Psion Omega (Psion series Book 5)

by Jacob Gowans

  A man’s rich voice sang loud and clear, I’d save every day like a treasure and then again, I would spend them with you.

  Jeffie, Brickert, Kawai, Natalia, and all of Sammy’s other friends floated in his mind, their faces happy and free. He remembered his carefree days as a Beta, training in the Arena, learning to blast, playing at a water park, arguing over things that didn’t matter. In a way, it was as if those memories didn’t belong to him, but someone else. And Sammy had only borrowed them.

  But there never seems to be enough time, the voice sang, to do the things you wanna do once you find them.

  When the music stopped, Sammy played the song again. He huddled on his bed and listened to it all the way through. Another person’s life appeared in his mind, the images a stream flowing along pleasantly. This person was a boy with parents who took him fishing on lakes, played football in parks, made ice cream on his birthday, and kissed him on the cheek at bedtime.

  The song ended once more, so he played it a third time and a fourth and fifth. He didn’t even remember getting up and moving the stylus. Tears flooded his face as he rocked himself, his chest tight as he sobbed.

  I’ve looked around enough to know that you’re the one I want to go through time with …

  After listening to the song countless times and feeling lighter than he’d been in weeks, Sammy picked himself off the floor and went to the infirmary. The drive took him longer than usual. Lemon took two attempts before she would start up. Sammy had to have one foot on the ground and one on the accelerator. Then, with his foot out the door, he used strong angled foot blasts to push.

  The infirmary lights were dimmed. The only sound in the building was a movie playing from the attending nurse’s holo-tablet. She looked up from the hologram until she saw Sammy’s face in the glow of the lights above her desk. They exchanged a nod, nothing more, their usual gesture to each other when Sammy came in the middle of the night to read to his friend.

  Brickert’s room was dark except for the thin strip of light above his bed which gave just enough illumination to see his face, nothing more. Sammy took the chair to his friend’s right and rested his hand on Brickert’s. Part of him hoped Brickert would wake. Part of him didn’t.

  “I blew it, Brick.” When Sammy saw that Brickert did not respond to the sound of his voice, he continued, “I went down there to save you, but instead I almost killed you. I wanted to control the anomaly—to use it. Instead I nearly … ” Sammy licked his lips and tasted tears. “I punched you over and over until you spoke. You—you asked me, ‘Who are you?’”

  Sammy squeezed Brickert’s hand, mirroring the tightness in his chest.

  “You didn’t even recognize me … your brother. I’m sorry.”

  Someone moved in the darkness. At first Sammy thought it was Brickert, but it was another person, a figure in the shadows. For a moment Sammy feared it might be the shadow person from his nightmare, but it wasn’t. Brickert’s door cracked open, and Sammy caught a wisp of blonde hair in the dim light.

  “Jeffie!” he called out, getting to his feet. “Jeffie, wait!”

  She did not stop. When Sammy called after her he was hushed by the attending nurse. He ignored her and called again, but Jeffie hurried away. In order to catch her, Sammy had to sprint, and by the time he did, he was nearly out of breath. The moment he touched her arm, Jeffie whirled around and pushed Sammy against the wall of the stairs leading down to the tunnels.

  “Now you want to talk to me? Now?” There was venom in her eyes.

  “Yes,” he stated firmly, “now I’m ready to talk.”

  His response caught Jeffie by surprise. “Well … that’s too bad because I don’t want to listen.”

  Enraged, Sammy spun, pressed Jeffie to the wall with a hard knock, and held her tightly. He instantly regretted it. For the first time ever, Jeffie looked at him with fear in her eyes. “You say you love me, well this is me! You know I’m a Thirteen! You know I’m one of them! Can you not love that part of me?”

  “Don’t give me that. Everyone has things that should be kept buried—that should never be let out. You don’t get to make excuses.”

  Sammy’s anger deflated and he stepped away from her. Jeffie caught him and pulled him into a tight hug.

  “Are you done?” she asked.

  Sammy knew what she meant. She wasn’t asking if he was done sulking or feeling sorry for himself, but was he done with using it. “I don’t know.”

  Jeffie looked at him in the eye. “Promise me.”

  “No. I can’t.”

  “Why not?” she shouted.

  “Because I don’t want to break a promise.”

  “Then promise me and keep it.”

  Sammy shook his head. “If it comes down to watching you die or using the Anomaly Thirteen, I will choose the anomaly. The choice won’t even be difficult.”

  “I don’t want to be saved by a Thirteen.”

  “It’s not—”

  Jeffie frowned. “I just heard you tell Brickert that you beat on him—”

  “Yeah, I lost control for a minute, but then I was fine. He snapped me out of it.”

  “What if I can’t snap you out of it? What if you save me and then kill me?” She kept talking before Sammy could answer. “You are stronger without it. You are better without it.”

  “I’m not. I know my limits. If I have to use it to save you, I will. And that’s all I can say.”

  Jeffie smiled sadly. “I want to hit you right now. You know that?”

  “Do it. Trust me. I could use a good slap.”

  “And we’re not done talking about this!”

  “I’m just glad we’re talking. It’s been—it’s been hard for me since Detroit.” Sammy’s voice cracked. “Dreams … guilt … mistakes.” His chest grew tight, but he was determined not to cry in front of her. “I killed so many people, Jeffie. Now my name is all over the news like I’m—like I’m a mass murderer.”

  “I know,” she whispered. “It’s not right.”

  “And I wet the bed this morning,” he admitted.

  This statement was met with silence. Sammy suddenly felt terribly stupid and wished he hadn’t said anything. Then Jeffie giggled. She crooked a finger under her nose as it turned into a full laugh.

  Sammy started chuckling too. “It’s not—” He jostled her. “Stop it, it’s not—”

  The harder she laughed, the harder he did. Finally they were both holding their stomachs, barely able to breathe. When they stopped, Sammy had to wipe the tears of mirth from his eyes.

  Their eyes met. Jeffie’s gaze turned fierce. “I do love you, Samuel Berhane.”

  “You still want to hit me?”

  “Yeah.” She smiled and leaned toward him. Sammy’s stomach did a flop and his heartbeat quickened. His arms went numb and tingly, and the rest of his body was jittery and trembling.

  Rather than hitting him, Jeffie kissed him. They hadn’t kissed in weeks, and Sammy responded to it by wrapping his arms around her and lifting her up until she could wrap her legs around his waist. Her mouth opened wider, so did his. Their breath mingled hot and tangy in the cold tunnel air. All of Sammy’s worries about Jeffie, Brickert, his anomaly, and Detroit vanished for a few moments. Jeffie’s affection and tenderness wrapped him in a warm blanket, comforting his soul and mind. He wasn’t in an underground tunnel; he wasn’t in Glasgow. He was home.

  When they stopped to breathe, Jeffie grinned, her lips red and raw. “Dang. I’ve needed that for about a month.”

  Then she kissed him again.

  8. Caller

  Monday, June 30, 2087

  YOU HAVE TO make a choice, Sammy, said the voice of the shadow. You can’t walk the fence forever.

  Sammy studied the shadow. Whenever he held up a hand, the shadow mirrored him. If he stepped closer, so did the shadow. The closer Sammy came to the shadow, the more the energy of it pulsed and pulled. “What will happen if I touch you?”

  What will happen if you touch m
e?

  Sammy punched at the shadow, stopping millimeters away from the shadow’s copying fist. Then Sammy opened his fingers and let his palm show. Like invisible rubber bands connecting them, the shadow pulled at Sammy in time with Sammy’s heartbeat. Bored of going through the same thing night after night and curious to see what would happen if he gave into the pull, Sammy finally connected their palms and fingers. The shadow brightened and shrunk until it disappeared, and Sammy was left with nothing but a key in hand.

  Sammy woke gripping the wooden rail on the side of his bed. He’d wet himself again. Cursing, he got up and stripped the bed of its sheets and his body of his clothes. I’m sixteen years old … not six … stupid dreams.

  By the time he finished cleaning up, it was a little after 0400. Sammy couldn’t go back to sleep so he dug up his holo-tablet and resumed his efforts to teach himself programming code.

  For the last two weeks he had tried to convince the leadership committee that he should go to the Hive and talk to Trapper, but no one else consented. Even Anna no longer supported him, mostly because she was annoyed that he kept asking. Without any support, Sammy turned his attention to the kill switch code. With all future bombings of cloning sites put on hold, it was the only trail of crumbs the resistance had to follow for the time being. Sammy’s hope was that by teaching himself coding languages, he could figure out some way to exploit the code Khani Nguyen had discovered in the data stolen from the Hive.

  Through the wall of his house, he heard a news report. Al often fell asleep watching CBN and left the holo-vision on all night.

  “The White House announced yesterday evening,” said the news reporter for CBN, “that four major military operations were conducted successfully during the past week, all targeting NWG military sites and terrorist centers. The first target was an atmospheric cruiser construction site in the deep African desert outside of Agadez. The second at coastal shipyards in Quanzhou. A new terrorist training facility had been built in Norilsk, Krasnoyarsk Krai. According to reports this attack led to the most casualties for the NWG at well over two hundred, though very few were civilians. And finally, CAG forces destroyed an arms manufacturing plant in Nagercoil near the Tamil Nadu coast. Minimal CAG forces were lost in these strikes, and many experts are calling this the opening act to the close of the war. To bring us more details on these operations, we’ve brought in our special wartime correspon—”

  Sammy chuckled as he left his bed, turned off the holo-vision, and returned to his bedroom. Commander Havelbert, Director of Military Operations for the NWG, had already informed Byron of the assaults. Only one of the attacks had been unforeseen: Quanzhou, and it was the only real blow to the war effort. The new training facility in Norilsk was a fake. New Beta trainees were being sent to Geneva, and there certainly weren’t two hundred of them yet. Fortunately, the false information had led to the discovery of a mole in the upper circles of the NWG ranks.

  The cruiser construction site in Agadez had been abandoned a month earlier as part of their plans to rotate sites every eight weeks. And Nagercoil was one of three recently converted small arms manufacturing plants, and fortunately the smallest of them. From the way Commander Byron made it sound—or perhaps the way Havelbert made it sound—the CAG had taken such severe casualties at Norilsk and Agadez that the NWG was the real victor of this round.

  Deet! Deet! Deet!

  Sammy glanced at his com laying across the room on the table. The holo-screen said UNKNOWN CALLER. Sammy frowned at this. Who would be unknown? By the time he reached the com and answered with a harried, “Hello?” the line was dead.

  Sammy ate breakfast with his friends. Brickert would soon be released from the infirmary, so planning a party for him was the topic of the meal. Not far from them sat Marie, baby bundled up in a sling against her breast. Al had stopped taking his meals in the cafeteria weeks ago. Sammy watched Marie sadly, wondering if he should say something or if he could do anything for her. Natalia must have taken note of the expression on his face because she put a hand on his.

  “Don’t,” she said, “there’s nothing you can do. Rosa told me Al and Marie are done. Al told her last week.”

  Jeffie shook her head. “All because Marie got herself pregnant without his permission. Al makes me sick.”

  “He wanted kids,” Li said with half of a banana in his mouth. “I heard him talking about it to Martin and some other Betas about three or four years ago.”

  “You remember something Al said three years ago?” Kawai asked.

  Li shrugged. “I’d remember any conversation where a man says he wants seven kids. And that was Al.”

  “He hardly talks to his dad, either,” Sammy said. “Not outside of the committee. Comes home, turns on the holo-vision, and drinks.”

  “Intoxication isn’t allowed,” Natalia said.

  “That’s why he does it on our couch,” Sammy said. “I’m not gonna tell on him.”

  “Does Byron know?” Li asked. “Thomas and Lara?”

  Kawai arched an eyebrow. “It’s not Sammy’s business to snitch. You know Al’s upbringing as well as I do. The Byron family—they’re all—”

  “It’s my business as his friend,” Sammy said. “I know I should talk to him about it, but I don’t know what to say.”

  Li put up a hand. “Nah, when you were going through your thing, we let you have your space until you were ready to deal. Al needs his space, not you reminding him of his beliefs about drinking.”

  Underneath the table, Jeffie squeezed Sammy’s thigh and smirked at him. He put his hand on hers, and they locked fingers. “How’s your oatmeal?” she asked.

  “Oaty,” he answered.

  “Are you sleeping better?”

  “Like a baby.” Not a total lie. Babies wet themselves at night. Though Sammy had told Jeffie about peeing himself that first night, he hadn’t mentioned that it was now a recurring event. Nor had he said anything about his shadow dreams. After seeing the fear in her eyes when he’d almost hit her, the last thing he wanted to do was scare her.

  Meetings were scheduled after breakfast. When the leadership committee convened, Sammy told himself more than once that he wouldn’t bring up his request again. But as the meeting wore on with more debates about ill-conceived ideas and plots that would ultimately amount to nothing, Sammy couldn’t stop himself.

  He raised his hand. Lara saw it and sighed, but changed topics instead of calling on him. Each time Lara glanced at him, Sammy met her with a pleasant smile. After five minutes of this, she sighed again. After ten, Sammy’s raised hand was all anyone could think about, wondering when or if Lara would recognize him to speak. When she finally did, his arm dropped to the table, aching and tingling from lack of blood. He’d held his hand high for fifteen minutes.

  “All right, Sammy, the chair recognizes that you wish to speak … even though we all know what it is you want to talk about.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “I’ve been put in charge of all operations, right? Which means if there’s an operation to be done, I get the final say.”

  Commander Byron cocked an eyebrow at his father and mother, silently asking them for their opinion. Thomas Byron shook his head.

  “You are in charge of the subcommittee of operations, yes,” Lara admitted, “under the supervision of the leadership committee. And no one on the committee thinks your idea is wise.”

  “I agree,” Thomas said.

  “We have nothing else to go on,” Sammy argued. “We’ve been stalled since Detroit. Six weeks of nothing but talking. I know you hate this inaction, Thomas. So do I. Let’s do something.”

  “It is too risky,” Commander Byron stated as though it was the final word.

  “Everything we do is risky. I’ll go alone.”

  “Like hell you will,” Anna said. “You take a stealth cruiser to the Hive and chances are you don’t come back. Now maybe you don’t consider a stealth cruiser a luxury, but the rest of us do. I can’t pull them out of my butt. Can you
? Because if you can, take the one from your butt, and leave the other one for us to use because your cruiser is gonna get blown to smithereens.”

  “Look, we have a kill code or part of one on our hands,” Sammy said. “Doesn’t anyone think this might be the answer—”

  “We’re not sure what it is until we use it and actually kill someone!”

  “What else could it be?” Sammy yelled. He was suddenly so angry that his hands shook, and he wanted to hurt Anna. “I watched our CAG prisoners blow up with my own eyes after we captured them! They imploded from the inside. Remember Akureyri, Anna? Al saw it too.”

  Al looked up from where he’d been sitting or sleeping. It was hard to tell which because his eyes were so blurry and bloodshot. “Huh? Oh yeah. I saw it too.”

  For about ten seconds no one in the room said anything. Then Khani stood up and said, “Technically an implosion is an external force causing an object to collapse inward on itself due to a difference in external and internal pressures. What you described, Sammy, sounds more like a textbook explosion.” Then she straightened her glasses and sat back down.

  “Let’s break into subcommittees,” Lara announced abruptly.

  As Sammy left the air control tower, he noted a faint stench of something stale and sour. He turned around to see Al, his eyes half open, his face pale and sporting pressure marks on it.

  “Didn’t get much sleep again?” Sammy asked with a half-hearted chuckle.

  “Hey Sammy,” Al mumbled in a hoarse voice. “No, haven’t been sleeping well.”

  “I finally got to hold your baby,” Sammy said. “It’s a, uh, cute little thing. You have a name picked out yet?”

  Al shook his head. The rumor was every time Al and Marie tried to settle on a name, they ended up screaming at each other. Despite having heard them through the walls, Sammy couldn’t imagine it. They were two of the most agreeable people he knew. And now they hated each other.