Spartan Resistance

by Tracy Cooper-Posey

  The younger man moved forward so that he was in front of the other two. No mouthpieces today, then. “We find ourselves in a difficult position.”

  “That explains the waffling,” Kieran said gruffly.

  “Gabriel Miyamoto Terranova. This name is known to you.”

  Kieran suppressed his reaction with effort. The hairs on the back of his neck lifted and cold fingers trickled down his spine. “The whole world knows who he is. He likes to splash his face across the nets on a regular basis.”

  “But not recently,” the man added.

  Kieran dipped into his mind, sliding through the barrier he had erected. He scanned quickly, too impatient to let him get around to his point. Kieran straightened, surprised. “That’s where he’s getting them from,” he said slowly. “He’s stealing them, any way he can. He’s stealing your own people, too.”

  While he had been scanning, Kieran had caught the man’s name and identity. Jeremiah was the name he was currently using, although he had others.

  Jeremiah developed a sour expression. “It’s not polite to scan a mind when barriers are raised.”

  “You’re just miffed because I can do it,” Kieran told him. “It saves time. So you’ve come to see me, to see what I can do about your little dilemma.”

  The older man and the woman—Benton and Alice, by name—had been studying him with the sort of intense looks that told him they were trying to scan him. So much for being polite.

  Benton, the grey hair, said distantly, “There are limits to your abilities, then. You have not seen the full picture.”

  “He knows something about this,” Alice added, just as softly.

  Jeremiah didn’t look at them. His gaze remained on Kieran. “Then we were right to reach out to you. Tell us what you know about this matter.”

  Kieran squashed the impulse to recall the image he had snatched from Rhydder’s mind just after they had retrieved Baby Jack from Gabriel’s lair. It had been a glimpse of the room where Adán and Rhydder had jumped to. Instead, Kieran threw up a black curtain, smothering the image forming in his mind. Instead he considered the cold reaches of space. The silence and the whirling, infinite stars….

  Alice gave a little hiss of frustration and Kieran grinned. “No, you don’t get to scoop whatever you want from me,” he told her. “You get to deal with me on a quid pro quo basis and nothing else. So talk.”

  Jeremiah sighed. “Gabriel has been recruiting psi-filers for over a year, since before that incident where you and your agency people took back the child.”

  “We know,” Kieran said complacently. “And now I know he’s scooping up your own people at the same time.”

  “We are your people,” Alice said angrily. “You can ignore us for as long as your agency protects you, but you cannot deny that you are one of us.”

  “That is totally irrelevant right now,” Kieran said. He looked at Jeremiah, who seemed to be best at sticking to the point. “Go on.”

  “Gabriel isn’t just recruiting,” Jeremiah said. “He will shanghai naturals, unnaturals and marginals…anyone with an ounce of psi talent, regardless of how they have come by it. Our own people have been disappearing as steadily as the psi.”

  “He hasn’t tried to recruit you three?” Kieran asked.

  Benton grimaced. “We can shield ourselves. We have stronger shields than many others.”

  “Not strong enough,” Alice muttered, which brought another smile to his lips. He remembered her moving Universal Wardens about with her mind, tossing them against walls and throwing them in high parabolas across the big dormitory. She clearly didn’t like not being the most powerful one in the room.

  Kieran dismissed her pouting. She would just have to suck it up, like everyone did sooner or later. Everyone had a natural enemy. There was always someone more powerful.

  Instead, he returned to the subject at hand. “If you say that natural psi are—”

  “Natural psychics,” Benton corrected, sounding offended.

  “You say naturals and unnaturals are both disappearing. Okay, fine, I can accept that as self-evident.” He knew they would be right about this, for he himself had an ever growing and elaborate map in his mind of the locations of everyone he cared about, or cared to trace. It was a living map and changed second by second as the mental signatures he kept track of moved. Only if a vampire jumped into the past did he lose track of them and sometimes not even then, if the jump was not long.

  If the natural psi—the natural psychics—said that psi were disappearing, then he could take their word for it. But…. “What makes you think that Gabriel is behind these disappearances?” he asked.

  “We just know,” Jeremiah replied. “So do you.”

  “Just because you say he is doesn’t mean I agree with you.”

  “You could confirm it is Gabriel in a heartbeat.”

  For the first time Kieran felt genuine surprise. “Wait. Wait. You scanned him? Gabriel?”

  Alice’s lips pushed together and out into a little simper. Her smugness wafted from her in mental waves.

  Kieran didn’t know if she was not bothering to shield now, or if he had her registered and could read everything, anyway. “You scanned him.”

  Jeremiah spoke gravely. “He has collected a mass of psychics around him and their numbers continue to grow. He drives them, whipping them up into a frenzy. He’s igniting all their furious passions.”

  “He’s building an army,” Benton added, his tone three steps beyond grave.

  “Why would he want an army?” Kieran asked, keeping his tone curious and light, even though he knew the answer. We’re building an army. Why wouldn’t he? But there was still something wrong. Something missing from the equation.

  “Let me show you,” Alice murmured, looking at him intently.

  Kieran opened up his mental shield enough for her to step just beyond it and no farther. “Show me.”

  What she delivered was a comprehensive sense package. Snippets stolen from Gabriel and compiled to show an uneasy whole. It was like scanning Gabriel directly and it was pure thought/feelings, more chaotic than any human or psi that Kieran had ever scanned.

  Gabriel was dying. He had just turned twenty-eight and he knew his time was drawing near. He could feel the approach of his mortality and it drove his every move, his every thought. He couldn’t stand a day going by without progress toward his goal. A day without success was a wasted day and he didn’t have many of them left.

  Kieran shook his head. “He’s fooling you.”

  Alice’s face flushed red. Anger tightened her jaw. “I scanned him. Are you suggesting he lied in his own thoughts?”

  “He lied to you. He knew you were scanning him. He let you do it.”

  “How can you possibly know that?” Fury heated her words.

  Kieran threw the memory/image at all three of them together. He had blocked it earlier, but this changed things. He recalled the memory as Rhydder had given it to him—Rhydder’s recall and transfer had been much crisper and focused than Adán’s had been, which told Kieran the man had experience with sharing thoughts, even though he had no psychic abilities of his own. It was one more secret the Malsinne leader carried, that Kieran had added to his list of mysteries to unravel one day.

  Kieran focused on providing the thought/image as clearly as possible so that these three would have no trouble seeing it. He saw/felt in his own mind the chair he was sitting on. The chair in the middle of the room, surrounded by them. At his feet and spreading to the far edges of the room, circling around him like a wheel, were the comatose bodies of hundreds of psi. Each psi touched another. That psi touched the next and so on, building an interconnected web that centered upon him. Sitting there, he could feel the pleasure of accomplishment. The growing—

  Then the thought had cut off abruptly. Gabriel had become aware of the intrusion and muffled his thoughts.

  Kieran passed this memory on to the three of them, complete and unedited, including the abrupt cut-o
ff.

  The trio simultaneously focused inwards, absorbing the thought.

  “The way he shielded at the end….” Benton murmured, either completing a thought or starting one.

  “He wasn’t happy being seen there,” Alice added.

  Jeremiah focused upon Kieran once more. “This is disturbing.”

  Kieran nodded. “If Gabriel is building an army, how do you explain that room full of unconscious psi?”

  This time they didn’t protest about their own being called psi. They didn’t say anything at all for they had no answer.

  * * * * *

  Hammerside, Detroit-Rocktown Supercity, 2265 A.D.

  Marley pulled the battered kitchen chair over to Gawaine’s desk and straddled it so that she was facing him, her arms resting on the back of the chair. “Hey.”

  Gawaine looked up from the monitor. A flickering glance. Then back to the screen once more. His fingers didn’t stop sliding across the pad for a moment. The split on the corner of his mouth wasn’t nearly as swollen as it had been a few days ago and the scrapes on his elbows were healing nicely.

  “You’ve been sitting at that desk for three days straight,” Marley pointed out.

  “I’m working.”

  “You don’t have any paid work right now.” She knew that because he had been at her side whenever she headed to the agency. Although he had abruptly declined for the last three days. The excuses he had given for not going to the agency with her had been reasonable. The hours she worked at the agency had put him into serious sleep deprivation and he was going to catch up. Plus, he needed to find paid work, something to top up their dwindling reserves.

  Marley couldn’t argue with that last one. The agency was generous in providing absolutely everything they needed while they were there. Food, clothing, anything at all. It was supplied hot, fresh, clean and new, almost as soon as they asked for it. But it hadn’t occurred to anyone that they both lived in a cash-only community. Money was anonymous and untraceable, unlike barter.

  Because Gawaine had used finding work as an excuse to avoid the Agency, Marley knew he didn’t have any. He would have been jubilant, if he had. He would have told her, too. “Gawaine,” she said, once more pulling his attention back to her.

  He looked. Briefly.

  She reached out and grabbed his wrist, halting his swiping. “You’re in the chute, Gawaine. You’re right on the edge of diving into the black hole. You haven’t slept. You haven’t eaten. You’re retreating.”

  When Marley had moved into his apartment a few years ago, she had learned first-hand what it was like to watch someone disappear into their own mind. Gawaine had been used to living on his own. He was smart. Marley knew he was smarter than her and she was nobody’s fool. He was intelligent and he was drawn to high-level thinking. He would retreat from the physical world into his mind, where he would play with pure theory and concepts far beyond normal human reasoning. When that happened, when he slid into the hole, it might be days before he emerged.

  The physical damage to his body imparted by such retreats had horrified her. Marley had found ways to keep Gawaine focused and active in the physical world ever since. He had always cooperated in that respect and she suspected he had agreed to her moving in just for this reason—to pull him out of his mental funks. “You’re starting to dive,” she said gently. “You know that and you know why.”

  Gawaine let his hands fall away from the pad. He sat back in his chair and blew out his breath. His gaze didn’t meet hers. Instead, he looked out the dirty window next to the end of his desk, which was a salvaged door resting on crates. With the light falling on his cheek like that, the faded bruise was clear.

  Marley had patched up his scratches and scrapes in her medical suite at the agency before they had come home, three days ago. He had limped into the surgery, bleeding from the lip. She could almost feel his fury. Silently, she waved him to the examination table and set about cleaning him up and tending the bruises.

  The worst was the one on the back of his hip. None of them was serious and there was no permanent damage, but they had all added up to some sort of physical fight.

  Marley had patched up too many drunks and fools with busted knuckles and fractured fingers and wrists to not recognize what had happened to Gawaine. Someone had ruffled him up. Not a lot, but enough to make his ego stagger.

  She figured it was some man who had taken offence at Gawaine’s sometimes painful social skills, until Gawaine muttered into his folded arms where he was resting his face as she worked on his back. “It was that Mavourneen woman.”

  “What did you do to make a vampire toss you around?”

  His answer was a long time coming. “I guess…the same thing I do that makes humans want to throw me.”

  It wasn’t the first time some Neanderthal had got pissed at him although with Marley’s coaching, Gawaine had got a lot better at recognizing when his usual manner of dealing with the world wasn’t being well received. He wasn’t social inept. Far from it. When he focused and put his mind to it, he could be charming. It was just that most of the time, the world moved too slowly for him. He was already six responses and five minutes ahead of everyone, including Marley more often than not. He wanted everyone else to get there now, instead of waiting out the five minutes of discussion, conversation, or social oil required to get everyone else there. In his impatience to cut to the chase, he sometimes spoke bluntly.

  “It’s been a long while since something like this happened,” Marley pointed out.

  He grunted into his arms. That was his version of agreeing when he was grumpy.

  “So are you upset because a vampire got the better of you, or because it was a girl that dumped you on your ass?” Marley asked.

  He sat up and picked up his shirt. “You about done for the day?”

  And that had been nearly the last time he had spoken. They had been delivered home by one of Rhydder’s lieutenants and Gawaine had headed straight for his desk. Apart from biological breaks, which had diminished as the hours ticked on, he had not moved from his chair.

  Marley watched him now as he stared out his window and wondered what else she could say. She wasn’t hitting the right buttons yet.

  But Gawaine surprised her by turning to face her squarely. He looked her in the eye for a second, before his gaze skittered away. Then back again, more firmly. “She was smart,” he said flatly.

  Marley stayed silent, not understanding.

  “She knew exactly what I was talking about. I wasn’t talking over her head at all. But she got pissed anyway, because I was touching her stuff.”

  “Mavourneen Beraht is talented, Gawaine. She’s created environments for clients around the world and off world, too. No one can match her for her creativity.” She had done a little research on Mavourneen Beraht since the vampire had given Gawaine his fat lip. “You didn’t touch her stuff. You were threatening to change her work. Any really talented artist would get upset about that.”

  Gawaine shook his head. “She understood me,” he insisted. “I wasn’t trying to change the end result, just the way she was getting there….” He trailed off, thinking about it. “She wasn’t afraid I’d change it….” he said slowly. “She just didn’t like being wrong.” Astonishingly, he smiled. “She didn’t think anyone would be able to figure out how she had programmed everything. I surprised her and I told her she was wrong in the same breath.”

  “And that makes you happy?” Marley asked cautiously.

  He stood up. “It wasn’t me being a social moron at all. Well, it was. I was too focused on trying to show her that it was dangerous. My mistake. But it wasn’t just me.” He grinned. “She threw a tantrum because she didn’t like that I had spotted her mistake.”

  Marley frowned, even as she was smiling. She couldn’t help smiling, because it was so good to see Gawaine back in the physical world once more. “So you aren’t upset that a girl tossed you around?”

  He shook his head. “She’s a vampire.
She could probably drop kick me into orbit if she put her mind to it. I got off light.” He stepped around his desk and headed for the cold cupboard. “She’s the first vampire I’ve met who acts just like a human. The others are all too ancient or something—their reactions get warped and faded after a while. Hers are still fresh and normal.” He opened the cupboard. “I’m starving,” he said, sounding surprised.

  Marley smothered her laugh.

  “And she’s smart, too…”Gawaine murmured to himself as he pushed items around inside the cupboard.

  Someone rapped on the apartment door and he lifted his head up to look at it.

  “I’ll get it,” Marley told him and put the chair back under the table, then answered the door.

  A woman stood on the other side. She was gaunt, dark-haired and short, with great big brown eyes that had dark patches beneath. She was also hugely pregnant. Her swollen belly looked distended. Marley didn’t know her, but that was all she had time to think.

  The woman stepped closer. “Please…help me.” She staggered and instinctively Marley lifted up her arms and caught her before she fell.

  Despite her wasted frame, she was heavy. A full term baby and all the fluids and material that surrounded it were adding weight and throwing her balance off.

  “Gawaine, help,” Marley called.

  Gawaine strode to the door and scooped the woman up in his arms. “Where do you want her?”

  Marley saw the arc of her belly move and laid her hand against it. Her heart squeezed. “My bedroom,” she told Gawaine. “She’s in labor.”

  “Arthur on a unicorn….” He moved into the tiny second room Marley called her bedroom. There was just room for a mattress and a bedside table, but it had a door that shut.

  Gawaine laid the woman on the mattress and straightened. “Who is she?”

  “I have no idea,” Marley said. “Please, would you get my medical bag?”

  The woman was breathing raggedly through her contraction. Marley doubted she had heard either of them. But when Gawaine left the room, she opened her eyes and Marley was once more bathed in the woman’s calm, brown-eyed gaze. “You helped Pritti,” she whispered.