Psion Omega (Psion series Book 5) (36 page)

Two hours of
surveillance told her nothing. No movement, no heat signatures, but an open
window. Her brain whirred more. An open window. It was too good to be true.
He knows I’m coming and wants me to enter
.

Her com rang.
Chad
. “What?”

“The team of Aegis
I sent into the sewers called for backup. No response since then. The audio had
gunshots in the background. I’m sending a drone in there now to give us a
visual.”

“Patch it through
to my com.”

Less than two
minutes passed before the holo-screen on her com blinked to life. Through the
drone’s camera, her view went down into the sewer manhole.

“Go to night
vision!” she hissed to Chad.

Immediately the
spotlight blinked out and her view changed to night vision. Everything looked
normal until the drone flew past three large equipment bags and four dead
bodies: three Aegis and one older man wearing a safety vest.

On the left wall
she saw a large black spot, a hole. Someone stood just inside the aperture
holding a thick pipe that pumped out a liquid. The person’s head turned at the
sound of the drone. The drone’s scanner required less than a second to locate
the person’s eyes and scan the retina.

Identification:
13F712072-Jane, Psion Dark agent, captured by the
resistance.

Behind her, two
others appeared to be dragging a massive drill out of a tunnel that went into
the wall. As the group discarded the drill and grabbed the large packs on the
ground, the drone scanned again.

Identification:
Albert Choochoo, captured Anomaly Fourteen, escaped
imprisonment.

“Drone!” the girl
cried. Then she whipped the flexible piping and slammed it into the drone. The
camera feed cut out.

“Get a team into
the sewers to find them!” the Queen ordered.

“Who are they?”
Chad asked.

“He’s in Rio,” she
told Chad. “Berhane is in Rio.”

“Are you going to
deal with this personally?”

The Queen didn’t
answer.
What is he doing in the sewer?
A trap.
They’re all laying traps.
The
fox, Sammy … she didn’t have time for these games. “Send in the rest of my
Aegis first. Find out what he’s doing. Constant reports
every
step of the way. I’m heading to Rio soon. I just have to do
one more thing.”

Using her blasts,
the Queen jumped from balcony to balcony until she reached the highest one
where the window was open. Before she let herself in, she muttered, “You underestimated
me once,” she said. “I wager you’ll do it again.”

She expected to
find an immaculate, well-organized, and lavish apartment similar to the fox’s
other penthouses in Orlando, New York City, and Los Angeles. Instead she found
a place in disarray. Tools littered the floors and tables. The smell of blood
and chemicals hung in the air, thick and fresh. In the main room she saw a cot,
heavily used, and a small kitchen in the corner. In the back room was an
operating table and used medical and mechanical equipment. The Queen didn’t
need to spend much time examining the mess to know what had happened.

“Bionics,” she told
herself. The fox had built himself bionic limbs. “Where are you, you son of
a—”

A worn, outdated
holo-screen in the corner of the living room blinked on. The fox’s face showed
on it. His skin had more color, his cheeks and eyes less emaciated than they’d
been under her care. “Hello, Katie. I thought you’d find me sooner than this.”

She ignored the
insult. “The world is a small place. You can’t run for long.”

“Oh, I’m not
running. Do you want to know where I am? Back trace the signal and you’ll find
me. But we should chat first, I think. How are you faring in your management of
the core CAG objectives? The Council? Do they still expect you to win the war?”

With a whisper, the
Queen ordered her com to trace the fox’s signal. “We destroyed the resistance
base. We’re primed to snuff out this offensive coming from the NWG and any CAG
insurgents. I expect President Marnyo to surrender soon after.”

“And then what?
Will you continue to use my identity? I think it’s highly unlikely that you’ll
just disappear.”

“I have a plan.”

“I once had plans.”
The fox frowned. “Recruiting you was a mistake, Katie. Perhaps it was my youth.
And your beauty. Yes, I think that was it. Those days I believed the end was
justified by the means, but now I see that it is never so simple. The means
taint the end. I was corrupted. And how can a corrupt man change the world for
the better? It took me losing my arms and legs to see that … and lying in a bed
with nothing else to think about but where I’d gone wrong. Now I know. I
thought I could shape the world. You say it’s small, but that’s wrong. The size
of the planet doesn’t matter, but the diversity of the people. It’s richness of
culture and thought makes it huge and untamable. To try to homogenize the human
race was a mistake.”

“Your only mistake
was to cross me. And now you have lost your vision. I shouldn’t be surprised
that you have given up, claiming to have seen some kind of light. You are
weaker than ever. And friendless.”

“Not friendless. A
friend risked his life to carry me out of my prison. He restored me to health.
And then he allowed himself to die to protect my secrets.”

The Queen laughed.
“Protect your secrets? He sang like a bird when I killed his wife and children.
You see? You are a fool!”

“Jeffery Markorian
doesn’t have a wife or children, Katie. Everyone in that car with him were
holograms. You only killed him. And only after he told you exactly what I asked
him to say. I knew you’d find him. And that you’d come here. This was where I
needed you to be.”

“Here I am. Yet you
talk to me via holo-screen like a coward.”

“I think it’s
because there is one thing that still tickles the back of my mind.”

The Queen gritted
her teeth, hissed a command into her com, and said, “You’re wondering why I
didn’t kill you?”

“No.” The fox’s
face told her he already knew that answer. “The cave.”

A lump formed in
the Queen’s throat. “What cave?”

“I think it’s a
fascinating thing, the cave.
Every
Thirteen sees the cave and the shadow. The cave is always there with a second
choice. For each person that alternative choice is different, but not the cave.
We couldn’t explain it no matter how deeply we examined the phenomenon. Our
best guess is that on some evolutionary level the cave is embedded into our
genetic memory. Each Thirteen chooses the cave over the other option. Don’t you
find that fascinating, Katie?”

She bristled at the
name. “No.”

“But what they find
in the cave, that’s not the same for each person either, I think. Just the
cave.” He gave a sort of shrug. “Tell me something. Now that you have spliced
yourself, have you seen the cave again? Was there a second chance of sorts? I
am still not certain that the Anomaly Eleven and Thirteen can permanently
coexist.”

The Queen did not answer, but what he
said gave her pause. Images from her recent nightmares returned: herself, an
adult, standing
at the bottom of a cave at the fleshy door she had once
cut open, now resealed, rotted, and blackened like leather. On the other side
of the door she heard a teenage girl screaming to be let out. No matter how
hard the Queen and the girl on the other side tried, nothing could reopen the
door. Somehow she had become locked on each side of the door.

“I told you before
that each person who has Anomaly Eleven—Tensai—whatever you want to
call it—each person tends to develop a genius in a specific area, often
something they are already good at. For me it was reading and manipulating people.
Have you figured out what it is for you?”

“Being you,” the
Queen growled. She glanced at her holo-screen.
He’s on the North American east coast.

The fox laughed.
Several metallic bangs and clangs came from around the room as windows and
doors sealed shut. The Queen screamed curses even as she calculated her odds of
escape.

“Empathy, Katie. I
saw the way you winced in real pain every time you looked at what you did to
me. I heard your whimpers as you tried to numb yourself with those creams. You
feel other people’s pain.”

“Let me out of
here!” she shrieked.

“And that makes you
more dangerous than any other human. The idea that you can feel what you feel,
and still do what you do … The new world I will build has no place for
Thirteens and Hybrids, Katie. And certainly no place for the likes of you. I
had hoped that when you gained your new intelligence you would regain some
measure of your old humanity, but I see that will never happen. Goodbye.”

The Queen removed
an explosive from her pack and threw it at the fortified window, shielding
herself with the strongest blasts she could summon. Fire and heat swirled
around her with the fury of a dragon’s breath. The Queen sprinted at the
window, blasting with all her might. The metal peeled outward like a grinning
demon, so she kept at it knowing only seconds remained before—

KCHOOOOOM!

The Queen blasted
again just as the concussion of the explosion hit her, hurling her at the
window. Energy poured from her hands as she flew. Metallic claws pulled at her
skin and clothes and hair, but she found air and space as her body squeezed
through the crack. Blackness overtook her, and then she was falling falling
falling …

The Queen opened
her eyes and blasted just before hitting the ground. A smattering of people had
stopped what they were doing to stare, a few screamed. The Queen blasted and
blasted, her body bounced off the cushions of energy before smacking her ribs
and face on the concrete. Everything was pain: breathing, moving, thinking, but
she got up and made it back to her bike all the same.

The cruiser’s
auto-pilot returned her to Orlando. As the Queen rode the elevator from the
rooftop to the penthouse, she collapsed and lay on the elevator floor for
several minutes before she found the strength to stagger out of the lift and into
the fox’s apartment.
Mirror … Where’s the
mirror?

The closest was in
the bathroom. She nearly tripped twice as she stumbled that way and opened the
door with a weak shove. The light brightened at her presence. Crimson red skin
was the first thing she saw. Blood everywhere, from her forehead to her chin. A
deep cut ran across her nose and cheek, smaller ones on her arms where the
metal had eaten at her as she passed through the demon’s grin. She had become
as hideous as the worst of the Thirteens.
I
look just like them.

The Queen blasted
the mirror into shards, bellowing and shrieking in rage. When the anger burned
away, she passed out again.

The beeping of her
com woke her. The first thing the Queen noticed was that her body didn’t hurt
nearly as bad as she’d thought it would, especially her face. She was tired and
sore, but not in agony as she’d been.

Getting to her
feet, she stumbled to her bedroom, passing two mirrors on the way. When the
Queen passed the second mirror, she stopped and jerked backward. She gazed at
herself as though a stranger stared back at her.
My face … my beautiful face …

It wasn’t as bad as
she’d thought. The deep cut would take some work, but her surgeons had repaired
far worse. Her arms were badly scratched with a few deeper cuts, so was her
chest and back. But those would heal in time.
Medicine. I need medicine for my face. Then a surgeon before the
scarring sets in. The damage can be repaired.

The Queen dug
through her supplies until she found the ointments she needed. The com rang
again. It had fallen out of her ear when she hit the floor. She let it ring
while she treated her wounds.

Seconds after she
finished patching herself up, it rang a third time.

Chad.
The Queen found the com and asked, “Did the
Aegis find Berhane?”

“They entered the
sewers as you ordered,” Chad told her. “Berhane is gone. They’ve been searching
for him in the service tunnels, but there are kilometers and kilometers of
walkways. It could take—”

“He’s heading for
the N Tower. Get the Aegis back there and have them wait until we know exactly
where Berhane is. Once we do, attack him. He’ll tear through the Aegis like
paper, so have a team of Thirteens ready to go down to hit him hard in a second
wave.”

“No Hybrids?”

The Queen grinned.
“Not yet. Let’s come at him in waves. We’ll wear him down.” Her eyes narrowed
on her reflection and she grinned at herself.

“I also have a
report on the trace you ordered on the fox.”

“Where is he?”

“He’s in Orlando.
Across the city in another safe house.”

“He can wait for
now. I’m coming to Rio. Once Sammy is exhausted, I will be ready to break him
like a porcelain doll.”