mentally activated it. The screen showed that he was heading west in the state of Colorado. The nav-screen had numbers in the lower right corner:

  Seattle: 1168 miles

  Seattle? He’d programmed that as his destination? He had no recollection of doing so. What was so important that he had to drive all that way?

  Riggio knew he’d been to Seattle before, though he wasn’t sure when. The fuel gauge registered more than three-quarters full. Maybe he had stopped at a fuel depot in Denver. Why couldn’t he remember?

  CHAPTER 2

  Meredith Lamour didn’t like click chambers. She found them uncomfortable and disorienting, but they were the fastest way of getting around the solar system. These days they were relatively safe to use, since the technical bugs had been worked out. Quite a number of lives had been lost in the testing phase of the hyper-fast travel system—thousands, she’d heard—but there were few reports of any recent deaths. Nowadays it was medical emergencies for the most part. A small number of heart attacks, breathing problems, bleeding from the mouth, nose, or ears, and dizziness. But as long as people went through the required physical tests before entering a chamber and didn’t have underlying medical problems, they generally survived without incident.

  Meredith was a slender black woman in her late thirties, and though her skin was a beautiful, unblemished shade of ebony, she had Caucasian facial features. She worked out to stay in shape and was constantly being approached by men of all races who tried to strike up conversations with her.

  She’d been divorced for almost two years, though she’d kept her married name. Meredith told herself she did this because it was easier than going through the formalities of changing all of her identification documents, and making the notifications that were necessary to everyone that knew her under her married name. She always had a lingering thought, as well, that she still cared about her former husband, despite the terrible break-up in their relationship.

  Now, accompanied by a diminutive older man, she entered the clearplaz chamber and took a deep breath, as the doors closed and the craft began to hum. Her companion, Piers Johansen, was her boss, the wealthy man who owned the risk-management company where she worked. Both of them understood risks and how to reduce them, but in the case of a click chamber, its technology was far beyond anything they could even begin to understand.

  They were at the Barona City clickport on Jupiter’s rock-and-ice moon Callisto, far across the solar system from Earth. One of their clients had just completed the construction of a domed shopping complex there, and they had performed a careful inspection of the new facility, leaving the client with risk-management recommendations for improving safety and reducing his insurance premiums. He had been grateful. The Johansen firm was among the elite in their field, and Meredith was considered the best
of the best, an uber agent who was almost as intuitive and skilled as her boss.

  She had worked hard to get her advanced engineering and insurance degrees, and the job paid well, though at times like this she didn’t think it was enough. She didn’t like to bend time and space.

  The click chamber became silver-white inside, and then glowed pale orange as the tiny chamber hummed at a higher pitch, searching for the exact frequency that would link it to the great beyond. Click technology was a primal thing, linked to solar storms and flares, and to invisible energy emissions from the sun. She’d heard that scientists thought it was potentially even more significant than that, and that all the suns in the galaxy were linked to the very core of the universe, in such a manner that it might be possible one day to travel at ultra-high speeds to other, far-off star systems.

  The humming grew rougher and then connected with something, causing it to smooth out. She heard a series of crisp clicks, louder than usual. Forces pressed against her body, a feeling of compression that she always found uncomfortable. Meredith’s head and ears ached, and she closed her eyes. The pain intensified. In the passage through space now, she picked up a slight odor of sweetness, as she usually did. This was a common experience; others reported a variety of odors, even sensations of taste when they had not eaten anything, and unusual sounds in addition to the customary clicks. The process activated different senses in different people.

  Then it was over. The compression eased, the humming stopped, and the doors opened. The walls were white again. Meredith was about to step forward when she noticed that Piers Johansen was not doing well. He leaned against a wall, wasn’t saying anything.

  “Are you all right?” she asked, concerned about him. Piers had always been in good shape, but he was an old man.

  To her relief, he straightened and smiled. “That was a tough one,” he said. “I’m going to have to give up traveling that way.”