Brain Storm (US Edition) (35 page)

Sara started to uncurl and looked over at the turrets.
She was lying at the base of a door, it could have been the one she entered through or any of the others, but she was too disoriented to know. As she stretched her feet came off the white doormat and the turrets resumed their firing.

Sara managed to pull her feet back in before she was hit again. She was safe for as long as she remained on the white patch. Slowly Sara got to her feet, the turrets had not retracted back into the ceiling so Sara took aim and fired with her machine pistol to take out the turrets. She disabled the gears that allowed the turrets to move so that she could move freely and decide which doorway to try.

Her thigh burned where the bullet had gazed her. Sara twisted and looked down. Through the tear in her jeans she could see a trickle of blood and a cut across her skin but nothing more serious. She looked back up as she tried to think of some way to decide which door Carla had gone through. She blinked and looked back down. There was a small mark on the floor next to her feet that reflected light slightly differently to the rest of the floor. Sara went down on one knee to investigate the mark. It was little more than a small scratch but Sara took hope. She went around each of the other doors but this was the only one with a mark of any kind. She didn't know whether Carla had made the mark for Sara to follow knowing that there was no other way for her to know where Carla had gone, or whether it had been left by somebody else's carelessness. It didn't matter, it was all she had to go on. Sara would investigate this way until she found Carla or it was clear that this was not the way she had gone. Sara would then come back and search through each of the other doors until she found Carla or she was killed trying.

***************

"Welcome home, Carla."

The man just stood there looking at her as though he expected her to know what he was on about. Carla thought that both he and the woman with him looked familiar but she wasn't sure that she had ever seen them before. What she was certain of was that this wasn't home in any sense of that word. So Carla didn't respond.

Seeing that Carla wasn't going to acknowledge him the man continued, "I wouldn't expect you to remember, you were taken from us when you were so young. I know that you probably won't believe me but this
is
your home. This is where you were born, where you would have been raised if you hadn't been stolen from us."

Carla looked around her at her surroundings. This was no place to raise a child. She stared at the man with an even gaze. "I never knew where I came from. The people who raised me couldn't tell me." She had another look around her. "But I don't believe I came from this."

The man met her gaze. "But this
is
where you came from Carla. This place is your birth place." He paused. "And we are your family."

Carla shook her head. "I was not born in some laboratory."

The man relented and nodded. "Technically no, you were not. You were grown. Your actual conception took place in a different laboratory, one more specialized for that sort of thing. After a short time there, only a matter of months, you were brought here and transplanted from your initial artificial womb into one of these larger growing chambers," He waved his hand at the vats around  the room. "You should have spent the next few years in that chamber until you were ready for your education. Unfortunately that was not to be. One of the  men working on the project managed to falsify readings and reports to indicate that you had died when you had reached a mature enough stage to be able to survive outside the growing chamber. We had no reason to question his veracity at the time, the death rate at that time was rather high, and in fact it still is. He smuggled you out of here, away from us, and hid you away." The man appeared contemplative. "We have only recently delivered punishment to him for that and his other treacherous acts."

He fell silent. Carla's head swam. The room seemed to be spinning around her. None of this made sense. It couldn't be true, it just could not. She was a person. She was Carla Swift, she wasn't some sort of experiment.

Carla stumbled back, her brain was too busy trying to make sense of what she had just heard to help her maintain her equilibrium. The security chief caught hold of her arm before she could fall. In a dream state Carla managed to control her feet and her body enough to balance.

She blinked her eyes and looked around her. Everything looked the same but somehow different. Nothing outside her had changed but inside Carla was shattered. She looked back at the man and the woman who was still silently at his side.

"Then I'm a
thing
," Carla said, equal parts disbelief and disgust.

The man shook his head. "You aren't a thing." There was no compassion in his voice.

"I'm not a person. I have no parents."

"You are more than a person. You are special."

Special, that was what Karl Grosset had called her. This was what he had meant about her, this was what he was sorry for being a part of.

"You do have parents, Carla." The woman stepped forwards speaking for the first time. "I was the donor of the eggs for the project. I am your mother."

Carla felt herself starting to swoon. This was too much, it was just too much. This was all insane. None of it could be true. But Carla couldn't lie to herself, she knew what they were saying was the truth.

Carla caught herself before she could fall and gave herself a mental slapping. This meant nothing. She had always known that the people who raised her weren't the people who had given her her genes but they had given her more than that. She was more than the sum of her DNA. It didn't matter where she had come from. She knew who she was. She was Carla Swift and nothing these people told her could change that.

Carla straightened up. She wouldn't give these people the satisfaction of getting to her. "Why was I made? What is my purpose?"

The woman, Carla refused to think of her as her mother, stepped back to allow the man to answer.

"I told you that you were special. You could still be of use to us which is why you aren't locked up in a cell right now being interrogated. I hope that when I tell you why you were created you will opt to join us, you will tell us all you know freely. You can come back into our family, the family you were never given the chance to know."

"Just get on with it," Carla interrupted him.

The man's face curled up in anger and his hands involuntarily went into fists. He regained his composure and continued, "The average person uses only a small portion of their brain. Certain individuals like Christine here, are able to use areas of the brain the rest of us have no access to. You are part of a program designed to create a group of people who can access even more areas of their brain giving them access to latent psychic powers. You were taken from us before you could be trained but you may have noticed that about certain things you have an intuition or that you are uncommonly lucky."

Carla had indeed felt that way, most recently Sara had called her up on it. Then Carla had had no real explanation but now she knew. She didn't let any of this come through in her expression. "I haven't felt very lucky recently."

The man nodded solemnly. "It is regrettable that we had to go after you in that way but I will not apologize for it. We could not risk having you fall into the wrong hands. Knowledge of your existence, of you abilities and where you come from could put all our work here in jeopardy."

"That makes me feel so much better," Carla said sarcastically. She was about to ask him to go into more detail about what abilities she was supposed to have when another question came into her mind as though from an external source. "What is project Brainstorm?"

The man blinked but that was the only indication of surprise. "I would have thought you could have guessed that by now," he said. "You are project Brainstorm."

Chapter
Twenty-eight

The shaft started heading horizontally and then started to slope down as well. There was no sign of the elevator or whatever was supposed to transport people through it and Sara would have been reluctant to trust it even if there was. Instead she ran down the shaft hoping that wherever the transport was it didn't come back or she would be splattered like a bug on a windscreen.

It took her several minutes at a good speed to reach the end of the shaft where the transport elevator blocked her way. She must be a good distance underground and well past the boundary of the Omnitech building. Rather than put her off this provided Sara with more encouragement. Secret hideouts for people doing things that they shouldn't were always hidden away underground.

Gaining entry to the unoccupied elevator was simplicity itself. Sara moved through and listened at the door on the other side. There was no noise but she was pretty sure by now that she knew what to expect. Sure enough when she opened the door to come out of the elevator a pair of security men were standing in the antechamber waiting for her.

Sara struck out at the closest man to her knocking him down with an elbow to the side of his head. The other man brought his rifle up into line with her. Sara stepped forwards and grabbed hold of the top of the weapon. She used both hands to pull the weapon away from the security man before he even knew what was happening. He looked to his empty hands in shock and Sara cracked the butt of the weapon up under his chin. His teeth clacked angrily together and his eyes took on a glassy, vacant look before he lost consciousness.

Sara flipped the weapon around as she turned around to target the other man. With the rifle facing the right way in her arms she lunged forwards and rammed the barrel into the man's mouth. Her finger was about to twitch on the trigger when she noticed the keypad on the wall.

"I could kill you right now. I'm going to remove the weapon from your mouth so that you can speak but one wrong move and I'll take your head clean off. Do you understand me?"

The barrel moved up and down as the security man nodded. Sara slowly pulled the weapon out of his bloodied mouth so that he could speak but kept only millimeters from his face.

"What is the access code?"

The man shook his head. "I don't know it."

Sara shrugged. "Then you aren't any use to me."

She made sure that the man could watch her finger slowly start to apply pressure to the trigger.

"All right, all right."

The man gave her the code so Sara stood and whipped the rifle around once more. She cracked the man on the side of his head and he went down unconscious with his partner.

Sara took another moment to listen at the door before she entered the code.
She still didn't expect to hear anything but if there was something to hear and she didn't try it would likely get her killed. She was impatient to get on after Carla, this had to be where they were taking her. She didn't want to waste any more time, once the people who were after her had Carla where they wanted her there was no telling what they would do. Whatever they wanted with her it certainly wasn't going to be pleasant.

As expected there was nothing to hear. Sara stepped back, got her hand on one of the machine pistols and entered the code she had been given. The door came open. Sara was down in a crouch ready to act. Past experience had told her to expect at least a pair of armed security men on the other side of the door. But there was nobody there.

Sara crouch-walked through the door way. This was the largest room she had come to so far. It was filled with banks of electronic equipment and computers so that her view of the room was very restricted. She could see that the walls were lined with vats similar to those they had found in the burnt out room during their escape from the prison facility. Pipes trailed upwards from each vat and curled around the ceiling.

There was nobody in the room that Sara could see but much of the room was hidden from her by the equipment. She crouch walked up close to a bank of computers. Everything looked to be shut down but there was no layer of dust or any other indication that the place had been permanently abandoned.

Sara rested with her back up against the equipment. She concentrated on keeping her breathing quite and even and she opened her mouth a little to aid in her hearing. There were voices in the room that she could make out over her own heartbeat. There was a male voice, educated and well spoken, and someone who sounded very much like Carla. Sara was happy that she had chosen correctly and that Carla was here apparently with the person responsible for the mess that had taken over both women's lives.

Sara listened dumbfounded as the man explained why they were after Carla. Sara found it difficult to hear and didn't know whether Carla would be strong enough to take it. At first it didn't seem as though the younger would be able to.

Keep it together, you're strong enough to handle this.
Sara willed silently.

After a brief silence Carla spoke again and her voice was surer than it had been before. The man started to explain how Carla had enhanced psychic abilities and suddenly Sara
realized that what she had once taken as evidence of Carla's treachery was actually evidence of her true potential.

The man had answered many of the questions Sara had had over the last few days but there was still one matter that he hadn't touched on. Sara listened intently and willed him to explain what project Brainstorm was. Brainstorm seemed to have initiated much of the recent events and it was one of the major links between the departed Dr Grosset and Omnitech, which had led them here.