Strykers

by K. M. Ruiz

  Quinton shook his head as he turned to leave. “Just don’t get dead, Jason. We still need you.”

  Quinton walked through the cargo bay and down the open ramp of the cargo door to the launchpad. The area, which had been empty when he’d gone into the shuttle, was now filled with large metal supply trunks, courtesy of Lucas, who was looking a lot worse for wear. After ten straight hours of constant teleportation between underground hangars, ferrying supplies, Quinton figured anyone would.

  “What’s in these?” Quinton asked.

  “Insulated skinsuits,” Lucas said as he kicked one of the trunks with his boot. “We’re going to need them when we hit the Arctic. It might be summer, but it’s still cold as fuck.”

  “Where do you want them?”

  “Cargo hold. Three in each. I’ll leave you to it.”

  He teleported out and Quinton swore tiredly. Just a fucking stevedore, that’s all he was right now. Quinton retrieved the hoverlift that was sitting idle past the launchpad and dragged the trunks one at a time into the shuttles, because more than just skinsuits were in those huge containers. The weight had carefully been calculated by Matron, things that they would need for and after the Arctic. Lucas hadn’t said as much, but everyone knew they weren’t going to stay on Spitsbergen. They couldn’t. The World Court would wage a quick and dirty war with them if they tried to, and the psions would lose.

  The thing was, Quinton thought as he guided the second set of trunks into the next shuttle, Lucas was damned good at keeping them all in the dark. Whether it was psionic interference or just a slick mindwipe, Lucas only gave out enough details to get the results he wanted. Didn’t matter how many lives he took or ruined, the only thing that he cared about was a final goal he shared with no one.

  “Where’s Jason?”

  Quinton glanced up as he finished anchoring the latest supply trunk beside one of the massive cold storage units bolted to the deck of the shuttle. Threnody stood at the bottom of the open cargo ramp, a tense expression on her face.

  “In the other shuttle,” he said.

  “Kerr just informed me that he picked up Warhound and Stryker psi signatures on the mental grid.”

  Quinton grimaced. “They’re early.”

  “Or they’re right on time.” Threnody climbed up into the shuttle, peeling open a ration bar. She had two in her hands and offered the unopened one to Quinton. “Depends which schedule we’re running on. That’s not all of it. Matron said the acid storm out west caught the polar jet stream. It’s going to hit here sooner rather than later. We don’t have much time left.”

  “How soon?”

  Threnody chewed hard on the bite of ration bar she’d taken before saying, “Three, maybe four hours. We can predict the weather, but we can’t control it.”

  Quinton took in a careful breath. “Guess that’s why Lucas just teleported out.”

  “We’ve got sixteen underground hangars to prep for launch in less time than we thought we’d get. That’s what I need to tell Jason. He needs to get these shuttles online now.”

  Quinton finished securing the last trunk before following Threnody to the shuttle Jason was working in. The telekinetic was hunched over the console, wires streaming out of both arms and inspecs running at high capacity as they parsed out the downloads that were coming through the bioware in his brain.

  “Jason,” Threnody said.

  “Busy” was his absent-sounding answer.

  “Not as much as you’re going to be.” Threnody leaned over his chair and put a hand over his eyes, forcing a physical connection he had to deal with instead of the hologrids in the air around him and the data being downloaded into his brain. “That storm is going to hit within the next few hours. We’ve got Strykers and Warhounds on the ground in Buffalo. We need these shuttles flight-worthy.”

  Jason swore, finished what he was working on with a few quick commands, and started the compiler. Then he pulled her hand off his face and twisted his head to stare at her.

  “Are you kidding?” Jason asked, voice dry. “How long?”

  “You’ve got two hours to finish this, Jason. That’s it.”

  “Or we’re all dead, I know. You’re lucky I’ve already installed all the firmware on the rest of the shuttles.” He refocused his attention on the data before him. “You did your duty by me, now start warning everyone else.”

  Quinton and Threnody left the shuttle side by side, hurrying back to the tenement where Matron had kicked her scavengers into high gear hours ago. There were fewer scavengers than when they’d first arrived in Buffalo. Matron had been sending them out in small groups to the other hangars over the last few days.

  “This is it people, we’re at the endgame,” Matron shouted over the buzz of conversation as a multitude of bodies worked around her. “You know your places. I want you all there before that acid storm hits. Keep your head down, stay off the grid, and stay the hell away from the quads.”

  Matron saw the Strykers approaching and nodded in their direction. When they got close enough, Threnody said, “Jason knows. He’s going to have the hive connection fully up and running in two hours.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “He was one of the best hackers the Strykers Syndicate had. He’ll get it done.”

  Matron grunted as she continued to separate out weapons on the table she was standing at. “Novak’s at his assigned hangar with Everett. I’ve got reports in from half my crew, the ones that are already at the other hangars or on their way. They’re worried about being discovered by you psions.”

  “Lucas and I have their minds shielded,” Kerr announced as he slipped through the crowd to plant himself next to Matron. “Don’t worry about them.”

  “Yeah, the last time Lucas said that, I ended up with a third of my crew dead.” Matron scowled, lips pulled back over her metal teeth. “How many is he going to let die this time?”

  “You’ll survive.” Kerr shrugged as he reached for a gun and hooked the weapon to his belt. “Isn’t that the only thing you’re worried about?”

  “Stay the fuck out of my head.”

  “I’m not in your mind.”

  Kerr nodded at Threnody and Quinton before disappearing back into the crowd with his own set of orders to follow.

  “Fucking psions,” Matron muttered as she loaded yet another gun and set it aside for someone else to claim.

  Quinton joined her at the table, sorting through the stash of weapons with familiar ease. Threnody positioned herself on the other side of the room, helping a trio of scavengers destroy the accumulated data the tenement held, which meant burning out everything electrical they handed her until it was just slag.

  Based on Matron’s orders and the way she was giving them, Threnody knew that Matron wasn’t going to return to Buffalo anytime soon, if ever again. She was covering her tracks in a methodical, almost brutal, way, stripping the tenement down to its bones. Threnody had a feeling that the other sites around Buffalo the scavengers owned were going through the same strip-and-burn scenario.

  “What about the hangars?” Threnody asked as she placed her hand on yet another hard drive and sent her power through it. “You’re not going to leave them for the government to dig through, right?”

  “That’s why we’ve got the C-4,” Matron said. “Don’t worry your pretty little head, girl. I’ve been doing this for longer than you’ve been alive.”

  The tenements that Matron’s scavengers used as their base of operations were off the electrical grid most of the time, but not for this mission. Matron was savvy, in the way most survivalists were. She didn’t have a permanent hard connection to the rest of Buffalo, but her restricted system could still uplink through a secondary one. It ran under the connections that the government used, but Matron considered information and secrecy more important than credit and following the law. Always had; it’s what enabled her to survive. Right now, they needed to be connected to the government’s grid.

  The vidscreens in the bui
lding switched on all at once, the emergency stream that appeared flickering red around the edges. A reporter for Buffalo, a pretty brunette press anchor set up high somewhere in the city towers, smiled at the masses.

  “People of New York. Please do not be alarmed. Curfew has been enacted for your personal safety. It has come to the government’s attention that rogue psions have infiltrated Buffalo. The government advises everyone to remain in their towers or in their bunkers. Strykers are on the ground for your protection against the rogue psions. Adhere to the curfew or face a heavy fine.”

  The average citizen didn’t know that rogue psions were a well-organized group, just that they were a dangerous enough threat to make people think twice about venturing outside the bunkers and the sealed city towers. The government didn’t want their problem spun any which way but dead, which was why they mentioned the Strykers.

  The broadcast repeated itself a second time before the stream went to standby mode. Like all emergency streams, it would be repeated every few minutes. Matron turned her head to look at Threnody.

  “How’s that notoriety feel?” the woman asked.

  Threnody clenched her hand around the latest hard drive she was holding, electric lines of power crackling from her fingers to the small machine in her hand as it became nothing more than slag.

  “They aren’t revealing our identities,” Threnody said. “Which means the government doesn’t want the world to know that Strykers have gone rogue.”

  “Most rogue psions are Strykers who defect.”

  “That’s not common knowledge outside of highly classified reports.” Something Threnody had only recently learned. “And most is a little too high a count.”

  Matron’s mouth curled up in disgust. “Fucking sheep.”

  Threnody chose not to feel insulted. Matron’s disgust only lasted for a few seconds, or as long it took for the lights in the tenement to flicker and die out, only some coming back online with the whine of generators a few seconds later when they were supposed to be tapped into the main electrical grid.

  Matron’s teeth clacked together loudly in the sudden silence. “That ain’t good.”

  Threnody followed her gaze to the nearest dark tracts of lighting. “I thought we were already running off the generators?”

  “We normally are, but how do you think we’re going to open fifteen launch silos?” Matron shook her head. “One would drain all my generators. Fifteen isn’t possible. We’ve been tied into the government’s electrical grid since Jason started his hack.”

  “And now?”

  “Now we’re fucking not.” Matron spun around. “Someone get me an uplink! I want to know what the fuck just happened here!”

  She rushed off, barking out orders as she went. Threnody was still needed for a few more minutes of disposal work, so she jerked her head at Quinton in a silent order. Weaving his way through the crowd of scavengers who were busy gathering up what they would need to get them to the other launch sites, Quinton kept doggedly on Matron’s heels.

  The two ended up back in the room that guarded the blast doors to the underground hangar. Matron was leaning over the chair in front of the control terminal, fingers stabbing at the hologrid that hovered in front of the vidscreen. A map of the Buffalo sprawl was sketched out in the air, rapidly expanding and decreasing, depending on Matron’s order. It was feeding her data through the neuroports in her cybernetic limb, a wireless feed that wasn’t as stable as a wired connection.

  “Coincidence?” one of the scavengers in the room asked, sounding hopeful.

  Lucas teleported in, saying, “Coincidence is a word used only by liars and fools.”

  “You would know,” Matron snapped. “Come look at this.”

  Lucas paced forward and watched as Matron zoomed out from the street view of Buffalo to the citywide view, bright blue dots pulsing where their launch silos were and an overlay of green from the electrical grid that was steadily blacking out over the entire city.

  “What about the main bunkers?” Quinton asked tightly.

  “They have environmental systems that run on backup generators located all over the city,” Lucas said. “For a lockdown like this, people can last a day, maybe two, with the environmental systems running at full before emergency restrictions would have to be enacted.”

  “You don’t think it’ll take that long, do you?” Threnody said as she came into the room.

  “I think a lot of people are going to die under a government-sanctioned power outage with an acid storm riding a derecho spine about to hit.” Dark blue eyes flicked her way. “The storms always do damage, that’s expected. The government never shuts off the power just because the weather’s bad. They’re doing it this time to find us. Warhounds are spreading out through the city, so are Strykers, and they’re all hunting for us. Kerr and I have already deflected search scans through human minds. We’re linked to every scavenger, but that’s a network that can be found more easily than a single mind, despite the precautions we’ve taken.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that we need the power plants to be turned back on—at least one of them.”

  “Can’t you mindwipe those workers to change it for you?” Quinton demanded, not liking where this conversation was going.

  “No,” Lucas said, voice firm. “The second I start altering minds, my sister will pick up on it. Samantha’s on the ground here and she was trained by Nathan, just like me. She knows the same tricks I do. If she finds out what I’m doing, she’ll want to know why we want the generators on when I could just as easily teleport everyone out of this place. It won’t take her very long to figure it out.”

  Threnody’s gaze was steady when she looked at him. “You need us to turn the electrical grid back on for you.”

  “I need you to turn it on.” Lucas turned his head and reached out for the map, dragging his fingers over the hologrid to zero in on one of the two power plants that kept the city running. “You’re a Class III electrokinetic. You can override whatever lockdown they’ve got on the power plants and jump-start the grid.”

  “That much power in those places will fry her nervous system,” Quinton said, voice hard. “That’s suicide.”

  “Not necessarily. It’ll take time for her to make her way to power plant two, and by then, the storm will have hit.”

  “The other power plant is closer.”

  “The other one feeds only into the city towers. We need the one for everyone else.” Lucas pushed away from the chair he was leaning on to face the Strykers. “If you want to go with her, then fine. Take Kerr along as well. You’ll need the coverage a telepath can provide.”

  “What about you?” Threnody asked. “And Jason?”

  “Jason’s working on the shuttles. He’s not going anywhere until we launch. As for me? I’m going to be the bait.” The smile Lucas gave them was tired, but every bit as dangerous as the ones he’d offered up before. “The Warhounds are looking for me because I called them here. The Strykers are just an additional bonus. I’ll draw their fire and let them take each other out.”

  “And if you die?”

  “This isn’t where I die. I’ll be there at the end to pick you up, as long as you get the job done.”

  “What if we don’t?”

  “Then Aisling was wrong.”

  Threnody pressed her mouth into a hard line. She swallowed and said, “I’d rather she wasn’t.”

  “Kerr’s getting a vehicle ready right now.” Lucas nodded at the door. “Get your gear and get out of here. That curfew is already in effect and quads are going to be on the street.”

  “You’ll want to hit the underground entrance about six kilometers north of here,” Matron said as she hurriedly downloaded the city map into a data chip. “You’ll need to travel underground half of the way to the power plant on the maglev trains, if they’re still running. If not, take a pedestrian tunnel. The rest of the way in, when you get closer to the power plant, it’s gonna be all abov
eground travel. The government likes to see people coming.”

  “I’m guessing the security grid is still up and running through the backup generators,” Quinton said.

  Matron gave a hollow little laugh as she tossed the loaded data chip and a datapad to Quinton. “You’d guess right. Get the fuck out of here. You’ve only got so much time.”

  Quinton and Threnody left without arguing. Threnody was hell-bent on this mission and Quinton knew better than to try to change her mind. It was too late to back out now.

  “Hope you know what you’re doing,” Quinton said as they finally made it to the garage, the doors winched wide-open and wind rushing inside. “You’re still not fully recovered.”

  “Then you better hope that Lucas packed some decent medical supplies in those trunks you were loading onto the shuttles,” Threnody said as they wove their way to where Kerr was checking over the SUV that would get them back to the city.

  Kerr tossed a bag at each of them. “Our old uniforms,” he explained. “I figured they might get us a little further than civilian attire if we alter them enough.”

  He was already wearing his, the black-on-black BDUs overlaid with bits and pieces of protective armor. Threnody and Quinton stripped right there in the garage, everyone ignoring them. The uniform felt strange after so many days wearing borrowed clothing. This wasn’t who they were anymore, not completely, and Threnody couldn’t help but wonder if the changes would show up on a feed.

  They still had the strips of bioware on their faces, iris peels coating their eyes. False identities that might get them into the city without being detected, but if the security grid was running on full, Threnody had a feeling the precautions wouldn’t get them far enough. They were the hunted this time, not the hunters, but they knew how Strykers thought. Maybe that would help.

  Then again, maybe not.

  Quinton packed extra ammunition into a case hooked to his belt before slinging a military-grade rifle over one shoulder. A separate hard pack that hung securely from his belt was a match for the one that Threnody wore as well: a field med-kit, specifically decked out to deal with loss of limbs. Quinton tended to lose parts of himself in the field while using his power if the fighting got bad enough.