Psion Omega (Psion series Book 5) (39 page)

Albert had their
attention now. The commander’s wounded arm burned and ached, but he used both
hands to blast the Thirteen off him. Albert had already managed to kill two
enemies, but more remained.

“You finish
cutting, Dad!” Albert said. “I’ll handle them.”

Byron tried to use
the plasma saw in his injured condition, but between his hurt arm and his need
to keep an eye on Albert, he did a poor job.
I should not have come. I am too old, too slow. My pride may end up
getting both of us killed
.

Using their
bizarre, animal-like communication, the Thirteens cautiously advanced on the
elevator. They could not all attack at once for fear of being bottle-necked and
picked off, one by one. Two more grenades flew at the elevator, immediately
followed by two more. Albert blasted all four back with reflexes that would
have impressed an Ultra. A bullet ricocheted off Byron’s bionic leg in the
process.

“Watch those
shields!” he told his son.

The explosion from
the grenades was tremendous. Black smoke filled the air, and the last thing
Byron saw before the cloud filled his vision was two Thirteens torn apart from
the detonation. Albert was shoved to the back of the elevator where his head
slammed into the wall. A female Thirteen attacked through the haze. She had a
shock of red hair styled in a Mohawk and a face tattooed to look like it was
covered in rivulets of wet blood. Byron dropped the saw and drew his gun,
emptying his magazine, but missing every shot. His left arm was weak and unable
to keep the gun steady. Rather than trying to reload, he abandoned the gun and
focused on blasting her. She attacked between his blasts, weaving in, out, and
around to get in close for hand to hand combat. Just as she got near, Byron
used one hand to blast himself off the ground and slammed his weight into her.

His momentum drove
the Mohawk Thirteen out of the elevator and into the wall, cracking ribs and
plasterboard alike. She tried to sink her teeth into his neck but bit down on
his shoulder when he jerked backward. Commander Byron brought up a hand to
blast her head at point-blank range, but she spun away only to attack again,
knocking Byron to the ground. His shoulder, arm, and face roared in pain.

Struggling to beat just one Thirteen
,
the commander lamented.
What good am I?

He jammed his hands
up under her ribs and blasted her up into the ceiling where she hit the
remnants of the plaster and crossbeams. As she fell she reloaded her gun, fast
as anything Byron had seen. He raised his hands to shield, but the bullet
cracked his collarbone and exited through his back, like a torch blowing
through his body. He blasted again, blindly, and forced her back, her head
smacking wetly into the stone wall.

Commander Byron lay
on the ground, fire spreading through his shoulder and back.
Failure
. He had volunteered for this
mission to prove something: to show himself and the other Psions that despite
his age, despite his mistakes, despite his injuries he was still useful. But
all he had done so far was prove the opposite.

No. I am not useless.

He tried to pick
himself up as the smoke choked his lungs. Around him he heard more gunshots.
Firing at Albert!
Between the bullet
hole in his left arm and his right clavicle, Commander Byron could not get up.
He gritted his teeth and tried again. At least four Thirteens remained. Albert
could not handle them all by himself. The harder he pushed the more agony he
created until something popped in his shoulder, and he blacked out.

“Dad! Dad!”

When Byron opened
his eyes, Albert was dragging him back into the elevator. He looked much
messier than the last time the commander had seen him. “How long was I out?”

“About fifteen
minutes. Don’t move.”

Albert removed an
orange goo dispenser from the med kit and a syringe full of antibiotic. As
Albert jammed the orange goo into his father’s wounds, Byron tried not to react
but the pain was unbearable. His son’s wide eyes, pale face, and pinched
expression told him the damage wasn’t insignificant.

“Maybe give me the
anesthetic first next time …” the commander muttered.

Albert grimaced as
he retrieved the second syringe from the kit. “Sorry.”

The anesthesia
brought a wave of relief. The commander sighed. “Patch me up. We need to go.”

“You’re a mess, old
man.”

“You should find a
mirror, kiddo. Is your head all right?”

“Tender, but in one
piece,” Albert answered. His face was covered in a reddish pink mess which had
once belonged in some Thirteen’s skull. Commander Byron winced and grimaced as
his son worked quickly to stem the flow of blood and get his father in stable
condition. When Albert finished, he helped the commander to his feet.

“Thanks,” Byron
said. The anesthesia was kicking in, leaving his body stiff but pain-free. “How
much time do we have?”

Albert checked his
com. “An hour and a half. Almost on the dot.”

Byron took a step
which immediately transformed into a limp. He hadn’t even noticed the pain in
his uppermost thigh until now, his shoulder and arm had hurt so badly. But when
he looked down at his leg, he saw the slice through the fabric of his pants and
a line of blood seeping through his torn skin, just above the joint where his
bionic leg met his own flesh.
A graze
.
Byron had never taken three bullet wounds in one battle until today. Seeing his
own blood in such quantities starkly reminded him of his own mortality, and he
yearned for the days when he thought himself invincible.

“Elevator’s still
not responding,” Albert said, punching the
DOOR CLOSE
button repeatedly. “They disabled it.”

“You took on four
Thirteens by yourself,” Byron said as he counted the bodies on the ground.

Albert sighed and
nodded. “Yeah. Remember I did it in the sims before I graduated. Sammy worked
with me.”

“I remember … I
just—I am impressed. You are better than I ever was.”

“The circle is now
complete. When I left you, I was but the learner. Now I am the master.”

Commander Byron
looked at his son. “Is that a quote?”

“Dad … Star Wars.
Come on.”

“Star Wars?”

“That movie you
showed me when I was little. I watched it about ten times. Don’t you remember?”

“We need to finish
cutting the hole.”

“I’m on it,” Albert
said. As his son resumed working with the plasma blade, Byron kept a lookout
for any surviving Thirteens who might try to surprise them. The biggest
surprise, however, came when the elevator gave a sudden lurch. Albert’s head
jerked up. “What was—”

The elevator
plummeted.

“Out! Out!”

“You first!” Albert
said. “I’ll boost you.”

The commander
stumbled on his wounded leg and caught himself on Albert’s shoulders. Lifting
his injured leg was not easy. He put that leg down and tried to stand on it
instead, but that was worse. Gritting his teeth, he shoved himself up and let
his son’s blasts force him through the hatch and out of the elevator. Right
before Albert jumped, the elevator crashed into the bottom of the shaft.
Albert’s head hit the ceiling, the skin split open, and he fell back to the
floor. Blood snaked down over his face.

“Albert?” Commander
Byron asked weakly. “Son?”

Tuesday, November 11, 2087

THE WHITE ROOM was white. For some reason, Sammy
hadn’t expected that. The black floor in Rio hadn’t been all black. Nor had the
red floor in Detroit been all red. But this one had white floors, white walls,
white ceiling. The elevator doors opened to a small anteroom, which he could
tell would seal off the main room from the elevator when the kill code was
triggered. The room itself was large but not huge. About eight meters by ten
meters according to his estimates.

“I—I thought
you needed me to get in here,” Vitoria said.

“Not in here,”
Sammy responded. “In there.” He pointed to where a small door occupied the
center of the back wall of the white room.

On the right of the
door was a thumb and retina scanner. Following Trapper’s instructions on how to
recode the door, Sammy found a tiny switch on the underside of the scanner
panel and flipped it. This revealed a port into which he slid the data cube
prepared by Trapper to recode the door with Vitoria’s retina, thumb print, and
voice.

As the data cube
did its work, Sammy checked his com and saw that they still had over two hours
before it was time to send the signal. He walked around the room, his fingers
brushing the flat smooth walls. Then he stopped and pointed to two spots close
to the center of the room. “There and there. Company may be coming.” He nodded
to Jeffie and Vitoria. “Set up the projectors.”

“This data cube has
passcode protection,” the panel next to the door informed Sammy. “Please state
the passcode to activate your cube.”

“Repentance,” Sammy
muttered.

“Passcode accepted.
Please submit retina for scanning.”

Sammy looked back
where Jeffie and Vitoria were assembling two holo-projectors in the middle of
the room, one nearer to the left wall, the other to the right. “Vitoria. It’s
time.”

For an instant,
Sammy saw some of that old rebellion in her eyes. “And then you’re going to
send me away?”

Sammy nodded. “Just
like we agreed.”

Vitoria locked eyes
with Sammy, her expression stoically blank. Jeffie stopped what she was doing
to watch. As Vitoria stepped closer to Sammy, her lip began to tremble and a
tear leaked from her eye. “Sammy …” she whispered. “Please don’t make me go.”

“Vivi—”

“Let me die with
you. I don’t want to be alone. I can’t—can’t live that way.”

Sammy’s voice broke
as he asked, “Will you open the door?”

More tears streamed
down her face as she put her thumb on the scanner. A green light showed that
her thumb print was accepted. Then she put her eye over the retina scanner. A
second green light appeared. Finally she said her name, “Vitoria Prado.” A
third green light blinked on and the door in the back of the white room opened.

Behind the door was
a small alcove less than a meter wide and two meters deep. Inside was one
screen and one keyboard on a desk. The cursor on the screen blinked next to two
magical words:

COMMAND:\>

Sammy hugged Vivi.
“Thank you.” He held her out at arms length. “Now listen. Today is not your day
to die. I want you to take a gun—”

“No—”

“
Take a gun
. Get out of here. And don’t
look back. Go to the safehouse and call the resistance operator. They will take
care of you.”

Her face screwed up
in pain. “I want to stay!”

He hugged her
again, and this time she hugged him back. Then he pressed a gun into her hand.
“Go. Live a good life for my sake.”

She backed away,
hurt and confused and scared. Sammy wanted to weep with her as he watched her
climb through the elevator hatch just as the doors began to close. He waved
weakly, but she didn’t wave back.

“I’m ready, Sammy,”
Jeffie said, steadying one of the two projectors. A red line, called the danger
line, ran across the projector bases. While Jeffie steadied them, Sammy bolted
the machines to the floor, making sure the danger line on one base lined up
with the other. Once this was done, they quickly donned their zero suits. This
would allow them to move about the room without interacting with the holograms
emitted by the two projectors.

Seconds after they
finished changing clothes, the elevator returned to the white floor with a soft
ding
. Jeffie blasted two shields.
Sammy turned on the projectors.

“Battery levels at
one hundred percent,” a robotic voice stated from one of the two projectors.

“Enter Mode One,”
Sammy ordered.

The machines
projected the images of twin drone guns around themselves so the projectors
were no longer visible.

 
“Safety measures off,” he ordered the
machines. “Destroy all targets in front of the danger line.”

A sudden
BOOM
came from the elevator as the doors
blew outward. The smoke cleared and Sammy saw shields large enough for the
Aegis to crouch behind, fully covered. Almost a dozen men and women in muddied
brown-green uniforms poured out of the broken lift. Behind them, the elevator
dropped the rest of the way down the shaft like a stone, crashing just out of
Sammy’s sight. The drone guns whirred to life and spat bullets at the Aegis as
they poured inside. Their shields had small bases for the Aegis to steady and
support them with their feet, which allowed them to use both hands to shoot.

The bullets of the
drone guns scratched and dented the Aegis shields, but did little else to harm
the enemy. They made their way around the room, sticking to the walls, as Sammy
knew they would.
So predictable, yet so
effective.

He and Jeffie stood
apart. The angle of their shoulders formed a wedge. Their blasts shielded them
from all angles except the rear. The drone guns’ rapid fire was deafening and
shells littered the floor from all the guns both friendly and foe. Sammy
couldn’t keep track of all the rounds from all the guns as he was accustomed to
doing during battle. He watched the Aegis, analyzed their movements, and noted
the minute communications they sent one another to adjust their form and
position as they reacted to Sammy and Jeffie’s defenses.

“There could be
more on the way,” he told Jeffie. “Take out as many of them as possible before
they surround us.”

“What do we do?”

“Blast their
shields. The drone guns will do the rest.”

Together they made
a coordinated effort of moving about and blasting shields. High and low
attacks, side to side shots, and occasionally powerful direct attacks knocked
the Aegis off balance. The drones made the Aegis pay for each exposed bit of
head or shoulder. It wasn’t long before the white walls were sprayed with red
and pink and gray, and the bodies of the fallen hampered the Aegis’ movement
around the perimeter of the room.

More Aegis arrived,
this time by way of rappelling down the elevator cables. Sammy and Jeffie had
already killed nine of the original twelve with a tenth injured. They carried
their shield and hopped out, stepping around and over the bodies of their
brothers. Sammy took advantage of their cautiousness and attacked furiously
before they could launch a coordinated counterattack.

Using the walls and
the heads of the Aegis, he stayed airborne for almost ten minutes, punishing
them from above while Jeffie and the drone guns tore them apart. In the eyes of
each Aegis, he saw Stripe, his tormentor in Rio. The Anomaly Thirteen and its
poisoned darkness swelled inside him, yearning to be free. The growing carnage
around him didn’t help, either. The scent of blood and bowels and body parts
clotted his nostrils. Smatterings of it flew everywhere. It sickened and
exhilarated him. He danced on the edge of danger and loved it. Yet the closest
Sammy came to receiving a wound was when a bullet whizzed past his left ear as
he flipped through the air with a jump blast while shielding himself with his
hands.

When it was all
over, thirty bodies and shields scattered the room, even blocking the elevator
door from closing. Sammy ordered the projector to enter stand by mode to save
battery power.

“Levels at
seventy-one percent,” the battery reported.

“Let’s move the
bodies,” he told Jeffie, “get them into the elevator shaft.”

Stacking the bodies
was hard work. Sammy’s arms and legs protested at each Aegis he picked up or
dragged across the white floor. He noted the way Jeffie’s body sagged when she
tried to stand up straight, the heaviness around her eyes, and how her breaths
were long and drawn, almost like sighs. He wanted to say something to comfort
her, but couldn’t.
No time for rest.

“How’s your ammo?”
he asked Jeffie.

She gave him a
thumbs up.

“You okay?”

Jeffie nodded. “Are
you
?” Her tone told him she wasn’t
only asking about his physical state.

“Fine.”

“Are they sending
more?”

The answer was yes,
but instead Sammy said, “We’ll find out soon.”

They split the last
of the energy pastes, but Sammy wasn’t sure it did anything to help. Ten
minutes later, the rappelling equipment the Aegis had used shot up the cables
with a high-pitched whirring sound. Sammy and Jeffie exchanged a dark look.

A few minutes
later, the noise returned accompanied by animal-like shrieks echoing down the
tunnel, growing louder each second. Thirteens. They exploded from the elevator
shaft just as Sammy gave the command to reactivate the projectors. He counted
thirteen newcomers. The Thirteens lack of protection meant they should be mowed
down like weeds, but some of them picked up the shields of the fallen Aegis.
Others used nothing but their constant motion and rapid reflexes to confuse the
drones.

Unleash me and win.

Sammy ignored the
voice and shot blasts at the Thirteens. The drones’ bullets passed through him
as harmlessly as wind, but caught one Thirteen in the thigh, piercing him. If
the Thirteen felt any pain, he didn’t show it. Instead he whipped his gun
around and shot at Sammy, but Sammy had already moved, dodging four other
Thirteens’ fire with a rapid blast to the upper right wall and then another off
it.

He and Jeffie had
to be careful with their zero suits. The technology allowed holograms to pass
through them, but the electric current in the zero suit had to remain unbroken
or else rather than passing through their bodies harmlessly, the holograms
would treat them as any other space in the room. With the projectors’ safety
controls turned off, a bullet could mean instant death.

Sammy and Jeffie
changed their focus from offense to defense. They had to keep the Thirteens in
front of the red line on the projectors’ bases to keep them in targeting range
and because the projectors were vulnerable from behind the line. Half of the
Thirteens shot at Sammy and Jeffie while the other half targeted the drones.
The more they attacked the drones, the heavier the drain on the
holo-projectors’ batteries, which had to consume more energy to deflect the
bullets. Already the batteries were down to sixty percent charge, and not a
single Thirteen had died.

“Coordinated
attack!” he ordered the drones. “One target at a time. Jeffie, pick the same
target as the drones until it’s dead. Then switch to another.”

This new strategy
worked better. Sammy worried about keeping the Thirteens behind the line while
Jeffie picked them off one by one. Yet three times the Thirteens managed to get
past the blasts and the drones to attack Sammy and Jeffie in close range. Sammy
made the first one pay by catching her off-guard and blasting her into the wall
hard enough that she blacked out. Then the drones and Jeffie put enough bullets
in her to turn her into a pencil.

The second Thirteen
who made it past the red line fired both guns at Sammy from less than a meter
away. Sammy protected his exposed flank from other Thirteens with his left hand
and blasted away the bullets with his right. The Thirteen shrieked. Sammy
wanted to use his burn blasts to melt the Thirteen’s eyes out of his skull. The
rage inside him bubbled and spat, urging him to release his full potential. But
Sammy forced himself to focus. He shielded with one hand and shot strong blasts
at the Thirteen until he caught him on the leg and made him lose his balance.
Still shielding, Sammy blast-jumped off the floor, flipped over, and put his
shoes on the ceiling. Then he blasted again and flipped once, shooting down and
landing on the Thirteen with a bone-crunching smash.

During this, the
third Thirteen made it past the red line. Jeffie pushed the rest back with
blasts and bullets. The Thirteen whipped his pistol at Sammy, but Sammy arched
back and lost his balance, landing on the fallen and broken Thirteen beneath
him. As Sammy fell, he shot at the Thirteen with foot blasts, missing with the
first blast, but spinning her around with the second. The Thirteen shot at him
as she spun, but her shot went wide to Sammy’s left. He could tell instantly it
had no chance of hitting him, so he didn’t shield. Instead he blasted at her
with hands and feet, pinning her against the wall so Jeffie could kill her.