Psion Omega (Psion series Book 5) (12 page)

“Boy or girl?” Sammy asked.

“A girl,” Lara whispered. “She’s so beautiful!”

“Congrats,” Sammy told Al, who looked as shabby as
ever, but a genuine smile hung on his face as he watched Marie hold his
daughter.

“Any name yet?”

Al shook his head. “We’re talking about that.”

Sammy nodded and looked around the room, but avoided
Jeffie’s gaze.

Commander Byron’s face glowed. “I am a grandfather.
Forty-eight years old and a grandfather. Still has not quite sunk in though,
the reality of it all.”

Thomas patted his son on the shoulder. “I’m a
great-grandfather. Wait until you get to my age. I feel like I should have more
wrinkles.”

Lara rubbed Thomas’s arm with a loving grin. “You have
plenty, old man.”

The device Rosmir held gave a beep, and everyone
froze, eyes on him. He looked at it, grinned, and said to Al and Marie,
“Congrats. You just created the first third generation Anomaly Fourteen.”

Cheers and hugs erupted. Sammy’s hand was shaken
five times, even though he hadn’t done anything. Al and Marie embraced, and Al
kissed her forehead. While everyone celebrated, Sammy took Dr. Rosmir aside.

“How’s Brickert doing?”

“He was awake for almost two hours this morning. I’m
upgrading his prognosis to a full recovery.”

An incredible weight lifted off Sammy. Brickert was
going to be all right. Hours spent by his side, reading to him, praying over
him, talking to him … all worth it. “Does he remember much?” was Sammy’s second
question.
God, please don’t let Brickert
remember. I’ll lose my best friend if he does.

“Don’t know yet. But I doubt he will.”

“He asked about you,” Janna, the nurse, mentioned.

Sammy’s mouth went dry and a lump the size of an egg
grew in his throat. “What—what did he say?”

Janna shrugged. “Just asked where you were.”

Jeffie watched him closely. However, when their eyes
met she immediately looked away. Rosmir glanced at the clock, then said to the
Byron family, “I need to check on a few more patients. You have ten or fifteen
more minutes before I kick you out so Marie and baby can get some rest.”

“You want to go see him?” Jeffie asked Sammy.
“Kawai, Strawberry, and Natalia are all there.”

“Sure.”

They walked side by side to Brickert’s room. Sammy
was so used to taking Jeffie’s hand that he almost did so. When his hand
brushed hers, he mumbled, “Sorry.”

Jeffie rolled her eyes and opened the door.

Almost instantly Strawberry wrapped her arms around
Sammy. “How have you been?” she asked him when she let him go. “Seems like I
haven’t talked to you in weeks.”

“Probably because you haven’t,” Jeffie said dryly.

“I’m well,” Sammy said. “Busy. With everything going
on it’s hard to find time to socialize.”

Just then, Janna Scoble came in to check on
Brickert. When Sammy glanced at her, he caught Jeffie giving Strawberry the
tiniest shake of the head. Sammy wondered what they were silently communicating
about. Him? What had Jeffie been telling his friends? Strawberry looked back at
Sammy and gave him a sisterly smile. “Try not to be a stranger. We miss you.”

“You’ll miss me even more when you’re going to
school in Lyon.”

Strawberry blushed and dropped her head. Sammy
realized that he was the only person she’d told about that.

“What school?” Kawai asked.

“Nothing,” Sammy said, smiling, “just a joke between
us.”

Jeffie’s face told Sammy she knew he was lying, but
she said nothing. Janna finished her check on Brickert and announced,
“Everything looks good. Natalia, don’t forget you’re due for a check up this
afternoon. Or we could do it now, if you’d rather get it over with.”

Natalia, who’d been shot and severely wounded in
Detroit, still spent ample time in the infirmary with Rosmir and the nurses.
She stood and said, “I’ll go now.”

Once they were gone, Kawai turned to Sammy. “Is it
starting to get to you? Is that why you’re MIA all the time?”

“Is what getting to me?” Sammy asked.

“All of this.”

“If it were going to get to me, wouldn’t it have
gotten to me in Rio? Or Omaha? Or a dozen other times after that?”

“Is that how it works?”

“I don’t know. Is it getting to
you
?” Sammy asked Kawai. “Or you, Jeffie?” He didn’t ask Berry
because he already knew how she felt.

Neither girl answered.

Finally Kawai said, “You’re asked to carry more than
we are.”

Brickert moaned and turned. All eyes in the room
fixed on him to see if he would wake. Then he snored softly, grinned, and his
breathing deepened again. Sammy let out a deep breath. “Have any of you seen
the baby yet?”

“Yeah,” Strawberry said, “we looked in on her just
before Jeffie left to get you.”

“She’s beautiful,” Kawai added. “Looks like Marie
more than Al.”

“Does Al seem happier lately?” Strawberry asked.

Sammy shook his head. “We don’t talk much. He comes
home and passes out on the couch. It doesn’t take very much to get him wasted.”

“Still can’t believe he moved out of the house,”
Jeffie said glumly. “Marie makes it sound like they’re getting divorced.”

Sammy shook his head.

“Crazy, huh?” Strawberry said.

“Everyone has a breaking point,” Kawai repeated.

“I haven’t hit any point yet,” Sammy told her. “I
can’t afford to let it get to me, and neither can any of you.” He directed his
last words at Jeffie. “The war isn’t over.”

“Doesn’t mean we can’t relax,” Strawberry said. “How
about a party to celebrate Brickert waking up?”

Sammy’s com beeped as a message came through from
Thomas.

We need to go to the tower NOW.
Apparently there’s HUGE NEWS.

“I have to go,” he told them as he hurried for the
door. Jeffie looked to her friends for help.

“Wait,” Strawberry said. “Does that mean no party?”

“I don’t know if I can do it. Why not wait until
Brickert can come?”

“Sammy.” Her tone was stern, “You can’t do this to
yourself. You need to take a break and let yourself be a kid.”

Sammy paused at the door before facing his friends
again. “You guys really think we’re still kids? You’re
kidding
yourselves.”

In under half an hour, Sammy, Thomas, Lara, and the
commander arrived at the air control tower in Saint Marie. Most of the
leadership committee was present along with some new faces, most of whom Sammy
vaguely recognized from his days spent in the data center sifting through
information stolen from CAG data servers. In the center of the meeting table, a
holo-tablet projected its information high into the air.

“Sammy!” Justice said when he entered. “Come have a
look at this.”

A few people moved aside to let Sammy through. All
he saw in the hologram was computer code, and as smart as he was, he had never
learned the languages of computers. Two of the experts spoke in technical
jargon as they pulled out and highlighted bits of text from the hologram. They
both stopped when they saw Sammy.

“Hello, Samuel,” one of the experts said as she
offered her hand to him. She wore a drab lab coat and a rather odd hairdo that
made her look like a peacock. Sammy remembered her as one of the Tensais who’d
flown in from Capitol Island with Commander Byron. “My name is Doctor Khani
Nguyen. Call me Khani, though. I dislike the title of Doctor. Too many—”

“Khani, why don’t you rewind a bit and show us all
what you’ve found?” Lara interrupted with an overly pleasant tone.

Khani gazed at Lara with a look of mild offense.
“Certainly. Last night my team of experts stumbled across a code which we
believe is linked to a possible kill switch in the CAG systems. We’re running
searches for similarly worded coding to find more information.”

“A kill switch for what?” Sammy asked.

“Possibly their entire army,” Justice said.

Khani rolled her eyes. “There’s no proof of that.”

“Wait … what?” Sammy asked. “How would that work?”

“There certainly is proof,” Commander Byron argued.
“We have seen Thirteens explode after capture. Not all, but some.”

Khani straightened her glasses with pursed lips.
“Your theory is nonsense.”

“Yet the time stamp on this part of the code shows
it was executed less than a minute before Victor Wrobel detonated during his
interrogation.”

Khani snorted with derision.

“I was in the room, Khani,” the commander insisted.
“I witnessed it.”

“It’s not your eyes I doubt, Commander. It’s your
brain. Why would the CAG leave something this important in their databases? It
should be erased. Scrubbed out of existence. They would never commit such an
oversight if it was so important.”

“As you of all people should know, sometimes even
the most impenetrable systems have errors.”

Another one of the data analysts spoke, though he
seemed nervous about saying anything to upset Khani. “It could be we’re
misinterpreting the data—”

“No,” Khani snapped. “I did not misinterpret it.
That’s classic kill switch coding.”

The computer experts began arguing amongst
themselves until Thomas clapped his hands together loud enough that it made
Sammy’s ears hurt. “Let’s settle down, folks.” Thomas looked mainly at Khani
and her team. “We need time to be sure we’re acting on good information. How
long will that take?”

“Anywhere from an hour to an infinite amount of
time,” Khani responded. “If there’s no more information to be mined in the
data, all we have is a teaser.”

A thought struck Sammy. “What if I go straight to
the source?”

“What source?” Thomas asked.

“The Hive. What if I go back?”

“Absolutely not,” Lara and Commander Byron both
said.

“I’m not talking about another hike through the
jungle,” Sammy clarified. “I’m saying I fly in and meet Diego.”

“He will shoot you down,” Byron said.

“He’d shoot
you
down, not me. He and I have a deeper understanding. A connection. Let me take a
stealth cruiser tonight. I’ll be back by morning.”

The committee spent the better part of an hour
arguing over Sammy’s request. Only Anna agreed that he should go. The rest obstinately
refused, especially those who had accompanied Sammy to the Hive: Lorenzo
Winters, Duncan Hudec, Duncan’s brother, Dave, and Nikotai. The meeting ended
with him soundly losing the battle.

Sammy went home, skipping dinner. With Brickert
still in the infirmary and Marie with the newborn, Sammy hoped he had the place
to himself. Unfortunately Al was already on the couch, snoring loudly in his
sleep. On the table near his head was a half empty bottle, its scent made the
air musky and heavy. Sammy sighed.

Now what?
he wondered. He
could go back to the infirmary and hold the new baby. Or perhaps Brickert might
be awake. Or he could wake up Al and try to talk some sense into him.

Most nights Sammy poured over maps or read through
data reports for hours. He could scan those very quickly, but he often read
them more than once, looking for something to give the NWG and the resistance
an advantage in the war. After making preparations for the next day’s committee
meetings, if he still wasn’t tired, Sammy read books—novels
mostly—anything to keep from wallowing in his own thoughts.

Before leaving the meeting, he’d asked Khani Nguyen
for a copy of the code for study. He wanted to try and make some sense of it,
but she laughed at him. When he told her he wasn’t joking, she stared at him
and then walked away without a response.

Sammy went to his bookshelf and scanned the titles
written on the spines, most of them crusty and faded from years of sitting
unread. He’d finished almost all of them—some to himself, others to
Brickert. The ones he hadn’t read did not interest him.

For a brief instant, he thought about finding his
friends and hanging out with them, but he could hear their comments in his
head.

“The Great Sammy condescends to visit us lowly
plebes,” Kawai or Li might say.

Or Jeffie might cozy up to him, interpreting his
presence as a sign that things between them were improving. She might tell him
again that she loved him.

He couldn’t tolerate hearing those words again. The
idea that she, someone so perfect despite her flaws, could think she was in
love with him …
It’s not right.

Nothing’s right
.

Sammy wanted to grab the half empty bottle of booze
and smash it over Al’s face. Then he would scream at him, throw him out the
door, and tell him to pull his head out of his butt, to quit screwing up his
life. What did Al know about pain or problems or anything? Al didn’t have the
Anomaly Thirteen. He had a beautiful wife and a new daughter; a family that
loved him despite his stupidity.