Psion Beta (23 page)

It wasn’t the first time he’d killed an enemy in the sims. Often, a voice in his mind, the one always urging him to do anything he could to win Star Racers, told him this was only a game and the Aegis wasn’t real, but Sammy felt differently. Of course, he realized as a Psion he would have to take human lives, but he didn’t look forward to it. He didn’t look forward to being a killer.

Maybe that’s what part of the oath was all about
, he decided,
a promise to be responsible
. But at the same time he couldn’t answer another nagging question:
who am I to be given the power to kill?

The thought scared him.

The next trial introduced a smarter, tougher Aegis, carrying a better weapon. Disarming him wasn’t too difficult, but subduing him proved to be a more arduous task. The third Aegis—armed to the teeth—almost proved too much for him. Intelligent, quick, and strong, she kept him at bay with a hand cannon capable of shelling out a large spread of shrapnel. When fatigue forced Sammy to ease his attacks, the brutish, ugly woman launched her own deadly offensives, trying to force him into a corner. Fortunately, Sammy had been in predicaments like this before in the Arena. He dove off the wall into the woman, bowled her over, and landed a bone-crushing elbow on her head.

Then the simulator threw two Aegis at him. In the first combination, they hindered more than helped each other. Sammy handily won. But the next pairs were always smarter and tougher, appearing on his sides, working together to flank him. It took four tries before he defeated the hardest combination of two Aegis. Then three appeared. By the end of his first day in Advanced Enemy Combat, he’d beaten three Aegis at once on the second easiest setting without taking a vital hit.

He noticed that the more he fought, the less the deaths of his enemies affected him, though not all simulations had to end in death. His attention was not on the bloodshed but on mastering his technique and increasing his killing efficiency. The holographic blood did not seem as real. Their wounds had no true tangibility. Perhaps he was not really killing after all.

As the days passed, Sammy became absorbed in the simulations. He rushed upstairs each day, shortening his lunch more and more, eager to continue the new training. It was better than anything he’d done before, more exciting than any game he’d played. Here his actions meant something. Things mattered. Winning translated to staying alive. He saw more difficult combinations of three or four Aegis take form, and he threw himself against them. He discovered a certain kind of freedom in the violence, a wild beast inside him that could be unleashed for a short while.

After his losses, he reviewed recordings from different angles to find his flaws and determine where he could improve. He often grew frustrated when he lost twice in a row, but used his anger to focus himself back into the simulation, remembering what Byron had said about his great expectations. At the times when he felt he hadn’t quite given it his all, he stayed late into the evening working on particularly difficult trials. With every new attempt he got better, until finally he defeated a very difficult combination of four Aegis.

“
Congratulations,” the hologram said. “You have progressed far enough to start combating Thirteens. As I have informed you, Thirteens are responsible for the training of Aegis. Thirteens, however, are different in important ways. They have little to no conscious visceral sensory perception. In other words, they will only be able to feel the most extreme forms of pain, and their brains do not process the body’s natural warnings from the muscles and tendons when they approach their limit of natural function. This allows them to exert their bodies in fascinating, but dangerous ways. They are swifter, stronger, and more lethal than a normal man or woman.

“
Also unlike Aegis, they often wear blast suits. These suits copy the science of metallic atom interaction. As electrons spread over a large surface, they are capable of absorbing more energy. Applied to blast suits, the energy of our blasts can be safely absorbed without affecting its wearer, similar to the noblack suits we wear in the Arena. However, if you damage these suits, the metallic-like flow of electrons is hampered, and the suit can no longer absorb your blasts. Therefore a top priority should be to damage a Thirteen’s blast suit, or aim for the face, which the blast suit does not cover.”

As Byron continued speaking, Sammy’s skin grew warm. Hot blood flushed his face and his palms were sweaty but cold. He hoped Byron’s instructions would go on forever. The simulations used images of captured enemies or known targets scanned into the NWG data banks. Real people. Sammy didn’t want to look into their cold red eyes. Lifeless, but not dead. He had thought he would be excited to fight them, but he was not. He was terrified. He was more scared of the Thirteens than he had been of the Elite several months ago.

Unsympathetic of Sammy’s feelings, the simulation computer obeyed its programming and called up the first Thirteen. It was a woman. She had long dark hair, olive skin, and large brown eyes. Perhaps before her transformation into a sociopathic killer, she had been attractive. Sammy would never know. Her hair was matted and filthy, her skin sallow and crusted, her face reminded him of a rotten potato. Her eyes fixed on Sammy, and he froze. Her face contorted into a sickly grin at his inaction.

The computer programmed all of this, even her reactions. It’s not real.

He told himself this over and over again, trembling from head to toe, and still unable to move. He didn’t know terror could be so real. She advanced on him, her expression now a dull scowl. Fighting to regain control, he watched her raise her arm, point a deadly weapon to his head, and squeeze the trigger. Just in time, he jerked himself out of his reverie of panic and leapt sideways.

BLAM! BLAM!

Projectiles sailed centimeters away from his face.

The battle commenced, rampaging across the whole sim room. Sammy attacked her with blast after blast, but she either dodged them or skillfully used them to give her distance from him. Despite the woman’s deadly precision with her weapon, her true lethality was in her ability to move. The way she could jump, twist, and attack so acrobatically caught Sammy off guard. She was lithe and agile like a ballerina from hell, her body a force to be respected even unarmed. As he worked her into a corner, easily fending off her volleys, she leapt animal-like off the wall, springing at him. He went into the air with a blast from his feet, but she flipped her body over, and her feet came crashing down around his head, legs gripping his neck and twisting. He would have felt it, but the safety mechanisms of the simulation obeyed the programming, saving his life.

“
No!” he shouted angrily into the air, “No! I wouldn’t have been hurt.” But his words fell on deaf ears.

He picked himself up and marched over to the panel. With a touch of two buttons he called up the three-dimensional replay of the scenario and watched echoes of himself and the devil-woman grapple in silence. Sure enough, the Thirteen had his head in a fatal grip.

I should be dead
, he thought, not for the first time. He marveled at her ability to move in such unimaginable ways. Byron had understated how much more capable the Thirteens were than Aegis.

How can someone move so fast with such prolonged intensity?
he wondered as he replayed the video a second time. He made a mental note to completely overhaul his exercises in the morning to focus on speed. Prolonged speed. If he couldn’t move like the Thirteens, he’d never beat them.

He restarted the trial with only a shadow of the trepidation he’d experienced previously. On his second attempt, he focused on exploiting the Thirteen’s weaknesses he’d seen in the replays. The trial lasted longer, but she still killed him. On the third go, however, Sammy caught her off guard with two strong blasts to the legs. When the fight finished, Sammy’s sim time had ended. He was down-to-the-bone exhausted.

One after the other, Sammy battled Thirteens for the next several days. It took time to see improvement. His body wasn’t conditioned for the level of intensity the battles required. Each morning he worked to increase his speed and agility, pushing his body harder and longer than ever before. After the first week, he noticed only small changes for the better. After a month, he was handling two Thirteens at a time.

The constant interaction with Thirteens was not without some side effects. Sammy began having nightmares. Often in the middle of the night, he lapsed into the same dream:

As an Alpha on assignment, he runs through the streets of Johannesburg, stalked by faceless bodies in Thirteen’s uniforms carrying shockers. They call his name over and over and over and over like it’s the chant to some perverse ritual of death. Their gravelly voices grow deeper until they sound as if they rose through blood-choked throats to reach him.

Every time, he ends up in the same dead end where he and Feet met the Shocks. Sammy picks up the broken pipe on the ground and holds it as if only this weapon stands between him and fate. He turns to see an army of Thirteens circling him, laughing inhumanly. The shockers they’d been carrying are gone. Instead they have cannons, mini-guns, jiggers, and syshées. Finally, right before they fire their storm of weapons for the kill, the middle of the crowd parts to reveal two bloody, murdered corpses.

They always ended the same. Just before Sammy could shout the names of his parents, he awoke, shaking and sweating almost every time. The topic of these dreams came up during one of Sammy’s late night conversations with Jeffie. He described them to her in so much detail that she had to set aside her bowl of ice cream.

“
That’s horrible! I’d want them to stop, too. When did they start?”

“
Right about when I started fighting them.”

Jeffie rolled her eyes and smiled. “I still can’t believe you’re already fighting them. You’re like . . . light-years ahead of me, Brainiac!”

Sammy shrugged as though he were helpless to do anything about it.

“
You’re lucky I’m not the jealous type,” she said.

Ice cream came out of Sammy’s nose. “Jealous?” he repeated with fake astonishment. “Have you ever been jealous of me?”

“
I don’t know. Maybe once,” she answered with a coy smile.

“
A week,” Sammy added.

“
I just love being second best at everything. Even Star Racers!” Then she rolled her eyes at herself. “With five older brothers, I can’t help it.”

“
Do you get the competitive edge from your mom or dad?”

“
My dad for sure. He almost competed in the NWG Olympics twice. One time he missed out because of an ankle injury in the qualifiers. He always says, ‘You got to do whatever it takes to win.’ He even showed me little ways to cheat in basketball when the refs weren’t looking. Step on players toes when you’re jumping, pull on their jerseys for a rebound. Stuff like that.”

“
That explains a lot,” Sammy said.

Jeffie returned him a mocking glare. “So whose faces do you see in the crowd?” she asked. “You know, the dead ones at the end.”

Sammy just shrugged. “So your mom’s not very competitive?”

“
Not like my dad or brothers. And nice job changing the subject. You’re a pro.”

“
Thanks.” He grinned even though he was peeved she had caught him at it.

“
But really, Sammy, what about you? You’ve hardly told me anything about your parents.” She swiped her spoon at him playfully, trying to get ice cream on his cheek. “What are they like?”

Sammy’s first reaction was to make a joke out of Jeffie’s question. Then he remembered his conversation with Feet in solitary. He’d promised Feet to be more open with his friends and he still hadn’t done it.
Maybe this is the right time. Maybe I’m supposed to tell Jeffie.
He tried to think of the words to say how he felt.

“
I, uh—I guess it’s not a very fun subject.”

“
Sammy, I’ve been wondering about this for a while. I’ve even asked Brickert about it. Just once. I was really surprised that he was clueless about your family. So if you don’t want to talk about, you don’t have to tell me anything.” She stared at him hard, but in a way that communicated to him how much she cared. “Was there something wrong with your parents? I mean, did they hurt you? Because you’ve got this side to you that’s—I don’t know. Dangerous, I guess.”

“
No, nothing like that,” he replied. He wanted to laugh, but could not because of what he planned to say. “I don’t talk about them because the year before I came here was extremely . . .” He looked around the empty cafeteria searching for the right word.

“
Difficult?” she asked, smiling now, like she thought this was a game. “Were you a rebel child?”

“
No.”

“
Extremely long?” she guessed. “Maybe you were a very boring child.”

“
No,” he said again, getting very uncomfortable now.

But Jeffie didn’t seem to notice. She raised an eyebrow and whispered, “Extremely paranormal? Your parents are vampires or werewolves?”

Sammy shook his head, afraid to say anything.

“
Give me a hint, then,” she said looking at him.

He tried to say something, but he didn’t have the words.

Jeffie’s countenance fell when she saw his face. “Oh Sammy, I’m sorry! I shouldn’t have treated it so lightly.”