Psion Beta (35 page)

“
What do you mean?” his father asked.

“
They’re dead and it’s all my fault.”

“
Samuel and Martin are dead?” his father repeated. His grip slackened, but his face became stone.

Al nodded solemnly, tears forming in his eyes again. He recognized the face his father wore now. It was the one he put on to control himself, to show no emotion. But Al knew how much his father cared for Sammy.

“
I’m so sorry, sir. I’m so sorry.”

“
This is not your fault, Albert. The best thing we can do right now is gather information. We need you to debrief us. We need to know everything that happened. Can you do that?”

Al nodded. His father put his hands back on Al’s shoulders and pulled him close.

“
Albert, this is not your fault.”

“
Yes, sir.” Al said it, but he didn’t believe it.

“
Ho Chin?” his father called out to an Alpha nearby.

“
Yes, Commander?” Ho Chin answered at attention.

“
Please escort Albert to the meeting room on the fifth floor and then contact everyone else who should be there.”

“
Yes, sir.” Ho Chin saluted Al’s father and led Al downstairs.

Al walked through the roof entrance and down the long flight of stairs. The door opened up onto the fifth floor, and he saw someone with long blonde hair sitting on the floor in the hall.
Not Jeffie. Anyone but Jeffie right now
. He stopped moving, but the man, Ho Chin, nudged him forward, oblivious as to why Al wouldn’t want see this particular girl at this particular time.

He tried avoiding her eyes, but could not help it. He saw in her eyes the same apprehension and terror as he’d seen in his father’s. Of course everyone had feared the worst.
They arrived home hours behind schedule with no word as to what had gone wrong.

Jeffie jumped up and ran toward him. “Al, what happened? Is everyone okay? Where’s Sammy?”

Suddenly Sammy’s death became even more real. Everyone at headquarters had known about Jeffie’s crush on Sammy. Everyone but Sammy, at least. The irony of Sammy’s naïveté had become a joke in the circle of the oldest Betas. And now Al had no idea what to say to her.

Jeffie stopped before she reached him, staring at his battle-worn state. He knew she could read his face. The truth was in large bold words all over him; even the way he stood, shouted:

“
SAMMY IS DEAD!”

She shook her head slowly, and her lips mouthed the word “no” over and over again. Her neck flushed scarlet, and her eyes dripped the tears he wished he still had. “No!” She slumped to the floor. “NO! Al, Sammy is not dead! Please say he is not dead!”

Al wished he could explain to her how badly he wanted to pull Sammy out of a crushing pile of bricks, how his team had to run out of a building to save their lives, and how it had erupted into a fiery furnace the moment they escaped. But it didn’t matter how desperately Al needed to justify his actions, he could not say anything. He knew he would choke on the words when they tried to come out of his mouth. He just wished he could make her pleas stop.

It was easy to let himself be steered into the room by Ho Chin. Her sounds followed him into the sim room. Ho Chin excused himself delicately and exited. When the door closed, cutting off Jeffie’s pain-filled sobs, a great weight lifted off Al’s shoulders. He had never been so helpless before, never in his whole life.

All too soon the door opened again, but Jeffie was not outside the room. It shamed him that he was glad she was gone. The room filled with people who were counting on him to tell them exactly what happened in Rio’s death factory. He tried putting on the face his dad used—to cut himself off from emotions he wasn’t ready to deal with—and he found that it helped to pull himself together.

Sammy pulled again, harder this time. CHUG! Chug! Chug. Chug. Cough.
Come on you stupid machine. Work for me.

He kicked it hard.

“
OW!” he yelled out.
No shoes on.
He grabbed a hold of the generator’s power cord and took a deep breath.

Prime it
, a voice said.

“
What?” Sammy asked out loud.

The voice was in his head, but it sounded so real and familiar.

“
You’ve got to prime it, kiddo,” his dad said to him on a hot Saturday afternoon.

Samuel Senior stood on the back porch laughing at his son who wanted badly to mow the lawn. Normally Sammy’s dad paid a guy to come to their house weekly to mow, trim, and weed, but Sammy wanted to do it just once because it looked fun.

He had even borrowed a little mower that actually ran on petrol. Their neighbor, a strange recluse named Mr. Nemosio, kept it as an antique, and Sammy wanted to try it out. “What’s the point of having it if you never use it?” he’d asked, stumping the man.

“
What do you mean ‘prime it?’” young Sammy asked his father.

“
There’s a little button on the side of the engine. You press it a few times to prime the engine for starting up. Prime it.”

Sammy pressed the button several times. Then grabbed the power cord and ripped it.

VRROOM! The engine roared, coming to life.

“
Atta boy, Sammy. Make sure you take that back to Mr. Nemosio all cleaned up . . . and don’t cut your toes off!”

Sammy let go of the generator’s pull cord and felt around in the dark for a primer. Sure enough, not too far away his hand touched a large rubber button. He smiled to himself in the darkness. He mashed on it several times until he was sure the generator was good and primed. Then he felt his way back to the power cord and gave one more hard pull.

CHUG! Chug! Chug! Chug! Chug! Chug! Chug!

Lights flickered on, a few of them burst, and Sammy had to squint until his eyes adjusted to the blinding illumination. The large blue generator against the side wall came into view first. The room told its own story about its purpose and history: furniture scattered, ripped, and overturned; broken equipment strewn across the floor; blood stains one of the walls and the carpet. Someone here had found big trouble in a bad way. Two of the walls were lined with dusty shelves holding big plastic cylinders. He went to the shelf and opened one of the bins expecting to find more junk.

To his great delight, he found dried food and preserved water, most of it untouched. He remembered what Al had said in their first mission meeting: “CAG troops shut the factory down by force when they discovered it was also a secret operating facility for NWG resistance fighters.”

In all likelihood, the room had been their storehouse. Food and water storage, broken equipment, an empty rack that looked like it was made for rifles . . . it made sense. When the CAG ransacked the place, they must have killed everyone present and searched everything, including the stuffing of the furniture.

He went through each of the food and water containers so he knew exactly how much he had. When he finished, he set about making the place fit for human use. He didn’t know how long he’d be there, but luck favored the prepared, as his mom liked to say. How much luck he had left, he didn’t want to find out.

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.

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?”