Psion Beta (36 page)

The thought stuck in his mind for several minutes, and he mulled it over until it became even more puzzling. He had been running the generator almost non-stop for eight days. With almost a barrel of fuel in storage, and the generator using far less a day than he had initially feared, he was not in danger of running out of petrol anytime soon.

“
Why would they haul something that big down here? Not just for the lights, right? If there was some kind of secret underground movement, they’d want computers. Radios or something to communicate secretly.” He turned the question over some more. “And why would they make it so hard to find a way out?”

He tasted the gruel to see if he’d gotten the flavor mixture right. It tasted a little bland, so he added some salt. It helped a little, but his thoughts stayed on the generator.

“
No. Not just for lights. How much power would it take to constantly run an interactive hologram? Would there be enough from a gas powered generator? And where would they hide the projector?” he asked himself. “That’s got to be right! There’s more to the bunker than just this one room. A hidden entrance not a secret escape. Clever.”

Using couch legs wrapped in cloth dipped in petrol, he made several torches. Then he turned off the generator and waited. It took almost half an hour before all the lights finally faded to black. The only illumination came from his torch. It cast a dancing light on the nearest bricks. Carefully, he walked around the perimeter of the room searching for a door, a gap in the wall. He ran his fingers along everything. It caught him by surprise when his fingers finally touched something that felt as smooth as steel.

It was the door, painted to look exactly like brick. Looking at it straight on, the door looked just like part of the wall. A masterful painting job. No doubt, when the power was on, the door could be perfectly concealed with an interactive hologram that looked and felt just like cold hard brick.

The door didn’t have a knob but a grip built into the door to turn. It was pretty jammed, but after several minutes of hard work, he got it open. He didn’t know what to expect to find on the other side, but he certainly wasn’t prepared for the stench that assaulted his nose.

“
Ugh. Is that bird crap?” he asked himself.

He surveyed his surroundings by torchlight. The concealed room was much smaller than the main room, almost like an antechamber, and filled with two things: maps and birdcages. Sammy doubted map stores held as many maps as he saw here. The three dozen or so birdcages almost all held at least one bird skeleton.

He decided to investigate this room later. Right now he needed to get out of the building. He needed to see the sun or moon, or whatever was up in the big endless sky at this hour. Across the bird room was another door, not hidden, not painted, just a plain door. Its handle was badly rusted and its hinges protested in loud squeaks when he opened it.

A rich earthy smell greeted him. The concrete floor was gone, replaced by something spongier. Sammy pointed his torch downward and saw soil and moss. It wasn’t in a room, but in a tunnel carved from the dirt and supported with wooden pillars. With torch in hand, he followed the path.

He could only estimate the distance he walked, but guessed it to be at least half a kilometer when the tunnel ended at a wooden staircase. The air still smelled no more hospitable than it had at the beginning of the tunnel, and that didn’t seem to be a good sign. As the stairs climbed closer to the tunnel ceiling, his hair brushed against the hard dirt above him. He reached up and felt a trap door embedded in earth.

He gently pushed on the wooden trap door to see how easily it would give. He pushed harder. The trap door didn’t budge.

“
Can’t you go a little easy on me?” Then, setting down the torch, he began to heave against the door, shoving it up with all his strength. He was so desperate to get out of this bunker that the aching in his shoulder didn’t slow him down. Only centimeters away from freedom.

Eventually the door moved slightly, then a bit more. Giving it one last hard shove, he heard a loud rip as the door gave way to fresh air. Sammy breathed it in deeply. Dirt cascaded into the tunnel on his head as he opened the exit wider, looking up to see the twilight sky and grass blades peeking out over the edge.

Grass. There’s grass planted above this thing, and I just tore a big hole in the yard
. He stamped out his torch with his spiked shoes and climbed out of the tunnel.

Once he got his bearings, he realized he was on the lawn of a large chemical manufacturing plant across the road from the Rio factory. After smoothing the grass back as best he could over the doorway, and sticking the smoking torch into the ground several paces back from it as a marker, he crossed the street, headed for the factory.

Somewhere in the very back of his mind, he held a glimmer of hope that someone, whether friends or Alphas, were still there trying to find his body, ready to take him home. He had not even realized how badly he wanted someone, anyone, to be there until he crossed the square where he’d landed. The thought of seeing someone he knew brought moisture to his eyes.

“
I’m coming,” he whispered. “I’m coming right now.”

The building was deserted as ever. Refusing to let himself cry, he navigated the wreckage of the factory slowly, taking it all in, not really knowing what he was looking for. Bullets and shrapnel littered the floor like junk food at a movie theater. Puddles of coagulated blood looked like spilled soda stains. But he saw no corpses.

In the basement, the hole he had fallen through was still buried beneath the huge pile of the charred brick and plaster that had caved down in the explosion. Much of the doorway and some of the hall had been blown out. Sammy wondered if that entire side of the building was safe. Out the exit he and Kobe should have escaped through, he saw the shells of more bullets, more blood stains on a concrete walkway, but still no bodies.

“
They came and cleaned up,” he told himself. “And they’ll be back soon if they’re going to use this place to make weapons. Can’t stay much longer.”

He wasn’t ready to go back inside the bunker. He had a theory he wanted to test out. With his ample spare time, Sammy had devised several hypotheses to explain how Al’s mission had gone so badly. His best idea was that the Thirteens had learned about Psion Command’s pre-mission surveillance. Acting under the assumption that Psions would come back, the Thirteens made a few key changes to the factory and kept it under constant surveillance. This would have allowed them to dispatch a response team when someone spotted Al’s team arrive.

That was his most optimistic theory.

His other guess was that someone, either on Al’s team or higher up, had betrayed them. That person would have tipped off the CAG as to when they would be arriving, where they would be stationed, and what exits they would be using in case of an attack.

He felt compelled to at least try to see if the surveillance cameras in the factory would give any more information. The entrance Gregor and Li had used was still intact, allowing Sammy access into the left wing of the building. The path to the security room had been burned into his brain from hours of practices. Lots of equipment was scattered over the room. On one wall was a large screen divided into over a dozen segments, each segment broadcasting live feed from the cameras still intact.

The hacker hardware Li and Gregor had used for the job was there, probably abandoned in their haste to leave when Al alerted them. Sammy knew enough about it to get it started, and then, through a mixture of memory and trial and error, figured out how to use it to hack the system and search the security archives.

It took him a couple of hours, but he finally found footage of the brick wall being constructed by two men in dirty work clothes smoking pipes. That had taken place only two weeks before Al’s mission.

He went even further back into the records, trying several different cameras. He tried larger spaced areas like the lobby, the production areas, anything that would show the presence of Thirteens or Aegis in the building during the months just before Al’s mission.

Nothing.

Either there truly was no footage or tracks had been hidden very well. Almost as an afterthought, he checked the camera watching the loading dock. It was easy to sift through the data; all the cameras were motion-activated. Most of the footage was of stray dogs or birds wandering through the zone. He sped through a scene of a car passing through the loading area, hit rewind so he could watch it again at normal speed.

A large, black sedan rolled past the dock and stopped almost right where Al’s command station had been. Two Thirteens came out of the door near the mail slot, Sammy thought he recognized them from the factory, but wasn’t quite sure. The rear car door nearest the Thirteens opened and they got in. As the car sped off, something caught Sammy’s eye—something familiar. He rewound the scene again, slowing it down this time so he could watch the car closer.

His finger holding down the play button started going numb. A nasty feeling settled in his stomach. The car drove off again. Sammy rewound and played it again.

“
Who is that?” he whispered.

He played it again.

“
NO!” he cried.

Still in disbelief, he played it back once more with the highest possible resolution.

“
It can’t be!” he shouted at the screen. “That can’t be right!” The sickness in his stomach was as real as ever, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away from the face of the man sitting in the front passenger seat.

The mission had been sabotaged from the beginning.

By Commander Wrobel.

How could Byron allow something like this to happen? Wasn’t he supposed to be in charge of everything? How could all of this happen from someone so high up? He knew Wrobel, he’d talked to him, he’d laughed at his jokes. Wrobel had seemed like a genuinely good person. It didn’t seem possible. Like a horrible dream, and maybe when Sammy woke up it would all be a fading memory, and he could breathe a sigh of relief. But no. It was real. And now, because of it, he was dead to everyone he knew. This thought struck him anew and with greater force than before.

They all think I’m dead. They’re not coming back for me.

He had no distinct memory of returning to the bunker until the overpowering stench of bird droppings hit him for the second time, and the sickness in his gut became intolerable. He was not right in the head until the next morning after a fitful night of sleep. The singular thought of what he had seen replayed in his mind so much that his dreams seemed filled with smoky gray blurs resembling Wrobel’s face and toppling brick walls.

He lay in his little “bed,” not moving more than a few blinks and the occasional shift of weight, letting his mind process scenario after scenario. All of them looked as hopeless as the one before. The Thirteens could come back at any moment to clean up; maybe Wrobel would be with them, just to make sure Sammy was really dead. Once they lifted the brick wall upstairs, it would be over. He could see them repelling down the shaft armed and eager to finish him off. He, with no weapons and no allies, was a sitting duck.

But I can’t just leave
—
where will I go?

A terrible weight settled over his chest, snuffing hope and happiness out of him as he imagined himself dying in a hundred different ways, each of them alone and helpless. That weight of despair grew heavier and heavier until Sammy could scarcely breathe. Even the room grew darker as though his eyes were dimming due to lack of oxygen to his brain.

Just as he was ready to abandon himself to what felt like destruction, the image of Jeffie bloomed in his mind. Her smile and her touch, but most of all, her love lifted the darkness from him. The crushing weight lightened until it disappeared. He sat up with a strange clarity in his mind. Ideas replaced despair, facts scattered away fear. His exodus would have to be smart—smart and speedy. Sammy made up his mind: he would leave as soon as he could. He would get home no matter what.

Thank you for purchasing Psion Beta, Fellow Bookworm, if I may call you that. Forgive me for leaving you with a cliffhanger ending. I chose this not to sell more copies of a sequel, but because the story of Sammy becoming a Psion Beta ends here. The story does continue, but is its own tale, and to continue it here would have made hefty reading for you, my friend. Sammy's next adventure, Psion Gamma, picks up almost right where we left him. It has been written and will hopefully see the light of day.

It's quite an undertaking to self-publish a book. It requires a massive commitment of time and work, almost five years for this one book. If you enjoyed this novel, please tell your friends, family, or the person next to you on the airplane about it. I hope to be able to continue Sammy's adventure to the very end.

In the meantime, I must pamper my wife, raise my kids, go to my day job, and work on other projects in hope of catching that elusive dream called a book deal. However, if success is found here, I will continue to publish the Psion series. I promise to make the books worth your time and money. Thank you again for your support. Feel free to share with me your thoughts on Facebook, Amazon.com via consumer reviews, or you may contact me personally through www.psionbeta.com when it launches. I will do my best to respond as soon as I can.

So farewell, Fellow Bookworm, and as my good friend always says … Long live Sammy!