Psion Omega (Psion series Book 5) (21 page)

The girl shot a dozen rounds at Sammy, but he
punched back with a strong blast aimed straight at the gun. The bullets flew
away harmlessly, and Sammy’s blast pushed the gun slightly to the side,
allowing him room to get under her guard. Their blasts met, pushing each other
apart. Sammy gently blasted forward with his feet, again shielding her bullets.
She tried to blast him away, but he spun to the side, crossed the distance, and
hit her under the jaw.

The girl with the colored hair dropped. Sammy
grabbed her gun as it clattered to the floor, and the sound of bullets rent the
air. A vicious punch hit Sammy high in the back, pushing him to the floor face
first. After several missions and injuries, he recognized right away that he’d
been shot. The bullet had entered above his shoulder blade and below his
collarbone, and exited between his rib and collarbone in the front. Lucky,
perhaps, but moving his right arm sent a searing burn through his whole side.
As he hit the ground, the darkness inside him roared to life at the pain.

You know what to
do …
a voice told him.

No
.

Yes. You will
die if you don’t do it.

I made a
promise.

Look around the
room. Look at your friends. They will all die unless you use your full
potential. Do it!

A flash of light reflected off the glass of the
fireplace and caught Sammy’s eye. Hovering outside the broken window was a
cruiser with several Ultra Dark agents standing on the top of the craft
tethered to the hull to prevent them from falling.

“More trouble outside,” he told his team. “Six
Ultras on top of a cruiser. I’m hit. Clean shot through the back. I don’t have
any orange goo.”

“I’ve got some,” Kawai said, “just hang tight.”

Gunshots exploded around Sammy. Blood poured from
his wound onto the carpet. He didn’t dare move. The Ultras on the cruiser would
shoot him down before he could even get a shield up. Screams came from the
halls, followed by Byron barking at civilians. “Get back in your rooms!”

Your chances of
surviving are slim
.
DO IT!
The
pull was strong. It reminded Sammy of his dreams with the shadow, the way it
tugged at him and pulsed with power.

Sammy ignored the voice as he pretended to be dead.
Resisting the urge to tap into the Anomaly Thirteen wasn’t easy. His whole body
tingled with the need to unleash it. Playing dead, however, wasn’t hard. The
pain from the gunshot wound radiated through his whole body, so he didn’t want
to move. Anna gave orders to the rest of the team, coordinating their efforts
to take out the Psion Dark agents. Vitoria, hogtied on the floor, now stared at
Sammy murderously.

“The stealth cruiser says it can’t move into
position unless the other cruiser leaves,” Li reported.

“Tell them to shoot down the enemy!” Sammy said.

“They can’t risk taking a hit,” Anna said.
“Structural damage to the hull will allow our stealth cruiser to be tracked.”

Sammy listened to the sounds of his friends battling
under heavy fire until a body crashed into the bed frame which slammed into his
head.

Next thing Sammy knew he was stalking through a
black forest, a long key in hand, his feet wet and cold. Gold and silver
adorned the key, giving it a heavy, solid feel. To the right was a large,
crystal lake. Moonlight sparkled like glittering diamonds off the water’s
surface. Bobbing on the surface was a raft, chained to a pole jammed deep into
the soggy lakeside ground. To the left was the cave.

Sammy walked to the cave’s mouth where a dank smell
greeted him, carrying a hint of something fouler, more menacing. The blackness
in the cave pulsed and pulled even stronger than the shadow-Sammy had, as
though the darkness was a magnificent living thing—breathing, heaving,
and wanting.

Go inside
. The voice was
the same as before. The same he’d heard so many times, urging him to unleash
the anomaly and become more powerful and invulnerable to pain and fear.
It’s the only way
.

A body collapsed next to Sammy. He jerked awake,
opened his eyes, and stared into the blank face of a dead Dark agent, a tall
black man with a hole in the middle of his forehead. Across the room he saw the
green and pink haired girl laying on the floor, still knocked out from the punch
he’d delivered her. Only two Psion Dark agents remained. Plus the six Ultras on
the cruiser. Two guns lay near him. How fast could he move with his wound? How
many could he take out?

You’ll be so
much faster if you—

SHUT UP
, Sammy told the
voice.

“Our Elite pilots are detecting incoming cruisers on
radar,” Kawai reported. “Five minutes before they’re on the scene.”

More shots were fired. Sammy heard a giant
THUD
as someone crashed into the wall,
shaking the floor. He couldn’t tell who. Moments later, the rest of his team
appeared around him, shielding for him while Kawai applied orange goo, an
antibiotic, and anesthesia to Sammy’s bullet wounds. Sammy grimaced at the pain
until the anesthesia kicked in.

“You okay?” Jeffie asked. Her face was pale and sweaty,
but she forced a smile for Sammy, which he appreciated.

“Clock is ticking,” Kawai said as the Ultra Darks
continued to fire at the team’s shields. “Four minutes.”

“I have a grenade,” Anna said. She removed the
device from her pack and showed it to them like it was a show-and-tell
surprise. “Class II sticky. It’ll take that bird down.”

“Those are Ultras,” Byron said, “they will shoot
your grenade out of the air before it makes it outside the hotel room.”

“Not if I personally deliver the package.”

“That’s suicide,” Jeffie said.

Anna breathed deeply and held it in. “No, it’s not.”

“Let me do it,” Byron insisted. “I’m only half a
Psion, anyway, Anna. You’ve got a life ahead of you.”

Anna shook her head. For a moment she looked like
she was about to cry, but that tough honcho expression returned and her eyes
hardened. “Without jump blasts, you wouldn’t cross the distance, Commander,”
she told Byron. “No offense.”

She crouched and shielded. Sammy knew there was
nothing else to say. No time for other options. “Tell Justice I said, ‘See ya.’
Now cover me.”

The four remaining Psions used one hand to blast
while firing their weapons with the other. The Ultra Darks dropped to the
cruiser to make themselves as small a target as possible while still firing on
Anna. Anna ran to the edge of the building, shielding herself. Jeffie shot one
of the Ultras in the head. Byron hit another, leaving four. The cruiser reacted
by trying to rise higher in the air, but it was too slow.

Anna barely caught hold of the cruiser’s cockpit
window with one hand. With the other, she slapped the sticky grenade onto the
glass, then showed the pilot her middle finger. The Ultras shot down at her as
she clung on, shielding herself with one hand raised above her head. Sammy
managed to hit one of the Ultras in the leg, giving Anna a narrow window of
opportunity.

She pulled herself up until her feet were flat
against the cruiser’s hull and blasted herself away. Two seconds later, the
sticky detonated. The explosion propelled Anna back in the hotel room, where
she rolled end over end into the mattress, her clothes singed, her flesh and
hair seared. Jeffie reached her first. “She needs a burn kit.”

“I thought you were dead,” Kawai told Anna. “That
was brilliant.”

Despite what must have been certain agony, Anna
managed a snort. Sammy detected a trace of disappointment there. “I said tell
Justice, ‘See ya.’ Not
goodbye
.”

Sammy laughed. “You’re right. Our mistake. Let’s
call our cruiser and get out of here. We’ve got about three minutes left.”

The Psions worked quickly to help Vitoria and Anna
onto the stealth cruiser. Vitoria thrashed and struggled but Sammy had bound
her well. With a little over a minute to spare, they jetted away from downtown
Mexico City toward Glasgow.

* * * * *

“You told us the plan was foolproof,” Julia Navarre, President
Newberry’s Chief of Staff, said. She looked older than the last time the
Council had met. “Why are we seeing mistake after mistake?”

“I never said foolproof,” the Queen, disguised as
the fox, said.

“The President is concerned.”

“The President should never be concerned. It’s not
his job to be concerned.”

“He is the leader of the world.”

Holding back a laugh, the Queen responded, “He does
not sit on the Council.”

“I, too, am concerned,” the VP of Comcorp said. “And
I
do
sit on the Council. The
resistance was supposed to be snuffed out within a week. You told us if we
allowed the insurgents to capture a Dark agent, we could use the agent as a
tracking device. What went wrong?”

“Insufficient data,” the Queen explained. “We did
not know the resistance knew about the solution. The plan was to send in one
team when she activated her distress signal, but use this team as an acceptable
loss. The ploy was to make the enemy think they had gotten away with something
valuable. As soon as the solution was deactivated in the agent, we sent in a
second team to prevent their escape. Unfortunately, we underestimated the
resistance and our agents were overpowered. The resistance escaped in a stealth
cruiser before they could be traced. We must now assume there is nothing they
do not know.”

“How?” a Council member asked.

“That is not important.”

“Many of us disagree—”

“I think what I am sensing here are the early
symptoms of panic,” the Queen stated firmly. “This bothers me more than any intelligence
the resistance might have uncovered.”

“Since the attack on the weapons cache near Colorado
Springs, we have witnessed problem after problem,” Navarre said. “I’m beginning
to question your ability to navigate us through this situation.”

The Queen saw several heads nod. Almost half of
them. “Let me open your eyes. The resistance may have deactivated the solution
inside the Dark agent, but it doesn’t change the fact that we now have a
capable, well-trained, and loyal agent placed in the resistance base. I advise
you to watch and wait. The plan will work.”

“This report says the Dark agents had the advantage
of surprise and greater numbers yet they lost to NWG-trained Psions,” the VP of
Comcorp said. “What does this say about the S.H.I.E.L.D. and H.A.M.M.E.R.
programs?”

“Inexcusable failure,” the Queen reported. “Both
programs are to be shut down and all participants erased, both staff and
subjects. The facility will be converted into a Thirteen cell for acquiring and
training new recruits. New Anomalies Eleven, Fourteen, and Fifteen will be
interrogated and executed without exception.”

Friday, August 15, 2087

THE PENTHOUSE WAS a tomb except for
the fox’s beating heart and soft breathing. Katie was gone and wouldn’t return
for two or three days, if his guess was correct. This was the fox’s moment.
He’d toiled for months preparing for today, a day where he had plenty of
uninterrupted time. He cleared his throat and spoke to the ceiling.

“Computer, activate
in Private Mode.”

“
Computer activated. Private Mode enabled.
”

Those words alone
sent a surge of bliss through the fox.
Finally.
He had spent countless hours muttering to the computer, using only his voice to
build this program while Katie was away. More than once he’d mistaken the quiet
for her absence and she’d heard him talking, but she had never figured out what
he was doing. If she had, he would be dead. Waiting to be sure she was gone so
he could resume his work had been difficult, especially recently as his plan
grew close to fruition.

“Computer, enter
code 413212 to access secure communications line.”

“
Code accepted. Communications line now
secure.
”

The fox’s joy was
real. It fell from his eyes down his face. He wanted to wipe away his tears,
but couldn’t. So many things he could no longer do. He yearned to have a body
restored. The indescribable horror he had experienced at the hand of Katie,
watching his own limbs removed crudely—accompanied by such mind-bending
pain—had changed him. It had opened his eyes to what he had become from
years of removing himself from most of humanity and thinking himself a greater
kind of being than his fellow man. It was a lesson for which he had not been
prepared, but had changed his perspective in ways he knew he still didn’t fully
grasp.

“Call Jeffrey
Markorian,” the fox said.

Less than a minute
later a man answered. “Hello?” Markorian answered. “Hello? Who is this?”

The fox had not
heard his friend’s voice in years, not since the Lark Montgomery incident in
Mexico City that Markorian had helped the fox coordinate. Long ago, Markorian
had been the fox’s go-to guy. He had always looked out for Markorian, even
gotten him a well-placed position in the Continental Security Department. But
distance had been duly maintained due to Jeffrey’s ties to the fox’s past.

“It’s me,” the fox
answered.

There was a pause
on the line before Markorian spoke again. “Newblood?” The word was a whisper.
“Diego, is that you?”

The fox had not
been called by his first name in years. “I need help, Markorian. Immediately.
Can you help me?”

“Of—of
course. Yes, of course.” Markorian stuttered as though he still wasn’t sure if
what he was experiencing was real. “I—I—I swore to always help you.
Remember? I swore to always be a friend.”

“I know, Markorian.
I need a friend now.”

“Where are you?”

“Orlando. The N
tower penthouse. I need you to listen carefully and act quickly. I do not have
an abundance of time.”

* * * * *

Saturday, August 16, 2087

“You don’t have to come to all her
sessions, Sammy,” Dr. Rosmir said. Sammy and Croz, the resistance’s resident
shrink, were preparing to leave the infirmary for their next therapy session
with Vitoria. “Croz can handle it. And some people are complaining that you’ve
been missing committee meetings.”

Croz was the
tallest man Sammy had ever seen. A man in his forties, well over two meters
tall, and as gentle as a newborn puppy. Croz also had experience dealing with
traumatized children who’d suffered from severe parental abuse, including
mental and emotional torture. Once and only once, he’d spoken to Sammy about
some of the more disturbing cases he’d worked on. Sammy had listened for about
two minutes before telling Croz he’d heard enough.

“I’ll take a
session with Croz and Vitoria any day over the leadership council,” Sammy said.
“Nothing actually happens in leadership meetings. The subcommittees are where
all the real action takes place. And … it’s Saturday, so we have no meetings.”

“Oh, is that how it
works?” Croz said in his deep voice. “I was invited to attend the leadership
council once. Fell asleep. That did it for me. I told ‘em no thanks.”

“Are we making any
progress with Vitoria?” Sammy asked. “It’s been over two weeks and—”

“Two weeks is a
blink of the eye, Sammy,” Croz said, “when you’re talking about undoing months
or years of brainwashing and conditioning.”

“Our mission
depends on her compliance. Is it even reasonable to hope she can be an asset? I
mean, yeah, okay … I know it takes time. It took me a few weeks to really snap
out of it—”

“You’re trying to
equate your experience in Rio with what Vitoria went through,” Rosmir said.
“It’s not the same.”

“Yeah, but I
mean—”

“It’s not the
same,” Croz repeated.

Sammy bit back an
annoyed response and nodded.

“You ready then?”
Croz had a clipboard and a stack of papers all held together with paperclips.

Dr. Rosmir stared
at Croz’s mess of documents and notes, shaking his head. “Good grief, Croz, why
don’t you just get a holo-tablet like everyone else?”

Croz looked at his
stack and laughed. “It works for me.”

Croz and Sammy left
the infirmary and took Sammy’s car, Lemon, through the underground road system
to the small penitentiary on the opposite side of the base. They were almost there
when the car stalled. Sammy groaned. “Again? I thought they fixed it.”

“Didn’t you take it
to the mechanic?”

“Yeah,” Sammy
complained. “It’s been behaving well for the last week.”

“Speaking of
behaving well,” Croz said now with a cautious voice, “how are things going with
your issues we spoke about?”

“Geez, Croz.” Sammy
gave a half-hearted laugh. “That was forever ago.”

“I know. Just
curious.”

“Fine. Been doing
what you said, and it’s been fine.”

Croz nodded. “So …
it’s your car. You get out and push.”

It took a minute to
get the car running again and another ten to reach the penitentiary. Prior to
Vitoria’s capture, the building had only been used sparingly as a place for
resistance members to get dry after a drinking spell. Most of the resistance
affectionately called it “The Pen.” Now that Vitoria had taken up occupancy,
six resistance members were assigned guard duty, two at a time in eight-hour
shifts.

Her “cell” was a
comfortable bedroom with bars. It had carpet, a mattress with sheets, and
skylights to allow plenty of light. A stack of clothes had been provided for
her, and a privacy screen behind which she changed. Sammy, Anna, and Justice
had combed over the cell for four hours to ensure there was nothing inside she
could use to escape or injure visitors.

According to her
guards, Vitoria still requested lots of books. Croz had asked her once if she
had always been a voracious reader. Vitoria’s nonchalant response was that she
had to do something to pass the time. She lay on her stomach, feet in the air,
reading a copy of
A Tale of Two Cities
.
She glanced at them for only a moment and turned her attention back to her
book.

“Hi, Vitoria,” Croz
said in his usual, friendly tone. “Do you mind if we sit?”

Vitoria wore a pair
of denim shorts and a shirt she’d tailored herself by tearing the fabric: the
shorts nearly showed off her lower butt, her shirt torn to look more like a
loose tube top. It was obvious she was trying to maximize her sex appeal, but
Sammy couldn’t understand why. She rolled from her stomach onto her backside,
sitting in a lewd position. Sammy stirred uncomfortably in his chair and waited
for Croz to start the session. Croz didn’t seem to notice as he sorted through
his stack of papers. She caught Sammy’s eye and winked slyly, licking the
corner of her lips slowly and meaningfully. Sammy stirred again and cleared his
throat.

“How is the book,
Vitoria?” Croz finally asked, looking up from his papers.

Vitoria glanced
meaningfully over the top of her paperback and kept reading.

“Excuse me … how is
the book,
Jane
?”

When Croz called
her Jane, she shrugged. “Have you read it?”

“I have. I’ve read
all of Dickens.”

“Then you have your
own opinion on it. Why do you want mine?”

Croz chuckled. “I’m
trying to be polite … make conversation.”

Vitoria spread her
legs a little more. “What do you really want?” Her voice had changed too,
transforming from that of a haunted fifteen-year-girl to a sultry Lolita. She
sounded thirty, not fifteen.

“I just want to
talk,” Croz said kindly. “Is that a problem?”

“I bet you’d like
to do more than talk, wouldn’t you?”

“Just talk.”

Vitoria closed her
legs. “Nothing I can do about it, is there?”

“If you and I have
enough productive chats, I think your circumstances will change and you can do
a lot to improve your situation. Is that what you want?”

Vitoria held
herself in a ball, face in her knees, eyes on the floor. For an instant she
looked scared and small, even trembling slightly. Her dark hair curtained her
face so Sammy could only see her golden brown eyes. He had seen this version of
her too, but only in the briefest of moments, as though she was not quite able
to maintain her façade of strength without occasionally allowing a glimpse into
her true state of emotion.

When Croz could see
she wasn’t going to answer, he changed tactics. Sammy had seen him do this
before. “Would you mind if I ask you some questions, Vitoria?”

She didn’t answer
to her real name, so Croz repeated the question, this time addressing her as
Jane
. In response she gave the slightest
of shrugs.

“If you could do
anything with your life, what would it be?”

Vitoria’s head
raised up, and before Sammy saw her eyes behind her hair, he knew what she was
going to say. “A stripper,” she declared. The scared girl was gone and the
sultry vixen he’d met at his hotel room door had returned. The gold flakes in
her eyes flashed and her mouth twisted in a smile so warm it gave Sammy chills.
“Or maybe a
whore
. I’d love to get
paid to lay on my back and just—”

“Thank you for that
descriptive answer,” Croz finished for her with a fleeting smile. “I know
enough about prostitution that you can skip the details.”

The rest of the
session went much like the last question, Vitoria giving answers so obscene and
explicit that Sammy’s guts twisted. Each time she spoke, she peppered her
responses with small sexual signals, licking a lip, touching or brushing
herself, giving Croz and Sammy glimpses of her nearly exposed body. When Croz
and Sammy thanked her for her time and left, Sammy wondered if they’d gotten
anywhere. Croz sighed when the door shut behind them.

“Is she—does
she have a multiple personality disorder?” Sammy asked, thinking of Diego and
Trapper. “That’s the second time now we’ve seen glimpses of that—that
shell of a person.”

“No. She does it
deliberately, I think. I’ve seen multiple personality disorders a few times,
and it’s very rare. If I had to guess, I’d say she’s neither the wanton floozy
nor the jumps-at-a-pin-drop basket case that we’ve seen.”

“Then what is she?”

“She’s someone who
thinks this whole thing is a test.”

“What? We saved
her. She saw us kill her fellow Dark agents.”

Croz wagged a
finger. “She was knocked out during most of the battle, if I read your report
correctly. Think on that. She wakes up here. People being kind to her, trying
to get her to betray the CAG, to open up … Her seductive manner is her way of
thinking the way they taught her to think. Her scared girl act is to get us to
let down our guard and sympathize with her.” Croz put an arm on Sammy’s
shoulders as they headed back to Lemon. “My guess is she thinks if she can get
one of us in a compromising situation, she can take a hostage and engineer an
escape. Then she’ll ‘win’ or ‘beat’ this test.”

“Compromising
situation?” Sammy had to think about that before it dawned on him. “Like one of
us would do
that
…”

Croz laughed a
deep, booming laugh from his gut. “I find your naïveté refreshing, Sammy. That
girl in there is drop-dead beautiful. And if you think many a man wouldn’t be
tempted to put himself in that room alone with her just for the chance … Well,
you should meet some of the people I graduated from school with, that’s all
I’ll say.”

They returned to
the infirmary to meet with Rosmir and submit a report on the session. The
doctor was in the rehabilitation room with Brickert, testing his agility,
blasting, and balance by having him stand on a beam and deflect tennis balls
being shot at him at increasing speeds.