Read Nexus for Free Online Page B

losing her mind.
      She liked to bike. She swam. She'd graduated with a master's in DA with honors. She had two loving parents. She had a memory of a gun, huge in her young hands, the man she'd shot lying in a puddle of his own blood, slowly bleeding to death, deserving this and more for the horrors he'd inflicted…
      Yet Sam remembered her training for this mission. Another dose of Nexus, Nexus 3, the palest shadow of her current experience. A briefing. An assignment. A mantra that veiled who she was…
      Sam understood then. It overwhelmed her. She understood who she was, understood the betrayal of herself that this experience constituted. It came out in a jumble through the upper layers of her mind. Sam felt the bewilderment of the minds she was connected to, each of them seeing just a part of it. Felt their growing alarm. She had seconds to act.
      NOOOOOOOOO!
      It came out as a scream from her mind and throat, unforced, perfect for her needs. Sam wrenched her mind away from them, as brutally as she could, felt things tear inside her, saw and knew them stunned and disoriented.
      She remembered her name. Samantha . Samantha Cataranes. She remembered who she was.
      Tactical contacts came online, had always been online, dropped layers of threats and recommendations and escape vectors and supplemental information on her.
      [EXTRACT EXTRACT EXTRACT], her display read.
      Arrows pointed towards escape vectors. Alternate exits. Ceiling hatch seventy feet above her. Likely weak points in the wall. Back out the door she'd come in through. She chose the latter.
      Samantha Cataranes stood up. Force of will pulled her out of the chaos of the drug high. Years of training took over. She swept her vision across the scene around her. A score of names lit up, faces recognized, bios scrolling. All green or yellow. No gross threats.
      Her fingers found her slimline in her boot, tripped the emergency uplink sequence. Buffered data pulsed out instantly at emergency power. Everything she'd seen and heard going out to her watchers.
      The phone pulsed once, twice, three times, violating FCC power regs by a cool order of magnitude, expending a quarter of its fuel cell to get the message out.
      White noise shot through mind space, tearing up mental cohesion. Sam saw one or two go down with their hands to heads. Her own head ached. The music stopped.
      She turned towards the door then. The voices and minds around her were starting to burble, coming out of their stunned and pained silence. Few of them had caught what had really happened, but they had caught on that something bad had occurred indeed.
      That was sick. That was wrong. I can't believe I took part in that.
      Images of the mind meld she'd just experienced bounced through her, nauseating her, reminding her too much of… of… of what she'd killed to escape.
      Time for reminiscing later. She caught a glimpse of Kade on his knees, vomiting onto the floor. She felt a pang of pity, of regret. Time for that later, too.
      She strode towards the entrance, locked her mind down. Crowds parted. Then she felt a mind against hers, saw him move to block her path. Watson Cole.
      He felt hard, poised, resigned. Pacifist or no, he was not going to let her pass.
  [Combat Threat. Extreme Caution.]
      Alternate routes flashed on her display. Arrows towards other escape vectors. She could turn and run, beat him to an exit.
      But Sam was not in the mood to let some burned-out jarhead stand in her way.
      She blanked her mind, weaved towards him unsteadily on the floor, brought her left hand to her stomach, her right to her face, feigned a disoriented stumble to the left as she reached him, came out of it in a vicious right-hand backfist to his temple.
      Wats was unfooled. The big black Marine had anticipated the move or something like it. He brought his hand up to block, fell back, barely twisted the blow aside as he gave ground.
      Good.