Psion Gamma (44 page)

“I’d rather be able to look back and say I did everything I could to be with you than live with the regret of never taking a chance.”

“We can’t be together,” he said in a husky voice.

“Why? How can you say that?” Jeffie asked, spilling her milk on the table as she stood up. “We’re not going to end up like them. We’re not them. You’re the smartest person I’ve ever met!”

“Not anymore. I’ve lost it. My anomaly is gone.”

“It can’t just be gone,” Jeffie said, but something in the desperate edge to his voice scared her.

“There was this man, an Aegis . . .” He swallowed hard, as if the name was difficult for him to say. “I called him Stripe. I was caught and—and he tortured me . . .”

Jeffie gasped aloud and covered her mouth. Sickness reared up in her stomach and she wondered if he was concealing scars under his clothes.

“. . . for two months.” Again Sammy seemed on the verge of losing control over his emotions. Seeing him like that broke Jeffie’s heart. “When I escaped, I noticed it almost immediately and ever since then . . .”

“Noticed what?” she asked.

“That I couldn’t
see
—you know what I mean. No matter how hard I’ve tried, it hasn’t come back. I’ve fought Thirteens, and—and some of them have been better than me. I relied on my anomaly too much. I never really developed the skills that I taught Al to do—real fighting skills. Even fighting them one-on-one. There was this one—a woman—I’ve never seen anyone move the way she did. So fast and agile. She was unlike any Thirteen I’ve met, and truthfully, Jeffie, I’m scared of her. Toad jumped in front of her gun. I should be dead.” The hollowness in his eyes was more pronounced than before as he banged his fist on the table. “Toad shouldn’t be dead! I should be dead!”

Jeffie was silent. There was no other sound in the room besides their breathing. The things Sammy said scared her, too, and it was magnified by his voice. It was far away and thin, like a child wandering in a desolate place. The light in his eyes had faded away completely.

“I’m just—I’m tired. I need to sleep.” He yawned, and Jeffie suspected it might be fake, but she said nothing. When he made to leave, she went to him, cutting him off.

“Where are you supposed to sleep?”

“In Brickert’s room. Apparently he’s had it all to himself for the last six months.”

“Lucky.”

“Yeah.”

Then what she wanted to say all along came out: “Please don’t go, Sammy.
Please
. Stay here. I don’t want you to leave yet, especially if you might not be here again tomorrow. We don’t have to talk. We can just sit and I’ll hold you if that’s what you want. I’ll do anything you want. Just stay with me for a little longer.”

She knew he would give in. Every time she’d begged him to stay up later, he did. He just couldn’t say no to her.

“I can’t.” And she saw in his eyes he meant it.

Crestfallen, Jeffie refused to be in a bad mood. Not with Sammy back. Maybe he just needed her to stay positive, to be his source of happiness until he found it inside himself again.

“Okay—okay. I hope you sleep well.” Then she added, “Are you going to spend some time with the others later?”

“What do you mean?”

Jeffie rolled her eyes. “Duh, Sammy. Everyone’s going to want to see you, touch you, make sure it’s actually you. We thought you were dead for the last six months.”

“Oh,” he answered, nodding slightly to himself. “Was there a funeral, or something like that?”

“No, which all of us thought was funny for a while. Brickert made it out to be some sort of conspiracy theory,
I’ll tell you
.” She chuckled lazily at her little joke.

Sammy looked straight at her. “And you? What’d you think?”

The mirth vanished from Jeffie’s face. Her voice became quieter as she spoke. “I didn’t believe it for a while . . . but I don’t know—sometime—at some point—I did. Guess I’m not as stubborn as you always thought.”

“There’s nothing wrong with letting go,” he responded in a tone she didn’t like. He looked at her in a funny way, and for a second she thought he was going to stay after all. But then he gave her a wave and left the cafeteria.

Jeffie watched the doorway for a long time after he left, hoping he might come back. She could barely remember why she had even come up there in the first place. Then she saw the spilled milk on the table. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t needed now. There was no way she was going to sleep tonight.

She grabbed a few cloth napkins and cleaned the spill, then tossed them in the bin. After turning out the cafeteria light, she headed for the exercise room. Farther down the hall, she heard a door close. It sounded like the door to the fourth floor stairs.

“Hello?” she called out. “Sammy?”

The footsteps continued toward her, but she couldn’t see anything in the darkness. She reached around the wall of the exercise room and fumbled for the light switch. When she turned it on, she screamed.

There was a loud sound followed by a sharp pain in her chest, but by the time she hit the floor, everything had gone dark.

* * * * * * *

Commander Wrobel surveyed the girl’s body on the floor for only a moment, then stepped over it.

“Queen,” he spoke to his com.

After a brief wait, the other line answered.

“What do you want?” the Queen asked. She sounded as if she had a cold and was speaking to a piece of dirt under her nails.

“I’m in the Beta facility. I have access to Samuel.”

“You can’t be serious. How did you get past the security?”

Wrobel crossed the floor to the stairs as he spoke. “Commander Byron trusts too much in his system. I put a nasty virus into a file I sent him a couple days ago. Your people have been working on it for months. It gives me access to everything. Do you still want to kill Samuel?”

“If you’re there now, why don’t you do it yourself?”

“I asked you if you want to kill Samuel.” Wrobel reached the first floor and scanned himself into the boys’ dormitory. “I want a yes or no.” He didn’t care about pushing her too hard. He knew enough now about her personality from dealing with her over the last weeks to guess what her answer would be.

After a pause of several seconds, she said, “It would bring me great pleasure to kill him.”

“Then you’d better be willing to do it on my terms.” He eye-scanned a second door, this one with the word PLACK above it in red lights. “Are we agreed?”

The room was silent except for the sounds of two boys sleeping soundly—one on a top bunk, the other beneath. Wrobel fired two shots. The first hit Samuel, the second hit the boy named Plack.

“Do I get to hear the terms first?” the Queen asked.

“No,” Wrobel said. He dragged Samuel’s body across the bed and slung him over his shoulder, grunting under the weight.

“You’d better have something good planned,” the Queen said. Wrobel could practically hear her smiling. “I’m in. Give me the terms.”

May 5, 2086

A
SMALL COUGH
was the first thing Sammy heard. It reached him like static coming from a dying speaker, tinny and stale. He knew it was a cough, but he didn’t care where it came from or who’d done it. Wherever he was felt so comfortable and warm, any type of concern was far from his mind. He smiled to himself, noticing distantly that a pillow was not beneath his head.
No big deal
. He adjusted his head slightly, but still found no pillow.

Undeterred that this rest would be a good one, he absentmindedly swung his arm up to feel for the pillow, his mind still hooked into the wonderful dream in which he was immersed. The arm did not move as well as he had hoped, in fact, it did not move at all. Sammy enjoyed the dream a bit more as footsteps went by his head. Sammy grinned vaguely.

Someone was humming in the background. That was nice. Sammy liked a good hum every now and then. But his dream began to melt away, and he did not want that. Not when everything felt so warm and good. He wanted it to stay that way. The humming and footsteps quickened the melting process.

Sammy reached for his pillow again, but once more found himself unable to move his arms.

“I’ve got the Beta,” a voice said somewhere close by. It was a nice voice. “Everything is in place for you to pick up the Alpha. He’ll be where I told you. Don’t worry, I’ve arranged it.”

In an instant, he was back to reality. The bindings around his arms and legs were very real. Gone was the comfortable warm sensation, and in its stead was the harsh carpet Sammy recognized as belonging to a cruiser. It was rough and punishing, the pebbles embedded in the fabric dug into Sammy’s cheek. He lay very still and kept his eyes closed, waiting for the footsteps again so he could get a better bearing on his surroundings.

“Stop pretending you’re asleep.” The familiar voice had none of the charm Sammy had heard in it before.

He did not open his eyes.

“I know how long my doses of sedatives last. I’d give you more, but that’d be approaching the danger zone, which is not what I want.”

Sammy refused to play along. He did everything he could to make it seem that he was still asleep. As he did so, he concentrated on the bindings, realizing strong metal cuffs bound his wrists and ankles together.

He heard two quick steps on the carpet, then a crushing weight hit his stomach. The air left Sammy’s chest, accompanied by a fleeting sensation of panic as his lungs seemed to quiver from the force of the blow. After a couple of failed attempts, he managed to suck in oxygen, restoring calm to his brain. Reluctantly, he opened his eyes. Commander Wrobel stood over him.

“Thank you, Sammy. It’s insulting to treat people like they’re dumber than yourself, even if they are.”

Sammy didn’t respond. He was trying to figure out a way to remove himself from the situation. His eyes slowly moved around the cargo space to find something that could help him.

“I haven’t underestimated you,” Wrobel said, watching him. “There are no weapons here. Nothing you could use against me, either. Don’t recognize where you are? Tsk. It’s the same cruiser you took to Rio.”

“Why don’t you just kill me?” Sammy asked. “Why all this?”

Wrobel looked at Sammy with disappointment. “I’m not a killer, Sammy. Not like some in our ranks.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean just that.” Wrobel squinted at the controls of the cruiser, probably checking the auto-pilot. “I have never taken a life, not even in battle.”

“Then what do you call this?” Sammy asked him, struggling against his restraints. “Are you crazy?”

Wrobel’s heavy boot came crashing into Sammy again, this time punishing his thighs and knees.

“You have no idea, you little bastard!” he screamed. “Just because someone acts sanctimonious, it doesn’t mean anything! You don’t have a clue what’s going to happen to you!” He kicked Sammy twice more, scaring more than hurting him now that his legs had gone numb. “I am not going to kill you.”

Wrobel stopped kicking and went back to the pilot’s chair.

“Walter Byron is going to kill you.”

Sammy looked at Wrobel as though he really were mad. “That’s impossible.”

“You wait and see . . . You just wait.”

A beep from the cruiser console distracted Wrobel. Sammy kept searching for something to help him.
That might do it
, he decided when he saw a small fire extinguisher about a meter away mounted low on the wall.

“You’ve never been to Baikonur, have you?” Wrobel asked, his voice now quite pleasant.

“No.” From his geography instructions, Sammy knew Baikonur was the NWG Space Organization’s main launch site. No doubt the Artemis shuttle would be taking off from there.

Commander Wrobel smiled and steered the controls of the stealth craft.

“Hasn’t the launch been postponed?” Sammy asked.

Wrobel snorted. “Do you have any idea how much it costs to launch a space mission with hundreds of people on board?” As he talked, Sammy slowly rocked his body in the direction of the fire extinguisher.

“No idea.”

“Lots. They won’t be rescheduling. They’ll beef up security, monitor satellites and aerial stations, and consider themselves safe. Congress doesn’t consider information from a fifteen-year-old kid to be worthy of changing the date of a moon launch.”

“What time is the launch?” Sammy asked, moving centimeter by centimeter toward his target.

“1700,” Wrobel answered.

“And when is Byron supposed to kill me?”

Wrobel glanced very seriously at Sammy and went back to his controls. “Shortly after.”

“Going to be kind of hard, don’t you think?” Sammy asked, nearly halfway to his goal. “Seeing as how he’ll be busy if the Thirteens attack.”

“You’ll be surprised how things work out.”

“And what’s your role in this?”

“Let that be a surprise, too.”

“I don’t get it, though,” Sammy said, willing to say anything to keep Wrobel’s mind occupied while he got into position. “Byron saved my life, why would he kill me?”

Wrobel did not answer. Sammy wasn’t sure if it was because he was concentrating on flying or because he had nothing to say.

He rocked his body a little more.

“Walter killed three people several years ago,” Wrobel began. Again his voice was void of all charm or emotion. A dead man talking. “We were in the sewers in CAG territory trying to rescue refugees when the Thirteens attacked us. My fiancée was there with us. Her name was Claire. She wasn’t the greatest warrior on our squad, but she had many talents. Walter had split us up into two teams, the eight of us. One team to escort groups of refugees to the cruisers, the other to keep watch on the rest. Claire was in the watch group with me, Emily, and Blake Weymouth. Have you heard of Blake Weymouth?”

Almost there,
Sammy told himself.
Slow and steady.
“No, I don’t know of him.”

“Because he’s dead,” Wrobel stated. The deadness in his voice fell to a new level. “Blake Weymouth could beat the living tar out of any man on this planet. He fought like a god among children. Watching him fight was like watching music being composed before your eyes. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen . . . except for Claire.”

Wrobel’s voice broke and he glanced back at Sammy, glaring. The hate on his face put a healthy measure of fear in Sammy’s heart.

“The Thirteens came. We fought them in that little sewer. We called for help, for Byron’s team to get back and save us, outnumbered three to one, trying to fight against the enemy and protect the refugees at the same time. I’ve never been anything but an average soldier—I admit that. My strengths lie in tactics and planning. Had it not been for Emily and Blake, I’d be dead, too. Instead, I watched as everyone else around me died.”

Wrobel’s empty eyes bored into Sammy’s.

“You know what that’s like, don’t you?” he asked. “How many people that you care about have died?”

“Six,” Sammy said. “Three of those were your fault.”

Wrobel nodded slowly and turned back around. Sammy knew he should start heading toward the extinguisher again, but he wanted to hear Wrobel.

“Our job is death. Even if we don’t die in battle like our loved ones, each loss kills a part of us until the only difference between us and those who die is the beating of our hearts. A Thirteen pulled the trigger on Claire. Her name’s Katie Carpenter. You met her. She killed your friend, too. In that hangar.”

Beauty.

“You’re asking yourself why I’d work with her now, but it’s easy. She can’t help what she is. Walter . . . he should have known better. If he had put himself or Zahn on watch instead of Claire, we could have beaten them. Claire and Blake and Emily would be alive. But even then, he still could have saved my Claire.”

“You think he wanted his wife to die? Are you insane?”

The look in Wrobel’s eyes answered Sammy’s second question. “Don’t ask me that again! I’ve been fighting to keep my sanity for the last several years. And believe me, it’s been difficult when dealing with Walter’s incompetence.”

Sammy said nothing, but resumed his efforts to get the fire extinguisher.

“You insist on trusting him?” Wrobel asked. “I guess I can understand. I trusted him, too. Let me ask you one more question. Why didn’t your mission team in Rio have any weapons?”

“I—I don’t know.”

“Walter insisted that Beta missions not have any. He believed they’d be a greater danger than good. ‘A bunch of kids running around with weapons, ready to shoot at the first thing that moved.’ That’s what he said. You tell me, Sammy. Do you think Martin Trector would have survived if he’d had a weapon?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re wrong and you know it.”

“I trust Commander Byron.” Sammy got three fingers on the cylinder of the small fire extinguisher and pulled it from the mount, barely catching it before it hit the carpet.

 “You’re going to be very disappointed then.”

“So what?” Sammy asked. “They came to you, offered you a job, and you signed up to get your revenge?”

“You think they came to me?” Wrobel replied. “I went to THEM! Three years ago. I’d had enough. If you stuck around long enough, you’d understand better.”

Sammy’s fingers found the pin in the firing mechanism, and slowly pushed it out. It was so quiet in the cruiser that Sammy heard the pin hit the carpet, but did Wrobel?

The cruiser began to descend. He tried to estimate when the appropriate time to act would be, but was afraid to trust his math without the aid of his Anomaly Eleven. He fumbled around with his cuffs, trying to find the keyhole. When his thumb brushed across it, Sammy fired a concentrated blast into it.

Nothing.

He fired again and again, focusing on making his small blast as powerful as possible. Still nothing. He gritted his teeth and pushed as hard as he could from his thumb. This time, something happened.

A burst of heat erupted from his thumb, something so hot, it burned him. He barely stopped himself from crying out in pain. An acrid smell reached his nose, the scent of burnt metal and flesh. But his hands were free. The scent, however, spread throughout the cabin.

“What is that?” Wrobel asked. He squinted back at Sammy, then kept looking around. It gave Sammy just enough time to pull the trigger of the extinguisher.