Mischief by Dei
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Mischief


Prologue - Low Pressure
         
"Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.
                          -Jesse Berst




    Not everyone gets his face on the front cover of Newsweek Magazine on two consecutive weeks. Glimpsing the picture, a stark black-and-white head-shot of himself in birdstyle, Jason kicked himself for not arriving in the kitchen earlier-- no-one had ever persuaded Mark to part with a magazine before he had read every word. Jason glowered at Mark, willing him to look up. Mark absently reached across the table for a bagel, not once raising his eyes from whatever article it was that held his attention. Sighing, Jason decided that making a large, elaborate Spanish omelet would be the best way of unobtrusively passing the time. Tiny would eat whatever he left.
    He went over to the knife-rack and tested the blade on each knife. Finding none he liked, he selected one and started sharpening it. As he drew the knife over the sharpener, he wondered about the article, whether it would be anything like last week's. Last week's cover had featured him holding a slim trophy aloft, grinning madly. The occasion had been his triumph at the 50th Intergalactic Invitational Race, held on Ameris. He smiled. The article had gone on about his youth (nineteen, pushing twenty), the fact that he was only the fifth Terran to have ever been invited and the speed record (by only about 7 minutes, but still) he had set. He paused and inspected the blade critically, then chose and started honing another knife.
Not all the comments had been good. Most of the other racers had been good sportsmen and it had been easy to be blind and deaf to the glances and mutterings of those who weren't. The press conference had been another matter. Especially when the reporters kept asking if he was afraid of burning out, how he felt about having already achieved what was usually the crowning glory of a distinguished career, if he would be leaving for a bigger racing team... The shadows of the anger he had felt then started making his stomach knot and he shook his head as if to clear the memories away.
He tested the blade again. Satisfied with the sharpness of this knife, he started to chop an onion.
    "Shit."
    Jason nearly cut his fingers in shock. He looked back over his shoulder at Mark.
Mark was staring at the magazine as if repelled yet fascinated by what he saw; frowning so that two vertical lines appeared between his knitted brows. A hand was lifted to his forehead as if to push his hair back - bad sign.
Wiping his hands on his jeans, Jason went over to Mark and peeked over his shoulder. "What's the matter?"
    Silently, Mark pointed to a picture. In it Mark was receiving an award from President Kane. He was smiling, as were Kane and the dark-suited dignitaries in the background. A smaller inset showed Spectran prisoners-of-war being led off to a prison transport. Standard publicity stuff. Jason shrugged, though the caption  ('The Hype') puzzled him slightly.
    "So?"
    Mark turned the page.
    Had an award for 'Year's Most Tasteless Picture' existed, the two-page spread would have made it to the finals. Dead goons or more accurately, bits of dead goons lay strewn over a courtyard of sorts, a garish study in red, green and black. Starting from the twisted heaps of man and metal at the periphery, the eye was irresistibly drawn towards the more sharply focused center, pausing to note details in the carnage - still-smoking pools of molten asphalt. A severed hand still clutching a gun.  A charred mass made human only by the gray-white gleam of a protruding bone - and stopped at the very center.
Like a fallen angel, Mark stood at this center, the white of his cape nearly obscured by the blood, dirt and soot.

    This caption read 'The Reality'.

 
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