Dark Genesis: The Birth of the Psi Corps Read Online Free PDF

thin but large, a mist hearing and feeling all within her. Spreading over them she felt their angry, stupid, piggy little minds. That one was mean because he had nothing else to be; that one wasn’t mean but did what he was told. She suddenly felt a cold, hard anger. Normals. She had watched the news reports, those smug bastards on the news shows, the yapping pundits. Look what they had done. People were dying all over the world because normals were stupid and afraid. She would give them something to be afraid of.
    The anger gave her strength, so when she stepped into the clearing , they saw more than a slightly built woman. They were standing around a Cortez four-wheel drive, drinking beer. Three of them. As if they were hunting deer. Their faces changed as they saw her, Kali, Gabriel, the skull and the sickle, the wings of the stooping hawk. They fumbled at their rifles as she calmly shot each of them in the head, delighting in feeling their dirty little minds wink out, vanish down the rabbit hole. Only the last one managed to fire, but he missed and she spattered him against the truck. Then it all sucked back in, blew the fire out, and she was hollow , without even enough muscle or tendon in her legs to stand. But she felt the ground shake as she collapsed to it.
    “Nice shootin’,” Monkey allowed.
    “What was the explosion?” Mercy asked.
    “That would be our temple,” Monkey said. “Sixty kilos of plastique.”
    “Oh, my God,” Mercy said. “Our followers …” She started to cry, and for once she was strong, her tears washing over them all.
    “Not anymore,” Monkey said, putting his arm under Blood’s and lifting her up. “That game’s over. It’s time to move on.”

CHAPTER 2
    Lee cheered along with everyone else when the actinic glare of a small, new star appeared above the Lunar horizon. The probe had actually been launched half an hour before, of course, from the ugly snout of the mass driver he could barely see poking up from the Von Braun Shipyard a kilometer away. While cost-efficient, a mass-driver launch offered no sound and fury, no glare of rockets. By long tradition, it was the first flash of the engines that signaled a successful launch. Still clapping and grinning, he turned to face the reporters.
    “I’d just like to say how gratified I am to be here,” he began, as the ruckus calmed to a general murmur. “I feel greatly privileged and enormously excited. There were those who said that this moment would never come that the curiosity that carried humanity from continent to continent and from world to world had begun to dwindle. Here is proof that they were wrong.”
    Hands shot up everywhere as he paused.
    “Well,” he said, “I had a longer speech planned, but you folks seem pretty eager.”
    He selected Robert Tanaka, one of the front row of reporters.
    “Bob? What can I do for you?”
    “I’d just like to know how it feels, Senator, to be vindicated. And what do you think the aliens will be like?”
    “Well, Bob, in keeping with the dignity being a senator of the Earth Alliance carries-ah, hell, it feels damn good.” He waited for the chuckles to float around. “But let’s keep this all in perspective. Our experience with tachyon emissions is mighty limited, and for all we know that signal the DeepProbe detected could have come from a natural source. But still, this is what I-and many others-have wanted for a long time. The DeepProbe network was put in place four years after tachyons were proven to exist. The Heimdal probe will upgrade the system at a bargain price, and I think one day-maybe sooner than you think-she’ll answer your second question.”
    “Thank you, Senator.”
    “Very welcome. What about you-Ms. Bochs, isn’t it?”
    “Yes sir, with Izvestia International. I was wondering how you respond to Senator Tokash’s recent statement that you have mishandled the telepath problem.”
    He felt the smile freeze on his face.
    “Well, I was hoping we could