Strykers

by K. M. Ruiz

  Jael pushed a few thin dreads behind her ear, getting her hair out of her face. “Alive.”

  Quinton headed for the door without another word.

  “Where are you going?” Ciari said.

  “To get my partner. I doubt you’ve changed the cells in this place since we left.”

  He was gone before anyone could stop him. Lucas looked over at Jason. “Go with him.”

  “If her wounds are extensive enough that she needs my help again, we’d be better off with sticking her into a biotank,” Jason warned before hurrying after Quinton.

  Jason found the other man about to run down a team of Strykers standing guard outside Ciari’s office. They were refusing to let him pass. Before things got ugly, Jael came out and joined them, her presence alone guaranteeing their safety.

  “I’ll take you to Threnody,” Jael said. “Follow me.”

  It didn’t take that long to get to where they were holding Threnody, and the Strykers who saw them could only stare. Strangely, they didn’t pass any humans. Even Jael seemed surprised until Lucas’s telepathy crawled through their minds. I’m not risking our presence here. The Strykers will do what Ciari says regarding us. The humans assigned here only obey the government. They’re guards as much as they are employees of this Syndicate.

  What about the bioware nets? Jael asked.

  I didn’t touch their minds. Your Strykers are keeping them occupied elsewhere.

  Lucas disengaged his telepathy, leaving them alone. When they finally reached Threnody’s cell, Quinton wished Lucas hadn’t left so quickly. He’d have asked the other man to show the same sort of care Threnody had received to Jael.

  Quinton stared through the two-way viewing window at where his partner lay, trying to control his temper. “Open it.”

  “What happened here was protocol,” Jael said unapologetically. “We did what we had to do in order to protect ourselves.”

  Quinton shot her a murderous glare and shoved past her once she tapped in the code to open the door. Threnody was lying on her back, the clothes she wore filthy with vomit and bloodstains, an external neurocollar locked around her throat. Blood was dried on her face and in her hair, but Quinton didn’t hesitate when he touched a hand to her shoulder.

  “Thren.”

  “Took you long enough,” she croaked out, but no heat was in her tone.

  Jason knelt down on her other side as Threnody opened her eyes. “Thought I told you not to undo all my hard work?”

  She managed a tight smile. “Couldn’t help it.”

  Jael leaned over and pressed her thumb to the sensor lock on Threnody’s neurocollar. The biometrics read her print and it unlocked. Jael got out of the way so Quinton could carefully pry the restraint off, pulling the bioware-tipped needles out of Threnody’s skin and spine as carefully as he could. He tossed the neurocollar aside, hearing it clatter against the floor somewhere behind him.

  Jason rested his fingers against the back of Threnody’s hand and let his power sink into her body. His vision layered itself to countless degrees of magnification, creating a kind of vertigo that made his stomach heave as he felt the damage in Threnody’s body along his own nerves.

  “Ribs,” he said clinically. “They’re bruised and cracked, but not broken. Nothing that would account for the blood.”

  “You’ll need Lucas for that.” Threnody coughed. “They broke all my shields. His is the only one I’ve got left.”

  “Bastards. All right, hold still. You’re lucky I got all that practice working on Quinton’s face and arms.”

  Jason knit bone back together quicker than he had with Quinton. Practice and use was going a long way to showing him how this was supposed to work. It was like building something tangible with his hands, only he was using his mind to reshape cells. Jason didn’t have any nanites this time to guide him, but he was beginning to realize he didn’t need them.

  Threnody finally took in a deep, unlabored breath and turned her hand over to squeeze Jason’s. “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  Quinton helped Threnody to a sitting position, supporting most of her weight. “You need a shower and some rest.”

  “I want a shower and some rest. I need to know what’s happening.” Threnody rubbed carefully at her throat and the small holes leaking blood there. “Get me up, Quin.”

  Between Jason and Quinton, they got Threnody to her feet. Threnody bared her teeth at Jael in a smile when she saw the other woman. Jael didn’t seem bothered by the animosity.

  “You should have asked,” Threnody said. “I would have told you the truth.”

  “Maybe you should have let me into your mind,” Jael retorted.

  Threnody turned her head to look at Quinton. “Take me to Lucas.”

  [TWENTY-NINE]

  SEPTEMBER 2379

  LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM

  Nathan stared down at the limp form of his son on the medical bed, studying the stress and agony lines that ravaged Gideon’s young face. His mind wasn’t much better, a jagged mess of broken thoughts and missing memory. When Gideon had teleported into the Warhound arrival room, Nathan was forced to abandon his job overseeing the last of the seed bank transfers from his Syndicate in London to Paris and help save his only remaining child.

  The damage Lucas had done to Gideon’s mind was uniquely twisted, but had echoes of Nathan all throughout. Nathan had trained Lucas extensively in the capabilities of a Class I power and he had learned those lessons well. This torture went deep, seemingly cutting out the most recent memories stored in the short term before widening out for days, sometimes weeks past. Nathan wondered about that. Wondered just what his oldest son was trying to hide that Gideon had found out—and now no longer knew.

  No answers were to be found in Gideon’s mind. Nathan stopped the mindwipe from doing any more damage, but he couldn’t fix what was already torn apart. Lucas knew the value in total eradication, and that’s what he’d attempted here. It was sheer luck that Gideon managed to make it back to London, luck that had a name: Samantha. Her act of guilty compassion stood out in bright relief in Gideon’s mind, the thing he’d clung to in order to escape. It didn’t absolve her.

  Nathan stood with his hands in the pockets of his suit jacket and closed his eyes, thinking about his options and how little time he had left. The Genome Privacy Act he’d lobbied for weeks ago merely legalized actions taken by his family over decades at the behest of the World Court. It enabled him to search out unregistered humans without needing to hide his actions anymore.

  Nathan was supposed to have weeks left to seed the Registry with targeted, unregistered humans who had unclean DNA. They were essential to his plans for Mars Colony, because high-Classed psions only came from the dregs of humanity. He’d been planning to have Gideon help him coordinate the movements of all those people and the Warhounds to the launch site, but now it fell on him alone, as it always did.

  I wonder, Marcheline, Nathan thought, thinking of his long-deceased mother, if you realized you were throwing everything away when you demanded I breed four children instead of just one.

  She’d forced him to break with tradition, ignoring the personal bylaws that the Serca family ran on. It didn’t matter, not anymore. Marcheline died years ago and Nathan was left dealing with the fallout of her orders—three lost children and one damaged heir.

  Nathan opened his eyes and dipped his mind into Gideon’s to wake him. I need you to focus, Gideon.

  Dark blue eyes opened slowly, a faint glint of silver staining their depths. Nathan had seen that gleam before, in Kristen, a warning sign of impending insanity. “Father?”

  More a question, not really recognition. Nathan grimaced. “On your feet.”

  Gideon slowly pushed himself to a sitting position before swinging his legs over the edge of the bed. “What happened?”

  He didn’t know, his mind a jumbled mess of fractured memories. Nathan didn’t have the time to help Gideon sort it all out. The blank spots Nat
han could feel in Gideon’s mind were hard to accept, but he couldn’t replace what had forcibly been lost.

  “The details are in there,” Nathan said, removing a hand from his pocket to point at the datapad sitting on the nearby table. “You can review it later. Right now, we need to move.”

  Gideon stood up on shaky legs, squeezing his eyes shut as a headache jolted through his skull. He blindly reached for the datapad. “I can’t—where’s Samantha? I can’t feel her.”

  Confusion filled his voice, but no panic. No sense of the permeating ache Nathan had felt in Gideon’s mind since Samantha’s defection.

  “I’m not concerned about your twin.” Nathan looked over Gideon’s shoulder at his new CMO, Hu Yin. The Class IV telepath stepped forward and firmly took hold of Gideon’s arm, giving him support.

  “I have his mind shielded,” Hu said, his telepathic presence in Gideon’s mind hard to miss. Hu carried a heavy medical trauma kit in his other hand. Trunks were stacked behind him, some bearing the international symbol of the Red Cross, still used by those who worked in the medical field, be they human or psion.

  Nathan closed his eyes, blocking out everything.

  Sharra, Nathan said, reaching for Erik’s wife through an increasingly volatile mental grid. Open your eyes to me.

  The psi link they shared, thin and tenuous and part of her registered baseline, pulled stronger. Nathan saw the inside of a private waiting room that lacked any adornments and housed only chairs. He sensed people around her, just a few political aides and technicians. More than that, he sensed Dalia, his human spy.

  Visual established, Nathan teleported himself, Gideon, and Hu into the room Sharra waited in at the Command Center above the flood of wastewater in Paris. The humans weren’t expecting his arrival, but it didn’t matter. Nathan telepathically put them to sleep where they sat, Dalia catching the only one who was standing. She dragged the heavier man over to a rickety chair.

  “Nathan,” Sharra said in a shaky voice as she held Lillian tighter, her daughter suddenly dead weight in her arms. Her blue eyes skated past him, taking in the sight of Gideon and Hu. She’d seen enough wounded psions in her life to know that Gideon was hurting.

  “Dalia, lock the door,” Nathan ordered.

  “Are things that bad out there?” Sharra said as Nathan gestured Hu to take care of Gideon.

  “The fact that you don’t know means that you simply don’t care.”

  Sharra swallowed and moved to lay Lillian down on the floor, on top of a small blanket that looked as if it came from the child’s bed. She smoothed back some of her daughter’s hair before straightening up again.

  Nathan watched her, the look in his eyes flat. “When is Erik joining you?”

  “I don’t know. He and the rest of the justices are still at The Hague.” Sharra tugged at the collar of her blouse, biting her lip. “The transfers are picking up, but they’re still far under the numbers the World Court hoped to move. The launch was supposed to take weeks, not days. They’re working to ensure enough of us get out before the riots get out of hand.”

  “So he’s still trying to position himself as the savior of the world,” Nathan said contemptuously.

  “We wouldn’t be in this situation if you had controlled your children.”

  Nathan reached for her, not with his hands, but with his mind. I’m of the opinion that this insolence in our children comes from your side of the family.

  He telekinetically slammed her down into the nearest chair with enough force to bruise her tailbone. Biting back a cry of pain, Sharra held herself still. She knew better than to fight, not here.

  I got what I bargained for, Sharra thought bitterly as Nathan approached. A bargain between a psion and a human was never really a bargain. She had learned that lesson late in life, but she still learned it.

  “Yes, you did,” Nathan said, reading her thoughts. “Survival. I know the new timeline for the launch. I was notified when Erik authorized the changes. That infiltration program you set up on my orders proved useful, like yourself.”

  “What do you want?”

  Nathan tilted her chin up with his hand, releasing his power. She could move, but Sharra didn’t dare. “You’ll be taking Gideon with you on your assigned space shuttle. Remove someone else if you have to, but he is going with you.”

  Terror filled her mind, worry for her daughter an almost overriding partner to it. Sharra glanced down at where Lillian lay on the ground. She was a small thing, skinny, like her mother. Lillian was going to grow up beautiful, if she grew up at all.

  “I wanted a life for her on Mars Colony,” Sharra said desperately. “That’s all I ever wanted.”

  “A mother’s instinct and a mother’s love. I can honestly say I’ve never felt either.”

  “That’s because your mother was a monster.”

  Sharra remembered Marcheline only too well, remembered the paralyzing fear that always wracked her whenever the woman entered her prison cell in the Serca Syndicate all those years ago. Freedom from the streets meant wearing a golden collar in a gilded cage. City towers weren’t all that much better than the gutter. Mars Colony was supposed to be the answer. Maybe it wasn’t.

  Gideon had never cared for the human side of his genes. It stood to reason he wouldn’t care about his half sister. Sharra didn’t want to lose Lillian.

  “One of the few things we’ll ever agree on,” Nathan said. “I don’t expect you to care about Gideon, but I know you’ll care about your own life. Keep Gideon with your retinue until I get up there. Don’t let anyone put you or him into cryo sleep.”

  “I wasn’t planning on going through the procedure until Erik arrived on the Ark.”

  Nathan’s smile was slight and condescending. “Keep being that dutiful wife, Sharra.”

  She jerked her chin up, finding a sense of defiance from somewhere. “I never regretted becoming this.”

  “No, you just regretted never knowing if Erik loved you. Would you like to find out?”

  “Damn you.”

  She had always wondered—would always wonder—if it was Erik’s own feelings or Nathan’s psionic interference that existed in their marriage. The kind of courage it took to claw her way out of the streets of London was different from the strength it took to tear apart her carefully crafted second life.

  Sharra was brave, but she wasn’t stupid.

  “Live with what you’ve made,” Nathan said, taking a step back. “And get my son off this planet.”

  All Sharra could do was obey.

  “Dalia,” Nathan said. “Make sure they get on the next space shuttle.”

  The uniformed woman with an unremarkable face only nodded. “Of course, sir.”

  Nathan teleported out, the only one to leave. Those people rendered unconscious during Nathan’s arrival snapped back to awareness, none the wiser of their brief blackout. Neither did they ask questions of the two newest faces in the room, Nathan having erased their curiosity and implanted new memories. Lillian stirred at Sharra’s feet, and Sharra bent to pick up her daughter and pull the girl onto her lap.

  “I fell asleep?” Lillian asked, yawning through the question. She rubbed at her face with one small hand, looking and sounding grumpy. All her toys were packed away and she was bored.

  Sharra tucked Lillian’s head under her chin and closed her eyes. “Just for a little while.”

  She rocked her daughter in her arms, thinking about what it took for her to reach this moment. From the streets of London to the isolated glitter of The Hague. From the launch out of Paris, then the flight to the moon and the colony ship there by way of space shuttles painstakingly reverse engineered from those left behind after the burgeoning age of space was destroyed by bombs.

  For far longer than the length of Sharra’s life, the government had been making careful forays into space to hone the skills needed for this venture and to bring the Ark back online for their escape. So much effort, so much deceit, so much hope placed over the decades for
the safety and survival of the human race onto the shoulders of the men and women who ascended to the World Court.

  All of it useless in the face of the Serca family’s machinations and desire for the same freedom Sharra and those like her wanted.

  “Sharra.”

  She grimaced at her name coming from her son’s mouth. “What?”

  “I’m not going with you.”

  She opened her eyes and lifted her head in shock. “But Nathan—”

  Sharra never finished her sentence, much less her thought. A foreign telepathic touch invaded her mind, ignoring the risk of being discovered by the bioware net. It didn’t matter anymore. Her orders didn’t matter because she no longer remembered Nathan delivering them.

  Sharra blinked, staring dazedly around the room, wincing against the tension headache that pounded through her head. The woman charged by Nathan to look after them approached and nodded down at Sharra and Lillian. Dalia looked how Sharra felt. “Let’s get you on a space shuttle, Mrs. Gervais.”

  Sharra nodded and stood with Lillian in her arms. It took several minutes for everyone to get organized and leave the room. The small group was met in the hallway by a scientist who took them to the ready room being used for the more important transfers. They were helped into space suits by a dozen workers, bodies wrapped in an enclosed environment that made Sharra feel claustrophobic. She held Lillian’s hand tightly in hers and followed every order given to her.

  Dalia walked them to the small dock shuttle and helped them get settled before letting the pilot know they were ready. The jaunt to their assigned space shuttle was short. The dock shuttle locked into place against a shielded transport tube and the hatch opened. Sharra took in a heavy breath and undid her harness, then Lillian’s. One step, then another, took her closer and closer to an escape she wasn’t sure would save them.

  “Mama?” Lillian said as they were escorted into the space shuttle by its crew. “I’m scared.”

  Sharra knelt in front of her daughter and framed the child-size helmet with her hands. She managed to dredge up a smile from somewhere. “I know. But everything’s going to be fine. Be my brave little girl, darling. I’ll be right here with you.”