Strykers

by K. M. Ruiz

  Kerr was the Strykers Syndicate’s only Class II telepath, with mental shields that never stayed up. Kerr should have been able to make his own, but even the best geneticists hadn’t been able to categorize all the quirks that showed up in the DNA and RNA of psions on the human accelerated regions of the human genome. His shields were unstable and his telepathy put him at risk of losing his mind in a maelstrom of the world’s thoughts. Riding along behind someone else’s shields was a stopgap procedure. It worked for now, but nobody back at headquarters was sure how many years he had left until it stopped.

  Jason was Kerr’s patch, his temporary fix, a Class V telekinetic that could teleport, making him a dual psion with average reach and strength. He was also the only Stryker in their entire ranks—their entire history—with intact natal shields that had never fallen. Psychically bonded at a young age by a psi surgeon telepath, Jason’s shields were Kerr’s only saving grace when Kerr’s own shields would fail him. The two weren’t lovers, despite the bond. They weren’t compatible that way. They considered each other family, and while Jason preferred men, Kerr didn’t like anyone.

  “Threnody,” Jason said with a sharp smile, hazel eyes cool in their assessment of her, but warmer when they focused on her partner. “Quinton. Never thought we’d ever get the pleasure of working with you two.”

  “Apparently you’re not doing as good a job as you should be and they sent us to sort you out,” Quinton replied with a steady look. “It’s amazing you haven’t been terminated after so many failures.”

  Jason only shrugged as if he’d heard that accusation many times before. Threnody resisted the urge to touch the back of her neck where all psions got a neurotracker grafted to their cranial nerves and brain stem the moment they were brought to the Strykers Syndicate. Government control wasn’t just lip service, and removing that collar was a death sentence.

  “The Strykers need me,” Kerr said quietly. “Which means they need Jason. The fact that you two, their favorites, have fallen this far means that they don’t need you. Not as badly. Maybe you should think about that.”

  Quinton looked as if he wanted to argue, but Threnody caught his eye and shook her head. “We’re all on the same side. We have a job to do and a target to find. If we fail this time, then we’ll all be terminated,” she reminded them. “Let’s just get where we need to be.”

  Jason stepped away to hail a taxi, the car pulling away from a long line of other service vehicles as he fed credit chips into the pay meter. Down here, credit chips were hacked to be untraceable, and they were all anyone used to purchase things, from transportation to pleasure to murder.

  They climbed into the taxi and got settled, bags at their feet and silence among them. Jason told the driver where to go in Spanish. It took an hour to get to their destination, driving down damaged streets in a car that had long ago ruined its shock system. They felt every hole the patched tires rode over in the streets that led to an old expressway, the main artery into the wreckage that existed in the shadows of the environmentally sealed city towers that made up Los Angeles. It was the only part of the city that the American military had managed to save during the Border Wars.

  Cars outnumbered the air shuttles that cast quick shadows from above. Threnody stared at the city towers, built high with neon bright adverts scrolling down their sides, until she couldn’t see them anymore as they drove into the murky depths of the Slums of the Angels.

  Like most of the world, the West Coast of America had once been a thriving, living place. That was before the Border Wars. That was before the deadly radiation and acid storms that filtered over all the continents, before the earthquake of 2167 that devastated the surviving population of the three coastal western states of America. The only pocket of civilization in the West, settled between large swaths of deadzones, to survive the 2167 quake was Los Angeles, but it lost half a dozen city towers when the land shook itself to pieces. The majority of the ruins were never dealt with, couldn’t be dealt with. They simply became something different.

  What replaced the infamy of Los Angeles and the tech-driven north were South American drug cartels running through the Latin Corridor and Mexico, eager to cater to those who didn’t care if their addictions damaged their DNA. The Slums of the Angels became a hole in the world that people with no identities fell into, where a person could buy and sell anything, but the only way out was by death or sheer, mind-boggling luck.

  Or power.

  Something that the four Strykers had plenty of.

  The taxi driver dropped them off a good fifteen kilometers into the Slums, at a corner braced by a building written over with warring gang signs. He seemed glad to leave them behind.

  Where are we? Threnody asked as they stood on the crumbling sidewalk.

  We need a cover to get us deeper into the Slums, Kerr replied. Jason and I had orders to build one. This is it what we were able to buy.

  A cartel soldier came out of the building and into the grimy sunlight. He spat between them, military-grade gun held steady in his hands as three more soldiers came out behind him, fanning out on the sidewalk. Their presence had the few people scattered around the street ducking out of sight.

  “Ident,” he snapped.

  Jason spread his hands and offered up a slick smile. “Carlos, you know it’s us. We paid good money to get clearance from you.”

  “Ident. You don’t get no special treatment just because you got credit.”

  Jason shrugged and stepped forward, body loose and expression bored as a soldier came close enough to scan his eyes. The portable bioscanner fit neatly in the soldier’s hand. The infrared light protruding from the tip scanned the identity of the iris peels Jason had been wearing since he and Kerr were assigned this mission weeks ago.

  “Clear,” the man said in heavily accented English as he stepped back.

  “You got our way in?” Jason demanded.

  “I got it.” Carlos’s gaze swept over the group, skipping over the pair he knew, lingering a little on Quinton, before finally settling on Threnody. His mouth curved into a leer. “She’s new. La gringa looking for some fun?”

  They have orders to kill us, Kerr said through the psi link.

  Guess we didn’t pay up to scale, Jason said.

  Threnody smiled invitingly at the soldier. “Come a little closer and find out.”

  The soldier’s buddies whistled sharply at him as Carlos approached her. Rubbing at his chin, Carlos let his gaze drift up and down her body in an assessing manner, mouth curling up in a hard smile when it became apparent that none of the men with her were going to interfere.

  “You’d make more money lying on your back than playing at being a man,” Carlos said with another leer as he reached out and squeezed her left breast hard.

  “Whores don’t keep the money they make down here,” Threnody said coolly as she grabbed his wrist and tapped into the bioelectricity that the human body ran on.

  Threnody’s own nerves sparked as electricity exploded out of her and into him, their bare skin the bridge she needed to work with. Her power coursed through the soldier’s body faster than his brain could process and he was dead before he hit the ground; skin blackened, burned and cracked.

  Before any of the other three humans could react, Kerr was in their minds and burning them out. A telepathic strike that hard, backed by his phenomenal Class II strength, had them dead in seconds. Humans didn’t have the genetic capability to defend against what a psion could do. They weren’t built that way. Their minds winked out on the mental grid, that vast psychic plane full of a world’s thoughts that all ’path-oriented psions functioned on. Tied into Kerr’s mind through the psi link, Threnody could feel through his power the holes those deaths left behind on the mental grid.

  “Get our clearance,” Threnody ordered as she peeled the dead man’s charred skin off her bare fingers.

  Quinton rifled through the pockets of the dead for the passes they had paid for. Kerr’s telepathy could wipe a person�
��s mind clean of their presence, but he couldn’t touch machines, and all checkpoints down in the Slums had extensive security. Quinton found what they needed on the second body, pulling out four thin, transparent pass cards.

  “Blanks,” he said. “We need someone to program them.”

  Jason nodded. “Give them to me.”

  Quinton tossed the pass cards to Jason, who caught them with his telekinesis. Jason dug out a slim datapad from his pocket and jacked the first pass card into the portable computer. He was one of the best hackers in their ranks, one of the reasons why he and Kerr hadn’t been terminated yet. The faint gleam in Jason’s eyes told Threnody his implanted inspecs were running through the data, connected to it by a wire plugged into the neuroport on his left wrist, as he hacked his way through the pass key’s minimal defenses.

  Threnody looked at Kerr. “Are we clear?”

  The telepath cocked his head to the side, eyes focused on some distant place. “Building is empty inside. Got human peripherals getting curious. I’ll take care of them.”

  “Do it.”

  She bent down, snagged the collar of the nearest dead soldier, and hauled the body into the dirty office. Kerr followed her lead, pulling one dead man by the arm while Quinton dealt with the last two.

  Inside, against the far wall, was a terminal with a single wide vidscreen displaying dozens of security feeds. Threnody glanced at the images as she approached the control console and took a seat in the abandoned chair. She was a brilliant tactician, but a piss-poor hacker. Her body couldn’t take most of the biomodifications that a quarter of the remaining population had grafted to their nervous system. All the delicate biowiring that was required to directly uplink with various computer systems wasn’t compatible with her body. That didn’t mean she was useless.

  “Nice of them to leave it accessible,” Threnody said as she dragged her fingers over the controls and started pulling up command windows. “Some of it, at least.”

  Quinton peered over her shoulder. “You going to fry it?”

  “Soon as Jason wipes us from the system.”

  It took her half a minute to find the home feed that showcased the corner right outside the office. She pulled up the log for the past hour, getting all the basic information ready for Jason to parse and do what he did best, outside of flinging things around with his mind. Three minutes later he was there, taking over her spot. He jacked into the system through two neuroports and hacked into the feed, hiding the murders they had committed by wiping the system clean.

  “Not even going to bother with a loop. Their server farm is on-site, so the damage needs to go deep, Threnody,” Jason said as he pried the wires out of his arms when he finished. “It’s all yours.”

  He shoved the chair back and got out of the way. Threnody leaned over and pressed a hand to the console of the terminal. She took a deep breath, steadied herself for the burn, and pushed her power into the electric heart of the system before her. Not the same as burning it through a human body, but electricity was electricity, and enough of a surge could kill anything, especially a machine.

  The system crashed. Circuits melted to slag and the vidscreen went dark. Threnody pulled her hand away and clenched her fingers down tight against the heat that tingled across her palm.

  “Are you feeling that?” Quinton asked sharply.

  “Some.” She couldn’t lie to her partner when it might cost them later on.

  “I told you they should have given you more time. If we had argued, Jael would have allowed it.”

  “And I told you we had our orders.” She looked pointedly at Kerr. “What’s our destination?”

  Kerr’s eyes were closed where he stood in the doorway, hands pressed against the frame, head bowed. Sweat dripped down the skin of his face, falling off the point of his chin. “South. Target’s broadcasting twenty klicks away. So far I’m not sensing any Warhounds in the field.”

  “For once,” Jason muttered. “Even if this is their territory.”

  Threnody ignored him. “We’ll use that SUV around the corner to get there. The soldiers won’t miss it. Or their uniforms.”

  Jason nodded at the bags he and Kerr had been carrying. “We’ve got supplies in there if we need them.”

  “Good.”

  They stripped the dead for clothes to create the illusion of cartel coloring over the standard black that should have meant neutral, except no one was neutral in the Slums.

  Kerr pulled on a flak jacket, buckling it tight over his chest as he glanced at Threnody. “No Stryker has ever discovered the identity of the target since it showed up on the grid two years ago. Jason and I, we’ve been tracking it off and on for the past few months and have never gotten close.”

  “I know,” Threnody said as she added extra ammo to her belt pouch for the gun she carried on her hip.

  “What are your exact orders?”

  “We can’t have a high-Classed psion running around unchecked. The government hates when we’re not leashed or dead. We’ve been ordered to find out who it is and bring them in. If retrieval is impossible, we’ve been ordered to terminate the target.”

  She didn’t bother with the rest of the order, about what would happen if she failed. Everyone in the Strykers Syndicate knew about their demotion, this sanctioned death sentence. Threnody stared at Kerr, daring him to say something, anything, in the face of her situation.

  Those strange teal eyes of his searched her face for a few seconds before he said, “You belong to one of the best teams we’ve got this generation. Why are they wasting your life like this?”

  “It’s not your business,” Quinton said.

  Threnody thought otherwise. She didn’t experience a traumatic flashback to their last mission. The psi surgeon in charge of putting their minds back together over and over was better than that, but the memory of it was difficult to ignore.

  “There was a school,” she said, voice steady, even if her thoughts weren’t. “An illegal one, run by unregistered humans. There were children. I wouldn’t—”

  Her nervous system remembered that nightmare better than her head. She could still feel that Warhound’s hand around her throat, his electric power cutting past her defenses and into her body. It was pure damn luck that Quinton had reached her when he did to save her.

  “Everyone deserves a chance.” Threnody swallowed tightly. “Even those without identities.”

  The Border Wars made this world 250 years ago, and they all survived in the long shadow of that nuclear aftermath. Education was the privilege of the registered elite, not meant for the gene-damaged masses. Population was regulated because there were only so many resources to go around, but laws would always be broken.

  Threnody thought about those unregistered children and the handful born with psion potential. She should have killed them to prevent the Warhounds from keeping them, but she was getting old for a psion. She could afford to question their superiors when others would simply obey. She’d lived long enough that the punishment didn’t sting as much as it might have if she had more years left to her. Strykers were taught to value human life, or at least the lives of those who belonged to the Registry. The government didn’t care about unregistered humans, but Strykers did. She did.

  Threnody’s body still twitched, even now, from that last remembered electric shock before the Warhounds had disappeared with the children in a teleport.

  Kerr pushed the memories aside for her.

  They’re alive, Kerr said. If you can’t think about the good somewhere in that, then think about the mission.

  It was, after all, what they lived for.

  [TWO]

  JULY 2379

  SLUMS OF THE ANGELS, USA

  The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels had seen many decades come and go since the ground it stood on was broken and blessed. It survived the upheaval of land and society when so many other structures had not. Perhaps by the grace of God, or so the priests still taught in thinned-out Sunday schools.


  While it still stood in all its grimy, gang-marked glory, with its alabaster windows long covered in mold and the bronze on the door stripped and pitted, it had not seen the light of day for over one hundred years. The adobe-colored walls had turned gray over time, marked in layers of ink and grainy pollution that stained the exterior. Generations of gangs had scrawled their call signs on the skeleton of the place even before the city towers were erected over that lonely piece of God’s land.

  A tiny amount of dim sunlight filtered down through the cracks of metal and the smog-filled air, covering the street just meters beyond the dry expanse of bare earth that once held grass and now only held vagrants. The entrance to the cathedral was located on the south side of the building, overshadowed by a crumbling cement cross that jutted out from the cathedral’s wall. The light inside that fifty-foot effigy had burned out before the turn of the century. It had never been relit. Electricity down on the ground was expensive, even back then, and even more so now.

  Bishop Michael Santos had spent nearly his entire life in the Slums of the Angels. The only time he had ever left it was when he completed his seminary studies at the Vatican’s fortress in the Swiss Alps and earned the right to wear the collar of a priest. The world was in need of men and women who gave their time and effort toward bettering the lives of others. In this secular, technology-filled society driven by desperation and greed, faith burned only in the background, in the cracks, with the forgotten. It wasn’t easy living life with faith, but he did it, one breath at a time.

  Bishop Santos stared up at the worn and cracked image of Christ on the cross that hung on the wall of the chancel and smiled. “Otro día, mi Señor.”

  No one was in the cathedral except for himself and a handful of Sisters. Mass was only offered on Sundays, confession had to be scheduled in advance, and he was tired of presiding over funerals. Bishop Santos sighed, running a hand through thinning gray hair. He’d been offered other posts over the years, because the pope believed in furthering the education of the faithful, but Bishop Santos didn’t believe in neon-colored crosses and biosculpted personalities that preached on vidscreens. Most days of the week he preferred his cracked and dying cathedral to the top of the city towers. But some days he wanted more. Some days he sinned.