by K. M. Ruiz
She couldn’t ever recall a point in her life where Kristen didn’t need the death of another person to keep her mind from falling apart. Maybe it had something to do with all the genetic altering Nathan had done to each of his children, trying to make them into something that none of them were. Kristen hadn’t been born this way, mentally unbalanced and always looking for a little bit of sanity. She had Nathan to thank for her predicament, for her need to model her shields and her thought processes on another person’s mind in order to try to stabilize her own. It never stuck long.
When she managed some semblance of sanity, the empath knew exactly what she was doing. Outside of those moments, it was anyone’s guess what was going on in Kristen’s mind.
Samantha eyed the deep scratches on Kristen’s face, which were covered with the distinctive shine of a quick-heal patch. Kristen tore herself up just as often as she tore up everyone else. She didn’t register the pain for what it was; her empathy didn’t let her. Pain was both physical and mental, and while Kristen understood that her body and mind were connected, that understanding got lost in the ravages of her power. She could feel nothing, produce no emotion of her own except a twisted, maniacal glee when given someone to kill. The emotions of other people, however, were easy enough for her to tamper with. There was something to be said for instinct, after all.
“Hungry?” Samantha asked, staying exactly where she was.
The brightness in her sister’s eyes matched the spike on the mental grid. Kristen pushed herself up on surprisingly steady feet and approached Samantha with grasping hands and a needy mind. Samantha, still reeling from Nathan’s punishment, didn’t bother to be gentle when she sent a driving telepathic spike straight into Kristen’s mind. The empath grunted, falling to her knees, but she was still smiling as a faint trickle of blood slid out of her nose. She licked it off her lips.
“You taste good,” Kristen slurred.
Samantha turned on her heels and left. “We’ve got a briefing to attend. Keep your mind to yourself, Kristen. Or I’ll stick you back in that cell of yours.”
The soft laughter that followed Samantha down the hall was cheerful. The gaping, raw need for the kill tainting the mental grid was too dangerous to ignore, and Samantha kept her shields up high and tight as Kristen closed the distance between them.
[SEVEN]
JULY 2379
TORONTO, CANADA
“You’re sure?” Ciari said, staring at the face on the vidscreen. The connection wasn’t the best coming out of the Slums, but it had still been picked up by a communications officer. “You didn’t find anything?”
“Not a single body,” the Stryker in the field said, her voice thick with a Portuguese accent. “Emilio and I searched a wide area once we teleported in from Brasília. The cathedral is a mess, but we found no remains.”
“Thank you, Imenja. I appreciate your efforts.”
“We can extend the search if that’s what you want. Move into a different cartel area. I don’t know if it will make a difference, though. We’ve spent twenty-four hours here already.”
“That won’t be necessary. Return to your posts in Brazil.”
“Sir.”
The connection was cut, leaving silence behind in Ciari’s office. She hesitated a long moment before tapping out a request for an uplink. It took ten minutes for it to go through, for her code to be screened by two separate communications officers in two cities, before Erik’s face appeared before her on the vidscreen.
“Ciari,” Erik said. “I’m heading into session within the hour. You have five minutes.”
“Preliminary reports from the team in the field confirm that the four Strykers we sent into the Slums are missing, sir.”
“Can you confirm that they’re dead?” Erik asked, gaze cool.
“Negative. We’ve found no bodies.”
“Then we’re going to presume they’re somehow still alive and MIA.”
“Did you want to initiate a hunt or kill order?”
“You know the law as well as I do. There are enough rogue psions in the world as it is. We can’t afford to add more to the mess we’re still fighting.”
“That’s a Class II telepath you want to terminate, sir. I realize you don’t much care about the rest of them, but—”
“That’s a dysfunctional Class II telepath I’m telling you to terminate,” Erik interrupted sharply. “There’s a difference between a psion that is worth something to me and one that hasn’t proven useful in all the years we’ve let him live.”
“Permission to speak freely, sir.”
“If you’re going to try arguing for their lives, then no. Terminate them.”
The screen went blank, Erik having cut the connection on his end. Ciari rubbed a hand over her face, mouth twisting slightly before the expression smoothed away. She hated this part of her job.
Getting to her feet, Ciari left her office for the lift beyond her doors, taking it down to the busy command level. It was a maze of hallways, offices, and command rooms, full of humans and Strykers alike monitoring Strykers out in the field on contract and those within their headquarters. All Strykers showed up on the government’s security grid through bioscans from the signal that their implanted neurotrackers transmitted, a precaution that was law. If they dropped off the grid, they were either dead or attempting an escape, the latter of which resulted in the former.
There was no way out of the Strykers Syndicate except by death. Everyone knew that.
Ciari made her way silently to a room where a Stryker and a human were still struggling to locate four missing Strykers and having no luck. When she entered, the Stryker stood as a sign of respect. The human remained seated. Ciari didn’t take it as an insult.
“Contact Jael,” Ciari said. “Tell her to report here for a termination.”
The Stryker bit back whatever protest he wanted to voice and did as Ciari ordered. He was a telepath, as was Jael, so in seconds Ciari felt the other woman’s mind pressing against her mental shields.
You can’t be serious, Jael protested. That’s one of our strongest teams and our strongest telepath you want to terminate.
It’s the order Erik gave. I need you as a witness and to sign off on their deaths.
For all that the World Court owned the Strykers and had control of their lives, their capacity for justice paled in the face of their cruelty. That wasn’t a popular opinion, but most people weren’t psions, beholden to a tangle of delicate, devastating bioware in the back of their head capable of killing them. Rarely did the World Court terminate Strykers themselves. They gave the order to do so.
The OIC initiated the punishment at the World Court’s command in situations like this. The act was a punishment in and of itself. A reminder of who was really in control.
Jael arrived some minutes later, her white scrubs spattered here and there with blood. She’d been doing rounds when Ciari had summoned her. Ciari knew the other woman would prefer to be there and not here, but they both knew how to do their job, as distasteful as it was sometimes.
“Ciari,” Jael said, her voice flatly neutral.
“Dismissed,” Ciari said to the pair of handlers. The Stryker and the human left in silence. Ciari knew word of this termination would spread through the ranks within the hour.
Hate, when projected by several hundred people directly at her, always gave Ciari a migraine, despite her shields.
The door slid shut, leaving her and Jael alone in their personal hell. Jael stepped forward, her eyes flickering over the data on the hologrid before them, a map of what was left of the world prominently displayed.
“I hate this part,” Jael said through clenched teeth.
“Me, too,” Ciari said quietly before raising her voice. “Computer, mission override. Authorization code Sigma Two Seven One Zeta. Request termination sequence.”
“Voice identification confirmed. Ciari Treiva, Officer in Charge,” the computer’s voice announced in a gratingly pleasant tone so at odds
with what they were doing. “Initiating termination sequence.”
Jael let out an explosive sigh. “Chief Medical Officer Jael Dawson present as witness.”
“Medical authority present, witness acknowledged,” the computer responded. “Request Stryker files.”
“Pull entire files of the following Strykers,” Ciari said, her voice curiously calm. “Threnody Corwin, Quinton Martinez, Kerr MacDougal, and Jason Garret.”
“Acknowledged. Files found.”
Four dossiers opened, laid atop the world map on the hologrid. Four faces frozen in holopics stared out at them. Four lives were written out in reports of strengths and weaknesses, missions accomplished and missions failed. Numbers, words, that didn’t fully encompass the lives Ciari was being forced to cut short. They never did.
“Location of targets?” Ciari asked.
“Location unknown.”
Ciari’s gaze never wavered as she pressed her hand down on the biometric scanner. The computer read her print in an instant. She formed the word reluctantly. “Terminate.”
Their network was fully integrated into the government’s security grid that spanned the world, enabling them to track Strykers anywhere on earth. With these four Strykers, Ciari was hoping it wouldn’t work, but recklessly hidden or not, neurotrackers would always respond to their programming, even if the person was already dead.
Four sharp spikes on the bioscanners that monitored baseline readings erupted somewhere on the east coast of Russia. The computer magnified the area five times, satellite feed finally pinpointing an area in Magadan, Magadan Oblast, as the final resting place of someone. They just weren’t Strykers.
The baselines terminated by those neurotrackers were human.
Jael took a step forward, surprise filtering through her voice. “Ciari?”
“Acknowledge the results, Jael,” Ciari said, never taking her eyes away from the hologrid.
Jael swallowed tightly before saying, “It is my assessment as the Strykers Syndicate’s CMO that the four baselines on record do not match the ones which were terminated.”
“Confirmed,” the computer said, recording Jael’s report for the record.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” Jael said.
Ciari tilted her head to the side. “No, it doesn’t.”
They stared at each other, both of them reading between the lines of what they were saying and what was showing up on the grid.
“Computer, save files and shut down,” Ciari said.
It took less than a minute for the computer to obey Ciari’s command. Only when the terminal went dark did Ciari turn to look at Jael, easily reading the uncertainty in Jael’s troubled expression.
“Contact Keiko,” Ciari said. “Tell her to report to my office in twenty minutes.”
Ciari left Jael behind and returned to her office with determined strides, where she followed protocol and contacted Erik once again. She sent the request red-lined as priority, and he answered more quickly than she thought he would.
“We have a problem, sir,” Ciari said when the connection was made.
“It hasn’t even been half an hour, Ciari. It takes less than a minute to fry a psion’s brain. What could possibly be the problem?” Erik said.
“The neurotrackers were activated. The kill results are inconclusive. They spiked as human on the grid.”
Erik stared at her. “That’s impossible. A psion’s baseline is nowhere close to a human’s.”
“Those are the results, sir.”
“I want the results changed. Immediately.”
“Of course, sir.”
It was just like him to want the impossible.
The connection cut off and Ciari leaned back against her chair. She let out a long sigh, thinking about everything that had gone wrong just now and what had gone right.
Keiko walked into her office ten minutes later, expression neutral, even if her tone of voice wasn’t. “Jael told me what happened. Your orders?”
“I’m sending you to Russia. The World Court wants answers.”
“I’ll see what I can find.”
PART THREE
NEGOTIATION
SESSION DATE: 2128.06.02
LOCATION: Institute of Psionics Research
CLEARANCE ID: Dr. Amy Bennett
SUBJECT: 2581
FILE NUMBER: 514
A nurse holds her arm gently, carefully extracting yet another vial’s worth of blood as the doctor looks on. When the nurse is finished, she leaves with what she came for, and it is only the two of them again. Aisling carefully touches the small bandage that covers the hole in her skin.
“You won’t find what you’re looking for,” Aisling says, glancing up at the doctor. “You think you can stop the wars by trying to make me better, but you can’t.”
“I think you need to share with us exactly what you know,” the older woman says as she taps her fingers against the table in a steady rhythm. “It’s been months, Aisling. The bombs are still dropping.”
“They’ve been dropping for years.”
“You can stop it.”
“It doesn’t stop here.” Aisling kicks her feet and sighs, sulking. “You’re like her, you know that? Threnody thinks I know everything, too.”
“Again with this Threnody,” the doctor says in exasperation. “You’ve mentioned her exactly twenty-three separate times now.”
“She’s my favorite imaginary friend.”
“Aisling,” the doctor says as she crouches down beside the girl’s chair. “You know what you see isn’t imaginary.”
“I know,” Aisling whispers, sounding scared as she curiously tilts her head to the side, wires brushing her face. “I almost wish it was, though. I just don’t want to worry you.”
[EIGHT]
AUGUST 2379
LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM
Jason came awake to a roaring, screaming pain in his head that made it impossible to think. For once, the pain wasn’t caused by his power, just his actual skull, and that was enough to drive the unconsciousness away.
Blinking slowly down at the dirty gray floor stained liberally with blood, Jason realized that he could see clearly in all the human visual spectrum, along with the overlay of data in his eyes. His inspecs were back online, which was impossible without surgery, and this sure as hell wasn’t the medical level back at headquarters.
He tried to move and became immediately aware that was impossible. The power clamped down on him was familiar, a telekinetic strength that he recognized and couldn’t break. Bent forward, spine arched, Jason could sense someone behind him, even if he couldn’t see the person. He couldn’t feel a damn thing at the back of his skull, but the rest of his head was feeding him pain. He could feel the blood that was trickling down his back. He could smell it, too.
“Interesting dilemma, you know,” that vaguely familiar tenor said through the hum of a sterility field, and thank fuck for that, because this place didn’t look clean at all. “Your natal shields never fell. You’re going to feel this more than the rest of your team since I can’t get very far into your mind to block the pain. First time that’s ever happened.”
A pair of scuffed, all-terrain black boots stepped into his sight, but even when he rolled his eyes upward, Jason couldn’t see the person’s face. Not that he needed to. Even doped up on drugs, it was difficult to forget the shock he had felt when they’d learned that a Serca was a high-Classed psion. Difficult to forget those eyes. Made him wonder about the rest of that famous family and if Lucas was merely an anomaly or normal for the Sercas.
“What have you done with them?” Jason managed to get out through clenched teeth. He didn’t bother to correct Lucas’s assumption that the four of them were a team. At the moment, he really only cared about Kerr, but he could worry about Threnody and Quinton. Especially Quinton. He kind of liked the way the other man looked.
Lucas’s tone was amused. “They’re recovering, even if everyone’s pissed that they can’t use their pow
ers. I have them blocked. The doctor’s almost finished with you.”
“What?”
More blood trickled down his back and Jason squeezed his eyes shut. He didn’t know what was going on behind him, not until something clattered on the floor an indeterminable amount of time later. He opened his eyes and stared at the tiny, oval-shaped device with six short spikes and six long filaments of bioware wet with his blood that had been tossed near his feet.
Jason didn’t need to ask what it was. He knew, just as every Stryker knew, about the neurotracker one was implanted with upon joining the Stryker ranks. He also knew that removing it should have instantly killed him. Any tampering sent out an immediate signal to the government as a red alert. Standard operating procedure was to terminate. At the very least, the Strykers would know—should know—that he wasn’t wearing it anymore. Which meant—
Jason laughed, the sound desperate. “I thought you said you didn’t want to kill us, because you just did.”
The neurotracker lifted off the floor and was drawn upward by invisible telekinetic power, settling into Lucas’s hand. He crouched down in front of Jason, focusing on him. No apologies were to be found in his gaze.
“Its programming is active. The signal, while blocked right now, still functions. When the time comes, it will send through the government’s security grid, even if it’s no longer in your head,” Lucas said. “They’ll be implanted into some desperate bond worker attached to the skin trade. This procedure is one that my side has done before.”
Jason swallowed drily. “And when the government flips the switch, your chosen little carriers will be dead instead. Do they know that?”
“Of course not. They just think they were paid for a body transfer over international lines. You should really be happy about being taken off your leash, Jason. Most of you Strykers are when we pull you off the field before you’re terminated.”
Jason squinted up at him. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Nothing that matters at the moment, since I’m no longer a Warhound. I haven’t been for many years.”