by Jacob Gowans
“Access granted.”
The panel went dead and the steel flooring dropped down in halves. Sammy stared down below and saw nothing.
Al saluted Sammy with a dramatic sincerity. “Cheers.” Then he jumped into the abyss and disappeared out of sight.
Sammy watched in mild shock. Then, with a gulp, he followed.
He fell down a dark shaft. He fell longer than he’d ever fallen. In the blackness, his body quickly became disoriented. A powerful blast of air rushed up at him, slowing him at first, then cushioning him until he’d stopped completely.
Al waited for him. “Fun, huh? Those are actually cheaper and safer than elevators. This way. You’re not going to believe all the cool stuff they’ve got down here.”
They walked into a huge underground warehouse of stone walls and concrete floor. Dozens of long shelves filled one section of the warehouse. On the shelves were hundreds of clear, plastic containers, each containing a different weapon or piece of equipment. Farther down the warehouse was a shooting range.
Al pointed to the shelves. “Find whatever weapons you want to try. Your thumbprint unlocks the casings. Go to the desk to request ammo, clothes, explosives, gear, all that stuff. You can try anything out at the range, even the explosives if you have the demolitionist with you. But you don’t need to worry about explosives right now. Wait until you have some more field experience. Usually all I carry is small concealable weapons, but for this mission, since we’re going hunting, we can take the good stuff.”
Sammy grinned mischievously.
“So what do you want to try?”
Sammy walked down two aisles of guns, laughing to himself. Seeing all the weapons of destruction stirred up a bit of the darker part of him. The part Stripe had awakened. So many guns. The choice wasn’t easy. He’d killed more enemies with knives and nail guns than any real hardware. Perhaps Al sensed that his friend was overwhelmed because he put a hand on Sammy’s shoulder.
“Let me show you all the weapons you’ve already trained with at headquarters. Do you remember which ones you liked better?”
“Not really. No one said I had to decide on a favorite.”
“That’s okay. I’ll offer suggestions.”
They spent the next half hour looking at guns while other members of Charlie Squadron came in and out, grabbing what they needed. Sammy would have spent all day in the warehouse if Anna hadn’t started following them around, hinting that they needed to leave shortly. He ended up choosing a hunting knife, an assault syshée, and a handgun with tranquilizer darts. At the ammo desk, an old man with a twitchy gray moustache shot Sammy several skeptical glances before jotting down the orders and returning with magazines and rounds.
“You know how to load those?” he asked. “You even know what they’re called? How old are you, boy?”
Al helped Sammy load his large, Alpha-emblazoned gear bag. “Relax, Josephus. You’re looking at a wunderkind here!”
The second Sammy had finished packing his gear, Anna announced, “Charlie Squadron, head to the hangar. Move it!”
“Outfitting is connected to the hangar via that tunnel,” Al said, pointing to a large metal gate slowly raising itself to reveal a well-lit passage of more concrete and steel.
The squadron flew in two cruisers, each piloted by one of the Elite. Anna told Sammy that this was because Elite were the best trained pilots. Sammy sat between Justice Juraschek and Anna. Justice was one of the two Tensais.
“So you’ve got Eleven, too, eh?” Justice asked. “Pretty crazy. I haven’t heard of anyone besides you with a double Anomaly. Have you?”
Sammy shook his head.
“How old were you when you first saw?”
Sammy blinked and looked at Justice properly for the first time. “What did you say? What did you call it?”
Justice smiled and adjusted the glasses perched on his nose. He wore thick round frames of solid blue that didn’t match his Alpha suit and pointed dark reddish-brown hair. Sammy guessed Justice couldn’t be past his early twenties, one of the youngest members of the crew.
“That’s what most Tensais call it . . . seeing.”
“That’s what I call it, too!”
“Is there any other way to describe it?” Justice adjusted his glasses again. “I read a psychological report on optical nerve transplant patients. Wild stuff. The way they described seeing for the first time is exactly how I felt when my anomaly began.”
“I was playing chess when it happened to me,” Sammy told him.
“Really? Wild. I was taking a chemistry exam. You might call me a late bloomer. I was sixteen and hadn’t studied a lick for the test. So there I was, sitting at my desk staring at a stoichiometry problem set—stoichiometry—can you believe that? Of all the things. . . . My teacher had to nudge me awake because I’d been up all night chatting with Veruka Mable. Beautiful girl. Very, very—anyway—I looked down at the paper and jotted down the answer without even thinking. Then the next one and the next one and the next. Before I knew it, I’d finished the test. It hadn’t even hit me what I’d done! My teacher handed me back the test and asked me to show how I reached my solutions. I shoved it back at him and said, ‘If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate!’” Justice waited for Sammy to laugh, but Sammy didn’t get the joke. “Yeah, well, I got detention for that, but by the end of the semester, my chemistry teacher was asking me to proofread his exams!”
Sammy did laugh at that.
“But I hate chemistry. Boring. Thankfully, there’s lots of Tensais who love filling up chalkboards and notebooks with equations. They love telling nerd jokes. Um . . . let me think here. Heisenberg is out for a drive when he's stopped by police. The police says, ‘Do you know how fast you were going?’ Heisenberg replies, ‘No, but I know where I am.’”
Justice held out his hands at the punch line, waiting for Sammy’s response. When Sammy didn’t even smile, the Tensai said, “Yeah, I don’t see how that’s funny, either. They do. Me, putting bullets and fists into Thirteens. That’s what I do.”
Justice talked to Sammy the entire way to Akureyri. Al glanced back occasionally with a knowing grin. It wasn’t a long ride, but it felt a little longer as Justice kept telling chemistry jokes even though he claimed to hate the subject. Sammy tried to laugh, but wasn’t always able to muster up the mirth with his thoughts lingering on the mission.
Dinsmore and Kolomiyets, two of the Elite squadron members, dropped the teams off at their designated points. The ground teams had far more gear than the other teams, but that made sense to Sammy. They had to cover their territory while living in the outdoors until the mission was accomplished or aborted. Sammy, Justice, and Nikotai were the last to be deployed. Their station to watch over the harbor was on the roof of a hotel that overlooked the bay. However, the government had booked them the penthouse suite on the top floor for easy access.
Justice let out a cheer when he saw their suite. “Isn’t this wild? I love working for the government!”
Large bay windows made up the northeast wall that gave them a great view of the harbor. The furnishings were all of the highest quality, and a fire had already been built in the fireplace to welcome them.
“Sammy, you don’t have to join Al and the other teams. Just stay here and enjoy your mission!” Justice joked.
It took over two hours to set up and test all the equipment that Justice and Wang had brought with them. Telescopes, computers, radios, long-range sensors, and a chess set were some of the items Sammy noticed while he helped by running wires out the window and up the side of the building to where Nikotai waited on the roof station. They tuned three radios to the same frequencies as their coms. This way, they need not wear their coms at all times to hear what other squad members were saying.
Nikotai kept mostly to himself. He spoke softly, said what needed saying, and then went silent again. Sammy found this a little odd because Toad, who had also been an Ultra, hadn’t been able to keep quiet. When Sa
mmy and Justice finished setting up their station, Nikotai took first watch while the other two played a game of chess. Sammy hadn’t played in months and was anxious to see how he’d do against another Tensai.
As Justice moved his first pawn, Sammy noticed that the skin on the Tensai’s right arm shined abnormally. “Is that bionic?”
“Yeah, you like that?” Justice held up the arm with a wink.
“What happened?”
“Thirteens, what else? I was on a reconnaissance mission in L.A. with my former squadron. Thirteens caught us and did what they do best. But don’t you worry. The other guy lost more than his arm. So, anyway, back to the chess match. What do you see when you look at the board?”
Sammy wasn’t sure what Justice meant, so he ignored the question and focused on his next move. Knight to C3.
Justice’s move came much quicker. “You don’t see anything?”
Sammy remembered the chess game with his father, the red sweater he’d bought at the mall, his parents’ blood all over the house the next morning. Back then, he’d seen something. Now he saw nothing.
“When I look at the chessboard, Sammy, I see . . . hmmm, how do I describe it? I see layers. Like several dozen boards stacked on top of each other. And I can see through them all. It shows me what I can do, what you can do. It’s almost like I see the future.”
“I run the hundred meter in nine seconds,” Nikotai announced over the radio.
Justice put his hand over his mouth so that Nikotai wouldn’t hear him through the com. “He loves saying that.”
Sammy moved again. As soon as he took his hand off the piece, he regretted it. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
Justice countered with a strong attack. Sammy doubted he could recover from the error. Three moves into the game and he was already dying a slow death.
“So you don’t see anything. Interesting. Could be just for chess. Not all Tensais are created equally. And not all excel at the same thing.”
“You mean some Tensais use more of their brains than others?” Sammy asked.
“What? No. Who told you that?”
“Doctor Rosmir.”
Justice tapped two fingers against his temple. “Everyone uses one hundred percent of their brain. Anything else is silliness. No offense to the doctor. Hopefully he was dumbing it down for you. If not, then someone probably explained Tensais to him, but he had no idea what they were talking about, so he resorted to the old myth that humans only use ten percent of the brain. Don’t believe that. Tensais have a DNA mutation that affects our oligodendrocytes composition. This makes the myelin on our nerve cells slightly different. In other words, better. It speeds up neural processing, and the brain responds at puberty to the anomaly by creating more neural connections. Three to four times more than the average human. That’s what enhances our thinking and deepens our memory. Pretty wild, though, huh?”
“Clocked in at eight point eight seconds once,” Nikotai interrupted. “A world record at that time.”
Sammy lost five chess matches in a row to Justice before deciding to take the second shift. It wasn’t a very difficult task, but it required methodical observation. The Coast Guard tagged each ship before it set sail. Sammy had to make sure that each ship and boat had a tracking mark on it. Then he used telescopes to capture the faces of the boat passengers, allowing the computer to use facial recognition software to identify them as possible matches with their targets. Every fifteen to twenty minutes, he scanned the harbor perimeter for any signs of disturbance and for boats that hadn’t been tagged.
Reports came in regularly on the radio from other teams. The ground units had set up their camps in low-visibility areas. Anna then ordered them to start placing motion detectors around the roads and paths most likely for the targets to travel. The air teams swept the perimeter of the city, reported on weather conditions, and sent back video footage to the teams stationed around the three major highways coming into town.
During those first three days, Sammy learned a valuable lesson about surveillance: it was tedious work and required a lot of self-discipline. Nothing exciting happened, and all the reports coming in over the radio reflected that.
“My dad was police,” Nikotai told Sammy late at night while they kept watch over the bay. Justice slept on one of the beds, resting until his next shift. “Now he’s retired. He was lucky. Never got shot or injured. He always said police work was ninety-five percent boredom and five percent sheer adrenaline. Most missions are like that, too. This is the important work. If we do it right, we can skip the adrenaline part. Doing it right makes the job easy, and no one gets shot.”
Sammy liked Nikotai. The Ultra was about the same age as Anna, early thirties. Some on Charlie were even older. Tom Garrett was in his forties. Jerome Yazzie, the other Ultra, was in his late thirties, but looked almost fifty. Justice said this was because he’d struggled off and on with alcohol abuse, a problem not uncommon among Alphas.
Nikotai and Justice explained to Sammy how Anna tended to use her team. The Elite typically served as medics, pilots, and backup. The Ultras often got called on for infiltration and other covert assignments, their speed and disturbing accuracy became very useful in such situations. Tensais were the tacticians, demolition experts, and, in Justice’s case, skilled fighters. Justice couldn’t match a Psion in hand-to-hand combat, but his superior intellect still gave him an edge over most opponents. Psions were used as the front line soldiers—the tanks, as it were—but Justice wasn’t sure Anna knew how she’d use Sammy.
Whenever Nikotai was on watch, Justice wanted to play chess. Justice probably had his doubts about Sammy’s Anomaly Eleven. It made sense. Sammy hadn’t told anyone in Charlie about his imprisonment and torture, so it seemed that none of them except Al and perhaps Anna even knew about it. However, the more they played the more improvement he saw in his strategy. Before long, Justice started bringing a Magic 8-Ball to the games and setting it beside the board. Every so often, perhaps once or twice every match, he would close his eyes, shake the Magic 8-Ball, and then peer at the answer underneath. Only then would he make his move.
Finally Sammy asked him why.
“Whenever I have to make a decision and I’m lacking sufficient data to see the correct determination, I prefer using pure randomness to control the outcome. That way, I avoid all possibility of having imperfect or incomplete information inaccurately affect the course of events.” Justice held up the toy like it was a crystal ball. “The Magic 8-Ball has twenty outcomes. Ten affirmative, five neutral, five negative. If I assume the neutral to be also negative, it becomes a fifty-fifty chance between affirmative and negative. That is, of course, assuming I introduce enough variation into the shaking and turning of the predictor inside the 8-Ball, which I do. I used to flip a coin, but I got good enough at that to where I could almost always predict the outcome based on which side was up when I flipped and the amount of force I used to flip it. It’s not difficult. Nikotai’s hand-eye coordination is so wild he can flip heads every time.”
Sammy raised an eyebrow at Nikotai, who responded by raising his own eyebrows one at a time.
“You don’t see at all any more, do you?” Justice’s eyes were on Sammy. Across the room, Nikotai turned slightly in his chair toward the conversation.
“No.”
“Head trauma?” Justice asked. “It happened to a girl I knew at Tensai Beta. She was emotionally crushed. They kept her around for about six months to see if it came back. It never did.”
“No, it wasn’t trauma. It was—well—they believe it was sensory overload.”
Justice laughed. “What does that mean? Is that something sexual?”
“Torture.”
Watching Justice’s face fall and Nikotai’s head turn back around didn’t make Sammy feel any better. “Tor—that was you?” Justice’s eyes got wide. “We heard about a Beta—rumors about one. No one believed them. You’re the one Byron lost on his mission.” Justice swore softly. “My apologies for pressing the
question, Sammy. I didn’t know. And you haven’t seen since then?”
“I don’t know. I get flashes of it. Not really seeing, but . . . something. Doctor Rosmir is hopeful.”
“Yeah, well, no offense or anything,” Justice said, “but Doctor Rosmir doesn’t know a thing about Tensais. That doesn’t mean you won’t see again. What I’m saying is don’t put your Tensai trust in a doctor of Psions.”
The rest of that second day seemed to go slower. Toward the evening, Anna gave the Elite pilot Dinsmore the order to pick up Sammy and bring him to her post. Sammy was both relieved and sad to leave the penthouse. While he didn’t like the constant reminders about his damaged Anomaly Eleven, he enjoyed the Ultra and Tensai’s company.
Working with Avni and Anna was weird. Both girls were ten or more years older than Sammy. Anna was all business, and Avni only talked to him when she wanted him to take over her duties so she could rest. Each shift was eight hours spent watching the roads and the visible terrain of foothills leading to the mountains. It wasn’t nearly as interesting as the boats in the harbor, and much more difficult. After almost two days of this, he was overjoyed when Anna told him he’d be going to grounds duty with Al and Jerome Yazzie.
As luck would have it, rain clouds came in about an hour before meeting up with Al. The team of two was eating lunch around a solar space heater when Sammy arrived on the evening of July 30th. They had set up camp not more than a stone’s throw from the steep banks of the Glerá River under the cover of a thick patch of bushes and small trees.
Al and Jerome showed him all the equipment and gave him a rundown of their method. “One of us stays at camp—”
“We call that guy the squatter,” Jerome said.
“The other guy is the rover. He spends most of his time on the bug.”
“The bug?” Sammy asked.
“That thing,” Jerome said, pointing to something hidden behind some bushes.
Sammy went into the bushes and saw a small vehicle that looked like a giant ant. It had six wheels, although Sammy wasn’t sure they were wheels at all because they had small, curved paddles on them. And though it had three jointed segments, it could only carry one person.
