Psion Beta Read Online Free PDF Page B

walked carefully down the stairs. Their eyes never left him.
    Nothing made sense to him. Why would the Elite make all this effort to come after me?
    Then one of them glanced down to check his footing on the last stair, and Sammy took his last chance. It was a stupid thing to do, but he had no options left. He raised his shockers and fired one jolt at each of them. Then he ran. From one Elite, he heard, “Target is running on the east side of the cathedral.”
    “ Set to disable!” yelled a third, older voice within earshot, but this one carried a tone of concern.
    “ Firing booms on disable.”
    Two electric hums followed the words as the boomguns fired. An incredible force hit Sammy from behind, lifting him off his feet before he even realized he had been hit. And somewhere between the terrifying realization that he had been shot and the unforgiving impact with the cold dirt, everything went very black.
    “ Target is down.”

 
     
     
    3. Conversations

Sammy awoke feeling very cold. He did not have the energy to open his eyes, but the hairs on his arms and legs stood straight up. Over time he became aware that his naked backside rested on something hard and flat, but also just as frigid as the air. A sound very similar to a mosquito buzzed in his ear. The buzzing noise gradually transformed into voices. Every so often, the room lurched and shook, jostling Sammy on the table.
    At first, while he was still groggy, he thought the voices belonged to his parents.
    “ Nasty storm to fly through,” a deep male voice commented. “He smells better.”
    “ One of the nurses washed him before putting him on the cruiser,” a younger male voice replied, this one with a slight Indian accent. “I wouldn’t want to put up with a stench like that for the whole trip, would you? You should have seen what he had in his hair … disgusting.” He cleared his throat. “Regardless, we got confirmation with both DNA genotyping and a high-res CAT scan. He meets all the NWG anomaly qualifications.”
    “ Probably why he gave us so much trouble.”
    “ I am lucky to have gotten there before he did . . . and before the Elite.”
    “ How did you know he’d go to the church?”
    “ Middle of the night. Only place offering refuge for several kilos in the direction they were last seen. What would you do?”
    “ Brave kid firing on the Elite like that,” the second man said. “But you didn’t have to dress up like the crazy old man, did you?”
    “ For now he needs to believe Amos was real.”
    “ We love our anonymity, don’t we?”
    “ His name and age?” the deeper voice asked.
    “ That just came through the system,” the voice with the accent informed the first man. “Samuel Harris Berhane, Junior. He’s fourteen years, three months, two days.”
    Sammy’s blurry mind stirred at the mention of his name. They’re talking about me?
    “ Very funny, Maad.”
    “ Just being thorough.”
    “ Kid looks more like sixteen. Date of birth is what? November eighteenth?”
    “ In the year of our Lord twenty-seventy.”
    “ You are on a roll today. Is today the seventeenth?”
    Sammy did not hear the younger man’s reply.
    “ That sounds right,” the deeper voice said. “And his history?”
    For a moment Sammy could only hear muffled voices as one person shuffled through paper. “ . . . but his record says he was caught stealing six weeks after running away from . . . sent to a juvenile reform center for nine months––escaped after six––then spent the last three months living in an abandoned supermarket.”
    The older man whistled appreciatively. “Rough. No extended family?”
    “ None discovered. Grandparents died in the Scourge. Parents have no siblings.”
    “ Good,” the older man said, indicating he was finished.
    Sammy shifted on his back so he could hear better. There was more movement nearby him.
    “ I put a tube into his stomach––somewhat malnourished. Probably eating nothing but junk for