Dean R. Koontz - Starblood

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Dean Koontz – Starblood

[Scanned by BuddyDk – August 5 2003]

[Original typos hasn’t been corrected]

THE HOUND

entered the room, sensed Timothy's presence, made sure that he was the proper quarry. It fired three

pins.

Timothy slammed down on his mobility controls, streaked into the hall and down the cellar stairs. He

slammed the heavy door of the shooting range. It was monstrously thick, plated in lead. Even the Hound

would require time to break it down.

He floated along the cellars that stretched back into the mountain, ripping the paneling away from the

walls with his servos, and squeezing into the old part of the house.

Behind him, he heard the heavy door explode before the attack of the Hound . . . and ahead was a

cave-in, trapping him in this room, his pursuer no more than thirty feet behind.

He turned, and saw the Hound's sensors gleaming in the dim light . . .

STARBLOOD

DEAN R. KOONTZ

LANCER BOOKS

NEW YORK

A LANCER BOOK

STARBLOOD

Printed In the U.S.A.

DEDICATION: FOR DAD

LANCER BOOKS, INC. • 1560 BROADWAY

NEW YORK, N.Y. 10036

"There was no 20th century hallucinogenic so heinous as PBT—slang for Perfectly Beautiful Trip. We're

still plagued by it in this new century. The substance cannot be analyzed, and there is no known way to

break an addict of his habit Addiction leads to non-involvement with productive society, an early loss of

mental capacities, and too frequently, death. Many drugs, hallucinogenic and otherwise, seem to offer

rich rewards to their addicts, but if there is one person in the world who has ever gained from PBT, his

must be a singu-larly odd case indeed . . .” Address by Chief of Narcotics Bureau,

World Health Organization

“. . . a singularly odd case . . .”

PROLOGUE

Timothy was not human. Not wholly.

If you include arms and legs in a definition of the human body, then Timothy did not meet the

necessary criteria. If you count two eyes in that definition, Timothy was also ruled out, for he had but

one, and even that was placed in an un-usual position: somewhat closer to his left ear than a human eye

should be and definitely an inch lower in his overlarge skull than was the norm. Then there was his nose: it

totally lacked cartilage; the only evidence of its presence was two holes, ragged nostrils punctuating the

relative center of his bony, misshapen head. There was his skin: waxy yellow like some artificial fruit and

coarse with large, irregular pores that showed like dark pinpricks bottomed with dried blood. There

were his ears: very flat against his head and somewhat pointed, like the ears of a wolf. There were other

things which would show up on closer examination: his hair (which was of different texture than any racial

variant among the normal human strains), his nipples (which were ever so slightly concave instead of

convex), and his genitals (which were male, but which were contained in a pouch just below his navel and

not between his truncated limbs).

There was only one way in which Timothy was even re-motely human, and that was in his brain, his

intellect. But even here, he was not entirely normal, for his IQ was slightly above 250, placing him well

within the limits of “genius.”

He was the product of the artificial wombs, a strictly mili-tary venture intended to produce living

weapons: beings with psionic abilities who just possibly might bring the Asians to their knees. To a certain

type of military mind, the human body is little more than a tool to be used as the officer wishes, and such

were the men in charge of the wombs. When results like Timothy slid from the steamy chambers, gnarled

and use-less specimens, they shook their heads, ignored public con-demnation, and went on with their

mad work.

Timothy was placed in a special home for subhuman prod-ucts of the wombs, where it was expected

he would die within five years. It was in his third year there that they came to realize Timothy (he was the

T birth in the fifth alphabeti-cal series, thus his name) was more than a mindless vegetable . . . it happened

at feeding time. The nurse had been duti-fully spooning pap into his mouth, cleaning his chin as he

dribbled, when one of the other “children” in the ward en-tered its death throes. She hurried off to assist

the doctor, leaving Timothy hungry.

Due to the training of a new staff nurse that afternoon, he had inadvertently been skipped during the

last meal. He was ravenous now. When the nurse did not respond to his cater-wauling, he tossed about

on the foam mattress. Legless and armless as he was, there was nothing he could do to reach the bowl of

food that rested on the table next to his crib, pain-fully within sight of his one, misplaced eye. He blinked

that eye, squinted it, and lifted the spoon without touching it. He levitated the instrument to his mouth,

licked the pablum from it, and sent it back to the bowl for more.

It was during his sixth spoonful when the nurse returned, saw what he was doing, and promptly

fainted dead away.

That same night, Timothy was moved from the ward.

Quietly.

He did not know where they were taking him. Indeed, lacking the sensory stimulation afforded most

three-year-olds, he did not even care. Without proper stimulation, he had never developed rational

thought processes. He understood nothing beyond the basic desires of his own body: hunger, thirst,

excretion. He could not wonder where they were tak-ing him.

He was not permitted to remain ignorant for long. The military hungered for success (they had only

had two others) and hurried his development. They tested his IQ as best they could and found it slightly

above average. They were jubi-lant, for they had feared they would have to work with a psionically

gifted moron. Next, the computers devised an ed-ucational program suited to his unique history, and

initiated it at once.

They expected him to be talking in seven months: he was verbalizing in five weeks. They expected

him to be reading in a year and a half; he was quantitatively absorbing on a col-lege level in three months.

Not surprisingly, they found his IQ rising. Intelligence quotient is based on what an individual has

learned, as well as what he inately knows. When Timothy had first been tested, he had learned absolutely

nothing. His slightly above average IQ score had been garnered solely on that native ability. Excitement at

the project grew until Timothy no longer reached a meaningful IQ of 250. It was now eighteen months

since he had lifted the spoon without hands, and he was very nearly devouring books, switching from

topic to topic, from two weeks of advanced physics texts to a month of nineteenth-century British

literature. The military didn't care, for they did not expect him to be a one-field expert, merely educated

and conversant. At the end of eighteen months, he was both these things. The military turned to other

plans . . .

They coached his psionic abilities carefully. There were dreams in military minds, of Timothy

destroying the entire Asian Army with one psionic burst. But dreams are only dreams. The fact was soon

evident that Timothy's psi powers were severely limited. The heaviest thing he could lift was a spoon full

of applesauce, and his radius of ability was only a hundred feet As a superweapon, he was something of

a washout.

The generals were disappointed: after the initial paralysis wore off, they opted to dissect Timothy to

see what they could discover of his ability.

Luckily for him, the war ended.

The Bio-Chem people came up with the ultimate weapon. They released a virus on the Asian

mainland at roughly the same time the army was discovering Timothy's limits. Before the generals could

act on him, the virus had destroyed approxi-mately half of the Asian male population—it was structured

to affect only certain chromosome combinations that occured only in Mongolians—and had induced the

enemy to a reluc-tant surrender.

With peace, the wombs were put under the administration of the Bio-Chem people, and the project

was dissolved,

But the scientists were still fascinated with Timothy. For three weeks, he was exhaustively tested and

retested by his new masters. He overheard their discussions about “What his brain might look like . . .”

It was a rugged three weeks.

In the end a leak reached the press and the story of the horribly deformed mutant who could lift

spoons without touching them was a three-day sensation. The Veterans' Bureau, the largest bureau of the

now peace-oriented govern-ment, stepped into the uproar and took control of him. Sena-tor Kilby

announced that the government was going to “reha-bilitate” the young man, provide him with servo-hands

and a grav-plate system for mobility.

He was a three-day sensation again. And so was the politi-cally wise senator who took credit for his

rehabilitation . . .

CHAPTER 1

Timothy stood on the patio that jutted beyond the cliff and watched a flock of birds settling into the

big green pines which spread thickly down the mountainside. He was fasci-nated by nature because it

contained two qualities he did not —an intricacy of purpose and general perfection. As most normal men

are intrigued by freaks, so Timothy was in-trigued by the nature of normalcy. He directed his left

servo-hand to pull apart the branches obscuring his view of a particularly fine specimen. The six-fingered

prostho swept away from him on the grav-plates that cored its palm, shot forty feet down the

embankment to the offending branch, and gently pulled it aside so as not to disturb the birds. But the

birds were too aware: they flew.

Using his limited psionic powers, Ti reached into the two hundred micro-miniature switches of the

control module bur-ied in the globe of the grav-plate system that capped his truncated legs. The switches,

operated by psi power, in turn maneuvered his hands and moved him about as he wished. He recalled his

left servo now that the bird had gone. It rushed back to him and floated at his side.

He looked at the watch strapped to the servo and was sur-prised to find that it was past time for his

usual morning chat with Taguster. He flipped the microminiature switches and floated around and through

the patio doors, Into the some-what plush living-room of his house.

The house was the pivotal spot of his life, giving him com-fort when he was depressed,

companionship when he was lonely, a sense of accomplishment when his life seemed hollow. He had built

it with money earned from his two vol-umes of autobiography, a proud monument built over the ruins of a

Revolutionary War, pro-British secret supplies' cel-lar. It was maintained by the revenues from

Enterstat, the first stat newspaper devoted to gossip and entertainment, a project launched successfully

with the book monies.

He crossed the fur carpet and glided into the special cup-chair of his Mindlink set. Raising a “hand,”

he pulled down the burnished aluminum helmet and fitted it securely to his bony cranium (the helmet too

had been specially crafted). He used the other servo to flip the proper toggles to shift his mind into the

receiver in Taguster's living-room.

There was a moment of blurring when intense blacks and grays swarmed formlessly about him. It was

said that this was the moment when death tried to rush into the vacated body —and when the Mindlink

circuits dissauded it from claiming another victim as it wished. Then his consciousness flashed onto the

Mindlink Company's beam past thousands of other entities going to other receivers. In less than a

second, the blacks and grays swirled dizzily, then cleared and metamor-phosed into colors. The first thing

he saw through the receiver was Leonard Taguster lying dead against the wall . . .

For a moment, he attempted to break away from the artifi-cial brain blank and the camera eyes of the

receiver, tried to plunge back into the chiaroscuro world of the beam. Taguster simply could not be dead.

And if he were, then Ti simply could not admit it. There was, after all, no one else in his world, no one

with whom he might talk with ease, as equal; no one else who would easily understand him. After

Tagus-ter, there was only the house, and the house could not con-verse. Then the core of him, which had

survived so much in the past, gripped him and forced him to cease his childish flight from reality. He

settled firmly into the receiver again and looked out through the glass eyes of the cameras at-tached to

the brain blank.

No, Taguster was not dead. There was blood, surely, pool-ing about the concert guitarist's head, but

the same head was also moving, nodding in near unconsciousness, but nodding nonetheless. Ti operated

the voicebox of the machine, spoke in a mechanical harshness. “Lenny!”

Taguster raised his head a little, enough for Ti to see the thin dart buried half in his throat. Taguster

tried to say some-thing, but he could only manage a thick gurgle, like syrup splattering against the bottom

of a galvanized bucket.

Timothy felt a silent scream welling up inside him, heard it booming deep within him. A moment later,

he realized it was not silent, but given voice by the receiver. That frightened him, and he looked away

from the wounded body of his friend, trying to regain his wits. Darts? Who would want to kill Leonard

Taguster? And why hadn't they finished the job?

The musician made frantic noises, as if he desperately needed to communicate something. His head

bobbed, jerked, as convulsions hit him. Ti wished he had not looked back. Taguster's eyes were wide

open and brimming with tears. He knew he was dying.

Ti's mind swam inside the receiver, receding into the swirl of black and gray, then surging into color

and life again as his fear of retreating overcame his fear of remaining. He was fighting off inglorious panic,

and he knew it. But Taguster wanted to say something and that was the important thing to remember. But

how could that be accomplished, with the man's pale throat so horribly violated?

Taguster scrabbled a limp hand against the wall as if writ-ing without implement, and Ti got the idea.

He turned the head of his receiver around so that the cameras showed him most of the room. There was

a desk with various writing tools lying on it, a mere twenty feet away against the far wall. But a receiver

was not mobile—and Taguster could not move. Ti thought of retreating from the receiver and returning to

his own body, calling the police from his house. But Taguster's desire to communicate was too intense to

ignore.

Ti squinted eyes that he didn't have (the cameras could not rightly be called eyes, and his own single

orb was at home, lying lopsided in his irregular skull) and forced his psi energies to coalesce in the vicinity

of the desk. He reached out and toyed with the pencil. It flipped over and almost rolled onto the floor.

He doubled his effort, lifted it, and floated it across the room to where Taguster lay dying. He imagined

he was sweating.

Taguster picked the instrument up and held it as if he were not certain what it was. He coughed bright

blood, stared at that a moment. When Timothy urged him to write, he looked up blearily at the receiver

cameras, seemed to make an expression of assent . . . or pain. He wrote on the wall: MARGLE. The

letters were shaky and uneven, but readable. Then Taguster sighed, dropped the pencil. It made an eerily

loud sound as it clattered on the slate floor.

“Lenny!”

Timothy seemed to remember having heard the name be-fore, though he could not place the source.

However, he felt justified in slipping out of the set now to call the police. But as he was loosening himself

from the brain blank, someone screamed.

It was a woman; it came high and piercing, bursting out full strength and turning into a gurgle, trailing

away in sec-onds. It had come from the bedroom, and Ti tensed his mind and shifted into the bedroom

receiver extension.

It was a woman. She had been trying to get out of the win-dow, but her flimsy nightdress had caught

on the latch, delaying her one moment too long. There were three darts in her back. Blood dripped off

the frilly lace and onto the floor.

Ti had been working under the assumption that the killer had left. Now he shifted the camera to the

left and saw the murderer.

A Hound floated toward the doorway, twin servo-hands flying ahead of it, fingers seemingly tensed

as if to strangle someone. The dart tube on the burnished belly of the spheri-cal machine protruded,

ready. Here was the killer: thirty-odd pounds of ball-shaped computer that could track with seven

sensory systems.

And only the police should have one.

But why should the police want Taguster dead . . . and why should they choose such an easily traced

means of ob-taining his destruction?

The Hound disappeared through the doorway, suddenly reminding Ti that Taguster was back there in

the living-room, half dead. The Hound was returning to check on its work. Ti shifted his consciousness

into the main receiver again.

Taguster was in the same position, still gurgling. When the mechanical killer entered the room, the

dying man saw it.

Ti found a curio, a small brass peasant leading a brass mule, a handcrafted trinket Taguster had

brought back from a trip to Mexico. Lifting with his psionic power, he threw it at the Hound with all the

force he could muster. The toy bounced off the dully gleaming hide and fell harmlessly to the floor.

The Hound drifted toward Taguster, firing tube open.

Timothy found an ashtray, tried to lift it but could not manage. He cursed the limitations of his power.

Then he re-membered the gun on the desktop, lying opposite the pencils, heavy and ugly. He touched the

pistol psionically, but could not budge it. He pressed harder, eventually moved it slightly until the barrel

pointed directly at the Hound. Pulling the light wire of the trigger was easy enough. The gun spat a

narcodart that bounced off the beast with no effect other than to elicit a scanning by its sight receptors.

Then the Hound shot Taguster. Four times in the chest.

Timothy felt as if all his energy had been sucked out of him by an electronic vampire. He wanted only

to fold up, shrivel in upon himself, and slide home into his temporal shell where, at least, he could gain

succor from his books, his films, his house. But he could not let the Hound escape. He sent the cameras

swiveling in search of articles small enough for his talent to handle. He found a number of trinkets and

figurines and rained these uselessly upon the machine.

The Hound surveyed the chamber, perplexed, firing darts in the direction of the hurled souvenirs,

unable to discover its assailant. Then it turned a spatter of darts on the receiver head and floated out of

the room, out of the house and away . . .

CHAPTER 2

For a time, Ti remained in the living-room staring at Taguster's corpse. He felt too emotionally

weakened to move elsewhere. Memories flipped past his mind like a parade of liz-ards, tail flicking after

tail, cold claws sunk into his brain. With each came more realization that there would be no more

experiences with Taguster, no more conversations to be stored for later retrieval and reflection. What he

remembered now was all that he would ever have. When a friend dies, it is much like a candle flame

being snuffed—the warmth and brightness gone, leaving a vague recollection of what it had once been

like.He broke from Taguster's receiver and allowed his mind to flow into the Mindlink beam, through the

penumbra land-scape, back into his own body. He sat for a moment, re-gaining lost energies, and slowly

became aware of the tears welling out of his eye and running down his pallid, clammy skin. He was not

crying so much for Taguster as for himself —for the one thing he feared more than all else was loneliness.

Those days and nights when he had been hope-lessly immobile in the government hospital preyed on him

now. The forgotten terror of being unable to communicate was renewed and metamorphosed into

anguish. There were few men with minds as alert and as deeply structured as his own, few who could

possibly be close friends. Indeed, Taguster was the only one he had ever called friend . . . and now he

had no one at all.

The flow of his own tears finally forced him to lift the hel-met from his head and shut off the machine,

forced him to come to grips with the situation. If his greatest weakness was his almost irrational fear of

loneliness, then his greatest Strength was his ability to stand alone. His weakness and his strength were

two sides of one coin. He sat there, letting the tears dry on his face, and thought through the events of the

last half hour.

Ordinarily, he would have wasted no time in summoning the police. But it had been a Hound that had

murdered Taguster, and that was a distinct complication. If some—or any—legal authorities had

conspired to take the musician's life then it was madness to let them know there was a witness to their

murder. He had to know more of the story behind the killing, though he had nothing but a name: Margle.

He rose from the cup-chair and crossed the room, moved through a painting-lined corridor and into

the library he prized so much. He threw a toggle along the wall, next to the comscreen; a panel slid back,

revealing a computer keyboard, a direct line to the Enterstat computer. He punched out the letters of the

name and depressed the bar marked FULL DATA REPORT.

Thirty seconds later, a printed stat sheet popped out of the information receival slot and into the

plastic tray, glistening wetly. He waited a moment for it to dry, then reached with a servo and picked it

up, shaking it to release any static that might make it curl. He held it up and read it, blinking now and then

as a stray breath of the copying fluid drifted up-ward and stung his eye.

Klaus Margle. He was connected with the Brethren, the underworld organization that had

encroached on the territory once held sacrosanct by the older Mafia—and had finally de-posed and

destroyed the elder organization because it con-trolled the supply of PBT. PBT had replaced nearly all

other drugs and quasi-drugs in man's eternal quest to avoid the un-pleasantries of modern life. Since

gambling and prostitution had been dignified by liberalized laws, drugs had become the chief commodities

of the underworld. It was rumored that Margie was the chief Don of the intricate counterculture of

illegality, though this information could not be checked for authenticity.

Physically, he was six feet tall and weighed two hundred and eighteen pounds. His hair was dark, but

his eyes were a surprising baby blue. He had a three-inch scar along his right jawline: source unknown.

He was missing a thumb on his right hand: reason for amputation unknown. He believed in taking part in

the common dangerous chores of his organiza-tion; he would not send one of his men to do something he

had not once done himself—or would flinch from doing now. He was a man of action, not a

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摘要：

DeanKoontz–Starblood[ScannedbyBuddyDk–August52003][Originaltyposhasn’tbeencorrected]THEHOUNDenteredtheroom,sensedTimothy'spresence,madesurethathewastheproperquarry.Itfiredthreepins.Timothyslammeddownonhismobilitycontrols,streakedintothehallanddownthecellarstairs.Heslammedtheheavydooroftheshootingran...

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