by K. M. Ruiz
One of the Warhounds nodded sharply at the order, and Nathan headed for the command room. He pulled his suit jacket straight as he walked back into chaos. The grating static of human thoughts beat against his mental shields as he took up his post next to the command terminal manned by the head of operations.
“Jets are confirming no response from those shuttles, sir,” someone told the man in charge. “We’re starting to lose uplinks with the jets as they approach the targets.”
“What do you mean we’re losing uplinks?” the government officer demanded.
“They’re disappearing from the security grid.”
“Do we have a visual?”
“Negative.”
“Why the hell not? Get me that goddamn visual!” The assistant ran off to obey and Nathan took his place. The officer didn’t look up from his terminal. “You shouldn’t be here, sir. Grab a quad and have them take you to the space shuttle we’re readying for launch. We need to get you off this planet.”
“I can’t leave just yet,” Nathan said.
“If I have to haul you onto that space shuttle in cuffs, I’ll do it. We need you alive, sir.”
“Yes, but that won’t happen if those incoming shuttles aren’t stopped. You have no clue who you’re dealing with.”
The officer scowled and waved over a quad. “I don’t have time to listen to politicians. They’re taking you to a shielded transport shuttle and putting your ass on the next space shuttle in the launch queue.”
The first soldier to lay a hand on Nathan got his arm broken, and the breaking didn’t stop until the screaming man was a mutilated mass of pulpy flesh and shattered bone lying on the floor. It took only a minute for the man to die, but it seemed like eternity to those watching. Nathan stared disdainfully at the dead man and tugged his suit sleeve straight.
“Don’t presume to tell me what to do,” Nathan said, raising his eyes to meet the officer’s shocked and uncertain gaze. “I don’t take orders from humans. Not anymore.”
Words died on the man’s lips as Nathan telekinetically broke his neck. Another body hit the floor and Nathan tossed it aside, clearing the way for him to take control of the command room. He could feel the rising panic in the large room, fear meshing into a ragged mob mentality that would have left him short of needed people for the controls.
The Warhound telepaths and empaths that entered the command room took care of that for him, brutally mindwiping the humans of their fear and panic. The mindwipe kept the basic pattern of human thoughts intact, leaving them with the ability to still function and do their duty. They were essentially puppets now, with bodies going through directed motions, all except Dalia.
She rose from her seat and crossed the room to take the second-in-command position one terminal down from Nathan. “Bringing up the visual you wanted, sir,” she said crisply, hands flying over the controls in front of her.
Nathan nodded, hands resting on the edge of the command terminal as his eyes flicked across the vidscreens and hologrid. The Warhounds settled themselves where they could, minds sliding into a pulsating merge that hovered near the back of Nathan’s mind.
A visual finally came up, taken from a security feed two kilometers away. The remains of fighter jets burned in the broken streets of Paris, smoke curling black and ugly into the sky. Strykers were already on the ground, moving around the wreckage. Nathan licked sweat off his upper lip before merging with the waiting Warhounds, taking the apex position in that grouping of minds and power.
Don’t let them near the launch area, he said. The order burned across the mental grid, reverberating and branding itself into every Warhound mind he could reach. Our priority is protecting the space shuttles. We can’t let them gain access to even a single one.
“Dalia,” Nathan said. He stared through the information scrolling across his terminal, feeling sweat sliding down the back of his neck, following the curve of his spine. “Keep the launches going. I want—”
He broke off as a familiar mind spiked on the mental grid, the psi signature one he didn’t think he’d ever feel on this planet again. Nathan jerked his head around, staring in anger and shock as Gideon leaned against the side of the command terminal, face calm.
“Nathan,” Gideon said.
“Why the hell aren’t you on the Ark?” Nathan demanded. “I need you off this goddamn planet, Gideon.”
“I have what you need.”
Nathan stared at him in disbelief, noting the soft silver gleam that stained his son’s dark blue eyes. “Lucas nearly burned out your mind. You’ve got holes in your memory. You don’t even know what to look for.”
“Lucas didn’t destroy everything.” Gideon slid a hand through his hair and pulled, the action one of Kristen’s habits. “There’s an echo in my head. Where Samantha used to be.”
Nathan didn’t ask for permission before entering his son’s mind, sifting carefully through broken thoughts for the scar that was left of the psi link Gideon once shared with his twin. Tangled through its raw layers were pieces of memory, transferred from Samantha in that moment when she saved Gideon at the Strykers Syndicate. Nathan saw it and carefully mapped out a large fragment of a psi signature that didn’t belong to either of his children.
“How did I miss this?” Nathan said.
“We’re twins. We can’t remain apart forever.” Gideon smiled slowly, the curve of his mouth tight and forced. “You always did fear insanity, but it’s all that’s left for you now.”
Nathan couldn’t deny that fact. “Suit up, Gideon. You’re right. I’m going to need your help to stop Lucas.”
[FORTY]
SEPTEMBER 2379
PARIS, FRANCE
The shuttles landed in the streets of Paris, between the remains of bombed-out buildings and away from the wastewater that flowed through the Seine. It was as close as the Strykers could get to the launch area without running up against Warhound telekinetic shields. If the Strykers didn’t land, they risked ending up like the military jets, blown to pieces after hitting a barrier their instruments couldn’t pick up.
The rest of the fighting was taking place on the ground, in the middle of a deadzone with toxicity levels that were still dangerous, even to psions. The two-pronged push came from the west and the north, both Stryker groups filled with telekinetics, pyrokinetics, and a few dozen telepaths not drafted into the Stryker merge.
They outnumbered the Warhounds by a decent margin, but that didn’t mean anything. Most of the Warhounds were higher-Classed psions than the Strykers, and all of them knew how to merge. The crushing telekinetic blow that slammed into the Stryker ranks coming from the west tore through weaker shields, throwing people to the ground with bone-breaking force.
Jason anchored his telekinetic shield with all his Class 0 strength against the Warhound merge. His shield wavered beneath the heavy weight of foreign power, but didn’t break. Swearing, Jason shoved his power forward at breakneck speed to clear the street ahead of them. Beside him, Quinton had a fireball formed, the crackling flame joined by dozens of others as pyrokinetics prepared to attack.
“Dropping shields,” Jason shouted. “Go!”
A firestorm ripped down the street, riding gas and burning through debris to add fuel to the fire. The pyrokinetics forced the fire to burn white-hot on its way to their targets. They came up short against telekinetic shields, but the fire served as a needed distraction. The Strykers had numbers on their side, and the hundreds of mental strikes started to slowly bog down the merged Warhound telekinetics. Some shields caved, sending Warhounds to their knees on the street, screaming from severe psionic overload in their minds.
The Strykers kept searching for weak spots, struggling to find a way into the center core of that power. They found some with Lucas’s help, his guidance enabling them to shatter pieces of the merge and, with it, some of the Warhounds’ concentration. The telekinetic shields in their immediate area disappeared and the fire consumed Warhounds.
Screams echoed in
the air, along with the stench of burning human flesh, but the Strykers ignored both on their push forward. Quinton looked over his shoulder to where Lucas ran, dark blue eyes like holes in his face behind the helmet of his skinsuit. Blood slid out of his nose in a thin trickle. He was skirting a line of mental damage far beyond psi shock by being here on the ground, but he had no choice. Lucas was commanding this battle, and if he was on the field, Nathan wouldn’t be looking for an attack anywhere else.
“Can you handle this?” Quinton asked as he adjusted the grip on his pulse-rifle. The strap was slung across his chest; he’d let the rifle go in order to use his power.
“Don’t question my judgment,” Lucas said.
“I’m not. You got us this far, but if you’re dead, we’re fucked.”
Lucas waved at Quinton. “We have to keep moving.”
Quinton took him at his word and lengthened his stride as Jason picked up the pace, pulse-rifle gripped in both hands. Everyone was loaded down with weapons for this fight, but half the Strykers on the field treated them as an afterthought. Telekinetics were guilty of that mind-set more than others, used to relying on the physical force of their power over the guns in their hands.
The sun beat down on them through a partially cloudy sky, smoke warping their line of sight. Telekinetics wrapped layered shields around everyone as they double-timed it down the street. The mental grid was like a warzone beyond every Stryker and Warhound shield, telepathic and empathic strikes ripping against hundreds of minds. The constant mental attacks wore down everyone’s defenses, with shields slipping beneath the weight of focused power. Once those shields slipped, the minds behind them were torn to pieces. Lucas’s merge of telepaths was holding off a good many Warhound strikes, but the distance between London and Paris put them at a disadvantage.
You should have let us onto the field, Samantha said through the psi link that tied her to Lucas. Here, catch the next layer.
Power slid through his mind, bolstering his Class I strength, burning against the edges of his shields. The faint hint of pain was caught by Kristen and locked down somewhere that Lucas couldn’t reach. His sisters were like twin spots of brightness buried in his mind. Kristen’s presence was chaotic and distracting, her empathy pulling at his mind in ways it didn’t want to bend, but had no choice but to accept. Samantha was a mental bridge between Lucas and the Strykers in London, linked beyond that to other Strykers across the planet. A web of psionic power spanned the world, and she was slowly spinning it all together, feeding him the power. Her own Class II strength was barely enough to guide the Strykers into the merge and help Lucas hold it together.
Lucas was the apex of that merge, the only one who could have carried the load and survived. Nathan made it a point to target him first.
The next telepathic strike caused Lucas to stumble in midstride. Jason caught him with one hand, keeping Lucas upright as they ran. Jason didn’t look at him, all his attention focused on the street ahead. “Lucas?”
The crushing pressure of merged minds weighed down on Lucas’s shields, echoed in the drag of his feet against the ground. He blinked black dots from his vision. “Let’s start teleporting.”
Telekinesis wrapped around everyone, dozens of Strykers picking up their fellow teammates and teleporting across the distance ahead in short-distance ’ports. They judged the distance as best they could using binoculars to get a visual, putting kilometers behind them in seconds rather than minutes or even hours. The Strykers came out of the last teleport into a hail of enemy gunfire, energy darts and bullets slamming into telekinetic shields and Warhound telepaths struggling to break their minds as their feet hit the ground.
The Strykers in the scattered group spread farther out. Some telekinetic shields fell beneath Warhound attacks, forcing Strykers to find physical cover behind broken cement foundations. Some weren’t quick enough and took bullets in the back, collapsing to the ground. They didn’t remain out in the open for long. Telekinetics pulled the wounded out of fire range, teleporting them back to London with the help of telepaths who provided up-to-date visuals.
Quinton dragged Lucas down behind a crumbling wall with Jason’s help, watching Lucas’s back while he watched over their minds. Lucas let his head fall back, helmet scraping against a cracked cement wall. His breath came rapidly, the oxygen coming out of his tanks clean, even if it tasted like copper on his tongue.
The sound of gunfire filled the air, screams echoing every once in a while over the shouted orders coming from both sides of the fight. Voices echoed down dozens of psi links, the mental chatter buzzing in the back of everyone’s mind. Beyond the Warhounds and conscripted human soldiers, the launch platforms were visible with their space shuttles, sunlight glinting off fuselages.
“They’ve got a space shuttle on the launch ramp,” Quinton said as he ducked down to reload.
“Lucas, who’s on it?” Jason asked.
“Unregistered humans,” Lucas said after a moment, the telepaths in his merge bringing him the information. “Some Warhounds.”
“What about Nathan?”
“No. He’s still on the ground.” Lucas coughed, trying to catch his breath. “We can’t let that space shuttle launch.”
“Then we won’t.”
Quinton looked over Lucas’s head at Jason. “You pulling back your cover?”
“No other choice,” Jason said grimly. He handed Quinton his gun. The Strykers ranged around them moved to compensate for his loss. Jason slid down beside Lucas and put his back against the wall, closing his eyes. “Can’t let the Warhounds have a gene pool to breed from. Besides, this will buy Threnody and Kerr some more time.”
Lucas nodded tightly. “They’re almost in position.”
“Good to know,” Quinton said as he focused on the enemy. “We’ll watch your backs.”
Lucas pulled Jason into the merge, reaching through him for Keiko. She was on the other side of the city, having come in from the north, her group of Strykers closing in on the launch area. Lucas’s mind pressed against Keiko’s shields and she dropped them.
The merge had mostly been filled by telepaths. Samantha anchored the ’path-oriented psions as Lucas rolled through Keiko’s mind, pulling the telekinetic into a secondary merge that began to meld with the first. Keiko knew every last Stryker in the Syndicate, both those in Paris and the ones left scattered across the world. She gave up those psi signatures to Lucas, their locations sparking across the mental grid for Lucas to see.
He reached for them, searching out the psions that read to his touch as telekinetic, and pulled the ones he could spare from the fighting into the merge. It was difficult for the Strykers to give up control, to cede their power to someone else completely. In the face of a changing world, they succumbed to Lucas’s mental order reluctantly, and he felt the merge strain beneath hundreds of psion minds. This merge held more power and more minds than any other Lucas had ever created, and its strength scorched through his own power, nearly shattering his concentration. Pain crept through his awareness, pricking at his thoughts.
That’s not for you to feel, Kristen said, his sister suddenly there in the center of his mind.
She turned off the pain, the safety function that enabled a person to know when something was dangerously wrong going dormant. The body needed pain, needed to know what was wrong with itself, as did the mind. Lucas couldn’t know, not for this. Kristen locked down all the pain synapses in his head and body, her empathic manipulation a mental block not even Lucas could break down.
Through the jumbled eyes of too many people, the Strykers in merge saw the space shuttle launch, saw it streak down the long length of the curved ramp as it was propelled into the sky. Engines fired with a roar, the vapor trail streaming behind the space shuttle, thick and impossible to miss in the late-summer sky as it fought gravity to leave the planet.
Jason, Lucas said, his thought echoed by hundreds of others. Take point.
The bottom seemed to drop out of the merge, every s
ingle one of Jason’s shields falling. His power exploded on the mental grid as a novalike burn, channeling into the merge. Through Lucas, Jason linked to every telekinetic in the Stryker ranks they could spare from defense on the field, drawing on their strength to bolster his own as he telekinetically reached for the space shuttle with a crushing mental grip.
Lucas nearly lost Jason in that rush of power, struggling to hold on to the other man’s mind in the sheer massiveness of the merge. It took Quinton to find him, the bond between the two stretched taut, but it held. The backlash rolled through Quinton’s mind, springing back down the bond in a never-ending loop that threatened the pyrokinetic’s sanity. Lucas threw up a telepathic shield around Quinton’s mind, struggling to keep the other man from succumbing to madness. Quinton’s thanks was wordless and desperate.
In the sky, the space shuttle hit the upper atmosphere. In Lucas’s mind, the merge was a glimmering monstrosity. Jason was somewhere in the thick of things, his Class 0 strength straining everyone’s connection. Despite the Warhound merge striking against their minds, driven by Nathan’s angry desperation, the Stryker telekinetics still managed to grab the space shuttle and wrench it off course. The broken angle of ascent was helped along by way of merged telekinesis. The space shuttle shredded apart as it fell back to earth.
NO!
Dozens of Warhounds minds screamed the word through the mental grid as the aborted launch—so close to its goal of escape—ended in hundreds of fiery fragments that streaked across the sky like meteorites. Silence stretched across the mental grid where the space shuttle fell, the static of human minds diminishing. They died in Earth’s atmosphere, burning up as gravity pulled them home.
Nathan’s merge ripped through the frayed mess on the mental grid, aiming for Lucas’s merge. The mental grid tore beneath the clash of so many minds slamming together, so many minds breaking apart and dying, threatening to take neighboring minds with them. Then Samantha was there, cutting and tearing the Stryker merge apart from the inside out. She reassembled it into something that would hold, struggling to keep it stable.