Psion Omega (Psion series Book 5) (2 page)

Around the table several nodded their heads in
agreement. The Queen noted the few who did not. “Meeting adjourned,” she
announced.

Despite all her experience with the fox, she
had no idea he spent so much time in meetings: meetings with the Council,
meetings with the CEO of N Corp, meetings with so many puppets and yes-men that
some days they never seemed to end. The fox had transformed himself into
nothing more than a shadow, but everyone who knew him was a string attached to
his fingers.

Even I was a string.

The Queen deactivated the hologram and stripped
from her zero suit. Naked, she left the room and crossed the penthouse. She
paused at a mirror to examine her reflection. Her eyes found no wrinkles, no
noticeable sag anywhere. Despite her fifty years in age, she looked like a
woman in her twenties. More importantly, she felt like a woman in her twenties.
She stared closer, making sure her beauty wasn’t a trick of the light.

Turning her back on the mirror, the Queen went
to the smallest of the three bedrooms. Voice, thumb, and eye verifications were
required to enter. Once it opened, she heard the beeps coming from monitors
surrounding a hospital bed. Confined to the bed was a man, talking to himself
again, mumbling something she couldn’t quite hear. All she caught was the word
parameters
.

“Do I need to remove your vocal box too?” she
asked in a sweet voice. “It would be a pity. I do so enjoy our conversations.”

The fox’s thighs ended abruptly in short fleshy
stubs. Instead of arms, he had a few centimeters of lumpy, pink masses that
ended five centimeters beyond the shoulders. The Queen had performed the
amputations herself. He had been awake while she did it. He had been given no
anesthesia. The surgery had been a glorious event. Liberating and beautiful.

Years ago, he had been her savior, her mentor,
her lover. She had adored him with a reverence she’d shown no one else. He’d
treated her like a treasure. While all the other Thirteens and Aegis had been
made to drink the
solution
, the Queen
had not. He’d given her a unique freedom, and she’d soared like the phoenix she
always imagined herself to be. Then she made a single mistake, and he took her
freedom away. He made her drink the bitter cup. That act had been unforgivable.
She stepped next to the bed and surveyed his pitiful body while his eyes rested
on her face, cold in fury, but impotent.

“The meeting went well,” she told him. “A few
have doubts, but I set them straight. The war will not end as soon as they
hope, but it will not last as long as they fear, either.”

The fox smiled. “Doubts will undermine you,
Katie.”

Before he could say another word, the Queen
grabbed a scalpel off the bedside table and held it to his face. “Call me Katie
again and I’ll do so much carving that you’ll make Diego look handsome.”

“My apologies, but I stand by my statement.
Doubts are diseases. You must eradicate them with swift and extreme prejudice.”

“I have taken care of it. The Council is
strong.”

“Not without me leading it.”

The Queen laughed. “You
are
leading it.”

“How long?” the fox asked after a notable
pause. Pain filled his eyes. “How much longer will you keep me like this? You
don’t wish to kill me, I think, yet you don’t trust me. What options remain?”

The Queen’s laughter turned into rage. She
bared her teeth at him. “Until you learn what it means to be imprisoned. You
have no idea what you did to me by making me drink the solution.” She grabbed
his nose and twisted it until it nearly broke. “Don’t you get it?”

“Then end it. You’ll never have to worry about
me again.” He took a deep breath and sighed as though even living was a chore.
“Take the scalpel and draw it across my neck. Do it now.”

The Queen already had a scalpel in hand when
she noted his use of voice inflection. Crippled, grotesque, and unable to move
anything but his head, the fox could still be persuasive. “You taught me too well
to recognize the subtleties of your talent,” she said as she set down the
blade.

“It must be torture for you,” the fox
continued. “The Anomaly Eleven is different for everyone. For some it makes
them mathematical or literary geniuses. Others tactical. For me … it lets me
read people and manipulate them to near perfection, I think. But what about
you? What does it do for you?”

The Queen did not answer.

“Has Anomaly Eleven restored your ability to
feel emotions? If so, what has it been like to feel revulsion, remorse, fear,
and joy again for the first time?”

A tear threatened to fall from the Queen’s eye,
but she pretended as though she had an itch there, and scratched it away. When
the fox noticed this, the corners of his mouth twitched. “Don’t be ashamed of
your emotions. They make you stronger. The pain, the fear, the regret …”

“Shut up,” she whispered.

“Embrace the remorse,” the fox said softly.
“Listen to your conscience or it will torture you. I have begun to do the same.
I’ve realized now that I was drunk with power. Thinking that I could change and
save humanity. Let’s end this mad—”

Laughter burst from the Queen’s gut. She hadn’t
laughed so hard in weeks. It felt good. She laughed hysterically at the fox and
his foolishness.
How did I ever think you
were anything but a fool?

“You mentioned torture … I can only imagine
what torture you’re experiencing,” she told the fox. “Your quality of life is
forever diminished. It must be maddening. And to think that it all could have
been prevented by simply asking for my forgiveness. Such a thought must be like
a splinter in your mind.”

“The cave.” The fox said the two words very
simply, but they jarred the Queen’s mind and spirit. Her head jerked back to
look at him.

“What cave?”

The fox’s eyes told the Queen that he knew she
was lying. Every few nights she dreamed the same dream. She stood at the bottom
of a cave at a door made of stiff, rotting flesh. She beat on it, tore at it,
but nothing would make it open. No matter how much she or the young girl on the
other side of it screamed and shoved, it would never budge.

“You cry out in your sleep,” the fox stated in
a perfectly even tone. “Have you been experiencing bad dreams?”

“Are you experiencing phantom pain in your
missing limbs?”

“Not at the moment. But I do. Sometimes it
becomes so intense that I shiver and tremble because all my mind wants to do is
itch and rub the spots, and it can’t. And sometimes, more often than you would
think, I forget that I can’t move at all.”

The Queen shivered as she experienced a
distant, faint version of what the fox described. A trickle of hot discomfort
ran up her spine to her neck. She pulled at her collar. The fox observed this
passively.

The pains are getting worse
. They had started the day
she removed the fox’s arms and legs, a mild but real aching in her own limbs
each time she cut and he screamed.

“What is going on in your head?” the fox asked
her. “Tell me. What harm can I do?” He laughed weakly. “I certainly can’t walk
away or plug my ears.”

Again he inflected his voice. He did it so
masterfully that the Queen wanted to confide in him. Yet he had to know she was
aware of this.
What game are you playing?
He was no stranger to her innermost thoughts, but she recognized the danger of
letting him have influence over her.
I’ll
give him a small amount of information just to see how he uses it.

“I have begun to feel pain again. My body is
growing accustomed to it, however.”

“I told you before of the great irony
associated with the Anomaly Thirteen. The Thirteens think their resistance to
pain and most emotions is a strength, but now you see that is not the case.
Your mind must also learn to cope with fear that comes from a realization of
mortality.”

“I have no fear,” the Queen responded.

“Perhaps you never will. Who am I to say? I
have never been a Thirteen.”

The Queen had heard enough from the fox. She
left the room and turned off the light. As she closed the door behind her, she
stared at the fox, a lump of wasted flesh. A small stitch of pain grew in her
chest. She slammed the door shut to the fox’s room.
Not again. Go away!
Even with her eyes squeezed tightly shut, she
saw the faces again in the dark recesses of her mind. Dozens of faces. Thanks
to her Anomaly Eleven, she recalled each face perfectly.

She recalled them because she had killed each
one. She could even match the faces to the methods of execution she had
employed: guns, bombs, knives, acid, drowning, strangulation, electrocution …
If she focused on one person too much, the sensations returned.

Yes, her body, her mind, something inside her
wanted her to feel this remorse, this empathy, this primitive, pathetic
emotion, but she would not. Instead she smiled and pictured herself killing
them, reveling in their blood and death.

I am stronger than you think,
fox
. The
Queen gritted her teeth and walked onward.
Ignore
anything long enough and it will go away.

Work needed to be done. She still had to find
Sammy and the resistance before they caused any more problems. Even as she
walked away, her thoughts went to the fox; to his wretched body. His mutilated
form. The pain started to blossom again. Before it could gain any traction, the
Queen found a tube of cream that she kept in a drawer in her bedside table. The
tube had only one word printed on it:
Fire
.

She squeezed some of it onto a gloved hand and
applied it to her thighs and calves. Her breaths turned ragged as the warmth
crept into her skin, growing in intensity like an electric stovetop. As her
legs burned, the emotional torment dissipated. In the height of the agony, she
got up and stumbled out of the room. It was time to get back to work. She could
not waste precious moments on petty feelings. The fire would purge them from
her.

It was almost two hours before the effects of
the cream fully wore off, but the Queen’s sense of clarity returned.
Sammy
. He was the goal. She needed
everything on him. Every scrap of data, video, idea, theory, or thought the fox
had ever collected on the boy. Nothing could go undetected or overlooked. Where
the fox had failed, she would succeed. The amount of data collected on him was
impressive.

Know thine enemy.

Hours into the research, her attention went to
Sammy’s days in Rio, particularly the days he’d spent in custody, and under the
care of the man Sammy had called Stripe. She watched the recordings, paying
careful attention to the things he muttered and moaned during his most
agonizing moments. Then she viewed them a second time. During one of the pain
sessions, there was an interruption. A second Aegis barged into the room
talking about how another prisoner was ready for extraction.

Extraction. What does that
mean? Why have I never heard it before?

After hours of searching through video and
transportation files, she discovered that orders for extraction from Diego were
always followed by a delivery to Mexico City. Not to the Mexico City Thirteen
cell like she expected, but to a different building.

What are you hiding there,
fox?
What
happened to the prisoners—the anomalies—who were extracted? Was it
the fox’s fancy term for death? Did he take their DNA? She tried to shift her
focus back to Sammy, but the problem gnawed at her brain. She dug deeper,
examined the data closer, but the answers still eluded her.

* * * * *

Thursday, March 13, 2053

Mrs.
Hepworth studied Katie with disdain as Katie returned to her classroom after
school. Katie tried her best to ignore it and slid into the chair nearest to
Mrs. Hepworth’s desk. Hepworth tapped her fingers on the wooden surface in
front of her, her lips twisted as though she’d sucked on a lemon.

“So?” she asked with her eyebrows tickling her
widow’s peak. “What brilliant plan did you come up with to save your bid for
prom queen?”

Katie took a deep breath and began. “Okay, so I
wanted to do something that would be meaningful and make a difference to
people. You know, like something to change lives, but I didn’t know what to do
until I saw Bobby John.”

“Mmm hmm … ” Katie noted the mixture of
disbelief and curiosity in her teacher’s tone.

Bobby John was one of the eight kids at school
with special needs. Everyone knew Bobby John because of his old, tattered, red
Razorbacks cap that he lifted off his head every time he passed a girl in the
hall. Sometimes, between classes, he walked to and from class with his hat
hovering above his head the whole time, a large smile on his face as he nodded
to each girl.

“Bobby John loves you,” he’d say to every girl
with whom he made eye contact.

“I asked Bobby John to be my date to prom,”
Katie said.

“Ah—” Mrs. Hepworth didn’t finish what
she planned to say. Clearly she hadn’t expected this. Her mouth hung open and
her eyes wandered over Katie’s face as though they’d never met.