by K. M. Ruiz
Going into that meeting alone would raise questions, but it couldn’t be helped. Nathan didn’t have the time or the tools to cut his way past two dozen bioware nets in a day and alter minds, even with help. Psionic interference would tip too many people off, and at this juncture that was the very last thing he needed.
“When does the meeting take place?” Victoria asked.
“The end of next week unless circumstances dictate otherwise. I’m sending Gideon out before then.”
Victoria managed to hide most of her wince, the only sign being a faint tic at the left side of her mouth. It was a difficult task, but she could accomplish it if she disregarded her own health in favor of Nathan’s son’s. She would, because she, like everyone else in the Warhound ranks, knew that the Serca family was the only thing standing between them and government enslavement.
“He’ll be ready,” Victoria said, staking her life on that promise.
“Excellent. Now, what of the Strykers that were seen with Lucas? Do we have any eyewitness reports?”
Victoria consulted her notes. “Gideon’s memories are intact. He tortured a pyrokinetic Stryker inside the power plant. The electrokinetic partnered with that Stryker was seen entering the power plant, but her condition is unknown. We think she may have been involved with Jin Li’s death and with what happened to the electrical grid. The telepath was merged with Lucas and no one saw the telekinetic.”
“Do we have any information of what may have caused the near breaking of the mental grid?”
“No.” Victoria glanced up. “Sir, do you have any thoughts on the matter?”
Nathan drummed his fingers once against the armrests of his chair, gazing past her. “During her fight in the Slums, Samantha discovered that a Stryker still had intact natal shields, but could use his power.”
Victoria’s expression became incredulous. “That’s impossible. Natal shields always fall within the first two to three years after birth so we can access our powers. If they don’t fall, we can’t access our powers. That is a documented fact, sir.”
“Apparently not for this particular Stryker. Our records indicate that Jason Garret is a Class V telekinetic who can teleport. We can add to them that he has intact natal shields. The question we’re left with is what would happen if those shields fell? What are they holding back?”
“Do you think it was him, sir?”
Nathan had been thinking about the question endlessly since Buffalo started running at full power. “I think it’s a possibility.”
“Will we be looking into it?”
“I will be.” Nathan dismissed her with a wave of his hand. “Go finish your work on Gideon.”
Victoria left, the door sliding shut behind her. Nathan allowed himself a moment of personal, frustrated bitterness at the position his children had put him in. He hadn’t wanted more than one child, but Marcheline had ordered him to create more. His mother died years ago, and Nathan felt he could blame her for this mess. Fighting his own family right now was a distraction he didn’t need, not when the only thing that should be occupying his attention was the scheduled launch. Nathan refused to let his ancestors’ plan wither and die all because of a few spoiled children who refused to learn their place.
Except their rebellion was undermining his control.
How had Lucas discovered and kept hidden a psion of such incredible strength? Nathan had been in and out of Lucas’s mind for years. Lucas shouldn’t have been capable of deceit. If the Warhound ranks had a traitor, however inconceivable the thought, then Nathan knew he would never find the person. Like Nathan and all Sercas before them both, Lucas would kill to keep his secrets. Nathan doubted he’d find even a memory of the traitor. Two years of searching had proven that conclusion as fact.
Nathan grimaced. Doubting his powers and his Syndicate right now would be disastrous. He needed Gideon in the field, searching out that new target. Being introduced as the new face of the Serca Syndicate would have to come later. Jin Li’s death meant Nathan had a hole in the Warhound ranks that needed to be filled, and quickly. The world press kept demanding a statement from Nathan, not just his Syndicate’s official publicist, on what had transpired in Buffalo. Nathan wasn’t going to cave to their demands, not yet. There was a lot to do, with little time to do it in, and too few people he could trust to get it done right.
The mental grid dipped beyond his shields, a psi signature sparking bright and high far away on the psychic plane. The presence of another mind brushed against his. Nathan recognized the orderly thoughts of a psion who lacked the impression of a static human mind, which told him it wasn’t a Warhound asking for a link. Nearly all Warhounds were shielded as human to some degree in order to hide. Strykers didn’t have that luxury.
Aidan, Nathan acknowledged, initiating a psi link between himself and the Strykers Syndicate’s third-in-command. To what do I owe this lovely little chat?
You already know, Aidan said, voice empty of all emotion. Nathan could still feel the ripple of the other man’s mind, how it strained against his own power. We require a meeting.
You require? I’d rather you beg.
Nathan. Aidan paused, the pull of his mind weakening slightly as he conversed on a separate psi link with someone else. Finally, the Stryker said, Please.
Any other time it would have amused Nathan. Today, it only irritated him, but he had appearances to keep up. Keiko knows what my office looks like.
She’d been in it before, ferrying Ciari from wherever the Stryker OIC might have been, on the pretense of negotiating a contract to hide their true reasons for meeting with him. Only in The Hague, when they were in the same city together, did Nathan purposefully keep a mental feeler out, waiting to hear from her. Ciari wasn’t with Keiko this time; she had Aidan. It was a mistake on her part, even if she didn’t know it. She should have brought an empath.
They arrived before his desk in a teleport, and a red alert popped up at the bottom of the vidscreen. Nathan disengaged it. Security still called in.
“Sir,” someone said over the uplink. “Is everything all right?”
“Only some visitors. Nothing to be concerned about.”
“Sir.”
The connection cut off and Nathan took in the pair’s tired appearance with a keen eye. “I expected you earlier than this.”
“We’re under stricter monitoring by the World Court,” Keiko said.
“They’re a little behind the mark, don’t you think?” Nathan said. “If I’m dealing with you, I suspect Ciari’s closer to dead after that little stunt Erik pulled. Such an entertaining show.”
“She’s alive.”
“And yet, she isn’t here.” Nathan leaned forward and turned off the vidscreen. “I know what the World Court has planned for your people, Keiko. Their salvation has always been the duty of your OIC. Did the World Court change its mind, or are you still the Acting OIC?”
Keiko lifted her chin higher. “I am.”
“Congratulations. I doubt you’ll live as long as Ciari did in that post.” Nathan’s eyes flickered from one to the other. “If the World Court knew where your true loyalties lie, they would have terminated you all. I can’t have that happen before the launch.”
“Strykers are excellent liars, Nathan. We have to be.” Keiko paused, weighing her next words. “Things have changed since our conversation weeks ago at The Hague. You know why we’re here.”
“You came here hoping to bleed off more of your people into the Warhound ranks.”
“Yes.”
“A wasted effort.” Nathan lifted a hand to forestall any argument. “I don’t have time to retrieve the amount of psions you want to rescue. What you’re asking for would raise the World Court’s suspicion in a way I refuse to accept before the launch. That action would get you all killed via mass termination and you know it.”
The World Court was ignorant of the Silence Law that secretly tied the two Syndicates together. Only the highest-ranking Strykers Syndicate officers knew that
the Serca family wasn’t human. Their silence on the matter guaranteed the survival of certain rank-and-file Strykers. Suicide missions handed out by the World Court were altered into Warhound retrievals by the Strykers Syndicate OIC. Those saved Strykers were then reconditioned by the Warhounds for the Serca family’s own use.
Those transfers were done with utmost care, the image of Strykers fighting for their lives against the enemy needing to be upheld until they were brought under Serca control. Freedom, of a sort. No neurotracker in their brain, but they were still required to obey strict rules if they wanted to survive under the government’s radar. They lived longer in the Serca Syndicate—usually.
“You still need some of us,” Keiko said. She took a half step forward, Aidan staying by her side. “You need a wider gene pool than you’ve got.”
“You are less the conniving bitch than Ciari is, so don’t think you can bargain where she failed. Our partnership will be terminated at the launch,” Nathan said. “You have known that since you took the post of chief operating officer for your Syndicate, Keiko.”
“We’ve kept your family in the clear,” Aidan snapped. “You owe us.”
Nathan got to his feet, letting his mind weigh heavily against theirs as he approached Keiko. He smiled down at her, his expression all teeth and utter contempt. “The same can be said of you. I am, however, not completely heartless.”
Keiko snorted her opinion of that.
“You have people you still want to save. I can admire that, Keiko.”
“You admire nothing that doesn’t happen on your orders,” she said.
“True, but I can make room on the last wave of shuttles if I want. I will give those seats up only to the Strykers that I find useful.”
“And those would be?”
“Every kind of psion at a Class III and higher—excluding you officers.” Nathan’s smile got fractionally wider. “I don’t need a rebellion within my own company.”
“The question is, will you keep your word?” Aidan said.
Nathan—three Class levels higher and thirty times stronger than the other man—stabbed his telepathy outward and coiled it tight around Aidan’s mental shields. Aidan’s defenses were good, but he couldn’t prepare for Nathan’s skill. Nathan might not have the years of use under his belt that other psions did, but his strength was something only Lucas could match.
“I don’t like being questioned,” Nathan said as he telekinetically forced Aidan to his knees, telepathy ripping through the other man’s mind. “You don’t rule here, Stryker.”
“Let him go,” Keiko demanded.
Nathan could feel her telekinesis slam against his own shields, scraping over his defenses. He sharpened his power against her, holding her back. Sharpened his telepathy until it sheared off half of Aidan’s mental shields, causing the younger man to shudder, blood dripping from his nose.
“This is my only and final offer,” Nathan said, twisting his power through Aidan’s thoughts. “Whether or not you accept it, I still expect your silence on the matter of my family.”
“So, you live and we die?” Aidan gasped out, shields caving beneath the pressure of Nathan’s telepathy. “Is that it?”
“That is how it has always been. Don’t fool yourself into believing otherwise. You won’t live to see Mars Colony, to take part in what my family has worked to build. Even Ciari accepted that.”
“No matter the amount of unregistered humans that you substitute for those who should have a berth on the Ark, you won’t have enough to breed psions out of them,” Keiko said. “Let him go. Please.”
“So little faith, Keiko. You’re all about filling Ciari’s shoes, aren’t you?” Nathan wrenched his telepathy out of Aidan’s mind, leaving behind raw mental wounds. “I’ll have what I need.”
Keiko’s lips curled back from her teeth as she bent to help Aidan up. “Fuck you, Nathan.”
The smile on Nathan’s face got fractionally wider as he felt her pull back her telekinesis. “Your jealousy is showing. Find yourself an empath instead of a telepath next time. I’d have thought you learned something from Ciari other than how to argue futilely. It seems I was wrong.”
Keiko swallowed her anger and the desire to strike out. It wouldn’t solve anything here. “My loyalty to Ciari was never in question. Her loyalty to the Silence Law has never been in doubt. The only transgressions here are yours.” Keiko’s mouth twisted as she slung Aidan’s arm over her shoulder. “We’ll consider your offer.”
“An empath, Keiko. You need one. Now get out of my office.”
In an eye blink, they were gone.
Nathan returned to his desk, accessing the system again. A new download had come in last night that he needed to deal with. Sharra, given enough incentive, managed to accomplish the impossible some days. Who would have thought a human could be so much more useful than his own children?
Sharra had sent along two files. The first was confirmation of the back door now embedded in Erik’s personal computer system, where the most sensitive data on the upcoming launch was stored. Nathan forwarded that to the hackers in his Syndicate, whose job it would be to monitor and retrieve information. The second download was pure data.
He initiated an uplink with the records division of the Warhounds. “Get me everything we have on the Stryker known as Jason Garret. Check Samantha Serca’s reports first, then supplement it with nonduplicative files. I want it within the hour.”
“Sir.”
Retrievals were done at his discretion, no matter how hard Ciari had lobbied for the saving of her people in the past. Nathan could leave Earth without the psion Lucas had discovered, but he didn’t want to. The explosion on the mental grid after the fight in Buffalo must have been the breaking of Jason’s natal shields. Samantha’s last useful act was discovering that Stryker’s unique shields, but it wasn’t enough to keep her alive now that she had turned traitor.
A window popped up on the vidscreen again, stating that the second download was complete. Nathan opened the file and scrolled through the latest schematics of the Ark that lay docked in cold space behind the moon, its decks just waiting to be filled.
[ELEVEN]
SEPTEMBER 2379
PARIS, FRANCE
The Border Wars were instigated by first-world countries, so it was no great shock when they were the first casualties. France was hit hard, situated between countries that suffered just as badly. That nation had owned a stockpile of nuclear bombs at the beginning of the five-year stretch of war, all the excuse anyone needed to attack. Retaliation was inevitable for every country on Earth, in whatever way possible. France was no different in its response, and like many countries, it was wiped off the map by the end of the Border Wars.
Deadzones still covered the European continent, areas where nuclear fallout and lingering radiation made it impossible for life to take back the land. The Paris Basin was a toxic pit, a concentrated mess of pollution and nuclear taint that no one could live in. The Seine, that ancient waterway that carved through France, was a poisonous water route that twisted through and around the ruins of the city. Massive dams that had once graced the banks downriver to hold back the Atlantic Ocean had been destroyed or eroded over time. Salt water inevitably flowed into fresh, seeping deep into dirt to mix with toxic runoff. Pools of water and crawling fog were stained an eerie green.
Paris—flooded, abandoned, and lost—stretched out before Dalia in the early-afternoon sunlight. Dalia was one of Nathan’s best spies, a human capable of taking on any identity and owning it for the duration of her mission. She was unremarkable to look at, easily forgotten once she finished a job. Switching identities and appearances to gain information was her life, and Nathan owned all of them.
Squinting through the brightness of a clear, near-autumn day, Dalia scratched at the skin where the collar of her uniform rubbed against her throat. Beneath it, she wore a skinsuit specially tailored to block the lingering radiation in the Paris Basin. Her hard helmet was on the floor
by her seat. People could work without a skinsuit, as bondworkers did, but the radiation levels were still high enough to damage DNA. The government’s Command Center was specially shielded, but people always took precautions.
The threat of certain death and ruined DNA kept people out of France, or should have. When records of Mars Colony, with its massive enclosed habitat, made their way back into the awareness of the surviving government, getting there became the number one priority. Surviving meant more than simply clawing one’s way into the Registry by any means necessary. It meant preparing to take up the mantle of a progressive society once again. The results of that effort stood before her beyond the Command Center, reflecting sunlight.
Platforms, hundreds of them, stood above the wastewater and ruins, all holding space shuttles. Running through the middle of those platforms was a long launch ramp that curved into the sky. Built by government scientists and enslaved bondworkers, shielded against lingering nuclear taint, the shuttles were waiting to be filled by those lucky enough to be in the Registry.
“Shuttle Prime, this is Command, do you copy, over,” the government’s head of operations said into an uplink where he stood some meters away from Dalia.
“We copy, over,” the pilot said.
Dalia trained her eyes back on the vidscreen in front of her instead of the view beyond the large plasglass windows. Her role here was in operations, just one of many bodies contracted out of government-controlled scientific divisions. She’d worn her latest identity as a scientist before, just not here. Studying the vidscreen, Dalia watched the shuttle’s system come online, the same information showing on other terminals.
“Weather looks like it’s holding. We’ve got clearance for launch, over.”
“Copy that, Command, over.”
“Begin preflight calibration and start countdown, over.”
The countdown went smoothly, months of practice simulations enabling the crew to launch on time and without difficulty. The shuttle roared down the curved ramp, thrusters burning a bright line through the sky as it launched, smoke and vapor trailing in its wake. This was one of the larger shuttles, capable of carrying three hundred people and supplies. Today, it carried only three-quarters of a full load as it fought gravity and left Earth behind, the shuttle’s route rigidly plotted on the vidscreens in the command room.