Strykers

by K. M. Ruiz

  Bullets cut through the air over her head. She felt telekinetic pressure on her bruised ribs, but her power was already arcing up into their bodies. Threnody’s vision tunneled out, a roaring sound filling her ears. For one long moment, she didn’t know if she was even breathing, then a sharp pain spiked through one side of her face. Spiked harder on the other. She blinked, vision coming back to her in time to see Jason’s hand descending for another slap. She made a wordless noise and he stopped in midmotion.

  Threnody was lying on her back, staring up into Jason’s face, his hazel eyes wide and worried. He let out a harsh breath. “Shit, Thren, don’t go undoing all my hard work.”

  It was strange hearing the familial diminutive of her name come out of his mouth. Threnody struggled to sit up. Jason helped her out, bracing her with one arm behind her back as she caught her breath. “My hand.”

  Jason looked down at the limb in question, finding red lines spanning across her skin like circuit wires. “Nerve damage. Guess you aren’t as healed as I thought you were. I think you might have fried the nanites in your veins, too.”

  “Wonderful.” Threnody grimaced. “Help me up.”

  Jason got Threnody to her feet. She checked her gun and they got moving again. The faint mutter in the back of their minds was everyone else’s conversation on the psi link as they cut through the outpost section by section. Overlaid across that was Kristen’s heavy, intense presence that was blocking the Warhounds’ ability to teleport away or telepathically get a warning out. Her psionic interference scratched against their shields. Kristen didn’t care about harming the Strykers if it meant the humans died, and Lucas was too busy right now to make her see reason. Kristen’s help was needed but it was difficult on their end to deal with it.

  The sound of an explosion nearby pulled them up short. “That came from outside,” Threnody said.

  Was that us or them? Jason sent out along the psi link.

  Us, Quinton answered. Samantha just blew up part of a building. We’ve got fire.

  Joining the fray?

  No. I’m staying put.

  “We need to get to the control room,” Jason said as they started moving again. Kerr, sitrep.

  You aren’t feeling the headache I am, came Kerr’s pained reply. Remaining Warhounds are in merge. Lucas and I are picking their minds apart, but I’d rather put a bullet in their brains.

  And the quads? Threnody asked.

  None in your section. Go knock some sense into Kristen and tell her to stop biting at my shields.

  Kerr’s mental voice faded. Threnody and Jason were still methodically careful on their way to the control room, but Kerr was right. They didn’t find any more quads on their way to Kristen’s position, and she greeted their arrival with a soft and raspy “All clear.”

  Jason hauled Kristen out of the chair and took her place. She immediately draped herself over the back of it. Threnody eyed the girl, keeping a finger on the trigger guard of her gun.

  “Maybe you should go find your brother,” Jason said as he yanked connecting wires from the console and plugged them into the neuroports in his arms and wrists. “I don’t like having you at my back.”

  “I know,” Kristen said. “It’s why I’m staying.”

  “I’m not leaving,” Threnody said evenly.

  Jason switched on his inspecs, data rolling across his vision, merging with the hologrids that snapped into the air. “I remember your psi signature from a few years ago, Kristen. Every Stryker died trying to get close to you. No one managed a solid ident.”

  “You wouldn’t have,” Kristen said. “We Sercas are supposed to be human, remember?”

  Jason shrugged his opinion of that. “You’ve fooled the world. Don’t expect anyone to be happy about that.”

  “You Strykers never are. You should see the faces of the ones we keep when they meet with old teammates. So many tears. So sad.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We retrieve select Strykers for our own purposes and make them loyal to us. We can make them forget where they came from, but we can’t make those they left behind forget who they lost.” Kristen stood up on her tiptoes to peer over the seat at Jason. “Your rank and file keep secrets better when dead.”

  Her empathy rolled through them, brushing up against their shields, but went no further than that. Lucas’s previous warning was enough to make Kristen stay her hand this time, just not her mouth. Pointedly, neither Threnody nor Jason engaged her in that conversation.

  Jason set to work breaking through encrypted software, inspecs streaming data over his sight. Lucas arrived several minutes later, looking tired and tense. He pried Kristen off the chair and pitched her toward the hallway.

  “Go back to the shuttle, Kris,” Lucas said, not watching to see if she left.

  “Maybe you should go with her,” Threnody said. “Make sure she doesn’t try to kill everyone else.”

  “Kris knows what will happen if she tries.”

  “You’re in no condition to stop her.”

  “Doesn’t mean I won’t.” Lucas gave Threnody a hard smile before addressing Jason. “Give me an update.”

  “That damn mountain is surrounded by artillery,” Jason said as he moved his hands through the hologrid, searching out leads for the hack. “Most of it is still active.”

  “I want you to keep anything from coming online when we get up there,” Lucas said. “That’s all we need.”

  “It’s going to take a while. The security up there runs on a different system than the one we hacked flying in.”

  “You’ve got two hours.”

  Jason grimaced. “I doubt I can do it in two. It already took us a day to fly to this island and hack the outer security. This is going to take longer.”

  “We have less than twenty-four hours to finish this. I’m moving everyone to the airfield that services Longyearbyen. I want you to set up five days’ worth of future communications to be sent out during the required status check-in time. The quads up here had a standard security code. I’m sure you can falsify it.”

  Lucas left and Threnody followed after him. Jason started hacking into everything the government had built up in Longyearbyen. Novak couldn’t help him with this, the scavenger having burned through most of the wiring in his brain and body already. Jason knew the feeling, knew the heat of burned wires before they cooled, the tiny surges making sections of his body go numb. He wasn’t looking forward to going through that again.

  Two hours later, Jason had to resign himself to the inevitable: he wasn’t going to meet Lucas’s timetable. Jason rubbed at his eyes, inspecs bright against the darkness. “Shit.”

  He was tired. Staring at command windows and the framework of a security grid he had no hope of breaking would exhaust anyone.

  Right on schedule, Lucas commed him. “Finished?”

  “I finished the communications you wanted, but we’ve got a problem.”

  “That’s not what I want to hear.”

  “I managed to hack the security feed around here earlier only because it was tied into the same system Novak hacked on our flight over the Atlantic. I got lucky with the artillery, but I can’t hack this last system, Lucas. It’s completely separate, half of it is tied into biometrics on-site, and I’d need a week, at minimum, to build a back door.”

  The comm hummed softly with static. Jason winced as Lucas implanted an image directly into his mind for a visual. “Get back here.”

  Jason extracted himself from the hack and closed out before teleporting back to the shuttles sitting on the airfield a kilometer away. Alpha shuttle had its cargo doors open, metal ramp digging into the dirt. Lucas was standing at the edge of the ramp, bright blots of red dripping from his nose to the metal beneath his feet. Lucas might not have been hemorrhaging anymore, but nosebleeds were common while suffering through psi shock. Jason was surprised the younger man was capable of walking, much less pulling off an attack on a government outpost.

  Shaking his
head, Jason jerked his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of Longyearbyen. “Security grid for the island is set. The artillery on the mountain is dormant now, but the security system tied into the seed bank is something else.”

  Lucas wiped at the blood dripping from his nose, flicking it off his fingertips. “If we jacked Novak into the hack?”

  “He’s burned through all his neuroports.”

  “We could strip new ones onto different nerves and modify the ones in his brain.”

  Jason stiffened. “That will kill him.”

  “Most likely.” Lucas turned his head to stare south at the flat-topped, small mountain that rose into the sky nearby. It was mostly white near the peak, the rest dark rock and dull green moss. “If you can’t hack it, we only have one option.”

  Lucas headed back into the shuttle, Jason on his heels. Matron and Kerr were huddled near some of the cold-storage units, with Samantha and Kristen sitting nearby, watching them. Jason didn’t see Threnody or Quinton.

  “Did you scan the terrain?” Lucas asked Matron as they got closer.

  “This place don’t get tectonic shift like other continents,” Matron said, glancing up from the readouts on the unit’s control screen. “That road is stable enough, but I wouldn’t want to land a shuttle on it. Lucky for you, two of the shuttles that survived are carrying the gravlifts. We’ll be able to transfer whatever Jason can’t teleport.”

  “I take it I’m the stevedore,” Jason said with a heavy sigh.

  Matron smiled at him, showing a line of metal teeth. “You know you’re worth more than that, so stop complaining.”

  “Is the hack finished?” Kerr said.

  Jason shook his head. “No.”

  “Then how the hell are we getting inside that mountain?”

  “Better question would be how are we doing it without tipping off the government?” Matron said.

  “They won’t know what’s happened up here until it’s too late,” Lucas said, heading for the flight deck.

  “You sure about that?”

  “We’ll be in Antarctica by then.”

  “We’ll be where?” Jason said. “What the hell, Lucas? You want to go from polar day to polar night? There are other places in the world we can go to ground that are less extreme.”

  “And that’s exactly where the government would think we’d go, except we won’t be in Norway, Greenland, or Canada. There’s no other place to match the Arctic except the south pole. Antarctica wasn’t worth the trouble for the government to excavate after the Border Wars, which means they won’t be searching for us there.” Lucas glanced over his shoulder at them as he palmed open the hatch to the flight deck. “The seeds need to be kept frozen. These shuttles won’t run forever.”

  Matron snorted. “Tell me about it. We’re gonna have to refuel somewhere between here and there. Hope you’ve got a place in mind.”

  “Just stick to the plan and don’t ask questions, Matron. You’ll live.”

  “You keep saying that. I keep not believing it.”

  Lucas ignored her in favor of Quinton’s sharp gaze. “I need Threnody.”

  “No.” Quinton stood up from the navigator’s seat. Threnody was curled up in the pilot’s seat, seemingly asleep, but at the sound of Lucas’s voice, she opened her eyes. She looked worse than she had before the fight.

  “You don’t have a choice.”

  Quinton put himself between her and Lucas. “She can’t handle whatever it is you need her to do.”

  “She survived a focused lightning strike. She can survive this. Move.”

  Quinton’s fist smashed against Lucas’s jaw hard enough to knock the other man on his ass. Pain stabbed through Lucas’s skull from the blow, blood trickling over his tongue from where he bit it. Black dots edged his vision, telepathy slip-sliding against his shaky shields. Lucas sucked in a deep breath, taking a few seconds to anchor his shields before anything else. Then he propped himself up on one elbow and glared at Quinton.

  “You’re starting to annoy me, Stryker.”

  “Quinton,” Threnody called out, pushing herself out of the seat. “Lucas—don’t.”

  Telekinesis yanked Quinton forward, slamming him onto the deck beside Lucas with enough force to knock him briefly unconscious. Lucas used those few seconds to roll over until he was crouched over Quinton, hands on either side of the pyrokinetic’s head.

  Wake up.

  The older man’s eyes jerked open as that harsh mental order stabbed into his mind. Blood dripped out of Lucas’s nose, falling onto Quinton’s cheek.

  “Still a bloody telepath, even with psi shock,” Lucas said, voice low and flat as he moved one hand to Quinton’s throat. “I’m not powerless here.”

  “Fuck you,” Quinton forced out between lips that barely moved, telekinesis holding him down.

  “We don’t have time for a hack. Threnody is the only one who can get us into the seed bank. And she will. You don’t get a say in the matter.”

  Lucas pressed his hand down hard against Quinton’s throat, feeling the ridges of the other man’s trachea roll against his palm. Quinton choked from the pressure, incapable of fighting back.

  Cool, shaking fingers pressed against the back of Lucas’s neck. He felt a faint, warning electric tingle against his skin. “Let him go, Lucas.”

  Be grateful Aisling needs your life, Lucas said into Threnody’s and Quinton’s minds. I would eradicate you if given the choice, Quinton.

  Lucas stood up, his telekinesis shifting off the other man. Quinton dragged in a ragged breath of air, shoving himself to a sitting position. Lucas bared his teeth at Threnody around a split lip. “Ladies first.”

  Threnody shook her head and walked away from him. Quinton got to his feet and followed Threnody to the cargo ramp. Lucas tracked their movement, watching as Quinton supported Threnody with a care he showed no one else.

  “Matron,” Lucas said. “Pick half your crew to come with us up the mountain. The rest can stay here and organize the shuttles for loading.”

  “You psions up to the task?” Matron said, eyeing them.

  “Worry about your own people.”

  Matron knew better than to argue and took herself out of the shuttle, yelling for Everett and Novak. Lucas focused his attention on his sisters and the other two Strykers as Quinton and Threnody argued in whispers near the cargo ramp.

  “Let’s go,” Lucas said.

  “Are you sure about this?” Kerr asked, glancing from Lucas to Threnody. “If all she’s doing is frying the system, won’t that trigger an alarm somewhere?”

  “The alarm would have to reroute through the outpost first, and Jason has done enough damage that it won’t get very far. No one outside of the highest reaches of the government knows about this place, and the government is busy dealing with the mess in Buffalo,” Lucas said. “The Strykers were never informed of this location, so a teleport can’t happen. The World Court won’t send a team by shuttle until it’s too late and we’ll be long gone by then. It’s still a calculated risk, but we’re taking it.”

  “And is using Threnody up a calculated risk?” Quinton asked harshly.

  “We’re all taking a risk here,” Threnody said. “Let it go, Quin.”

  Jason shook his head. “I don’t know if I can save Threnody again, Lucas. My first few attempts apparently didn’t take.”

  “Keep her breathing until we reach Antarctica, that’s all I need,” Lucas said. “I’ve got someone there who can help if it comes down to it.”

  Surprise flickered over Jason’s face. “Don’t tell me you’ve got black-market surgeons stashed all over the world?”

  “When I find useful people, I keep them.”

  “I’ve always liked your collections,” Kristen said as she skipped past them for the cargo ramp. Everyone followed her outside.

  Matron and ten of her scavengers were busy hauling three gravlifts off two shuttles. The machines were capable of carrying heavy loads on the flatbed, with lifts that cou
ld deposit the cargo on any given surface. Their max was half a ton, and they would be utilized as much as Jason’s telekinesis.

  “These are good,” Matron called out to Lucas as she hauled herself up into one of the gravlift control seats. “No damage on the flight out.”

  “You know how much of whatever’s in those vaults you want to load?” Everett asked as he climbed onto another gravlift. He sported a quick-heal patch over his left temple, having taken a minor beating on the flight out of Buffalo.

  “Half or more of everything the World Court is hiding in there,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah, you better hope we’ve got room.”

  “If we don’t, you stay behind.” Lucas climbed up onto the flatbed behind Matron and settled in for the ride. “Your scavengers need a refresher course on how to take orders.”

  Matron glanced at him over her shoulder. “I lost more’n half my crew getting your ass out of the fire back in Buffalo. Leave them alone.”

  The Strykers and Lucas’s sisters climbed up onto the flatbed, finding handholds along the edges where straps were coiled into shallow recesses. Kerr helped Quinton get Threnody on board, the two men working in silence to steady her and help her get comfortable. When they were ready, Matron started the gravlift and steered away from the airfield to the rarely used road.

  The incline wasn’t that steep, and the long, winding road seemed stable. The wedge of metal sticking out of the mountainside was covered in moss and seemed like part of the landscape. When they reached the level part of the road, they passed by the remnants of an old-fashioned gate off to one side, the rusted metal still visible. Up ahead, the dirt road curved until it cut parallel to the entrance of the metal wedge. The gravlifts were locked into a hovering line behind Matron’s lead when they arrived, the engines a soft hum in the chilly air.

  A faded logo could be seen on the side of the metal wedge: The Svalbard Global Seed and Gene Bank.

  “Why can’t we teleport inside?” Everett said as everyone started to climb off the gravlifts.

  “Teleporting requires a visual,” Kerr said as he watched Quinton and Jason help Threnody get her feet on the ground. To his eyes, she wasn’t looking too steady on her legs. “You can’t teleport to some place you’ve never been, not unless you want to end up embedded in a solid object.”