Psion Gamma (20 page)

Once in the hub, he went to the bathroom and let Toad out in one of the stalls.

“Oh man . . .” Toad moaned, “This really, really sucks.”

“Do you want to switch?” Sammy asked testily. “Just ignore my legs hanging out of the bag. Maybe tell the other passengers you couldn’t afford a coffin.”

The layover was only fifteen minutes and the change in passengers was relatively small. The ride to Guatemala was short. Toad spent as much time as possible stretching his body out on the floor before they headed to Mexico City. Sammy badly wanted to sleep on this leg of the journey, but couldn’t relax enough to doze off. The only thing keeping his mind off Stripe was focusing on Wichita.

If I can find the resistance, I can get home.

Toad complained a lot in Mexico City about his legs cramping. Sammy had little patience for it. He almost had to force Toad back in the suitcase so they wouldn’t be late for the departure.

One stop in San Antonio. One stop in Dallas. Then Oklahoma City. Then we’re there.
He told himself this over and over as the rail car filled up to capacity and then moved off. Looking forward to Topeka, he started trying to think of ways to get from Topeka to Wichita without having to walk the whole distance. By the time they left Dallas, he still didn’t have a clue. The problem was that he couldn’t seem to hold a steady thought in his head for very long unless it involved Stripe or memories of horrific pain.

They hadn’t been moving for more than two minutes out of Dallas when the engineer’s voice came over the speaker system.

“Ladies and gentlemen, North-to-South Air Rails regrets to inform you of an unscheduled delay in the Oklahoma City hub due to small maintenance troubles. All passengers will be required to exit the rail car and allow our escorts to take you to a designated waiting area until the problem is resolved. A qualified technician will be at the hub on arrival. We expect only a twenty to thirty minute delay.”

Maintenance troubles, my eye
, he thought, sitting stiffly in his chair.
They’ve found me
.

Amidst the grumbles and empty complaints of the other passengers, he stood up, grabbed the suitcase out of the compartment, and set it on the floor. When he opened the luggage, Toad looked aghast at being exposed in his hiding place.

“Get out,” Sammy told him. “Did you hear it?”

Several people in the rail car stared at them, some in shock or interest, others in amusement, as Toad emerged from the suitcase.

“Hear what?”

Sammy told him about the announcement. “We can’t leave this to chance.”

Toad nodded his little head with a sniff. “Okay—okay—okay—I think I know what to do.”

“How do you know that?”

“From my dad. Um . . . can you do one of those special jumps like you did earlier? You know, back in that building?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay—okay. I think we can get out.”

Sammy followed Toad to the back of the car. Everyone aboard was watching now. On the ceiling was an emergency hatch about the size of a sewer cover. Toad pulled a red lever and several warning lights began blinking in the car. At least a dozen people cried out in anger.

A soft alarm beeped and the engineer came out from the front to investigate. He was a fat little man with thinning hair. When he saw them at the hatch, he started running to them.

“Get in your seats! You have no business being back here!”

They ignored him.

“You two are breaking the law, and I am ordering you to sit down!”

Sammy helped Toad climb out the hatch.

“You stay right there or I’ll shoot you, kid!” the man said.

Sammy saw that he was holding a small concealable handgun. It was laughable.

“You’re not going to fire that in a car full of people,” he told the man.

The engineer cocked his gun, but Sammy blast-jumped, grabbed onto the ledge of the exit, and pulled himself up and out. Beneath him, he heard the angry yells of the engineer and the murmurs of astonishment from the passengers.

Toad closed the hatch under them, sealing them off in the tube on top the rail car. Air howled around them, whipping their hair and clothes with dangerous force. From his crouched position, Sammy looked and saw that every couple kilometers was a bright colored circle. Toad pointed at them.

“These holes let the air out of the tube. We have to jump through one of them!”

Sammy shook his head. “No way! It’s too fast. I can’t time it right!”

“I can. Trust me!”

“I don’t trust you!”

A banging sound came from below them as the engineer knocked on the hatch. Sammy looked at Toad, who seemed scared but also surprisingly confident.

“Fine. But you better not kill us!”

Sammy watched the circles fly by at regular intervals. Toad ticked off each beat with a finger perfectly. They had only a few centimeters clearance above their heads, even crouching as they were. It was terribly cold, and Sammy’s eyes were now watering from the constant wind.

Toad gave a thumbs-up, then began ticking down each circle.

Five
. . . 
Four
. . . 
Three
. . .  
Two
. . .  
ONE!

Sammy launched himself and Toad from the top of the rail car and they sailed up through the top of the tube. Some type of thin metal screen covered the hole, but they broke through it cleanly. Sammy scrambled to grab onto the ledge of the giant tube and almost lost his grip, but Toad let go and snagged on with perfect timing. With two hands free, Sammy used his other arm to secure his grip and pull himself up.

It was colder here than Rio, and the sun was setting over the tops of the trees of a wooded area that stretched as far as Sammy could see from the top of the tube. From what his jumbled brain could remember about geography and the maps he had studied, he guessed they were in the northern part of the Territory of Texas. Not too far from the Dallas hub.

Yee-haw
.

He used his blasts to help them get safely onto solid ground.

“Okay, now what do we do?” Toad was already shivering and stamping his feet.

Sammy didn’t answer right away. The only thing he knew for sure at the moment was that they had to go north. “We run and hide.”

March 5, 2086

C
OMMANDER WROBEL SAT BEHIND HIS DESK
filling out the ridiculous forms that never stopped coming. He paused from his work to crack his knuckles and rub his temples.

Despite being a member of Psion Command since its inception over ten years ago, Wrobel had the worst job of any Psion. He was the Beta-Alpha liaison. Commander Wrobel had something to do with anything that connected Betas or Alphas to each other or the outside world. When Psion Betas were deemed ready to graduate, he organized the Panel, the mission, and the ceremony. He selected which Alpha squadron a Beta should go into. If the Beta had excellent tactical skills, he sent them where a tactician was needed. If the Beta was good at weapons and demolitions, he found a place for that one, too. When Alphas needed new arms or ammunition, Wrobel signed off on the orders. When the food shipments came to Beta or Alpha headquarters, he signed those forms.

Forms. Forms. Forms.

He glanced at the art piece hanging on his wall—an oil painting of Sisyphus rolling his giant stone up a hill. He’d had that commissioned over six years ago during a particularly dark season of his life, and he’d paid handsomely for it. Claire had been a fan of Greek and Roman mythology. In fact, she’d learned Greek and Latin in her spare time. He doubted Walter remembered that little fact.

He dragged a finger angrily over his screen and enlarged several more files to review so he wouldn’t have to squint to see them. The next order of business for the day was reading over contract offers for explosive providers for the next fiscal year.

Riveting
.

A little red box popped up in the corner of his screen. Wrobel swore and hurried to save his work. Then his computer instantly turned off, and he bent under his desk to disconnect a wire from his hyper-drive, reconnecting it to a small black box no bigger than a domino. The small box was well-concealed in a corner underneath his desk. His computer came back online with a flashing red text on an otherwise blue screen:

Transmission incoming.

Beneath the message was a countdown from nine. When the countdown reached zero, the transmission went live. On his screen, Commander Wrobel saw the ugliest face he’d ever seen in his life. Severe burns had left the head completely bald and pitted. The face was mutilated with thick deep scars that would never lose their red tinge. One particularly nasty scar ran from the right side of the chin, across the lips, leaving them split and twisted, up into the nose where the left nostril was completely missing, and into a hollow pit where his right eye should have been.

“Diego, you handsome devil,” Wrobel said. “To what do I owe this pleasure?”

Diego’s voice was high and raspy and the lower lip twitched badly when he spoke, probably from all the screwed up nerve endings. Worse than that, however, was the empty eye socket twitching each time he blinked. It made Wrobel queasy.

“I just spoke with the fox.”

Wrobel maintained his composure, but a wave of fear washed over him. Diego held a special place in the Thirteen hierarchy. He was supposedly one of few people who knew the location of all the Thirteen cells, as he acted as a sort of switchboard operator between them all. If a cell needed to get in contact with another, they went through Diego. He also was the only person Wrobel knew of who had regular direct contact with the fox.

Commander Wrobel had a pretty good grasp of the Thirteen organization after his dealings with them over the last few years. But the fox was still like the boogey man. People rarely dropped his name, but when they did, Wrobel knew there was some serious crap flying around. The fact that Wrobel had gotten a call from Diego immediately after Diego spoke to the fox . . . that was bad news.

“Samuel Berhane is alive.”

Wrobel’s stomach dropped, and he let out a very pretty curse. “That’s—” He was going to say
that’s impossible
, but he knew better. Diego. The fox. These people don’t tell jokes. He swore again. “Whose fault is that? Mine?”

“The fox isn’t assigning blame to you at the moment. But I assure you, there’s plenty to go around.”

“I told you in November that I couldn’t confirm his death. I recommended that you send in a full team to sweep the factory!” Wrobel’s breathing quickened as his temper flared up. “You didn’t listen to me!”

Diego snarled as a nasty chuckle gargled from his throat. “That shouldn’t surprise you. We lost a whole cell in Rio. Around here we call that a debacle. You’re telling me I should have trusted your word after one of your teams wiped out a whole cell?”

“I warned you in my report that the kid was dangerous!” Wrobel was yelling and he didn’t know why. He pulled his collar away from his neck which suddenly felt very warm. His large index finger pointed back at Diego. “You check it. I wrote that!”

“Shut it, Fourteen,” Diego drawled. “Just shut it. Here’s the straight point. Your kid is out. Fell into a hole in the floor that went straight down into the basement.”

“Your cleanup crew got lazy.”

“I sent in three Aegis to do the job a week after the battle. They didn’t find a body, so they got out fast. They thought you were setting them up for another ambush.”

Wrobel laughed an off-kilter chuckle. “Ironic. Psion Command thought the same thing about you.”

 “You don’t understand, yet. It gets worse. We created a new cell and moved them down to Rio in December. The next month, Aegis picked up a kid downtown on a questionable complaint. They held him in an interrogation room for two months with no idea who he was. The kid insisted his name was Albert Choochoo. We had one of our best interrogators down there. The kid got loose and turned on the interrogator. Poured torture creams all over him and down his throat. Then he killed eight more on his way out the door. Got a picture of him on a surveillance camera leaving the building.”

Diego held a picture up so Wrobel could see it, but the commander had to really squint to make out what was going on. It was Samuel—Samuel and someone else the commander didn’t recognize.

“Holy—”

“Now you see why I’m coming to you.”

Wrobel shook his head to himself.
Byron. Byron knows about this and hasn’t told anyone.
He thought of Claire again. He thought of Sisyphus.
Later, Victor. Later.
This was worse than filling out forms. He cracked his knuckles again and shook the stiffness out. “So what am I supposed to do about it? You want me to fly to Rio and find the kid?”

“The kid isn’t in Rio,” Diego snarled. The angrier he grew the more his eye socket twitched. “We tracked him to an air rail hub, and he bailed out in Texas, north of Dallas.”

Wrobel didn’t know much about Texas. And he wanted to keep it that way. “Excuse me for a second.” He stood and went to the small water fountain on the back wall near the door to his private restroom. It was a small chrome bowl polished to a high shine. The jet of water was nice and strong, the way he preferred it. He swallowed a large mouthful and felt three drops splash onto his shoe.

Drip. Drip. Drip.
It was Claire’s voice he heard in his head, not his own.
Sounds like this whole place has a bad plumbing problem.

He rejoined Diego at the computer screen with a friendly smile.

“Where were we?”

Despite the difficulty in reading Diego’s face, Wrobel could see that the Thirteen’s expression was one of pure anger. “This problem is yours, you realize that?”

Wrobel disagreed with a simple gesture of his hand and a long blink.

“Your job was to fix the mission.”

“I put everything on the line for that, too, didn’t I?” Wrobel’s patience snapped like a brittle bone. “I flew out there myself and gave you information as a gesture of good faith. The fox told me he wanted Samuel, so I handed you his head on a plate. Your men screwed this up—
your
people. If you can’t handle less than a dozen kids, then that’s your problem. I’m not cleaning up this mess.”

“The fox says you will.”

Wrobel’s fury died like a candle being snuffed out in a hurricane. He swore silently. The fox says this. The fox says that. He couldn’t do anything but say yes. “Fine. But I want that number this time.”

Diego laughed. It wasn’t a pretty sound, an awful mix of a grunt and water being sucked down a pipe.

Sounds like this whole place has a bad plumbing problem,
Claire’s voice said again.

Wrobel buried his anger. Long ago, his psychologist had told him he shouldn’t do that, but he’d done it anyway. For years he’d buried his feelings one grave at a time, until he’d become a mental cemetery.

“Listen to me, Diego. I said I’d take the job. I asked for her to be in on this clear back in November. You said no. Now look where we are. Same situation; different place. If you want this done, you give me that number I asked for last time.”

“You wiped out a whole cell in Rio,” Diego growled. The deep scars grew redder as he got madder. “Now you’re demanding the Queen’s number?”

“That cell was wiped out because you didn’t listen to me!” Wrobel let his voice rise, now undaunted by Diego’s status with the fox. Enough was enough. “You know what happened there. Give me the number and I’ll be out of your . . . hair.”

An animal-like shriek came from Diego’s mouth as he whipped a knife out of his belt and took a long lick of the blade. Wrobel watched with disgust and fascination. Diego punched numbers into an unseen console.

“There!” he screamed with frothy red spit flying from his mouth and more blood pooling on his lips. His voice was almost all rasp now. “If I ever see you in person, this knife will be in your back. I don’t trust your loyalties, no matter what the fox says. You have now sent two dozen of our men to their deaths, Newgie filth.”

“Thanks. But if you’re so mad, why insist on always winking at me?”

As another terrible, murderous screech rang out, Wrobel pushed two buttons, and the screen went blank again. Grinning to himself, he rubbed his lips in thought. Was he doing the right thing, bringing the Queen into this? Rumor was that no one bested her in tracking. She was impeccable, her ruthlessness unmatched. He’d also heard some call her a wild card. But she was in the fox’s inner circle.

His fingers hovered over the keyboard.

What are you doing, Victor? Bringing in these animals to kill a kid? Who are you?

Victor’s hands shook, and he had to get up for another drink. His mouth felt like he’d been sucking on a sponge.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

Suddenly Wrobel was back in the sewers. Water was dripping around him like a thousand leaking faucets.

“Drip,” Claire said as she and Wrobel crept through sewer pipes large enough they barely needed to bend over. “Drip. Drip. Drip. Sounds like this whole place has a bad plumbing problem.”

“Tell me about it,” Wrobel responded. “My waterproof boots are already water logged.”

Walter’s voice came over the radio. “Check-in please.”

In succession, the Psion team checked in over their mikes. Blake Weymouth was one. Emily Byron was two. Victor Wrobel, three. Claire Greenwall, four. Muhammad Zahn, five. Annalise Havelbert, six. Jason Ling, seven.

“I have everyone’s position on GPS,” Byron said. “Claire and Victor, you are closest to the refugees. Move in.”

“Moving in,” Claire replied. She looked to Wrobel and winked. “Beat you to it.”