Psion Omega (Psion series Book 5)

by Jacob Gowans

  He stood up straight to see, but still couldn’t see through all the wreckage. A dozen missiles launched at once, their sounds followed by a strange roar. Brickert jumped back into the tree, climbing as high as he dared. His eyes widened and his breath left his lungs in one great rush.

  “They’re coming,” he shouted down to Natalia, his team, whoever could hear. “I can’t believe it. There’s so many … The people are coming. Not hundreds, not thousands. Hundreds of thousands, Natalia! Hundreds of thousands. And those cruisers—” His face whitened and his jaw slackened. “The marchers are going to be massacred.”

  Tears filled his eyes. Thousands upon thousands would be turned back or slaughtered. Where are Sammy and Byron?

  * * * * *

  “Sammy …” Jeffie’s voice came through his com, whispering so softly he barely heard it. His eyes fluttered open, dry and sore. When he realized he’d fallen asleep, he gasped and jerked.

  “Sammy.”

  “Sorry. I’m awake.”

  “Oh, great. You’re awake. What is the deal with you and falling asleep during really important, really stressful situations? I’m covered in dead people and having a panic attack over here.”

  “I didn’t know I was asleep,” he whispered back.

  “The batteries are almost dead. She’s killed me, and you’re about done. How was your nap?”

  “Short, but I actually feel a little better. Not so tired.” Sammy peered through the coffin-shaped holographic projection that hid him from view where he lay on the floor near the back of the white room. Near the elevator stood the Queen pointing what looked like a miniaturized blitzer at Sammy’s holographic image. Disappointment etched her face as she fired one into his left eye. Then she adjusted her aim slightly to the right eye and fired again.

  “How much time is left on the battery?” he asked Jeffie.

  “Less than a minute. Five minutes until kill code activation.”

  “What to do with your body?” the Queen asked Sammy’s hologram that now lay motionless on the floor. “Maybe I’ll preserve it. Start my own personal museum.”

  “I don’t think it’ll keep,” Sammy said as he rolled over the floor, out of the holographic box he’d been hiding in. No sooner had he stepped out then all the holograms in the room flickered away, the batteries finally drained. The white pillars in the room flickered and disappeared, revealing the twin holo-projectors underneath. “See?” Sammy gestured to where his fake body had lain. “Meat nowadays. You never know what it really is.”

  The Queen’s eyes looked like they might pop. She took a step back, her blitzer pointed at Sammy’s chest. “No …” She closed her eyes and shook her head. “No … I killed you. I just killed you. You’re dead.”

  “It’s 1025, Sammy,” Jeffie said as she climbed out of the elevator covered in the gore of the Hybrids and Thirteens. “Less than five minutes until the next—”

  The Queen jerked her head to look at Jeffie. “And you! I KILLED YOU BOTH!”

  “Too many crazy pills for this one,” Jeffie told Sammy.

  “You know what they say about women and the hot-to-crazy scale.”

  “Are you saying I’m crazy?” Jeffie asked.

  “Shut up!” the Queen fired a blitzer at Jeffie, but Jeffie jumped away. “This isn’t real! This is a lie! The fox … someone … I killed you!”

  “Yep.” Sammy tried to stay light on his feet, but his body was slow and worn. “I’m just an illusion. So if you’ll go on upstairs back to your therapist—”

  “I had the element of surprise!” She fired another round, this time at Sammy, but he ducked it and shot a blast back at her.

  “Not really a surprise, Katie,” Sammy said. “Diego told us about your new skills. Why do you think I brought these?” He pointed a thumb at the holo-projectors. “We spent weeks recording ourselves fighting other Psions and Ultras. For you. I knew you’d figure it out. Knew you’d show up.” He sniffed and wiped an eye mockingly. “This was my going away present for you.”

  She attacked him with blasts. He dodged and fired a blast back at her. The little nap had re-energized his arms, but his legs still felt stiff as boards and his head was full of fog.

  “You look like you’ve been through the ringer,” Jeffie said to the Queen. “Did our holograms wear you out?”

  “Cowards!” she snarled, diving at Sammy.

  The Queen was faster than him, stronger, more tireless. Her Anomaly Thirteen gave her those abilities; Sammy had passed on them. But he had to believe he was better. He hopped over her while firing blasts back at her, but she nulled them with blasts of her own.

  “You couldn’t beat me so you used tricks!”

  “Yeah,” Sammy said, circling her, “I guess I did. But you sent your army of undead ahead of you, so I think we’re even.” He signaled to Jeffie to reopen the back door and prepare the terminal for the command.

  “One minute!” Jeffie called.

  The Queen saw this and laughed. “That signal will never go out.” She fired three blitzers at the computer but the discs did not penetrate the reinforced metal.

  She fired again, this time at Sammy. He barely avoided the blitzer, and used her missed attack as an opportunity to draw in closer. The Queen tried to blast him away, but he jumped and shot himself back down at her from the ceiling. His knee connected with her nose, making a distinct crunching sound.

  When Sammy saw the blood run down her face, he laughed. “Seriously, how many times have I broken your nose? I think your plastic surgeon owes me a gift basket.”

  The Queen cursed at him and sent a blitzer disc at Jeffie.

  “Look out!” he shouted.

  The blitzer disc caught Jeffie in the lower torso, slicing a thin line clean through her abdomen and passing through just where her kidney would be. Jeffie cried out as she grabbed at the wound and fell.

  Sammy blasted himself at the Queen, wrapped his arms around her, and drove them both to the ground. He roared every curse he knew while pummeling her head with his left hand and slamming the blitzer in her hand into the floor with his right. The Queen propelled both of them upward with blasts from her free hand and feet, nearly forcing Sammy’s skull into the ceiling, but he narrowly avoided it with blasts of his own.

  “Sammy … the code,” Jeffie said. “Ten seconds.”

  “Can you fight?” he asked her.

  “I can hold her off!”

  “You’re not going anywhere!” the Queen screamed and grabbed at Sammy. She drove him to the floor so fast it stunned him. Before he regained his wits she swung the blitzer at his head. Sammy raised his hand to block her, but Jeffie rammed the Queen in the left flank, knocking her off Sammy. He shot across the room to the alcove with the desk and screen. His fingers flew over the keyboard, entering the code that Diego had guarded for years. All for this moment. But by the time he finished typing and jammed down the standby button, the clock read 1031.

  * * * * *

  Pain deeper and hotter than anything Jeffie had known radiated through her side as she bowled into the Queen. Ignore it. Protect Sammy. You’re dead anyway. The Queen grunted as she and Jeffie tumbled to the floor. She blasted Jeffie away, glaring as though Jeffie were lower than animal droppings.

  “Don’t touch me!” the Queen snapped as she wiped a trickle of blood from her lip. “This doesn’t concern you. Leave if you want. I don’t care.”

  “Afraid to face me, Katie?” Jeffie asked, sounding braver than she felt.

  Using the Queen’s first name had the effect Jeffie wanted. She blasted and ran at Jeffie, who stood in place, absorbed the blasts, and let the Queen tackle her. When they collided, Jeffie wrapped her up tight, then bit the Queen in the neck. She bit as hard as she could and tasted blood. The Queen shrieked and blasted Jeffie away again, sending her skidding across the floor on her back. The collision created waves of agony up and down Jeffie’s side, but she ignored it, struggled back to her feet, and spat the Queen’s blood from her mouth.

&
nbsp; “You taste like chicken.”

  The Queen turned her attention to Sammy, filthy names spewing from her mouth. But before she could reach him, Jeffie blasted the Queen away and scrambled to block her path. The Queen shot her blitzer, sending disc after burning disc at Jeffie until her trigger brought nothing but an empty clicking sound. Jeffie tried to dodge them all, but couldn’t. The Queen was as fast and clever as Sammy. One disc hit Jeffie’s leg as she flipped, searing the inside of her thigh; another sliced through her ribs on the right side. A third narrowly missed her face, but left a thin burn on the bridge of her nose and cut strands of her hair as she whipped her head around.

  Between her injured knee and punctured abdomen, landing on the floor was pure torture. And the Queen was waiting, blitzer at the ready, hitting Jeffie so hard in the face with the butt of her weapon that the bones in Jeffie’s face crunched. Blood choked Jeffie’s airway and she coughed up spatters of red phlegm. She grabbed the Queen blindly and blasted with her feet, carrying both of them near the elevator shaft. She meant to land on the Queen, but the Thirteen twisted around in the air. When Jeffie hit the ground, she thought she would never move again.

  “Sammy …” she said. “I can’t breathe—”

  “Get back to the computer!” he said as he charged the Queen. “I’ll take care of her. Just tell me when it’s 1044!”

  The Queen tried to stop Jeffie, but Sammy blasted the Queen back against the wreckage of the elevator door. Jeffie spat out more blood and phlegm, then began to crawl, pulling herself by her arms while her legs dragged. The force of the floor against her body burned her insides. Jeffie could hardly breathe, hardly talk, hardly move. She didn’t know how to tell Sammy that she didn’t think she could make it across the room, let alone live another fifteen minutes.

  * * * * *

  The Queen swung the blitzer at the blonde girl’s head as though the gun was a baseball bat and the girl’s head was a ball sitting on its tee, but Sammy stopped it with a blast. It flew from her hands and landed in the elevator amongst the bodies.

  Grunting, the girl continued to crawl at a snail’s pace. She can’t reach the computer. She can’t. But Sammy now blocked the Queen from getting to her.

  The Queen blasted, dove, charged and spun, but Sammy would not let her pass. He blasted at the Queen again, but she met him with her own blasts, angled to push his aside. Sammy tried to adjust, but she was faster, her blasts stronger. Her elbow met his chin; her fist rammed his gut. Air rushed from his lungs. The Queen tried to bowl past him, but he snagged her foot and pulled her down on top of him.

  “Let go!” she shrieked.

  When the Queen tried to blast Sammy’s head and snap his neck, he gripped her hands in his, locking their fingers together. She yanked and pulled but couldn’t loosen his grip. Then he blasted them both into the air, and their heads connected with the ceiling. A tremendous pain filled the Queen’s skull.

  Sammy’s eyes rolled back as he fell to the ground. The Queen’s thoughts turned hazy. This is my chance … to kill … She crawled toward him even as her vision blurred and darkened. Must … now. She put a hand on his head. One blast, it was all she needed to finish it. Then the girl would die so easily.

  Do it! Before you black out!

  The pain growing in her head debilitated her. It was not only from the collision with the ceiling, but from what she knew Sammy would feel if she were to finish it. Sammy was no longer visible in all the blurriness. The Queen tried to ignore the pain, fought to remain conscious, yet the darkness won.

  When her body collapsed on the floor, she was no longer in the white room, but the cave. Whereas before the cave had always been black as pitch, now it was light and filled with glass windows. Each glass window was a stained and muraled face. She recognized the first ones: her parents. Her first victims. Seeing them made her stomach roil uncomfortably. The condensation on the glass made their eyes weep even as they followed her, their expressions frozen just the way they’d been when she killed them. She turned her eyes away from their faces and walked down the steps faster.

  Next were the Queen’s victims at school, the girls and boys she’d found who had laughed at her at the prom. She began to jog down the steps, taking them two at a time.

  Following her classmates were guards and officers and others she’d killed in prison. Then came other inmates, then civilians—people the fox had sent her after. Face after face after face, each in horror, agony, or disbelief at the notion of their own deaths. All dead by the Queen’s hand. The last faces at the bottom she knew well. They belonged to Sammy and the pretty blonde girl. Even though she hadn’t killed them yet, they were as good as dead when she woke.

  When the Queen finally reached the black door of flesh at the end of the cave, she found it still locked. The girl’s voice, the Queen’s own teenage voice, still pleaded from the other side to be let out.

  “What do I have to do?” the Queen screamed in frustration as she beat at the door. “Where is the knife?”

  No one answered. The Queen slammed her fist into Sammy’s glass face, sending shards of blue, black, and white onto the cave floor. She picked up the largest of them, one of Sammy’s eyes still visible, and stabbed it at the door. Unlike last time, when the knife’s blade had sunk easily into the flesh, the glass shattered against the door. The Queen found another shard and tried again, but this attempt also failed.

  She remembered the last time she had entered the cave, and what she had found inside: the altar, the fire, and the pot. Within the pot had been a heart.

  “No.”

  Even as she said the word, she realized what the cave demanded. From among the glass shards, she found the longest. Her quaking hands held it up high until the light from other windows made the glass glow, and then she plunged it deep into her own chest. And after minutes of work, she finally removed her own beating heart.

  Holding it up to the door, the blackened flesh began to turn brown, then pinkish. It gave a quiver and started to pulse. And when she touched the heart to it, it fell away like a curtain that had been ripped from its hanging rod. Swallowing hard, the Queen re-entered the room for the first time in almost thirty-five years.

  Young Katie sat on the floor, her hair covering her face. Her skin was a pale yellow and tight like a mummy’s. When the Queen entered, the girl looked up at her, and the Queen recoiled. Katie’s eyes were sunken in, her face sallow with hollow cheeks, and her lips dry to the point of cracking.

  “Are you here to save me?” she asked when their eyes met. “I—I made a mistake.”

  “No,” the Queen answered, still clutching the beating heart in her hand. “I made the mistake. I tried to have it all.”

  “Please …” the girl moaned, struggling to her feet only to have the Queen push her back down. “I want to go.”

  A clanging sound came from the far end of the room, drawing the Queen’s attention. It was the white pot. She dragged the girl over to have a look at it. As expected she found it empty. That was when it all clicked.

  “I can turn it off,” she muttered to herself. “One or the other.”

  Two Anomalies. Set at odds against each other. The empathy of the Anomaly Eleven. Or the cold power and fearlessness of the Anomaly Thirteen.

  She looked at the heart. At the pot. At Katie. And at the altar.

  The choice was easy. She yanked Katie by the arm and threw her atop the altar. Katie screamed. “What are you going to do?”

  The Queen tightened her grip on her own heart. “I’m going to finish the job.”

  * * * * *

  Sammy blinked awake just as the Queen pounced. His head throbbed, but he was cognizant enough to roll away and get back to his feet. A glance at his com told him it was 1039. He and the Queen had only been out for a minute or two. He shook his head to chase away the thick cobwebs.

  Across the room Jeffie was still trying to drag herself to the computer. Her pace had grinded to a halt. She couldn’t seem to pull herself any further. Fres
h blood trailed behind her, and she sobbed as she tried to crawl.

  “Hurry, Jeffie,” he said. “Get to the computer! Five minutes!”

  “I can’t make it,” Jeffie cried from behind. “You do it. I can’t.”

  “You have to do it, Jeffie!”

  The Queen rushed and blasted at him. Sammy tried to blast jump, but was too slow. She caught him by the legs and flipped him over. Sammy barely prevented himself from slamming his head into the floor by using hand blasts to steady himself.

  The Queen used the opportunity to attack Jeffie, but Sammy blasted himself off the floor at the Queen, driving into her less than a second before she reached Jeffie, who was only halfway to the computer. The Queen and Sammy tumbled to the ground over each other. The Queen rammed her elbow into Sammy’s face and tried to blast the side of his head, but Sammy rolled over and kicked.

  The Queen caught his foot and twisted, trying to break his ankle, but Sammy let his body turn. As his other foot crossed in front of her face, he blasted and shoved her backward. He hadn’t expected to catch her off guard with that move, but it gave him an opening to tackle the Queen and buy Jeffie more time.

  As he did so, he climbed onto the Queen’s back and wrapped his arms under hers, taking away her hand blasts. She tried to roll and shake him off, but Sammy held strong. She fired her foot blasts, but without a surface to push off, the blasts only made Sammy and the Queen rock up and down.

  Sammy angled his palms at the Queen’s neck. One good blast would kill her. But when he did it, nothing happened. He tried to blast again. Nothing came.

  I’m too tired, he realized. Gonna have to do this the old fashioned way.

  “Keep going, Jeffie!” he shouted. “Four minutes!”

  “She can’t!” the Queen cried out with exultation. “She’s weak. You’re both weak.”

  “Go, Jeffie!” he urged while the Queen tried to slam her head into his. “Go!”