Strykers

by K. M. Ruiz

  On the mental grid, pockets deepened with individual powers from the Strykers and the clumping knots of power that signified Warhound merges. None of them even remotely approached the strength that Lucas and Kerr wielded.

  Telekinesis wrapped around their bodies; a shield also bubbling over Threnody and Quinton as they made it to the rusted blast doors of the power plant. Lucas and Kerr planted themselves on one side of those torn-down doors, clothes soaking wet and skin chilled beneath the sudden barrier against the storm. Two men who were neither Stryker nor Warhound, just human enough to believe in doing the right thing.

  Traitor, Gideon said on a narrow psi link between himself and Lucas, riding a Warhound’s telepathic power to make the connection.

  Lucas didn’t sense Samantha in any of the Warhound merges at all, nor did he feel the devastating pull of Kristen’s deadly need. A slow smile cut across his face, Kerr the only witness to it.

  You seem to think that because I want to survive, I’m a traitor, Lucas said as he readied his and Kerr’s shared power behind their shields. You can have what Nathan’s offering. I found something better.

  Lucas’s and Kerr’s telepathic strike ripped through everyone’s mind like an explosion, burning through the shields of anyone who was a Class V and lower, shattering concentrations. People fell to the ground, Warhounds and Strykers alike, minds whiting out in pain. The backlash of that much power caused Lucas’s control of the merge to waver, just a little.

  Don’t kill them, Kerr said, guilt and a lifetime of commitment to the Strykers asking for a reprieve.

  Beg elsewhere, Lucas said as he raised their shields and felt the dip on the mental grid that signified an attack from the Strykers, because they had never learned what the Sercas had imparted to the Warhounds about merging.

  Telekinetic strength exploded around them as if a bomb had gone off, cracking the ground and the walls, sending debris spinning off into the storm for the wind to catch. Lucas was ready for it, mind braced to deflect the attack. He grunted, rocking back on his heels from the mental strain, muscles drawn tight over bone as he stubbornly held his ground.

  Kerr fed him more strength and Lucas absorbed it greedily, fortifying his telekinesis right before they were hit. Lucas’s training and knowledge of how Gideon worked on the field was the only thing that let him anticipate his younger brother’s attack. The Class II telekinetic had merged seven other telekinetics with his power. Lucas could feel the difference between his brother and the Strykers like a sharp divide. Gideon had been trained by Nathan. His attack was quick, powerful—expected in this instance in the wake of the kill order. The Warhounds had dropped off the mental grid, covered by telepaths in merge, and this time the telekinetic attack happened both outside and inside Lucas’s shields.

  The power Gideon wielded would have crushed Lucas and Kerr if Lucas’s defenses had been even a sliver less than what they were. His shields weren’t a single barrier; he layered them at intervals around their bodies and mind. What Gideon’s merge broke down was only half of Lucas’s defenses, but the damage was more extensive than that. Power broke apart in Lucas’s mind, synapses overloading somewhere in his brain at the backlash. Lucas’s mind dealt with the damage instinctually, compensating for a bridge that was lost, the merge shifting just enough to steady both minds.

  I’ll take the telepaths, Kerr said. You deal with the telekinetics.

  It was the logical choice, and Kerr was used to being a backboard for telekinetic strength. Lucas didn’t hesitate to switch his concentration to the telekinetics, holding up his shields while Kerr used his own Class II telepathic strength in an attack that left holes in all lesser-Classed psion minds. Not as deep as Lucas could go, but deep enough to cause damage.

  Not even a month ago, Kerr wouldn’t have been able to stand his ground in a battle like this. His shields wouldn’t have withstood the follow-up attacks. Here, now, his power had a new depth, strength once used fighting his empathy now relegated to controlling it, twisting his secondary power into an attack that affected everyone’s emotions.

  He had no formal training for his empathy. What Kerr knew now had been imparted through Lucas from the psi surgery, and what Lucas didn’t know about the human and not-so-human mind wasn’t worth the knowing. Kerr had control of his minute amount of empathy, just enough to push fear against the minds that he slammed through until they choked on it.

  A Class IX power wasn’t really much of anything to be worried about. Kerr didn’t think it would make a huge difference, but it left damage in its wake. People forgot, sometimes, why the higher Classes were rare and why most psions never broke past a Class V. The human mind didn’t need a lot of power to do a lot of damage. It just needed enough to leave a scar. A reminder.

  Kristen understood that better than anyone else because she lived with it day in and day out. Her mind was just scar tissue built on top of scar tissue, layers of damage that would never be fixed because she’d been broken too young and too many times, and no one had bothered to put her back together again. When she dropped her shields, called by the taste of fear Kerr had projected, her presence shook through everyone’s mind.

  Lucas cut her off at the pass, sliding between Kerr and his sister with a skill that spoke of long practice. Kristen was only a distraction, though, just a threat that they couldn’t ignore and had to face down first even as Gideon dropped out of the merge he led, his place filled by a different telekinetic. Lucas couldn’t react fast enough and stop them, not and risk letting Kristen find a crack in his own two-person merge and exploit it.

  Lucas, Kristen called to him, laughter in her thoughts. Come play with me!

  In the midst of all that fighting, only one person stood apart from it all, mind bleeding into her bones as she felt Gideon teleport beyond Lucas’s defenses with Jin Li by his side. Samantha spat out a mouthful of blood and saliva as the wind howled in her ears. Kristen was a heaviness between herself and Lucas on the mental grid, a barrier that was steadily eating through the thoughts that swirled all around them.

  Samantha’s shields were paper-thin and full of holes. Her defenses were no better than a human’s, which was all the difference that mattered.

  For the first time in her entire life, Samantha could think.

  She used it—that decadent, giddy sense of freedom—to fight.

  [THIRTY-ONE]

  AUGUST 2379

  BUFFALO, USA

  Threnody fried the control panel to the blast doors until its necessary parts melted beneath her power. The blast doors unlocked, but they didn’t open.

  Lucas, the doors, Threnody said through the psi link.

  Focused as he was on not letting them die, Lucas still managed to telekinetically open the blast doors for them. The two slipped inside the power plant, where the lights were running on half-power.

  Power plant two, built in the middle of Buffalo, ran on fossil fuels, like the majority of the power plants left in the world. Nuclear power plants were a thing of the past, humanity’s absolute fear of nuclear power etched into the backbone of the remnants of society. Renewable energy plants were few and far between, and America’s East Coast had relied on fossil fuel power plants for centuries before the Border Wars. The tradition continued through to the present.

  This one burned coal, supplies scavenged from cities all along the coast, stored by the ton in tall steel silos that supplied the plant’s six pulverizers by way of conveyer belts. Those belts weren’t running, stilled in the face of the acid storm and the government’s order. The hum that should have filled the power plant had been replaced by the screaming wind and Threnody’s and Quinton’s own harsh breathing.

  The skeleton crew assigned to monitor the power plant was dead. Only when Threnody tripped over a body did they discover that. They stared at the corpse’s face twisted in an expression of permanent pain, a puddle of blood outlining the head. The lack of physical wounds had her thinking it was a mental attack. Lucas’s doing, or possibly the Warhounds’.
Either way, with the scientists dead, anyone who could have helped them bring the power plant back up to full readiness was dead.

  “Well, shit,” Threnody said as she knelt down to rifle through the dead man’s pockets until she found a security card.

  Quinton glanced at her. “I figure they’ll have biometrics throughout this place.”

  They looked at the body on the ground. Without a word, Quinton called up fire from some of the remaining natural gas left in the biotubes in his arms, snapping his fingers to light it. The fire burned bright and hot, shrinking down to a thin blue line of the hottest heat he could produce. He focused it on the dead man’s right hand, just below the wrist, and the fire burned through flesh easily. The stench was foul, something they ignored, having smelled the dead many times before. Only when they started to smell metal did Quinton stop to bend down and pick up the severed hand. It was cool to the touch, the wrist area cauterized.

  “Let’s go,” Threnody said.

  She and Quinton hurried down the hall, bypassing the doors that led to the boiler steam drum and the high-powered steam turbines, all abnormally silent. They ran, leaving a trail of wet footprints for anyone to follow. Working their way to the control room, they found it behind layers of protective shielding and fire-resistant paneling. Threnody swiped the card over the security reader as Quinton pressed the severed hand against the screen. The computer read the print, as well as the security card, and the doors slid open. Quinton dropped the severed hand on the floor; Threnody kept the security card.

  Inside were more bodies, and they hauled two corpses out of the chairs they had died in. The terminals were still on, access to the power plant’s computer network available. Threnody and Quinton slid into seats on opposite sides of the control room, the wide, clear windows providing them with a near 360-degree view of the massive, internal guts of the power plant.

  “You ever wish they taught this in a simulator?” Quinton asked as he brought window after window up on the vidscreen, furiously looking for any prompt that would get them further than the public areas of the system. They couldn’t get far without viable codes or passwords, not with the entire network so tightly locked down.

  “You’re a better hacker than I am,” Threnody reminded him.

  “I’m not that good, Thren. Maybe it should have been Jason after all.”

  Threnody didn’t say anything to that, just continued to demand answers from a computer that was reluctant to give them up, security card or no. She swore after the fifth failed attempt, slamming her hand down in frustration on the terminal.

  “Careful,” Quinton barked.

  “I know.”

  Frying the main system that controlled this place wasn’t in anyone’s best interest. There had to be a different way.

  Lucas, we need a little help here, Threnody said. Can you link us to Jason?

  No answer. From the way Lucas and Kerr had been fighting outside, she wasn’t surprised. Swearing, she brought up a map of the power plant on the screen and stared critically at every last section of the place. Her gaze lingered longest on the transmission lines and transformers built into the ground outside, some distance away from the cooling tower and the building they were in.

  “Think a jump start might work?” Threnody asked as she swiveled her chair around to face Quinton.

  Quinton turned his head to look at her, a tight expression on his face. “It’ll kill you.”

  She shrugged, grimacing. “Better here than under the government’s control.”

  “Threnody—”

  “Quinton.”

  She got to her feet and crossed the distance between them in a few quick strides. A bittersweet, ruined smile curved across her mouth. She hid it against the top of Quinton’s skull; a brief caress, a thank-you, for all his years of loyalty.

  “I’ll come back if I can,” Threnody said, promising no more than that.

  Quinton pressed his hand to the small of her back, pulled her into an embrace that lasted only a second. “Go,” he said, voice low and gravelly. “I’ll keep trying to contact Lucas or Kerr.”

  She left the control room and didn’t look back. Quinton didn’t watch her go. This was how they worked, how all Strykers learned to work with their partner or their team. You did what had to be done for the good of everyone else, for the mission. Personal desires were never, ever allowed.

  Quinton put all his focus on the terminal before him and calling out through the psi links for their only telepaths. Distracted, he missed Gideon and Jin Li’s arrival. He didn’t miss their presence when he was telekinetically slammed face-first into the wall.

  His nose broke; so did a few of his teeth. Quinton spat out blood and shattered enamel, the front of his face feeling as if it were on fire.

  “Jin Li, go after the other one,” Gideon ordered as he flipped Quinton around onto his back against the wall.

  Quinton wrenched his eyes open at that command, blinking through the swollen heat that encompassed his face in time to see Jin Li leave the control room.

  Lucas! he shouted through the psi link. Kerr!

  Silence, the psi link empty of any support. Held immobile against the wall by that strong Class II telekinetic grip, Quinton could only stare as Nathan’s third child approached the terminal he had been working on, studying all the open command windows on the vidscreen he’d been struggling to break through.

  “You’re not a hacker,” Gideon stated. “Not a good one. I don’t know why Lucas allied himself with you Strykers if you don’t have the proper skills to get the job done.”

  Quinton didn’t say a word. Gideon was a telekinetic, not a telepath, which meant unless he brought in a Warhound telepath, he wasn’t going to be able to pry a damn thing out of Quinton. Mentally, at least, and Strykers had died for less.

  Gideon glanced up at him, the intent in his dark blue eyes different from the pair Quinton had been staring at for the past few weeks or so. “Why do you want the power plant turned back on?”

  Quinton kept his mouth shut. Gideon was unsurprised at this silence. His gaze settled on Quinton’s bare arms and the shadow of biotubes beneath his skin. “Pyrokinetic. You can make this easy on yourself if you open your mouth and start talking.”

  Quinton couldn’t risk a fire here, not in a place that they needed. It didn’t matter anyway, not when he couldn’t create the very thing his power controlled. Gideon had him held fast, the weight of his telekinesis slowly crushing Quinton up against the wall.

  Gideon started with Quinton’s fingers first, breaking every bone from nails to knuckle with each refusal to answer his question. Eventually, Gideon moved up to the bones and biomodifications that spanned Quinton’s palms and the carefully placed tubing there. Quinton didn’t scream, just squeezed his eyes shut and ground his broken teeth together, trying to breathe through the agony of the slow torture as Gideon telekinetically tore his body apart.

  “I’m sorry,” a new voice said an indeterminate time later through the pain he was feeling, sounding raw and broken and so, so determined.

  The power holding Quinton prisoner abruptly disappeared. He fell to the ground, gasping for air around the blood in his mouth, vomiting when his shattered hands touched the floor. This time he screamed, unable to choke it back, the sound mingling with the high tone of Gideon’s own voice.

  Lying on the floor of the control room, Quinton stared in disbelief at the sight before him. Samantha Serca had both her hands pressed against Gideon’s temples, eyes narrowed in concentration, lips pulled back in a snarl as she focused all her telepathic strength on frying her twin brother’s mind. The effort left the tendons standing out in her arms and throat, sweat pouring down her face, mixing with the blood that was dripping out of her nose.

  Gideon, though, Gideon was rigid in her grip, mouth opened wide and the expression on his face one of shocked betrayal as his twin overrode his thoughts and his power. She sent him spinning down into psi shock with the last of her strength. Gideon fell to the groun
d first, Samantha less than a second behind him. But while Gideon was unconscious from the massive psionic overload, Samantha wasn’t, and her dark blue eyes focused on Quinton’s bloody, broken face.

  Behind her, a skinny form slid into the control room. Quinton could only stare in shock as the girl approached him, the smile on her face cracked and bleeding, her eyes that signature Serca dark blue. He didn’t need to be a telepath to recognize the distorted pressure against his shields as that of a dysfunctional mind.

  Lucas, you fucking bastard, he thought muzzily through the pain. You never said anything about this.

  “Shh, shh,” that girl whispered as her fingers touched his forehead, stroking over his hot skin.

  With every motion of her fingers, she wiped away the pain.

  His brain ceased to acknowledge the agony that existed from his elbows on down in each arm, the sudden absence of it leaving him light-headed and queasy. The pain in his face faded until it was just a distant ache that was hard to breathe through. Quinton’s brown eyes snapped open and he stared up in shock at the smiling teenager who knelt beside him, a psion who could only be an empath after that little show of power.

  “Promises to keep, Stryker,” she cooed at him. “Promises, promises.”

  “Wha—?” The word came out messy, garbled. Spitting blood, coughing to get air into his lungs, Quinton tried again, concentrating on what he was saying so that he could be understood, even with a broken face. “What?”

  “You aren’t the only person Lucas needs,” Samantha said as she dragged herself into the nearest seat. “Kristen, get him up.”

  Instinctively, Quinton jerked away from that crazy empath’s touch, wishing for the first time in a long while that he had even a sliver of ’path-oriented power in his genes. The knowing look in Kristen’s gleaming dark blue eyes told him that his fear hadn’t gone unnoticed. Still, for such a small girl, she had a lot of strength; enough to help Quinton get his feet back underneath him. Once vertical, Quinton shrugged her off, stepping away from her grasping, clinging hands.