Psion Gamma (28 page)

Sammy nodded, torn between eating the food and talking about Commander Byron. The couple embraced.

“This is my wife, Lara.” Thomas patted her on the back. “We haven’t seen our boy in a very long time.”

It was too much for Sammy to wrap his head around. Byron’s parents? Here? But now that he thought about it, Byron was from Mid-American Territory.

“We have a lot to talk about, am I right?” Lara said. “Thomas, get him out of this room and get him cleaned up—and the other boy, too. We can do better than crackers and cheese!”

Sammy and Toad devoured a kilo of food each while the Byrons watched them with fascination and disgust. As they ate, Sammy noticed his strength returning, though his body needed sleep and time to heal. He also had the difficult task of trying to tell the couple everything he knew about their son while simultaneously putting as much food as he could fit into his mouth. Before all was said and done, they had talked for the better part of two hours.

The longer the discussion went on, the easier it was to see so much of Byron in his parents: their religious foundation, their impeccable manners and kind dispositions. Even Commander Byron’s eyes were similar to Thomas’. He found himself wanting to tell them every last detail he could remember. It gave Sammy the feeling that in some small way he had reunited the family again.

He told them about the Rio mission, how he met Toad, and their journey north, but he said nothing about Stripe or the room with the black door. The Byrons asked many questions about the death of the commander’s wife, but Sammy couldn’t remember if he’d been told how she’d died or not.

“Shall we give them the grand tour, dear?” Thomas asked his wife, throwing his arms back in a great stretch. He was quite robust for a man in his sixties.

“Not right now.” She pointed at Toad, whose face had narrowly missed the plate when he fell asleep. Sammy couldn’t blame him. The only thing keeping him awake was the exhilaration of meeting the Byrons. “They just need a couple of couches to sleep on.”

“Well . . . I guess the tour can wait.”

Lara showed Sammy to a nearby sitting room while Thomas led a stumbling Toad behind them. Sammy remembered nothing after his head hit a pillow.

Eventually Toad’s sniffing woke him up.

“What time is it?” Sammy muttered.

“I think it’s morning . . . I can hear them eating breakfast.”

Sammy’s mind became a little clearer. “Breakfast . . . I want some of that.”

“Do you think we should go in there? I mean, are we guests? We probably smell bad, too.”

“I don’t care. I want food.”

He stood and entered the large dining area, where over two dozen adults sat around a very long wooden table. Toad followed. Lara played the part of hostess and ushered them to their seats. Several people glanced or even stared at them, but Sammy cared too much about his eggs and toast. Not long after his third helping, Thomas jovially entered the room and rested his hands on the boys’ shoulders.

“‘To dwell in presence of immortal youth, immortal age beside immortal youth.’”

Toad looked at Lara with a puzzled expression.

“Tennyson,” was all she said.

“You boys can tell I’m excited to take you around, can’t you?”

“You’re going to show us the palace?” Toad asked since he had missed that part of the conversation. “And let us stay here?”

“Of course we are.” Lara responded from the sink where she and a few of the men were now washing dishes. “Where else would you go? You’re family now.”

Sammy stole a glance at Toad and saw no objection. The notion of family seemed nice, but hopefully this “family” would help him get back home.

Lara excused herself while Thomas showed them where they could shower and change into clean clothing. Then he gave them the grand tour, more of a history lesson, in reality. The building was nearly two hundred years old, originally built as the Wichita City Hall. When the resistance took over the building, it was the Wichita-Sedgwick County Historical Museum or “Palace of the Plains.” With all the adjustments the resistance had made over the years to fit the building to their needs, the Palace was much bigger than it looked, which was saying something.

From his time in the bunker in Rio, Sammy had imagined the resistance to be a broken-down, barely-surviving faction of rag-tag fighters. From Thomas’ tour of the Palace, he got the sense that it was much more than that. Besides a well-run organization, they had a network of tunnels running under half of downtown Wichita, and from some of the hints Thomas kept dropping, some highly placed people in government, media, and business.

“At any given time, we’re housing seventy or eighty people in the Palace. Only thirty of us live here permanently. But we could house hundreds if we had to. We’ve tunneled through to a hotel a block away.”

“How do you feed so many people?” Toad asked. “Do you have a secret farm?”

Thomas smiled proudly. “We have enough in storage to feed five hundred people for twenty more years.”

“Twenty years?” Sammy’s face betrayed his shock. Even his addled brain knew what a staggering amount of food that would be. “Where is your storehouse?”

“We keep it in several adjacent buildings around a few city blocks.”

“How . . .?” Sammy started to ask, but still could not fathom so much food.

“Part of it came from cleaning out ghost towns near and far. Pantries, stores—you’d be surprised how much food people left around. Some of it is just good old fashioned know-how. We also get regular shipments of new stock from our members.”

“What else is here?” Toad asked.

“We have an infirmary, and above that, in the towers, we keep our surveillance equipment.”

“Like what?” Sammy asked.

“We got all kinds of toys up there. Land-based transmission interceptors, long-range terrain surveillance, not enough to be terribly effective, but we get snippets of stuff. Right now we think we’re onto something big.”

 Sammy’s ears honed in on this. He wondered if it had anything to do with what he knew. “What big thing?”

Thomas looked blankly at him for a moment and then answered, “I’ll tell you later. Let’s look at the basement, and then you boys need to see the infirmary.”

“Okay, why?” Toad asked with a glare.

Thomas smiled at Toad like he was remembering something. “Seeing as how you both have been on the lam for the last few weeks, half-starved, etcetera, etcetera, the doctor thought it would be best.”

“The doctor?”

“Bryce Vogt. You met him earlier.”

“That jerk who shot at me?” Toad asked.

“Cool it, Toad,” Sammy muttered, but Thomas just laughed.

“Boys, let’s go the basement. I think you are going to love it.”

Sammy thought it strange how excited Thomas was to get them into the basement. He understood once they went downstairs. The basement was huge. Massive. So massive, in fact, that Sammy guessed it must extend far beyond the borders of the Palace walls and connect underground to several adjacent blocks to their storehouses and who knew where else. He’d need a map just to get around. One thing was certain, if members of the resistance didn’t want to leave the Palace, they didn’t have to.

“There is one other resistance center,” Thomas said. “Not all the resistance even know where that place is. Wichita is our base of operations.”

The “base of operations” was a giant cavern filled with gadgets, machines, weapons, maps, holo-projectors, blueprints, records, generators, nitro-computers, and many other things Sammy didn’t have a name for.

“It looks a lot cooler than it actually is,” Thomas informed them when he saw the look of wonder on Toad’s face. “We have some extremely talented people working on our side. They helped us get all this stuff. When the resistance first began we were in the technological dark ages, so to speak.”

“How did the resistance begin?” Sammy asked.

Thomas ran his fingers through his hair, rumpling it like a kid would. “Shoot. You really want to hear that whole story?”

“Yeah,” Toad answered for both of them.

Thomas stood for a second, looking around. “Well, let’s sit.”

He led them to a group of desks. After gesturing for them to take their seats, he pulled a mug full of pencils toward him and grabbed one. Leaning back in the chair and twirling the pencil between his fingers, he began.

“Either of you ever hear about the Mexico City bombing? Lark Montgomery?”

“Of course,” Toad said, but Sammy was pretty sure Toad had not.

The history instructions had covered Lark Montgomery in detail. He was a nut job, part of a militant reactionary group resisting the formation of the CAG. Sammy tried to remember the exact date of all those events, but couldn’t.

“The lawyer assigned by the state to defend Lark Montgomery was Crestan DeFry. Does her name ring a bell for either of you?”

Sammy and Toad both signified that it didn’t.

“Figures. Well, one day, mark my words, there’ll be volumes written about her.” To emphasize his next words, Thomas tapped his pencil on the desk. “Brilliant woman.”

The seriousness in Thomas’ face reminded Sammy a lot of Commander Byron.

“Anyway, back to Montgomery—everyone thought he was mad as a hatter. In court and in press conferences, he raged on and on about how he hated the CAG, how the NWG was going to take everything back with force. His trial was famous for his long rants about the CAG being an abomination before God. It scared a lot of people—me included. In those days, terrorist acts were too common. People like him were burning government buildings, sabotaging the air rails. The prosecutors were willing to cut a deal with Montgomery if he’d give information on some of these groups, like where they got their funding from, who was running them, stuff like that.

“Montgomery refused. Crestan tried and tried to convince him to cooperate, but he was adamant that he wanted the death penalty to complete his martyrdom. About two days before his sentencing, Crestan visited him in prison. She’d set her mind on persuading him to talk. What she found was a completely different Montgomery than the one she’d come to know. Instead of the uncooperative braggart, he was quiet and soft spoken—Crestan thought he even seemed scared.

“Naturally, she interpreted this as willingness to cooperate, so she pressed him on the issue, but Montgomery still wouldn’t budge. In the end, he was sentenced to death—it was what he wanted—even though Crestan did everything she could to prevent it. But he stayed his mad, crazy-talking self, right until the end when he rode the electric chair to hell.”

The pencil did a little dance across Thomas’ fingers. Sammy was impressed with how well he could make it move. Everyone watched the pencil for a moment while Thomas chose his next words. It reminded Sammy of the commander, who often seemed to carefully pick the best word to say in a conversation.

“Even after Montgomery’s execution, which happened in record-breaking speed, I might add, that day stuck with Crestan. She got to thinking that maybe there could be more to him than just a psycho. She contacted an old friend from law school. Henrico Garcia. They started looking deeper into Montgomery’s association with pro-NWG groups. None of them had taken credit for the bombing. They started to wonder how Montgomery had financed his terrorism. When Crestan and Henrico confronted Montgomery’s widow, things went from strange to crazy.

“She lived in the same house she’d been at before her husband got arrested. Six kids, ages ranging from two or three to thirteen, I can’t remember the details. She didn’t work, but the kids were all wearing decent clothes and looked fed. Where was she getting the money from? Crestan already knew Mrs. Montgomery from handling her husband’s case, but the widow had refused to testify for or against her husband. He’d wanted it that way.”