Seasons of Murder: In the Shadow of This Red Rock by John Wiltshire

Author:John Wiltshire [Wiltshire, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: gay romance, Science Fiction
Goodreads: 30060236
Publisher: MLR Press LLC
Published: 2016-05-20T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

Zero had barely been in bed for more than an hour when he was jerked out of a half-asleep, half-awake doze by the searing terror of an anguished mind, and he realised his life had only just begun to get complex.

This time he was not in the mind of the killer. He was hearing the agonised thoughts of a victim—someone in horrendous physical torment. The awareness was tangled in layers of consciousness, all jumbled and confused, but overlaid with the terrible certainty of pain. Zero was paralysed by the intensity. He had lived with people who whispered thoughts, mindful, polite. This was a human mind-scream on full, petrified, desperate, and hopeless send, and it was like standing next to an engine on maximum power, gears grinding and screeching, hot metal smoking. He tried to stand but wobbled helplessly to the floor.

With an effort of will that nearly tore him in two, he began to project back. It was like standing in the face of a Martian dust storm, knowing it was about to obliterate him, but not running. He desperately wanted to pull away from this tormented mind, put his walls up and stay safe behind them, but instead he stood his ground and curled around the agony, dulling it where he could, taking it upon himself and flooding the tortured consciousness with other images—anything he could conjure: the vast, towering cliffs of Mars at sunset, bright stars seen from a world with no ambient light. He swamped the dying man’s thoughts with storybook visions of a perfect life after this one. He lost awareness of time. It could have been minutes or an hour when it all just…stopped.

For one awful moment, Zero thought he would be sucked down through the final door and into death itself. He teetered on the brink then broke away.

It was over and he was free.

He was sweating and shaking uncontrollably. He began to drag himself along the floor to the tiny bathroom. He held it in until he got there, but then vomited, and kept doing so until there was nothing left but raw misery and red eyes and a throat that he could hardly croak out of.

§§§

Cal spent the first few hours of the night reviewing the details that he had for the unfortunate Titan colonist who had been so savagely and inexplicably murdered. He had requested them some hours before, but the communication delay from Titan meant they had only just arrived at his comms station via the lasers. He sat in his tiny office and scrolled through the very short bio. Graham Nash had been born on Titan forty years previously and had been a forerunner in the nuclear fission programme that served the power requirements of the entire colony. He seemed an uncontroversial scientist with no family and no history that would put him in the sights of a killer. No one who had known him amongst the colonists on board had noticed anything unusual about the man. He

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