Q q q
Al did not sleep the first night back home. He kept replaying the debriefing over in his mind, the hours of discussion with Alphas and Command where and when each incident had happened. Despite everything that had gone wrong, the Panel still grilled him on his performance. Going over every excruciating detail had been wearisome and troubling. In the end, the Panel had made their decision about Al’s leadership. Their words still echoed in his thoughts:
“After careful review of your leadership and decision-making throughout the entirety of the Rio Factory Mission, we have concluded that you, Albert Hayman, have surpassed all expectations, and we give you full recommendations for graduation into a Psion Alpha squadron.”
Alphas and members of Command had come to him afterward, giving him resounding praise and accolade for his highly intuitive ability under the hottest of fires. But their words did not calm his storm of doubt. Nagging questions formed clouds in his mind. And the darkest of these remained the same: What happened to Sammy?
It wasn’t enough knowing that Cala’s condition was gradually improving, and that she would recover to at least some degree. Or that Kobe was already moved from serious condition to steady recovery. Martin was certainly dead, but he had to know about Sammy. Had he been alive when they left the building? And if so, whose fault was it? Whose hands bore Sammy’s blood?
The need for answers drove sleep from his mind and fatigue from his exhausted body. Sleep wouldn’t come, so he got out of his bed and slipped into a fresh jumpsuit.
He’d always liked the tranquility of headquarters at night. Over his nearly seven years here, he’d discovered the best cure for sleeplessness was more time in the sims. He’d been up enough during the wee hours of the day that he’d even gotten to know the names of all the ladies who cleaned the building top to bottom each weeknight. Tonight, though, the only sounds in the building belonged to him. He went to the fifth floor, to sim room one, and eye-scanned the door open. The white walls were ghostly pale in the dim lighting, but Al paid no attention to anything but the panel on the wall.
He touched the screen and it glowed with life:
Enter Command:
Al keyed in,
Beta Mission Logs
Please specify:
Rio Factory Mission Log
User Name:
Albert Hayman
Please verify with password and retinal scan:
MaLCovas
After the eye-scan, the panel began to separate millions of pieces of information into categories: Voice Recordings, Mission Checklists, Vitals, Tracking Signals, etc. Al began to realize just how much work it was going to be to cross reference hundreds of targeted pieces of data, and recreate the whole mission through voice feeds, time data, and vitals. Weeks, maybe months. His whole body let out a great yawn. Hot chocolate was his beverage of choice on late nights. He hurried downstairs to get it, and when he came back, he went to work.
Q q q
Solitude and its accompanying loneliness had never been a problem for Sammy. He’d been lonely many times, particularly right after his parents’ death, and had managed himself fairly well. But this was different. He had no one to talk to. So, on his fifth day alone, he started talking to himself. Little things at first, just to make noise, but after a week he was carrying out many of his thought processes verbally. That was as far as it went. When he got so lonely that it became a distraction, he sat down and thought about headquarters. He thought about Kawai’s feathery hair, Brickert telling a funny joke, and he imagined getting the other half of his birthday present from Jeffie. That was his favorite memory, even though it hadn’t happened yet.
“Someday it will, though. I just have to make sure of it.”
From day one, he had set his mind to figuring out a way to make fire. He had no idea when the generator might decide to quit working or when he would be paid a surprise visit and need to kill the lights, so he wanted to have torches ready, just in case. Matches were not among his storage provisions, so he decided to build a small fire from scratch using the spare wood from the broken furniture. Trial and error eventually produced flames, but he quickly doused the hot coals since the fumes had nowhere to go.
Next he looked for a way out of the building. The storage bunker felt like a giant cage. He needed to get out so badly the urge often overwhelmed him. When those moments came, he took a few minutes to calm down, then set his mind to a specific task. His first idea was to build something so he could climb back out of the shaft he’d fallen down.
This idea eventually proved impossible. The opening to the shaft was too high to reach by blast-jumping alone, and he couldn’t build anything sturdy to jump from because he had no tools. It seemed reasonable to believe the resistance group must have had a second entrance somewhere, an emergency exit perhaps, to enter and leave the compound.
For days he searched the walls and ceilings for some sign of a door, even a secret one. The room wasn’t terribly large, a simple rectangle he estimated to be roughly twelve by sixteen meters. He poured over every brick, hunting for some kind of hint, but with no luck. When he wasn’t searching for an escape, he was sleeping or exercising to keep his body in fighting condition.
His diet consisted of nothing but “gruel,” as he called it: a soupy mixture of several dehydrated foods. It didn’t taste too awful, and he knew how lucky he was to have anything at all, but after living off the wonders of the Robochef, he sorely missed a well-cooked meal.
“They could have at least hauled a stove down here so I could cook,” he muttered to himself as he stirred more gruel with a large knife (he had no spoons and only small forks). “They hauled this honking huge generator in here! What’s the point in putting it down here for nothing but lighting a few bulbs?”
The thought stuck in his mind for several minutes, and he mulled it over until it became even more puzzling. He had been running the generator almost non-stop for eight days. With almost a barrel of fuel in storage, and the generator using far less a day than he had initially feared, he was not in danger of running out of petrol anytime soon.
“Why would they haul something that big down here? Not just for the lights, right? If there was some kind of secret underground movement, they’d want computers. Radios or something to communicate secretly.” He turned the question over some more. “And why would they make it so hard to find a way out?”
He tasted the gruel to see if he’d gotten the flavor mixture right. It tasted a little bland, so he added some salt. It helped a little, but his thoughts stayed on the generator.
“No. Not just for lights. How much power would it take to constantly run an interactive hologram? Would there be enough from a gas powered generator? And where would they hide the projector?” he asked himself. “That’s got to be right! There’s more to the bunker than just this one room. A hidden entrance, not a secret escape. Clever.”
Using couch legs wrapped in cloth dipped in petrol, he made several torches. Then he turned off the generator and waited. It took almost half an hour before all the lights finally faded to black. The only illumination came from his torch. It cast a dancing light on the nearest bricks. Carefully, he walked around the perimeter of the room searching for a door, a gap in the wall. He ran his fingers along everything. It caught him by surprise when his fingers finally touched something that felt as smooth as steel.
It was the door, painted to look exactly like brick. Looking at it straight on, the door looked just like part of the wall. A masterful painting job. No doubt, when the power was on, the door could be perfectly concealed with an interactive hologram that looked and felt just like cold hard brick.
The door didn’t have a knob but a grip built into the door to turn. It was pretty jammed, but after several minutes of hard work, he got it open. He didn’t know what to expect to find on the other side, but he certainly wasn’t prepared for the stench that assaulted his nose.
“Ugh. Is that bird crap?” he asked himself.
He su
rveyed his surroundings by torchlight. The concealed room was much smaller than the main room, almost like an antechamber, and filled with two things: maps and birdcages. Sammy doubted map stores held as many maps as he saw here. The three dozen or so birdcages almost all held at least one bird skeleton.
He decided to investigate this room later. Right now he needed to get out of the building. He needed to see the sun or moon, or whatever was up in the big endless sky at this hour. Across the bird room was another door, not hidden, not painted, just a plain door. Its handle was badly rusted and its hinges protested in loud squeaks when he opened it.
A rich earthy smell greeted him. The concrete floor was gone, replaced by something spongier. Sammy pointed his torch downward and saw soil and moss. It wasn’t in a room, but in a tunnel carved from the dirt and supported with wooden pillars. With torch in hand, he followed the path.
He could only estimate the distance he walked, but guessed it to be at least half a kilometer when the tunnel ended at a wooden staircase. The air still smelled no more hospitable than it had at the beginning of the tunnel, and that didn’t seem to be a good sign. As the stairs climbed closer to the tunnel ceiling, his hair brushed against the hard dirt above him. He reached up and felt a trap door embedded in earth.
He gently pushed on the wooden trap door to see how easily it would give. He pushed harder. The trap door didn’t budge.
“Can’t you go a little easy on me?” Then, setting down the torch, he began to heave against the door, shoving it up with all his strength. He was so desperate to get out of this bunker that the aching in his shoulder didn’t slow him down. Only centimeters away from freedom.
Eventually the door moved slightly, then a bit more. Giving it one last hard shove, he heard a loud rip as the door gave way to fresh air. Sammy breathed it in deeply. Dirt cascaded into the tunnel on his head as he opened the exit wider, looking up to see the twilight sky and grass blades peeking out over the edge.
Grass. There’s grass planted above this thing, and I just tore a big hole in the yard. He stamped out his torch with his spiked shoes and climbed out of the tunnel.
Once he got his bearings, he realized he was on the lawn of a large chemical manufacturing plant across the road from the Rio factory. After smoothing the grass back as best he could over the doorway, and sticking the smoking torch into the ground several paces back from it as a marker, he crossed the street, headed for the factory.
Somewhere in the very back of his mind, he held a glimmer of hope that someone, whether friends or Alphas, were still there trying to find his body, ready to take him home. He had not even realized how badly he wanted someone, anyone, to be there until he crossed the square where he’d landed. The thought of seeing someone he knew brought moisture to his eyes.
“I’m coming,” he whispered. “I’m coming right now.”
The building was deserted as ever. Refusing to let himself cry, he navigated the wreckage of the factory slowly, taking it all in, not really knowing what he was looking for. Bullets and shrapnel littered the floor like junk food at a movie theater. Puddles of coagulated blood looked like spilled soda stains. But he saw no corpses.
In the basement, the hole he had fallen through was still buried beneath the huge pile of the charred brick and plaster that had caved down in the explosion. Much of the doorway and some of the hall had been blown out. Sammy wondered if that entire side of the building was safe. Out the exit he and Kobe should have escaped through, he saw the shells of more bullets, more blood stains on a concrete walkway, but still no bodies.
“They came and cleaned up,” he told himself. “And they’ll be back soon if they’re going to use this place to make weapons. Can’t stay much longer.”
He wasn’t ready to go back inside the bunker. He had a theory he wanted to test out. With his ample spare time, Sammy had devised several hypotheses to explain how Al’s mission had gone so badly. His best idea was that the Thirteens had learned about Psion Command’s pre-mission surveillance. Acting under the assumption that Psions would come back, the Thirteens made a few key changes to the factory and kept it under constant surveillance. This would have allowed them to dispatch a response team when someone spotted Al’s team arrive.
That was his most optimistic theory.
His other guess was that someone, either on Al’s team or higher up, had betrayed them. That person would have tipped off the CAG as to when they would be arriving, where they would be stationed, and what exits they would be using in case of an attack.
He felt compelled to at least try to see if the surveillance cameras in the factory would give any more information. The entrance Gregor and Li had used was still intact, allowing Sammy access into the left wing of the building. The path to the security room had been burned into his brain from hours of practices. Lots of equipment was scattered over the room. On one wall was a large screen divided into over a dozen segments, each segment broadcasting live feed from the cameras still intact.
The hacker hardware Li and Gregor had used for the job was there, probably abandoned in their haste to leave when Al alerted them. Sammy knew enough about it to get it started, and then, through a mixture of memory and trial and error, figured out how to use it to hack the system and search the security archives.
It took him a couple of hours, but he finally found footage of the brick wall being constructed by two men in dirty work clothes smoking pipes. That had taken place only two weeks before Al’s mission.
He went even further back into the records, trying several different cameras. He tried larger spaced areas like the lobby, the production areas, anything that would show the presence of Thirteens or Aegis in the building during the months just before Al’s mission.
Nothing.
Either there truly was no footage or tracks had been hidden very well. Almost as an afterthought, he checked the camera watching the loading dock. It was easy to sift through the data; all the cameras were motion-activated. Most of the footage was of stray dogs or birds wandering through the zone. He sped through a scene of a car passing through the loading area, hit rewind so he could watch it again at normal speed.
A large, black sedan rolled past the dock and stopped almost right where Al’s command station had been. Two Thirteens came out of the door near the mail slot, Sammy thought he recognized them from the factory, but wasn’t quite sure. The rear car door nearest the Thirteens opened and they got in. As the car sped off, something caught Sammy’s eye—something familiar. He rewound the scene again, slowing it down this time so he could watch the car closer.
His finger holding down the play button started going numb. A nasty feeling settled in his stomach. The car drove off again. Sammy rewound and played it again.
“Who is that?” he whispered. Then he played it again.
“NO!” he cried.
Still in disbelief, he played it back once more with the highest possible resolution.
“It can’t be!” he shouted at the screen. “That can’t be right!” The sickness in his stomach was as real as ever, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away from the face of the man sitting in the front passenger seat.
The mission had been sabotaged from the beginning.
By Commander Wrobel.
How could Byron allow something like this to happen? Wasn’t he supposed to be in charge of everything? How could all of this happen from someone so high up? He knew Wrobel, he’d talked to him, he’d laughed at his jokes. Wrobel had seemed like a genuinely good person. It didn’t seem possible. It was just a horrible dream, and maybe when Sammy woke up it would all be a fading memory, and he could breathe a sigh of relief. But, no. It was real. And now, because of it, he was dead to everyone he knew. This thought struck him anew and with greater force than before.
They all think I’m dead. They’re not coming back for me.
He had no distinct memory of returning to the bunker until the overpowering stench of bird droppings hit him for the second time, and the sickness in his gut
became intolerable. He was not right in the head until the next morning after a fitful night of sleep. The singular thought of what he had seen replayed in his mind so much that his dreams seemed filled with smoky gray blurs resembling Wrobel’s face and toppling brick walls.
He lay in his little “bed,” not moving more than a few blinks and the occasional shift of weight, letting his mind process scenario after scenario. All of them looked as hopeless as the one before. The Thirteens could come back at any moment to clean up; maybe Wrobel would be with them, just to make sure Sammy was really dead. Once they lifted the brick wall upstairs, it would be over. He could see them repelling down the shaft armed and eager to finish him off. He, with no weapons and no allies, was a sitting duck.
But I can’t just leave—where will I go?
A terrible weight settled over his chest, snuffing hope and happiness out of him as he imagined himself dying in a hundred different ways, each of them alone and helpless. That weight of despair grew heavier and heavier until Sammy could scarcely breathe. Even the room grew darker as though his eyes were dimming due to lack of oxygen to his brain.
Just as he was ready to abandon himself to what felt like destruction, the image of Jeffie bloomed in his mind. Her smile and her touch, but most of all, her love lifted the darkness from him. The crushing weight lightened until it disappeared. He sat up with a strange clarity in his mind. Ideas replaced despair, facts scattered away fear. His exodus would have to be smart—smart and speedy. Sammy made up his mind: he would leave as soon as he could. He would get home no matter what.
THE END
AFTERWORD
Thank you for purchasing Psion Beta, Fellow Bookworm, if I may call you that. Forgive me for leaving you with a cliffhanger ending. I chose this not to sell more copies of a sequel, but because the story of Sammy becoming a Psion Beta ends here. The story does continue, but is its own tale, and to continue it here would have made hefty reading for you, my friend. Sammy's next adventure, Psion Gamma, picks up almost right where we left him. It has been written and will hopefully see the light of day.
Psion Beta (Psion series #1) Page 31
