Psion Omega (Psion series Book 5) (40 page)

“Take her out,
Jeffie!”

But Jeffie didn’t
fire. Sammy glanced back and saw her on the ground, scooting back and grabbing
her knee with one hand and shielding herself with the other. Blood seeped from
her wound as she tried to staunch the flow.

“Jeffie! Take the
shot!”

Jeffie let go of
her knee and picked up her gun. Sammy dropped his blasts just as Jeffie fired
several bullets into the Thirteen’s chest and abdomen. Not her cleanest work
but adequate. Sammy got back to his feet and blasted back the other Thirteens.

“Stay down,” he
told Jeffie as he moved in to provide her better cover. “Shoot from the floor.”

Sammy worked even
harder on the remaining Thirteens, picking them off one at a time with the
drones’ help. Although they were less than half in number as the Aegis, it took
Sammy more than twice as long to finish the Thirteens off. The last one was a
tricky bugger. He stood less than a meter and a half tall but was as spry as
any Thirteen Sammy had faced. Implanted pearls in the skin of his face and
green-black tattoos gave him a reptilian appearance. His forked tongue snapped
each time Sammy attacked. Jeffie was low on bullets, saving them in case more
enemies came, so Sammy did all the work. He finally caught the Thirteen with a
blast that stunned him enough that the drone guns could do their job, and the
Thirteen ended up just like the others: a bloody mess.

Pools of blood now
replaced the once pristine whiteness of the room; the stink of it made the air
hot and thick. Sammy’s zero suit was more red than blue now as was Jeffie’s.
The screen of the zero suit covering his face was splattered with blood as
well, making it difficult to see in some areas.

He knelt next to
Jeffie and rolled up her pant leg to examine the wound. She hissed in pain when
he moved it. The tears in her eyes reminded Sammy that despite all her
experience and training, she was still just a sixteen-year-old girl.

“We don’t have a
lot of med supplies,” she protested. “Save them for yourself.”

Sammy ignored her
and treated the wound. Then he took out one of their two zero suit patches,
unrolled her pant leg, and placed it over the hole in the special fabric. The
charge in the suit activated the patch, and the patch wove its metallic fibers
into the suit, restoring the electrical current.

“You okay?” he
asked her.

“Been better,” she
answered.

They cleared the
room of the bodies. Sammy wanted to destroy the Thirteens’ rappelling
descenders clamped to the cables, but the gear had already disappeared.

“More Thirteens?”
she asked, grimacing each time she put weight on her injured leg.

Sammy sighed and
sat down to preserve what little strength he had. “I hope not.” He checked the
time. “Still an hour and a half before time to activate the code.”

“Ugh,” was Jeffie’s
reply.

“She’s trying to
tire us. She knows I’m here.”

“Who is
she
?” Jeffie asked.

“The Queen.”

“How do you know?”

Sammy shrugged.
“Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe we just need to wait ninety minutes.” But he knew she
would come as well as he knew his own name. Blood soaked his hair and clothes
and made his skin sticky. “Battery report.”

“Forty-nine
percent,” the battery replied.

“I am exhausted,”
Jeffie admitted. “And starving. Do you have a cheeseburger in your pack? I
could really go for a cheeseburger. Extra ketchup.”

Unleash me. I can help you destroy her. It is the only way you
can win
.

I’ve beaten her before. I’ll beat her again.

She can blast now. Remember what Trapper told you? You can’t
hope to win without unleashing me!

Sammy closed his
eyes and almost fell asleep, but high-pitched whirring noises forced them open
again.
More coming
. He wanted to cry.
Jeffie looked like she wanted to as well. As the sound grew louder, he and
Jeffie stood, arms hanging to their sides, waiting. Blood and sweat dripped
down their faces, but they couldn’t wipe it off through the zero suit screens.
Enemies dropped silently onto the pile of dozens of bodies at the bottom of the
elevator, sliding down them into the white room. Their faces mirrored Sammy’s.
Hybrids
. His own clones. Ready to attack
the original.

* * * * *

On the 94
^th
floor of the
Rio N Tower the Queen hovered over the shoulder of a technician working in the
Computer Sciences division. Constant communication passed between the Orlando
and Rio towers.

“They’ve checked
the black and red floors in Orlando,” a new report came. “No sign of the
intruders. The main elevator plummeted down the shaft. Now disabled.”

“If Sammy is on the
white floor in Rio, then Walter Byron must have gone to the white floor in
Orlando,” the Queen stated, not for the first time. She rounded on her techs,
eyes ablaze. “Find out what is down there!”

“We’re trying!”
said one tech in an insubordinate tone. The Queen stared and memorized the
tech’s face.
Later.
Something long and painful. Perhaps I’ll
flay you
. The thought excited the Queen, but her enthusiasm quickly turned
into a deep itching in her skin followed by bolts of pain and revulsion as she
envisioned peeling back someone’s skin piece by piece.

Get control.

“How can no one
know what’s down there?” she asked. The notion was absurd. Not one tech had any
idea about what was on the white floor. It couldn’t be a coincidence that the
only two towers with white floors were hit simultaneously.
But why?

Techs had searched
through databanks, schematics, and code but uncovered no helpful information.
How had something hiding in plain sight been kept such a secret? The Queen had
known about the floor. She’d been in the undergrounds of both towers, but she’d
never given the white button on the elevator panel a second thought.

“Chad, give me a
report!” the Queen said into her com.

But there was still
no answer from him. She glanced at her clock.
Almost an hour now with not a word from that little—

Either Diego had
wiped all information regarding the white floor out of the Hive’s servers or it
had never been there at all. And the fox had so many cursed firewalls around
his most precious pieces of information that it would be a wonder if they ever
broke through them. Regardless, Chad had proven himself worthless. The Queen
would kill and replace him at her next opportunity. Another jolt of pain shot
up to her torso, making her queasy.

“Here’s something,”
one of the techs said. “A memo from the CEO of N Corp marked urgent … sent to
the architect of the towers. Apparently the two towers were built simultaneously.”

“Give me the memo!”
the Queen snapped at the worker. When the girl sent it to the Queen’s com, the
Queen scanned it quickly. “This tells me nothing except that he wanted the
white floor done in white. Why are you wasting my time?”

“I’m sorry, ma’am.”

The Queen wanted to
kill this one too. Instead, she left. “Call me when you have something that
isn’t completely useless.”

She read the note
again:

The
tactile esthetics of the room are unimportant. White represents a classic
symbolism that I find important.

A memory popped
into the Queen’s mind. As a young girl, she’d been invited to her friend’s
baptism. Her friend wore a white dress as she descended into a font filled with
water. The dress had billowed out in the water, then clung to her friend’s
skin. Someone at the ceremony had said the white represented purity and
cleansing.

Cleansing.
Diego’s word. What had he said to her
before she killed him? That the fox had a purpose for him, a planned way to
die. Somehow the two were tied together. She knew it. Cleansing of what?

The Queen
saw
the answer. Cleansing. White.
Simultaneous. The solution.

“No,” she muttered
to herself. “No, no, no.” More words came to her mind, this time they belonged
to the fox:
The new world I will build
has no place for Thirteens and Hybrids
.

The fox was ashamed
that he had to use the Thirteens, the Aegis, and these even newer Hybrids to
achieve his ends. He viewed it as a problem, and to counter it, he’d created
the
solution
. He planned to snuff out
the Aegis, the Hybrids, and any remaining Anomaly Thirteens in an instant.

You bastard. You bastard!
She ran back into
the room with the technicians. “Are there any terminals on the white floors?”

One of the
technicians typed furiously on her keyboard. “Yes. One on each.”

“And are they
connected to a mainframe within our master system?”

“I don’t know.”

“If they are, you
find a way to block those terminals.”

The Queen watched
them work for five minutes, their frowns growing deeper by the second. They all
seemed reluctant to be the one to give her bad news. Finally one of them spoke
up, a girl no older than twenty-five. “The terminals are unreachable. They are
each hardwired to satellite dishes. At the Hive.”

“Can’t we just shut
down power to the two white floors?” the Queen asked. “Isn’t that something we
can do from here?”

“The white floors
aren’t powered through the—”

The Queen got in
the girl’s face and screamed, “What
can
you do?”

“I—I—I
don’t know!”

“What options do I
have right now?”

“If—if
they’ve already gained access to the room … security will have to remove them.”

The Queen called
Chad again. “How quickly can we get major explosives sent up to Orlando and
Rio?”

Still no answer.

“CHAD!” The Queen
swore and threw her com across the room. “Will someone tell me what is going on
at the Hive?”

One tech was brave
enough to speak. “Everything is offline. Possibly shut down by an external
network breach.”

“Get a team of
cruisers and have them destroy the satellite dish on the Hive.”

“What?” one of the
techs asked. “We can’t—”

“DO IT!”

She would not let
Sammy succeed. The Hybrids were going down to fight him now. They would not
prevail. They were too green, and Sammy’s prowess in combat was all but
unmatched. The Hybrids had their Achilles’ heel. It took years for a Thirteen
or an Aegis to prepare for combat with a Psion. With only a two-year lifespan,
the Hybrids simply didn’t have enough time to train.

But Sammy was near
her. Only a hundred floors below. Wearing down with each body she made him
kill.
Soon … where they have failed, I
will succeed. I nearly beat Sammy in hand-to-hand combat without Anomalies
Eleven and Fourteen. Now, with them, I will destroy him.

* * *
* *

With Jeffie’s knee hobbled, the Hybrids posed a more difficult
challenge than the Thirteens. They were not as skilled at attacking, but much
better at defending due to their blasts. Sammy forced himself to play a purely
defensive game. The battle wasn’t the only thing on his mind. The batteries on
the projectors were down to little more than twenty-five percent, and he had
less than an hour remaining before it was time to launch the signal. Of the
nine Hybrids, only one was dead.

Between fatigue, Jeffie’s injury, and the Hybrid’s
ability to shield the bullets from the drone guns, Sammy wasn’t certain he and
Jeffie could clear the room in time to send out the code signal at 1000.

There is a way,
Sammy. I can help you. You are going to die anyway. What does it matter if you
let me help you get there?

I want control.

You
want to release your rage.

The voice was right. The emotion—the
anomaly—was right there beneath the surface. And it grew each time Sammy
looked into his own eyes—his cloned eyes. All Sammy had to do was let it
rise a little more and it would erupt. The fatigue would disappear, and Sammy
could destroy these sick clones, these unnatural copies of himself made without
his permission. He could tear their hair out, rip out their eyes …

Ignoring the voice, Sammy drew closer to Jeffie.
Three of the Hybrids had hand cannons. Two had jiggers. The other three had automatic
rifles. They were picky with their shots, shooting only when they saw an
opportunity, which Sammy and Jeffie had to close quickly.

“Enter Mode Two,” Sammy told the drones. Mode Two
was a purely defensive holographic projection designed to protect the holograms
from attack.

“Why did you do that?” Jeffie asked.

“To save battery.”

“And what about saving our lives?” she yelled.

“Do you trust me or not?” he yelled back over the
sound of two hand cannons firing simultaneously.