Strykers

by K. M. Ruiz

  “Hell of a way to go, dying on some other planet.” Jason took another drag on his cigarette. “I hope they die slow.”

  Quinton barked out a laugh, the smile on his face humorless and all teeth. “You and me both.”

  The sound of London at night filtered through the air, the city towers only half-lit. For all that the city towers were open to everyone now, people on the street were still hesitant to enter them. They weren’t abandoned, not how some city towers had been in other parts of the world. No one was certain of the whereabouts of those registered humans and probably never would be, even with the oncoming census set to document everyone’s identities to create a Registry of humans and psions alike. The old government didn’t exist anymore to deny people access based on damaged genetics. That didn’t mean old habits were easy to let go.

  “We should leave soon,” Jason finally said as he stubbed out his cigarette. “Lucas is expecting us.”

  Quinton didn’t move. “I hate Toronto.”

  “I know.”

  It was why they lived here now, in London, with Matron and her scavengers. Maybe things would be easier if they moved back to the city tower they’d spent most of their lives working out of, but other Strykers kept wanting to pull them back into a fold they’d left months ago in a broken-down cathedral on America’s western shore. While survivor’s guilt was shared by all of them, almost every Stryker back in Toronto and those residing in outposts in various cities hadn’t experienced what they had.

  The loss might be similar, but it wasn’t the same.

  “I miss her,” Quinton said quietly.

  Jason’s mouth twisted, grief a bitter taste on his tongue, even after all these weeks. He pressed one hand against the edge of the cement step, thinking he could still feel Kerr’s hand in his. Thinking maybe, if they’d had just a little more time, he could have saved them. Both of them.

  “I’m sorry,” Jason whispered.

  Neither knew whom he was apologizing to.

  Quinton let his hand hover over the fire, his power slowly fading. When the fire was gone, he got to his feet and Jason did the same. Taking a breath in London, they let it out in Toronto, Jason’s teleport bringing them to the arrival room on the medical level.

  They stepped off the platform, nodding at the Stryker on duty before heading into the hallway. They made their way to Jael’s private lab in silence. The door was locked, but Jason had the override. Lucas knew better than to keep them out of the lab. When they walked inside, they could see Lucas standing before the gestational unit, one hand resting against the warm side of the machine that held his daughter. Jael stood beside Lucas, watching him.

  “Lucas,” Jason said in greeting as he and Quinton crossed the lab space. “Jael.”

  “Didn’t expect you back so soon,” Jael said, lifting her hand in a half wave. “Hello, Quinton. Haven’t seen you in a while.”

  “There’s a reason for that,” Quinton said.

  “I know.” Jael didn’t bother to hide the sadness in her voice. “But you’re always welcome here. You know that.”

  Quinton ignored her words. Jason shrugged at Jael, not willing to apologize for their choice of distance over reunification. “How’s the kid?”

  “Doing exceptionally well,” Jael said as she picked up a datapad and handed it to Jason. “She’s got the genetic markers of a triad psion, but I think we can conclusively say her telekinesis is going to be like yours.”

  “I should hope so. After all the effort I put in to make her into what we needed, she better be like me.”

  They all knew that the power Jason had engineered Lucas’s daughter into having would change the course of history as surely as nuclear war had. Jael no longer hated Ciari for the closely held orders that woman had given, at Lucas’s urging, that set them all on this road. She regretted, uncomfortably so, that she never told Ciari that while she still lived. Not forgiveness, nor regret, but a thank-you. Jael liked to think Ciari would have accepted it.

  “We’ll have to figure out a way to keep engineering this power,” Jael said, gazing at the monitors, voice thoughtful. “It’s going to take so long to fix this world, even with the terraforming machines, that we can’t let this power die out.”

  “What about when the world is fixed?” Quinton asked as he braced himself against a nearby lab table. “What then? What happens to our kind?”

  “If we’re going by rates of half-life, psions are going to be around for the next several thousand years, no worries,” Jason said, studying the medical information on the datapad. “Maybe by the time we shrink some of the deadzones, what we can do won’t be considered a disease. Maybe we’ll all be human, able to live an entire human lifetime, but still have these abilities. Maybe it won’t take bad genetics to give birth to a psion.”

  “That’s a lot of maybes.”

  Jason shrugged. “Who knows? It might happen.”

  “Let’s just stick with what we do know,” Jael said. “Someone else can figure out the future.”

  “Someone already did,” Jason reminded her, glancing at Quinton. “Aside from not having a death switch in my head, I’m still not sure I like it.”

  Empty spaces existed in their lives now, silence where another person once lived. The two still grieved the losses of Threnody and Kerr, and always would, no matter how many years they had left to live. They still kept looking over their shoulders for two people who were no longer there, who would never again be there.

  Jael tilted her head in acknowledgment of their unsaid words. “That’s your prerogative. I’m heading out. Don’t keep Lucas in here for too much longer. We need him to get better, not backslide.”

  “Do you?” Lucas said, his voice quiet, empty.

  She’d only allowed him out of his recovery room this week, and he had spent every waking hour in this lab, watching his daughter’s heartbeat on the cardiac monitor. Jael stared at his profile, at the bruises still marring the skin beneath his dark blue eyes; those would fade. The bruising in his mind would be with him until death.

  Genetically, Lucas would always be a triad psion, but his telepathy wasn’t much stronger than Samantha’s now, and his telekinesis was completely broken. He couldn’t teleport at all. The mess of his emotions, of his pain, was Kristen’s legacy. The ruination of his mind was self-inflicted. He would have to live with it, for however long he had left.

  “I’m not made to rule,” Jael reminded him after a brief pause. “I’m a Stryker, not a Serca.”

  “You’re the OIC.”

  “I was the last possible choice and you know it. You and Ciari both did.”

  Jael left the lab on quiet feet, the door sliding shut with a soft hiss. Jason set the datapad down on the table Quinton was leaning against and drifted over to Lucas’s side. Jason pressed his hand against the gestational unit, let his power drag him down into amniotic fluid that washed the world out in a sea of proteins, lipids, and other nutrient structures that kept the baby growing. Jason followed the coils of her DNA in his mind, assuring himself that the genes that would make her a microtelekinetic were still holding up strong.

  Jason blinked rapidly when he came back to himself, the world solidifying into hard lines with Quinton’s distant help through their bond. “Have you chosen a name yet?”

  “No,” Lucas said.

  “You’ve got a few months until she’s born. There’s still time.”

  Lucas splayed one hand over the top of the machine. “Will she have it?”

  “I’m not a doctor, Lucas. I wasn’t taught medicine. I followed what Korman and Jael showed me would be the best genetic course, but genes don’t always stay true to DNA. I think she’ll live longer than you or I will. How much longer, I don’t know.”

  “Your daughter’s survival for the sake of humanity doesn’t absolve you of your actions, you know that, right?” Quinton said, coming to stand by Jason.

  “You mean you won’t,” Lucas said, not looking up.

  Quinton rubbed his f
ingers together, the sound of metal on metal grating on their ears. “You didn’t need Threnody to change your mind about the launch, to keep everyone on Earth instead of letting them go into space. You could have figured that out on your own.”

  “No,” Lucas said. “I don’t think I could have. I needed someone to believe in. Threnody showed me how.”

  “You had Aisling for that.”

  “I simply followed orders where she was concerned and Aisling is dead. Threnody wasn’t.” Lucas lifted his head, meeting Quinton’s gaze, seeing the sharp grief that still existed in the other man’s eyes. “Your partner helped me see what needed to be done. I couldn’t do that on my own. I wasn’t raised with the ability to believe in someone other than myself. It’s why Aisling told me to find her.”

  “Threnody wasn’t a precog.”

  “The thing about precogs is that they see so many futures. They have to choose the best end result they can find. In order to do that, they have to build the future that will become our history. That takes a lot of steps, a lot of people, and a lot of time. One wrong move, one wrong choice by any single person, disrupts that goal and forms a new future.” Lucas smiled bitterly. “There are linchpins that precogs find who need support, places where the future turns. Threnody was mine. You were Jason’s.”

  “And Kerr?” Jason asked sharply. “What about him?”

  “Kerr did what he was supposed to do. He made sure Threnody had time to do her job.” Lucas looked away from them, back at the machine that housed his unborn daughter. “We all did what we had to do.”

  Quinton shook his head. “I don’t count this as a win.”

  Lucas choked on a hollow laugh. “It’s never been about winning.”

  “What if we made a wrong choice?” Jason said. “Somewhere in all this mess that happened, what if we didn’t do something right? How do we know?”

  Lucas didn’t answer, only stared straight ahead.

  “We don’t,” Quinton said as he walked to the door. “That’s the problem.”

  Jason followed Quinton out of the lab, locking the door behind them. Alone, Lucas mentally reached with everything he had for the datapad that sat on the other work counter, mind stretched to its limits, struggling to locate a power that was nothing more than the ghost of a memory.

  The datapad did not move.

  Lucas stayed where he was, counting heartbeats.

  PART TEN

  EPITAPH

  SESSION DATE: 2128.01.30

  LOCATION: Institute of Psionics Research

  CLEARANCE ID: Dr. Amy Bennett

  SUBJECT: 2581

  FILE NUMBER: 99

  The doctor holds up the card, the back of it smooth and white where it faces the girl, the side facing her holding a single shape. The child knows this game. It bores her, and it shows. The electrodes attached to her skull and chest and arms itch, the machines she is connected to beeping a familiar cadence into the quiet, white room.

  “Let’s try again,” the doctor says, a strained expression on her face. “What do you see, Aisling?”

  She blinks bleached-out violet eyes slowly, a child playing at a grown-up game.

  “What do I see?” The smile she offers is more than enough to make the doctor flinch as pupils contract to pinpricks in a sea of bleached-out violet. “I see—”

  The machines behind her scream.

  “There is a child, a girl, tiny against the backdrop of a ruined city, of a broken world. She wears a jumpsuit, durable little boots that carry her over a cracked street that stretches out before her, green grass shoving up through the dusty ground here and there and there. Her hair is honey brown, her eyes so dark a blue they’re almost black. Her mind is wide and open, power burning hotly through the synapses of a triad psion’s brain.”

  A breath. Then another. The cadence of her singsong words never wavers, sounding so much older than the handful of years she has lived.

  “A voice calls out to her from behind. Deep. Exasperated. Not her mother, because her mother is dead. Not her father, because he cannot teach her what she needs to learn. But one of the two men behind her are important to her life. The little girl who does and does not listen to her minders skips farther away with a teasing laugh, flowers blooming bright and colorful and alive in the footsteps she leaves behind.”

  Aisling convulses on her seat, bitten-down nails digging scratches into her skin.

  “The world is waking up. Or she is waking the world.”

  Praise for K. M. Ruiz

  Mind Storm was named one of the best science fiction releases of 2011 by BN.com

  “K. M. Ruiz powerfully explores what happens when rogue humans with mind powers set out on a plan to enslave ‘normal’ humans and control the world after a cataclysmic nuclear war. This is not an X-Men comic book. The books are full of action, intrigue, and graphic violence. It’s adult ESP science fiction with a kick.… The buildup is impressive, and there is plenty of action to go around.”

  —Examiner.com

  “Mind Storm hurls you three hundred years into a ferociously possible future where the mind has long since escaped the cage of the body and roams free and wild and dangerous. Total, delicious immersion into a world rendered startlingly real by white-hot writing skill.”

  —Whitley Strieber, bestselling author of The Day After Tomorrow

  “To term Mind Storm a thriller, even a post-apocalyptic thriller, doesn’t fully describe the novel, because it’s also a study in psychological deception and self-deception in a devastated future Earth where the greater the power one has, the greater the deception required, making the book both unsettling and a parable for our time.”

  —L. E. Modesitt Jr., bestselling author of Legacies

  “A fast and furious vision of a very dark future … one of the best reads of the year.”

  —Nate Kenyon, award-winning author of Starcraft: Ghost—Spectres and Sparrow Rock

  “Mind Storm crackles with pent-up energy, fresh ideas, and crisp dialogue. It flies like a bullet!”

  —William C. Dietz, author of the Legion of the Damned series

  “Mutants, martyrs, and mayhem—this book has it all and leaves you craving yet more of this broken and battered world.”

  —Rob Thurman, author of the Cal Leandros series

  “It’s like X-Men, only more brutal.”

  —SF Signal, 4.5 stars (out of 5)

  “Kaleidoscopically intricate shifting alliances and relationships, terrifying mental tortures, and near-death experiences and resurrections drive this saga of revolt and renewal and leave plenty of room for future installments.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  STRYKERS: MIND STORM copyright © 2011 by Katrina M. Ruiz and TERMINAL POINT copyright © 2012 by Katrina M. Ruiz. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.thomasdunnebooks.com

  www.stmartins.com

  ISBN 978-1-250-03846-3 (trade paperback)

  First Edition: December 2013

  eISBN 9781250038470

  First eBook edition: November 2013