Psion Gamma

by Jacob Gowans

  “What’s wrong?” she asked, sitting down beside him.

  Sammy turned back to his bowl. “I don’t know. Maybe everything.”

  “Do you want to—?”

  “No.” He cut her off without looking at her. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Hey.” She’d thought her smile might never disappear, but already it was wavering. She put her hand on his shoulder. “Aren’t you glad to be back?”

  Apparently this was the wrong thing to say. Sammy sat straight up, forcing her hand off his shoulder. “Well, I’ve been gone for six months,” he said, still not looking at her. “And I’m leaving again.”

  “What?” She tried to scale back the frustration in her voice. “Sammy, please . . . tell me what’s going on. I’m clueless.”

  “Stuff happened.”

  “What—”

  “I don’t want to talk about it!”

  Jeffie involuntary leaned back from Sammy. What could she say that wouldn’t make him mad?

  “Please don’t make me,” Sammy asked. His gaze bored so intensely into her eyes that she almost wished he’d look away again. He’d never been this serious before. “I’m not the same person I was last November. I was so excited to see you and be back here. And now that I’m here I feel like there’s nothing inside of me. And I’m different and I don’t belong.”

  “What’s changed?” she demanded. “You don’t have to be like this.”

  Sammy put his head in his hands.

  “Where do you have to go, Sammy?” She tried to speak gently, but she was losing patience with his unwillingness to tell her anything. “Will you at least tell me that?”

  “What does it matter?” He dropped his spoon in his ice cream with a disgusted look on his face.

  “It matters!” she said, almost swearing in anger at him. “I don’t want you to go!”

  “WHO CARES?” he shouted. His face was contorted into an expression of deep pain. “It’s just a game!”

  “What is a game?” As Jeffie asked this, she pulled on Sammy’s shoulder until he was forced to look at her again.

  “Everything. Life. And we’re all going to lose it eventually.”

  “No, we’re not!”

  “Yeah? Tell that to my parents. Or Martin and Cala and Kobe . . . or Dr. Vogt . . . or Toad!”

  “Who? Why? I don’t understand.”

  “Because they’re dead!”

  A giggle escaped Jeffie before she could stifle it, but her hand flew to her mouth to try to stop it, anyway.

  He doesn’t know. Oh my gosh, he doesn’t know.

  “Sammy, you idiot, Kobe and Cala aren’t dead. You saved Kobe’s life!”

  He stared at her, and she saw part of his anger melt away. His eyes softened a bit and the lines of hurt etched into his face lessened. “Really? He’s alive? Is he okay?”

  “Yes. He’s completely fine. He thinks you’re dead . . . everyone thinks you’re dead.”

  He still wasn’t happy. The hurt in his eyes went deeper than Jeffie could go.

  “Who’s Toad, Sammy?”

  She wished she hadn’t asked because Sammy began crying. “A kid—an Ultra that I met in Rio.”

  “And . . . he died?”

  Sammy’s shoulders shook and he covered his eyes with a hand. Jeffie put her hand on his back. “I’m—I’m—”

  “Please don’t tell me you’re sorry,” he said, breathing deeply. “I don’t want to hear that anymore.”

  “Okay, that’s fair,” she hurried to say. “I mean . . . I can’t—I don’t even want to imagine what you’ve been through. But I’ll be here whenever you want to talk about it.”

  To give Sammy time to calm down, Jeffie got up to make her warm milk. She couldn’t help glancing at him every few seconds. He didn’t do much but stir his ice cream and take small bites. Maybe the silence finally got to him, because it was Sammy who started talking next.

  “So how have you been?” he asked. His pathetic attempt at sounding casual bothered her.

  “What’s to tell? Life’s the same here—oh, but since you’ve been gone I’ve been honcho and beaten the two easiest three-Thirteen sims!”

  “That’s great. I knew you would.” He smiled at her, but it was a really lame smile.

  “Well, you helped.” She gave him a wink and sipped her warm milk. It didn’t taste as good as when her mother made it. She’d forgotten to add the sugar.

  “Me? How did I help?”

  “I watched the recordings of your sims. Brickert did, too. We even started copying your exercise routines.”

  He didn’t say anything in response. His eyes were fixed on some spot on the white wall.

  She couldn’t help but think Sammy wanted to tell her something, but wasn’t saying it. As she went back to the Robochef to add sugar, she debated whether or not to push him.

  “When will you be back, Sammy?”

  “Does it matter?” he answered.

  Jeffie gave him a face that told him the answer should be obvious. “Yes. It does.”

  “Why?”

  “I told you six months ago how I felt about you—that wasn’t easy. My feelings haven’t changed, and I don’t want to go through that again.”

  He stood up with his unfinished ice cream and dumped the bowl in the cleaner. Jeffie thought she’d said the wrong thing again. The last time he’d been this bothered, he’d been telling her about his parents’ death.

  “You don’t get it, Jeffie. I might die tomorrow. You might die tomorrow. What’s the point in a relationship? This war is going to kill us.”

  Jeffie stared at him from her seat, trying to think of what she should say. She was not sure if Sammy was really back or not. Here he was, standing in the same room, but it was not him at all. What am I supposed to do?

  “Commander Byron lost his wife to the war,” Sammy continued. “What makes you think we’d be any different?”

  “So am I just supposed to forget about you and all these crazy feelings inside me? Be a warrior-nun so I never have any tragedy?”

  “I don’t know what you’re supposed to do. But Psions don’t seem to have a great survival rate.”

  “You’re being dramatic,” she snapped.

  “No, I’m not!”

  “Yes, you are. How would you possibly die tomorrow? It’s absurd!”

  “Oh, I don’t know, maybe the NWG is secretly launching a space shuttle to the moon! And maybe the CAG knows about it, and plan to attack the launch site! And maybe that means an all-out war will start, and we’ll be right in the thick of it!”

  Jeffie ran the words through her mind for a moment. “Are they going into open war with us?”

  He jammed his hands into his pockets and shrugged. Jeffie wanted to smack him. And kiss him. And then kick him in the nuts.

  “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.”

  30. Claire

  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 ref
used 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.”