Psion Delta (19 page)

In
less than fifteen minutes, they were in the air with new coordinates set into
the navigation system. The atmosphere inside was more lively than before, with
all three members of the Byron family chatting during the time it took to fly
from Wichita to Glasgow. Byron’s knee bounced uncontrollably and his mind
couldn’t hold a steady thought for more than a few seconds. As they approached
the small town, he noted the dozens of small buildings spotting the small
town’s main streets.

Which
one?
he asked himself.

He
thought back to the letter. Certainly his father had told him. He read it once
again, remembering the code. Three words caught his eye.

City
office building. Sammy said the resistance headquarters was in the historical
museum, not a city office building.

He
researched the location of the city office building in Glasgow and directed the
cruiser to the street in front of it. The scent of death was gone from the air.
Sounds of birds whistling and crickets chirping were noticeable, but a strange,
almost watchful stillness pervaded an otherwise peaceful, natural atmosphere.
It didn’t bother Byron. He figured if his parents were indeed in Glasgow they
would have some way of knowing of his arrival.

From
the road, he could see large black letters above the main doors to the building
that read:
Glasgow
Civic Center
covered partly by tree branches. The three walked around
the building until they came to a back entrance. Byron tried the door and found
it locked. He jiggled it hard several times, then pulled out his syshée and
pointed it at the lock.

“Wait
a sec, Dad.” Albert put a hand on his father’s wrist.

Byron
checked his safety and moved aside for his son. Albert put both hands flat on
the door, one above, the other below the doorknob. Then he blasted repeatedly.
The door jerked violently on its hinges, rattling metallically. When his son
tried the knob again, the door opened.

“Where
did you learn that?” Byron asked.

Albert
winked at Marie, who covered her smirk with her fingertips. “Sammy,” they both
said.

They
walked into a dilapidated gymnasium. Cracks covered the wooden floor, and
several of the boards had gone missing. One of the basketball hoops hung
vertically, attached by only one bolt in its corner. Broken gymnastics
equipment had been piled into one area and several deflated basketballs and
volleyballs were gathered in another.

“Now
what?” Albert asked, gazing around the room skeptically.

Byron
shook his head disappointedly, starting to share his son’s line of thought.
This
building does not look like it can handle regular use. How can the resistance
be here?

“I’m
sure your dad told you what to do in the note, didn’t he?” Marie asked.

The
commander looked at the note with Albert and Marie. “Not really . . . ” he
stated, glancing over the contents several times.

“What
do those numbers mean?” Albert asked. “Are those GPS coordinates?”

“They
look like it,” Marie agreed.

“They
are.” Byron was about to say that they were meant to send an interceptor to a
town on the border of Death Valley, when he got an idea. “But they might also be
something else. Like an X.”

“As
in ‘X marks the spot?’” his son asked.

Byron
nodded. “The only question is what measurement do the numbers represent?”

“Meters?
Centimeters?” Marie offered. “Or decimeters?”

“My
father hated the metric system. He would have chosen inches—no—he would have
picked feet. You guys walk thirty-six feet left and then turn right for one
hundred eighteen feet. I will do the same in this direction.”

They
set off with the sound of creaking wood accompanying their steps. Byron counted
out his steps in a whisper, turning abruptly when he hit thirty-six. Albert and
Marie, he noticed, were moving much slower. His one hundred and eighteenth step
was near the far right wall on the three-point line. Carefully, he knelt down
and examined the wood in a circle all around himself. After a thorough search
and seeing nothing out of the ordinary, he began testing the wood to see if one
of the floorboards might come loose.

Methodically,
in a clockwise circle, he tugged at the cracks of each plank. At every tug his
heart beat a little faster, hoping that he might find something, even if only
another note with new directions. Once he had completed the circle and found
nothing, he stood, glancing over at Al and Marie. They were also inspecting the
floorboards. Commander Byron decided to go back to the door and count his steps
one more time. As he lifted his foot, he felt the board beneath him slide ever
so slightly in its slot.

He
stopped and turned once more. A sliver of black, masked by the paint of the
black line, stared back at him. Byron wedged his fingernails into the crack and
pulled. The wooden board gave way, and the commander’s heart thumped madly in
his chest. Using his com as a flashlight, he inspected the area beneath the
floor and found a small, sharp object. He retrieved it hastily and saw that it
was a miniature F-22 Raptor—the one plane that had been missing from his
bedroom collection. Attached to its underside was a microtransmitter set with a
little red button in the middle of the small box.

Byron
had his finger on the button, ready to push, when a loud
BANG
came from
across the gym. He stood immediately, readying himself for action. Someone came
running into the room. It was a tall man with thin gray-white hair wearing a
flannel shirt and denim jeans.

“Walter?”
the man shouted. “Walter, my boy?”

Tears
clouded the commander’s vision, and at the same time, a lump formed in his
throat. “Pop?” he croaked out and started toward the blurred image of his
father.

Thomas
and Walter Byron ran to each other, stopping only when the two men had embraced
for the first time in nearly twenty years.

11.
Kiss

July 2086

Winning
the Game
with Strawberry changed life dramatically for Sammy. It
seemed as if time had suddenly become twisted into a sharp vortex, causing it
to speed along like lightning at some moments, then drag on as though someone
had managed to capture that lightning in a glass jar at others. The hours spent
in instruction and sims zoomed by, while the other hours of the day were
torturous.

The
day after the Game, Brickert and Natalia finally started dating. Sammy had seen
this coming for weeks and figured it was about time. While he was happy for his
friend, he was also jealous. Natalia was ecstatic, as she’d been trying to woo
Brickert off and on for over a year. Now she occupied almost all of Brickert’s
free time, including the evenings when Brickert and Sammy were supposed to be
training together in the sims. This left Sammy with two options: spend time
alone, or be pestered by Strawberry. Strawberry, it seemed, felt bonded to
Sammy after their shared victory and saw any moment not with him as a moment
wasted.

If
she ran into him in the cafeteria: “Want to eat with me, Sammy?”

Or
in the rec room: “Shoot some hoops, Sammy?”

And
when they bumped into each other during free time on the weekend: “Feel like
going on a walk, Sammy?”

Every
evening, without exception, she asked Sammy to do something with her. He had
few excuses since Brickert was with Natalia, and Jeffie with Kobe. Kawai
couldn’t always help Sammy out because she was studying for an exam most
evenings and wouldn’t be bothered. Depending on how he felt, Sammy either caved
in and hung out with Strawberry, or read in his bedroom to avoid her. When he
was feeling really miserable, he’d replay his last conversation with Jeffie in
his mind:

It
was Sunday, the day after his big win in the Game. He’d spent all day trying to
talk to her, but she’d either ignored him or changed the subject. Finally,
frustrated and out of options, he went into the rec room and announced in front
of all the Betas that he needed to speak to her privately. The awkward silence
and questioning stares that followed forced Jeffie to follow him into the
exercise room where they were alone.

Jeffie
stood with her arms folded, ignoring Sammy’s request to sit with him at a
table.

“I’m
sorry,” he finally told her. “I should have been up front with you about my
decision and—and I feel bad about that.”

“You
lied to me.”

“Technically
I omitted information. Not lied.”

Jeffie
pursed her lips and scowled, an expression Sammy found very effective at
communicating her feelings.

“Seriously,
if you think I lied, then you need to explain that. I never lied to you.”

“Sammy,
why do you feel such a strong urge to graduate?” He noted that she hadn’t
explained her accusation and counted it as a small victory. “Do you have some
kind of need to grow up faster?”

“No,
of course—”

“I
can’t believe you wouldn’t rather stay here . . . with us!”

“Don’t
you think I considered that?” he replied. “That I didn’t agonize over this
choice?” In the privacy of his mind, he again heard Byron’s advice to learn to
control his emotions. For some reason, it was much more difficult to do that
around Jeffie.

“Not
the first time you’ve failed to consider people’s feelings, you know.”

Sammy
mentally gave Jeffie a very rude gesture, gritting his teeth as he did so.
“That is so ironic coming from you.”

“What
do you mean?”

“Ironic.
It means—”

“I
know what the word means.” A dangerous, cold tone had crept into her voice and
the normally lively green light in her eyes had turned into something closer to
deep permafrost.

“Good.
Why don’t you take a few minutes, sit down, and figure out what I mean because
I don’t feel like spelling it out for you.”

“Ha!
Talk about irony! I spent the first nine months here learning how to spell
things out for you.”

“I’m
sorry I couldn’t learn all the niceties of flirting like everyone else while I
was in the Grinder, Jeff. My bad. Hard to do that when there are no girls
around!”

Jeffie
folded her arms even tighter and took a step forward. “Quit blaming everything
on your past. If you’d had one inkling of how to act normal around a girl, we
wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“What
are you talking about?” Sammy asked, genuinely bewildered. “How does that
change anything? I can’t read your mind!” He tapped on his own skull several
times in frustration. “Maybe the problem isn’t me! Maybe it’s you! But I’m sure
you’re too stubborn to admit that. You can’t lose anything, not even an
argument!”

“That
is so not true!” Jeffie shouted.

“Yes,
it is!” he shouted back, matching her volume. Any desire he’d had at
controlling himself was gone. “Who was the one about to kiss me in the
hospital, and then who was dating Kobe when I got back? Oh . . . you! The girl
who couldn’t even wait FIVE DAYS for me! Don’t tell me that any of this is my
fault because that is—that is—
screwed
up.” He took a deep breath, but it
didn’t help.

“You
wouldn’t have any clue about relationships and feelings, would you?” Her voice
had changed from angry to disconcertingly calm and measured. “Sammy the robot.
Ice in his veins. Doesn’t even have the balls to kiss a girl.”

“You
don’t know what you’re talking about. I could have kissed a girl while I was in
Rio, but I didn’t.”

“Why
not? Because she wasn’t real?”

Sammy
was too angry to think about his words. He wanted to hurt Jeffie so she could
feel what he’d lived with the last six weeks watching her date Kobe. “She was
plenty real and way prettier than you. Oh and guess what else? When I turned
her down, she didn’t run off and date the next guy in line. She actually
respected my feelings. Amazing, isn’t it? Maybe I should go downstairs and make
out with Strawberry while you watch, you hypocrite.”

No
sooner had the words come out of his mouth that Sammy closed his eyes and
cringed. In his mind, he called himself every bad word he knew. Jeffie moved to
walk past him, but he blocked her path to apologize. She tried to step around
him, but he blocked her again.

“GET
OUT OF MY WAY!” she screamed.

“Make
me!”

Jeffie
uncrossed her arms and blasted him backward so hard that he had to use his own
blasts to not crash into the wall. When she reached the door, he thought about
apologizing until she flashed him a rude gesture without looking back. When the
door closed behind her, Sammy let loose all the foul words he’d been holding
in.

They
hadn’t spoken a word to each other since. By the next day, Sammy regretted
everything he’d said, but had no chance to apologize. Every attempt he made to
speak to Jeffie was met with silence. He’d consulted with his other friends on
the subject, but Natalia and Kawai’s advice was always the same. “She won’t
talk to you. Don’t even try.”

Strawberry’s
counsel was somewhat different. “You deserve better.” It seemed to be her
favorite phrase lately. That and, “Leave her alone and get over her.”
Eventually it dawned on Sammy that Strawberry’s idea of better was Strawberry.

The
morning of the 8
^th
of July started like any other. Sammy woke up to
the alarm, which was no longer the voice of Byron’s wife saying, “Good morning,
Psions,” but a dull beep that grew louder until someone flipped the lights on.
He stumbled out of bed and put on his exercise clothes while Brickert groaned
about how much he hated exercising first thing in the morning.

Within
minutes, Sammy’s ears were filled with the hums of several feet running on
treadmills, the chattering of Betas (including four new ones, who’d arrived
yesterday), and the news as it poured from the speakers of the holo-screens
around the room. The top story of the morning revolved around evidence of a
cyber-attack on medical records at NWGMC almost a month ago, quickly followed
by a report of another minor earthquake in one of the island territories.
Sammy’s thoughts, however, focused on none of these things.

Today
was a big day. After breakfast, he would sit for his final written exam. Then,
after lunch, he had an appointment with Commander Iakoka to begin his Psion
Panel. The news had come to him the day before in a private meeting with Major
Tawhiri. Not long after the television station went to commercial break, the
treadmill next to Sammy became occupied with a pretty girl with dark brown
hair, small but cute features, and perfect make-up.

“Hey,
Strawberry,” he grunted as he ran at near-f speed.

“Good
morning, handsome.” Her voice was light and airy, and she flashed Sammy her
biggest, cutest smile.

He
gasped for air as he spoke. “You’re late . . . for exercises . . . again.”

“You
think I wake up looking this good?”

Sammy
chuckled to himself and concentrated on keeping a good pace on his run. There
was no denying Strawberry’s beauty, which, in his opinion, rivaled even
Jeffie’s. She was much more feminine than Jeffie, too. Yet none of that
mattered. She was Brickert’s little sister, and that was how Sammy saw her. Not
to mention that while Sammy was almost sixteen, Strawberry wasn’t even
fourteen.

“You
nervous?” Strawberry asked.

“Nope,
but I bet the test is because it heard I’m coming.”

Strawberry
laughed as if Sammy had told a tear-jerker. With the help of the wall mirrors,
Sammy saw Jeffie roll her eyes and let out an exasperated snort. Then she got
off her treadmill and went to a different machine. Strawberry watched her
roommate for several seconds, then turned her attention back to Sammy.

“She’s
been a real witch lately.” Strawberry clucked her tongue.

“A
witch
, huh?”

“Yeah,
well, I don’t get it. I tried to tell her she can’t have it both ways. My mom says
that a lot. I never liked to hear it. Apparently Jeffie doesn’t, either.”

“Hmm,”
Sammy commented. “Imagine that.”

When
his workout session ended, Sammy promptly excused himself and went to the
showers. He skipped breakfast as per his usual ritual for the day of a test.
Ignoring all the well-wishers on his way upstairs, he took his place in the
Instructor and began his test.

Final
Examination: Basic Mechanics/Weaponry

Question
1: Which of the following choices best describes a semi-automatic pistol that
fires encapsulated micro-barbs which detonate on contact with a target?

Sammy
laughed to himself and selected the correct answer: syshée. The test didn’t fly
by as quickly as his previous ones, and his score wasn’t perfect as all his
others had been, but he performed well, which was all that mattered. At lunch,
while in line at the Robochef, Kawai inquired about his score. When Sammy told
her he’d passed, everyone behind him gave him a raucous cheer.

“One
down, one to go!” Kawai said, rubbing his shoulders. “Good job.”

“We’re
throwing you a party tonight,” Natalia told him. “It’ll be doubly awesome since
you’re taking two tests today.”

“Did
Tawhiri tell you which part of the Panel you’re taking this afternoon?”
Brickert asked.

“Nope.”
He grabbed his veggie sandwich from the Robochef and the four of them took a
table near the wall. Across the way, Jeffie was eating with Kobe, Kaden, and
Brillianté.

Same
old, same old
, Sammy told himself. It wasn’t long before
they were joined by Strawberry, Antonio, and Hefani.

“You
must be pretty stoked,” Antonio commented. “Graduating early and all. That’s
pretty cool. I wouldn’t be surprised if—”