Psion Delta (28 page)

Justice’s
move came much quicker. “You don’t see anything?”

Sammy
remembered the chess game with his father, the red sweater he’d bought at the
mall, his parents’ blood all over the house the next morning. Back then, he’d
seen something. Now he saw nothing.

“When
I look at the chessboard, Sammy, I see . . . hmmm, how do I describe it? I see
layers. Like several dozen boards stacked on top of each other. And I can see
through them all. It shows me what I can do, what you can do. It’s almost like
I see the future.”

“I
run the hundred meter in nine seconds,” Nikotai announced over the radio.

Justice
put his hand over his mouth so that Nikotai wouldn’t hear him through the com.
“He loves saying that.”

Sammy
moved again. As soon as he took his hand off the piece, he regretted it.
Stupid.
Stupid. Stupid.

Justice
countered with a strong attack. Sammy doubted he could recover from the error.
Three moves into the game and he was already dying a slow death.

“So
you don’t see anything. Interesting. Could be just for chess. Not all Tensais
are created equally. And not all excel at the same thing.”

“You
mean some Tensais use more of their brains than others?” Sammy asked.

“What?
No. Who told you that?”

“Doctor
Rosmir.”

Justice
tapped two fingers against his temple. “Everyone uses one hundred percent of
their brain. Anything else is silliness. No offense to the doctor. Hopefully he
was dumbing it down for you. If not, then someone probably explained Tensais to
him, but he had no idea what they were talking about, so he resorted to the old
myth that humans only use ten percent of the brain. Don’t believe that. Tensais
have a DNA mutation that affects our oligodendrocytes composition. This makes
the myelin on our nerve cells slightly different. In other words, better. It
speeds up neural processing, and the brain responds at puberty to the anomaly
by creating more neural connections. Three to four times more than the average
human. That’s what enhances our thinking and deepens our memory. Pretty wild,
though, huh?”

“Clocked
in at eight point eight seconds once,” Nikotai interrupted. “A world record at
that time.”

Sammy
lost five chess matches in a row to Justice before deciding to take the second
shift. It wasn’t a very difficult task, but it required methodical observation.
The Coast Guard tagged each ship before it set sail. Sammy had to make sure
that each ship and boat had a tracking mark on it. Then he used telescopes to
capture the faces of the boat passengers, allowing the computer to use facial
recognition software to identify them as possible matches with their targets.
Every fifteen to twenty minutes, he scanned the harbor perimeter for any signs
of disturbance and for boats that hadn’t been tagged.

Reports
came in regularly on the radio from other teams. The ground units had set up
their camps in low-visibility areas. Anna then ordered them to start placing
motion detectors around the roads and paths most likely for the targets to
travel. The air teams swept the perimeter of the city, reported on weather
conditions, and sent back video footage to the teams stationed around the three
major highways coming into town.

During
those first three days, Sammy learned a valuable lesson about surveillance: it
was tedious work and required a lot of self-discipline. Nothing exciting
happened, and all the reports coming in over the radio reflected that.

“My
dad was police,” Nikotai told Sammy late at night while they kept watch over
the bay. Justice slept on one of the beds, resting until his next shift. “Now
he’s retired. He was lucky. Never got shot or injured. He always said police
work was ninety-five percent boredom and five percent sheer adrenaline. Most
missions are like that, too. This is the important work. If we do it right, we
can skip the adrenaline part. Doing it right makes the job easy, and no one
gets shot.”

Sammy
liked Nikotai. The Ultra was about the same age as Anna, early thirties. Some
on Charlie were even older. Tom Garrett was in his forties. Jerome Yazzie, the
other Ultra, was in his late thirties, but looked almost fifty. Justice said
this was because he’d struggled off and on with alcohol abuse, a problem not
uncommon among Alphas.

Nikotai
and Justice explained to Sammy how Anna tended to use her team. The Elite
typically served as medics, pilots, and backup. The Ultras often got called on
for infiltration and other covert assignments, their speed and disturbing
accuracy became very useful in such situations. Tensais were the tacticians,
demolition experts, and, in Justice’s case, skilled fighters. Justice couldn’t
match a Psion in hand-to-hand combat, but his superior intellect still gave him
an edge over most opponents. Psions were used as the front line soldiers—the
tanks, as it were—but Justice wasn’t sure Anna knew how she’d use Sammy.

Whenever
Nikotai was on watch, Justice wanted to play chess. Justice probably had his
doubts about Sammy’s Anomaly Eleven. It made sense. Sammy hadn’t told anyone in
Charlie about his imprisonment and torture, so it seemed that none of them
except Al and perhaps Anna even knew about it. However, the more they played
the more improvement he saw in his strategy. Before long, Justice started
bringing a Magic 8-Ball to the games and setting it beside the board. Every so
often, perhaps once or twice every match, he would close his eyes, shake the
Magic 8-Ball, and then peer at the answer underneath. Only then would he make
his move.

Finally
Sammy asked him why.

“Whenever
I have to make a decision and I’m lacking sufficient data to see the correct
determination, I prefer using pure randomness to control the outcome. That way,
I avoid all possibility of having imperfect or incomplete information
inaccurately affect the course of events.” Justice held up the toy like it was
a crystal ball. “The Magic 8-Ball has twenty outcomes. Ten affirmative, five
neutral, five negative. If I assume the neutral to be also negative, it becomes
a fifty-fifty chance between affirmative and negative. That is, of course,
assuming I introduce enough variation into the shaking and turning of the
predictor inside the 8-Ball, which I do. I used to flip a coin, but I got good
enough at that to where I could almost always predict the outcome based on
which side was up when I flipped and the amount of force I used to flip it.
It’s not difficult. Nikotai’s hand-eye coordination is so wild he can flip
heads every time.”

Sammy
raised an eyebrow at Nikotai, who responded by raising his own eyebrows one at
a time.

“You
don’t
see
at all any more, do you?” Justice’s eyes were on Sammy. Across
the room, Nikotai turned slightly in his chair toward the conversation.

“No.”

“Head
trauma?” Justice asked. “It happened to a girl I knew at Tensai Beta. She was
emotionally crushed. They kept her around for about six months to see if it
came back. It never did.”

“No,
it wasn’t trauma. It was—well—they believe it was sensory overload.”

Justice
laughed. “What does that mean? Is that something sexual?”

“Torture.”

Watching
Justice’s face fall and Nikotai’s head turn back around didn’t make Sammy feel
any better. “Tor—that was you?” Justice’s eyes got wide. “We heard about a
Beta—rumors about one. No one believed them. You’re the one Byron lost on his
mission.” Justice swore softly. “My apologies for pressing the question, Sammy.
I didn’t know. And you haven’t seen since then?”

“I
don’t know. I get flashes of it. Not really seeing, but . . . something. Doctor
Rosmir is hopeful.”

“Yeah,
well, no offense or anything,” Justice said, “but Doctor Rosmir doesn’t know a
thing about Tensais. That doesn’t mean you won’t see again. What I’m saying is
don’t put your Tensai trust in a doctor of Psions.”

The
rest of that second day seemed to go slower. Toward the evening, Anna gave the
Elite pilot Dinsmore the order to pick up Sammy and bring him to her post.
Sammy was both relieved and sad to leave the penthouse. While he didn’t like
the constant reminders about his damaged Anomaly Eleven, he enjoyed the Ultra
and Tensai’s company.

Working
with Avni and Anna was weird. Both girls were ten or more years older than
Sammy. Anna was all business, and Avni only talked to him when she wanted him
to take over her duties so she could rest. Each shift was eight hours spent
watching the roads and the visible terrain of foothills leading to the
mountains. It wasn’t nearly as interesting as the boats in the harbor, and much
more difficult. After almost two days of this, he was overjoyed when Anna told
him he’d be going to grounds duty with Al and Jerome Yazzie.

As
luck would have it, rain clouds came in about an hour before meeting up with
Al. The team of two was eating lunch around a solar space heater when Sammy
arrived on the evening of July 30
^th
. They had set up camp not more
than a stone’s throw from the steep banks of the Glerá River under the cover of
a thick patch of bushes and small trees.

Al
and Jerome showed him all the equipment and gave him a rundown of their method.
“One of us stays at camp—”

“We
call that guy the squatter,” Jerome said.

“The
other guy is the rover. He spends most of his time on the bug.”

“The
bug?” Sammy asked.

“That
thing,” Jerome said, pointing to something hidden behind some bushes.

Sammy
went into the bushes and saw a small vehicle that looked like a giant ant. It
had six wheels, although Sammy wasn’t sure they were wheels at all because they
had small, curved paddles on them. And though it had three jointed segments, it
could only carry one person.

“It’s
fun,” Al said. “We’ll let you take it out for a spin when you’re the rover. In
the meantime, we’ve set up a perimeter of motion detectors around our sector.”

“That
way we spend a lot of time chasing wild animals,” Jerome added.

“And
the sensors form a grid so we know exactly where the activation occurs within a
square meter or two. But the grid only covers the routes that are easiest to
travel, so we take the buggy out to scour the rest of the terrain while the
squatter watches the sensors and video feed. Easy enough.”

The
rain clouds continued to gather in through the night. Jerome left to do the
rounds while Al and Sammy stayed in camp.
It wasn’t so bad for the
first couple hours catching up with Al, but then Marie called and Al talked to
her for over an hour. Every five minutes Al would look up and give Sammy a
sheepish grin as though it was somehow fun for Sammy to hear them tell each other
how much they were missed and loved.

When
Al finally hung up, he smiled guiltily and said, “Sorry, I didn’t know she
could talk that much.”

Sammy
waved it off so Al wouldn’t feel bad.
Give me a break, man. You’re the one
who kept bringing up new stuff to talk about. Any Thirteens within fifty meters
of us heard you
.

This
became a pattern over the next few days. Whenever Jerome left for roving duty,
Al either spoke with Marie over the phone, or engaged Sammy in long, personal
discussions. During the phone conversations, Sammy wanted to throw things at
Al’s head to make him see what a doofus he was being. Instead, he promised
himself he’d never become so mindless.

Al
asked Sammy lots of questions about life at Beta headquarters, especially in
regards to how things had changed under Major Tawhiri’s leadership. Several
times Sammy considered telling Al about his girl troubles, but worried it would
make him look childish.

The
real excitement throughout the day came when the sensors went off. Every time,
without fail, a small thrill shot through Sammy when heard the sound:
Deet
deet deet! Deet deet deet! Deet deet deet!
The computer displayed which
grid had been infiltrated, and Sammy or Al would go check it out. About
two-thirds of the time they’d find the culprit immediately: low-flying ravens
and gulls or occasional sheep. One time Sammy thought he saw a wild horse, but
it was so much smaller than the horses he had seen in the South African
countryside that he could not be sure.

The
rain fell incessantly, and the nights chilled the Alphas. Someone always had to
stay up, so Jerome and Al split the watches in half and told Sammy to sleep.
Sammy didn’t like that idea, and told them he’d stay up half the night with
each to keep them company. Jerome took the watch the first two nights, and
Sammy stayed up until 0200. Jerome didn’t talk much, and when he did it was
always about food, particularly bacon. The third night Sammy woke up at 0200 to
keep Al company. When he crept out of the small tent, Al was stirring a pot of
hot cereal.

“Where’s
Jerome?” Sammy asked. “I thought he was asleep.”

“Anna
called in and asked him to take the bug to check something. Hungry?”

“Sure.
That stuff actually smells good.”

“I
added honey and brown sugar. Don’t tell anyone my secret!” He winked and
divided up the food, then bowed his head before eating. This wasn’t the first
time Sammy had seen Al pray over his meals. Sometimes he watched Al’s lips move
to figure out what he was saying. Growing up, Sammy’s mother had sometimes
prayed, but when he asked her about it all she’d said was, “You’ll understand
if it’s right for you.”