Strykers

by K. M. Ruiz

  “That’s crazy,” Jason said. “A colony on Mars? Our ancestors practically destroyed Earth over Mars?”

  “Mars was in the process of being terraformed. The colony there was half a generation old already, according to the reports I’ve been able to find, and it was growing. They already had an energy source from giant solar panels in geosynchronous orbit around the planet and at two Lagrangian points between the sun and Mars. They were working on getting a viable atmosphere when the Border Wars happened. Communication died after that. So did supply runs by the ship that’s still cold-docked on the other side of the moon.”

  “A ship,” Quinton echoed.

  “A colony ship, to be precise. The government calls it the Ark.” Lucas glanced up at the night sky, which could just be seen past the tops of the buildings that surrounded them. “Bloody thing still has a functioning system, even after all these years. The government got it completely back online about twenty-five years ago. That was the mission of the World Court’s first manned space launch.”

  “We lost the capability for space flight after the Border Wars. It killed off most of the population and nearly all the scientists and engineers,” Threnody said. “The closest vehicle we’ve got to a space-faring one are atmospheric shuttles, and they’ve got limits. They’re still earthbound and only registered humans have the right to use them.”

  Lucas cocked his head to the side as he stared at her. “Humans hate limits and the government hates the limits of this planet even more. The government never forgot what the Border Wars were fought over. The government never forgot about Mars and the colony there. Neither did my family. Why do you think the Serca Syndicate pushed for the Fifth Generation Act and the Registry? Not everyone can leave Earth for Mars, and not everyone will. The government is going to make sure of that. They’re going to leave behind everyone who’s not on the Registry, and I’ve got it on good authority that not everyone in the Registry is going to make it into space either.”

  The four Strykers were silent in the face of that confession, staring at Lucas and each other as they struggled to swallow a history that made too much sense for it not to be the truth.

  “The government thinks Mars is the answer, a new beginning for the human race. Just the human race,” Lucas said. “Psions aren’t human, according to their laws. You Strykers are all going to be dead come the final launch date. Termination is scheduled for the week the space shuttles launch, and Ciari knows it. There’s nothing she can do about it.”

  “They wouldn’t kill all of us,” Jason protested. “They need us.”

  Lucas gave him a pitying look. “The World Court isn’t going to allow psions on Mars, which is ironic, considering the Serca Syndicate has had berths reserved since before the Fifth Generation Act was passed. And as you all know now, even if the government doesn’t, the Warhounds belong to the Serca Syndicate.”

  Lucas’s words tumbled through Threnody’s mind as she struggled to make sense of what he was telling them. “Does Ciari know about you Sercas?” she asked.

  “Every OIC does.”

  The betrayal was like a sucker punch to the gut. Threnody stared at Lucas, a bleakness in her eyes that hadn’t been there seconds ago. “Then why doesn’t she report what she knows to the World Court?”

  “I would think you’d be happy that your former masters are going to get a rather bloody comeuppance.”

  “You’re going to kill them.” Threnody clenched her hands into fists. “Everyone who gets on those space shuttles—if there even are space shuttles—your family and your Warhounds are going to kill them.”

  “Oh, there are space shuttles. Platforms of them above the wastewater in the Paris Basin. All those explosions in that area over the years? It hasn’t been leftover unstable nukes going off like the government warns in the press. It’s not space debris falling from the junk orbiting Earth. And, no, my family doesn’t want to kill the humans. My family wants to rule them in the same fashion that the government has owned you Strykers.”

  “Is that supposed to make us happy?” Quinton asked. “Some half-assed attempt at revenge?”

  Lucas leaned forward, staring at the Strykers over the rims of his dark glasses. “It’s misguided, not revenge. The Border Wars created psions out of the mutated population left behind. All the humans in the Registry are clean of mutation and disease. No mutation means no psions, not the higher Classes at least. We can breed, but we breed low on the scale. Every psion a Class IV and higher has come straight from the unregistered human population. We go to Mars, we psions die as a people.”

  “Good riddance,” Threnody said around numb lips. “It’ll just be you Warhounds.”

  “You’re forgetting the fact that you Strykers will be dead. We fucked up this planet, we’ve got an obligation to fix it if we want to own it. It’s difficult, but not entirely impossible.” Lucas pushed aside his empty bowl and half-finished beer. “The means of doing so is standing right there.”

  He was pointing at Jason as he spoke, focus sharp and unwavering. Jason just shook his head in denial. “You’re crazy. Yeah, maybe parts of what you’ve said make sense, but we still don’t know who fed you this information, and I don’t know what you want with us. There are other Class V telekinetics out there, not just me.”

  “When I break your shields, you won’t be a Class V,” Lucas told him. “You’re going to be a Class I if you’re lucky, more likely a Class 0.”

  “Jason isn’t a precog,” Kerr said, standing a little straighter and putting himself between Lucas and his bonded partner. “Precogs are the only ones who get labeled a Class 0, and there hasn’t been one on either your side or ours for over a hundred years. They’re the rarities, not telekinetics.”

  “Microtelekinetic,” Lucas corrected. “Power enough to work on the atomic level. And you’re right. There haven’t been all that many precogs because the use of their power burns out their brains after only a few years of living. I’m offering you a guaranteed way out of hell, it just comes with a price. Question is, are you willing to pay it this time in order to save everyone and not just the registered elite?”

  Threnody opened her mouth to answer him when she felt the hard edge of a gun barrel press against her spine. “Running away, dog?” a man’s voice growled. She glanced over her shoulder and caught a glimpse of the quad that had passed them earlier, their faces obscured by protective helmets.

  Three other weapons were aimed in their direction, and the people at the bar scattered, leaving a swath of empty space around the group. Threnody focused her attention on Lucas.

  “I thought you said they couldn’t find us,” she said.

  Lucas waved a hand at the soldiers. “Those are quads, not Warhounds, which means it’s the government who located you. Human effort, not psionic. Facial-recognition software is embedded in the security feeds around here and I can’t affect machines with my power.”

  Threnody glared at him. “You knew they’d find us.”

  “I’m making a point, Threnody. Honestly, did you really think the government was just going to let you go?”

  None of them got a chance to answer as the quad pulled the triggers on their guns, the bright flare of energy darts striking against Lucas’s telekinetic shield, not flesh. The blasts flared dangerously wide and ricocheted backward to hit the soldiers and whoever was still stupid enough to be sticking around, knocking them to the ground. Everyone who had been hit screamed, their voices mingling with the sudden sound of alarm. One of the quad members had tripped the security system for reinforcements.

  Casting about for a distraction, Lucas poured his power into the minds of the people around them, starting a riot. Then he telekinetically tossed the members of the quad directly into the path of the suddenly rampaging crowd.

  His attention, for the most part, was still focused on the former Strykers.

  Lucas pulled the glasses off his face, dark blue eyes bright and fierce with something that might be madness. “This is your one and on
ly chance.”

  “A bit of an extremist, aren’t you?” Threnody said as she shoved away from the side of the bar.

  “More of an opportunist.” Lucas smiled again, showing all his teeth. “Yes or no?”

  She thought about what Lucas had said, they all did. For a vital few seconds, they weighed the words of a Warhound against the edicts of their government, and all of them came away with the same realization.

  None of them wanted to die a slave.

  “Get us out of here,” Kerr said as the noise of people fighting, of people dying, mingled with the shrill alarm of unrest that echoed up and down the street, summoning quad reinforcement.

  Lucas teleported out of London, pulling them along with his vast telekinetic strength into the unknown.

  [NINE]

  AUGUST 2379

  TORONTO, CANADA

  News of the termination spread quickly through the Stryker ranks. Three days since the two Stryker teams had gone missing, and the World Court hadn’t thought anything about giving the kill order. The OIC of the Strykers Syndicate had no choice but to obey. That Ciari became the focus of everyone’s fear and hatred was nothing new. That she let herself feel it? That was new.

  “It’s terribly illegal, I know, to want to murder him,” Ciari said tiredly, thinking about Erik. “But it would make me feel better.”

  “You don’t like to feel,” Jael said as she looked at where Ciari stood in front of a wall filled with vidscreens all streaming different programs in the OIC’s office. “You prove that fact over and over again. Why are you choosing today to keep your shields down?”

  Jael was angry. It was in the burr of her voice, pressing against the power of Ciari’s mind, difficult to ignore. She had every right to be, Ciari thought as her eyes tracked over the dozen or so news streams before her. Every right, and then some. It still didn’t mean anything to her despite her empathetic power.

  “I knew he would ask for their deaths,” Ciari said. “Threnody made too many mistakes during the last few missions. She was on the watch list after Madrid and the botched transfer.”

  “She and the other teams working with her still got back the stolen crude oil, got it off the trucks, back onto the train, and on its way back to the processing plant in Andorra.”

  “They lost half of it.”

  “They still salvaged the rest.”

  “Doesn’t matter. It was still enough of a commotion that the press got wind of it and the government had to do some heavy spin duty to make them look the other way. Propaganda is all well and good, but the government doesn’t control every news stream.”

  Jael shook her head, disgust making her voice sharper than usual. “You set Threnody up for failure with this current mission. That blip on the grid turned out to be a Class I triad psion—a rarity—and there’s no one in our ranks capable of handling someone like that; not and actually survive the encounter intact.”

  “The target never previously read as a Class I in all the time we tracked it. It never read as Lucas Serca.”

  “That’s a piss-fucking-poor excuse if I’ve ever heard one and I’ve heard many. You knew the target had to be dangerous if none of us could pin it down.”

  Ciari finally turned to face her subordinate, gaze cool. “Everyone in this world is dangerous to someone, Jael. We needed what Threnody could possibly get us, suicide mission or not.”

  “And what would that be other than two dead teams?”

  “A chance. Keiko brought back human bodies from Russia carrying neurotrackers assigned to the missing four.”

  “I know. I did the autopsies, remember? Best-case scenario is that our Strykers were killed elsewhere, which is better than being tortured. Worst-case scenario is that they’re hostages of a rogue Class I triad psion, either being tortured or reprogrammed. You pick.”

  Over the decades, the Sercas had mastered the skill of hiding their presence on bioscanners and the mental grid, able to project themselves as something they weren’t when they had to, which meant their ability to murder unsuspecting Strykers made them formidable enemies. They had passed on that skill to every psion that joined their ranks as a Warhound who had the power to uphold the charade. Ciari had no way of knowing if Lucas Serca was still within the Slums of the Angels or even in Russia. She had no way to confirm if her Strykers were truly dead. The Strykers in the field were still searching in America and Russia for answers, as well as scouring London as discreetly as they could since the government had contacted them about the riot. It was anyone’s guess if they would ever know the truth.

  “Why let this happen, Ciari?” Jael asked quietly from behind her. “You have the means to work around problems like this. If we had coordinated with Nathan before this happened—”

  “No.” Ciari cut her off. “We had no other choice.”

  “I think you’re lying.”

  Ciari let out a low, tired chuckle and carefully raised her shields. “You think?”

  “All right, I know you’re lying.” Jael stepped up beside Ciari and looked at her instead of the vidscreens. “You usually appeal every kill order handed down to you, just to have it on record, and it takes a while. It doesn’t change a thing—it never has and never will—but it’s a sick tradition every OIC has kept. You didn’t with these four. Why change the way you do things now?”

  Ciari kept quiet long enough that Jael knew she wouldn’t get an answer. Letting out a frustrated sigh, Jael turned away from the other woman and headed for the door.

  “I’ll add their names to our list of the dead,” Jael said.

  “Don’t.” Ciari glanced over her shoulder. “Not yet.”

  “They deserve that much, if not more.”

  “I know. I’m not saying they don’t, but if you put their names on that list, we close out their lives. We can’t do that until we’ve got something to report to the World Court.”

  “Give us our fucking right to grieve, Ciari.”

  “You only get that right when we’ve got bodies to burn, and even then only with the government’s say-so. They’re alive, Jael, and we need to find them. Until we do, they will be listed as rogue status in our records and that won’t change. It can’t change, do you understand me?”

  “Perfectly,” Jael bit out.

  “Good.”

  Jael strode out of the office, leaving Ciari alone with her thoughts and the twenty-four-hour news stream. Rubbing at the back of her neck, she sighed and turned away from the vidscreens. Retreating to her desk, Ciari dug through the data chips that cluttered one corner, finally finding the one she needed for her next meeting. In her searching, one fell off the desk, and she bent to retrieve it.

  Holding it between two fingers, Ciari peered at each side of the data chip. It wasn’t shaped like the government chips that they normally used. Clear, with no file number of any sort written on the outside, it was unusual in its blankness. She was never sure when these particular data chips would appear on her desk, but she never questioned their arrival. She’d been getting these data chips at intermittent intervals over the last five years. They always made for a better read than any orders the government sent her.

  She put it in her pocket.

  Hours later, when she found the time to read the information it held, on a datapad that wasn’t synced to any system or acknowledged by the grid, the heavily encrypted message would only be two sentences long: You know that chance I took? It’s paying off.

  The encrypted reply she saved to it was even shorter: Good.

  In the morning, the data chip was gone from her desk. Ciari didn’t question that, either.

  [TEN]

  AUGUST 2379

  SAPPORO, JAPAN

  There was a phrase in this country’s language for what Nathan was doing: nemawashi. Formally confirming what had informally been proposed, even if it was still all under the table until the press report went out. Corporate mergers never really came as a surprise to the public. The reason behind every single one was always neatly det
ailed for anyone to read, though it was the oral agreements that really mattered. Those were the deals that were never recorded. Every businessman and woman seated around the long conference table had come for just such a promise. Nathan Serca’s word was better than that of most. His family had spent decades making sure that they were indispensable to the world’s needs. This was no different.

  Jin Li stepped into the windowless conference room, wearing a severe business suit that wouldn’t hamper his movements at all, and a single gun on his hip. Casing the room with a glance over the top of his dark glasses, he pulled a small gray sphere out of his pocket and walked over to the only empty seat at the long table. He pressed two buttons on the side of the sphere, activating it. A green light blinked on and the jamming sequence cut off all vidfeed coming from the security points built into the wall and all recording devices scattered around the table.

  “We said no records,” Jin Li said, voice flat and dangerous as Nathan finally stepped into the conference room.

  “Apologies,” said Sydney Athe, the venerable old man rising to his feet with the use of a heavy, ornate cane. “This room is set automatically for recording every time it’s in use. I did not think to check that it had been deactivated.”

  Nathan offered the head of the Athe Syndicate a polite smile as the man’s grandson and successor, Elion Athe, stood to help his grandfather sit back down.

  The Athe Syndicate was much like the Serca Syndicate in its survival of the Border Wars to become what it was today. The family had been trapped in Sapporo on a business trip during that horrific time, and of all the islands that belonged to Japan, only Hokkaidō had managed to survive partly intact. The Athe family had made themselves indispensable to the survivors of the country and learned to thrive. Elion’s father, Travis, was a member of the World Court, and for that alone they would have been allowed into the Registry. Additionally, their genetics were clean, which was a bonus, and their success in aeronautics and space science was worth the delicate dance the Serca family had done with the Athe Syndicate for the past four generations.