Dark Genesis: The Birth of the Psi Corps (32 page)

Another minute or so passed, as the attackers began discussing the situation. One fired a burst at the debris, and imaginary sparks flared on the stone. The imaginary water level rose. A Psi Cop fired another burst, and that broke someone, probably Mikko. Fiona felt him shake loose, weakening the rest, and sudden thunder to the right revealed his panicked alternative. That was it. She yanked out her Naga, aimed around the column of stone she crouched behind, and began to fire. The cavern filled with the whine and ricochet of bullets.

Surrender! We don’t want to harm you! The combined urging of the Psi Cops battered her, and for an instant she considered it. At least she would be alive, and Matthew would be alive … She clenched her jaw and fired again. Her life was hers to win or lose, not Psi Corps’ to give her. “Live free!” she yelled. “Live free!” Limestone spalled all around her. They must have it by now. Start the retreat. Mikko was already down-she’d heard his death scream. Mustapha and Chapman-something was making them sleep.

“Gas!” she hissed. Go! The remaining three ran back down the Neck as she and Matthew lay down cover fire. Then she tossed a grenade and ran herself, just as something struck her oddly, made her head whirl and her body seem far away. Matthew was dragging her, almost, and suddenly the whole situation seemed more than a little ridiculous. She giggled. Her grenade went off, and she felt someone die, and that snapped her out of it. She must have come in contact with the gas they were using. As she ran, she could feel it wearing off-it must have a short life, sensible in a cave. Had the cops been wearing masks? She hadn’t been able to see. By the time she reached the end of the corridor, she felt almost sober again. They reached the team at the AI at a dead run.

“Got it?”

“Got it.”

“Blow, then.” An instant later, very near, the sky fell. There was no sound of explosion, just a dull sort of vibrafion in the stone, and then a low, grinding crash followed by the gush of water. A ragged cheer went up, and Fiona recognized her own voice in it. Ops was on skeleton crew when they got back.

“How is it?” Matthew asked Enoch.

“Not good. They had Two and Six staked out. I don’t think anyone got through. They found One and Four about three minutes ago. We’ve sealed them all and diverted everyone to Five, Seven, and Eight.”

“Which way did Stephen go?”

“Eight, I think.”

“Good. Good. How many do we still have in here?”

“Us, and maybe thirty more.” He hesitated. “We’ve lost every major nexus now. They’ve shut the railroad down. There’s nowhere to go, even if we get out.”

“We’ve got time to breathe, though.”

“Sure. We’ve teams at all the other entrances. We can blow ‘em as we find ‘em. But you two better go, now, while you can. They’re picking off our exits pretty fast.”

“I’m not leaving until everyone else is out” Matthew insisted.

“That won’t happen,” Enoch said. “Because I’m not leaving with you two here. Capische?” He glanced at a sudden glare from his board. “There went Seven.”

“We still have Eight, though?”

“Yes,” Enoch replied. “Stephen should be out by now.”

“Eight, then,” Matthew said. “The caves are filling up. Time to go, and all of us are going together.”

CHAPTER 6

Stephen emerged on a mountainside, stepping into the cool night air. His namesake was awake, but quiet, almost as if he understood the need for it. Perhaps he did. The kid was already a powerful teep. Stephen scanned the valley and hillside through his night goggles, but noticed nothing peculiar.

“Okay,” he said, to the other five or so in his group. “Spread out. I know you want to stay together, but you can’t. Stay away from the highways and small towns-go cross-country when you can. Time works for you, so put as much of it as you can between now and when you have to put yourself in danger again. If you hear choppers, hide under something, and don’t move. Try to get to Chattanooga or head south. Keep your ears to the ground; we’ll get the railroad back together, but it could take a little while.”

They nodded solemnly, and reluctantly started away. All but one, that is, a fifteen-year-old girl named Valerie. She stood as if petrified, staring at the cave mouth.

“Where are Fiona and Matthew? Why aren’t they coming out?”

“They’ll be out, don’t worry.”

“I’m going to wait for them.”

“If you wait here, you’ll only tip off any air surveillance the Psi Cops have, Valerie. Go!”

“I’ll wait for them inside of the cave,” she said stubbornly.

“No. They will find this entrance, it’s just a matter of when. You’re one of the lucky ones, so don’t be stupid and blow a chance others would kill for.”

She turned her terrified gaze on him.

“I’ve never been in the woods. I don’t know what to do.”

He sighed.

“Come with me, then. You can help me with the kid.”

She brightened a little at that. He watched where the others went-mostly down into the valley , which made sense. It was narrow, almost a gorge, and sparsely populated, with heavy cover and a stream. So, of course, the cops would look there first. He turned and started up the mountain, Valerie in tow.

It was harder even than he thought it would be, leaving Fiona and Matthew. He strained to find their thoughts, though he knew it was impossible, through the layers of ancient stone. He kept catching himself dragging. Think of the kid, he would remind himself. He was so preoccupied that he almost missed the choppers. They were running nearly silent, without fights, but they blotted the stars at the edge of his vision, and through the night goggles he could see that they left a faint trail.

“C’mon!” he told the girl, urging her up the next slope. There was nowhere to hide, here, nothing that would provide shelter from infrared sweeps, or from radar so refined it could detect a heartbeat. The choppers weren’t close enough yet, but they would be soon. Odds weren’t good that he could take a chopper with his rifle, much less the three he counted. Valerie began to whimper; she had noticed them, too.

The rise brought them to a small road, one that hadn’t seen use for a while, judging by the high weeds thrusting through the black pebbles that remained from the ancient asphalt. Over the centuries, rural populations had continued to contract toward cities, as fuel prices rose and private cars gave way to trains and monorails. The cheap fuel cells that powered cars now had done a bit to reverse the trend, and people kept predicting-as they had for two hundred years-that cheap communication and AI nets would eventually decentralize civilization. But cities had become a habit with humanity, a hard one to break, and the countrysides had been given over to national parks and big industry. For the most part, people liked things that way. The Appalachian Mountains were littered with ghost towns. They didn’t find a whole town, but the remains of a house, its slate-tiled roof mostly intact. It would have to do. He hustled Valerie into it, found that it had a cellar that had been dug into the rock. Even better. The girl was near panic, and Stee was picking up on it, starting to wail.

“Here,” he murmured. “Watch Stee, will you? I’m not so good at it. That’s what you can do for Fiona and Matthew. Watch their baby. It’s the biggest job there is.”

Taking the baby seemed to calm her down. He crawled back to where he could see a sliver of sky and waited. The helicopters went over, and kept going, making a beeline toward entrance Eight.

“Okay,” Fiona hissed. “Matthew and I will scout point. Terrence , China, you watch our flanks. They might be out there and they might not, but we should be ready for a fight.”

She could feel their tension, and nothing else. If there were cops outside, they were quiet, well shielded. She poked the nose of her rifle into the air, looked around carefully , and followed it out. Matthew was right beside her. Okay, Fee? Seems okay. I just-no! Above us.’

Almost too late, her night visor showed her the faint pools of heat. Metal began clanging all around them. Bombs! But no explosions-Gas! She sent it as loudly as she could. Masks! She pulled her own on, hoping the invaders weren’t using a nerve agent. Some of her group either didn’t hear or weren’t fast enough, but most got them on by the time ropes began snaking from the sky. She lifted her rifle and fired at the dark shapes that were sliding down. A man screamed and thrashed to the ground. Out! OUT AND RUN.

She put her back to Matthew’s, and they both kept firing up, their tracers cutting loops in the sky. Men poured out of the helicopters like rain from a thunderstorm. She hit another, and another-The choppers began to fire back. The tracers ate toward them, as Fiona pumped bullets toward the gunner. Behind her, the rest of their group were doing as ordered, fleeing through the holes as Matthew and she opened them. They both dove flat as the fire from the choppers thuttered the earth where they had been standing.

The gunfire was tiny, almost inaudible in the distance, and Stephen shook his head. Poor bastards. He wondered who it was. But then, in a terrible flash, he knew, because he caught a hint of Fiona, mindscreaming. Too far. Way to far. Your imagination, he told himself. But he knew it wasn’t. It didn’t usually take Stephen long to make decisions. It didn’t now.

“Watch Stee,” he grunted to Valerie. “I’ll be back for both of you. Stay here and do not move.”

Fiona had seen movies in which one or a small handful of commandos or cowboys or policemen fought against fifty times their number, and won. The way the scenes were shot, it seemed credible. The method was to break the action down into a lot of smaller confrontations. What the films generally left out, purposefully , was the big picture, the aerial views, because this would show the fights for the fantasies that they were and leave the audience wondering why all of the bad guys to the sides, behind, and above the hero were holding their fire so said hero had to shoot only those in front of him. She and Matthew survived in such a situation about as long as one could, perhaps twenty seconds. Then a mule kicked her in the back. Fee! But then several somethings hit Matthew, too, somethings that hurt him a lot more than a mule.

The only place they could go was back into the cave, and the muffled whump! that greeted them as they stumbled into it-more charges farther down, sealing it shut-reminded them that they couldn’t go far that way, either. Matthew had dropped flat next to Fiona, continuing to fire methodically , despite the pain she felt radiating from him. She stood straddling him, because she knew if she squatted or lay down she wouldn’t get back up. Her breath came painfully-the impact of the bullet on her vest must have broken ribs. She fired all of her rounds and then ducked around the corner. Matthew gurgled, and she grabbed his foot and dragged him around, too, tossed her last grenade so that it bounced out into the clearing, then began changing clips.

Stephen tore down the hill, stumbling often. Once he fell a full thirty feet, and his head cracked against rock, but he kept going, blood welling along the rims of his goggles. The helicopters bobbed in and out of sight. He couldn’t hear gunfire anymore, but that might be because of the blood pounding in his ears.

When she peeked around the corner to fire again, the tunnel filled with lead. She got off only a shot before something tore the rifle and most of her shoulder away. She grunted in surprise and fell back against Matthew, where he lay bubbling blood from a hole in his throat. Take them alive, you idiots! That from a Psi Cop outside.

“Alive?” she muttered. “Alive.”

Fiona …

She stripped off her goggles and mask, pushed his up, and bent to kiss him. She didn’t need to see his face anymore, or her own. Surrender, Fiona, he managed. And go back to one of those camps? No. They can use us, program us, make us betray ourselves… She felt them getting close outside. She hunted on Matthew’s belt and found his last grenade. Remember that wild night in Santa Cruz? The boring party? The carnival? The midget and the dwarf? And we went walking on the beach. I remember you were shy. You wouldn’t go skinny-dipping. Wouldn’t go that far on a first-He coughed, and something broke loose inside of him. I love you, Fiona. I love you, too. She pulled the pin. The last thing she saw was sunrise over the Sulu Sea.

Stephen was still eighty feet up the hillside when a tongue of flame curled out of the cave mouth below, and he felt them go. He screamed. He screamed and he began to fire. Sparks flew from the nearest chopper, hovering at about his own level, and it turned, sluggishly, its sixty-millimeter barking to life. He stood, watching the fire hunt him, squeezing the trigger of his rifle in metronome bursts. The gunner fell back. He was empty. He put in armor-piercing rounds and started again. It took eight shots to crack the cockpit, another three to take out the pilot The craft dove into the mountainside, its rotors exploding as they dug at rock. He walked farther down the hill, took the time to shoot a couple of men coming up it, but now the other two choppers were after him. He stepped behind a tree, felt it shiver like a drumhead under the impacts. He pulled the pin on a grenade, counted six, and then stepped out and flung it as far and high as he could. It detonated short, but the blast picked the chopper up a few feet. He pulled, counted five, threw again. This time he got the rotors. He realized that he was still screaming, that he almost couldn’t see for the blood and the tears.

Fiona and Matthew were dead. He would kill every one of the bastards. Every last one. Of course he was out of ammo, and grenades, too. He pulled his knife, and then the tiniest bit of sanity crept back into his head.

Stee. If he died, who would take care of Stee? It was their last wish, the only thing they had asked of him. So he sheathed the knife, as the last chopper rose like a death angel above him, and he began to run, weaving through the trees. The stupidest thing he could do was lead them straight back to the kid, so he wouldn’t do that. He would lose them first, then go back. If only Valerie kept her head.

He plunged down the hill, leaves kicking behind him. They couldn’t possibly see him anymore; they were hunting him on radar and infrared. He stayed in the tallest stands, to make them keep their distance. He took a bullet anyway. Coming straight down, it shattered his clavicle, wobbled along his ribs and dug into his hip. Shocked, he ran headlong into a tree, rolled, and plunged into freezing cold water . Gritting his teeth against the pain, he managed to kick himself up under a mass of debris that choked the stream to one side. The chopper flew on. He stayed there a few more moments, breathing hard, then tore two strips from his shim, plugged the entry and exit wounds on his shoulder, tore a third strip, and tied it tightly around both. The arm hung uselessly. He drew the knife again, and waited.