Mind Storm (16 page)

The pilot nodded, attention already focused on the route his navigator was building. Samantha walked back into the cargo bay of the shuttle, letting the hatch close and seal shut behind her. She steadied herself as she felt the shuttle beginning to change its angle of flight for the descent, feeling a telekinetic touch brace her body and give her additional support. She nodded her thanks to the Warhound who had reached out to her.

“We're descending,” she told everyone in the cargo bay. “Telekinetics, be ready for assault. Telepaths, you're with me in merge.”

“How many Strykers do you think are down there?” Genevieve asked as she checked the clip in her assault rifle and slung the strap across her shoulder, bracing the weapon against her bent legs. The twenty-five-year-old Class III telekinetic was the best train hijacker in the Warhound ranks. Samantha still wished she had her twin by her side.

“Several teams, at the very least.” Samantha dragged herself back to her assigned seat and strapped into her harness. “Fuel transport trains always have heavy defenses.”

“Hungry,” Kristen said from beside her. The empath was strapped into her harness, fingers tapping out a soft rhythm against the armrests of her seat.

“Not yet.” Samantha pressed her power against her sister's mind, skimming it over those jagged broken shields. “You feed on my say-so.”

“Sure, Sammy-girl.” Kristen's smile got so wide that the corners of her mouth cracked and bled. “On your say-so.”

Which, in Kristen's demented way of thinking, could be whenever Samantha opened her mouth or 'pathed out an order. Samantha offered her sister a sharp look and a warning telepathic probe before sliding out of Kristen's mind.

It had taken five days to track the oil shipments coming through the Suez Canal to the Mediterranean Sea and up to Europe's southern shores. Previous generations had nearly depleted the Middle East oil supplies, but the regional governments in control at the time had placed trade restrictions on exports to save some of the fossil fuel for their own people. What the World Court had slowly been siphoning out of the surviving storage bunkers wasn't headed anywhere except to the Paris Basin, to be transported to Mars, or so they thought.

Samantha clenched her hands into fists until her knuckles popped. Warhounds had stolen a quarter of those shipments over the past thirty years, ransoming it back to the government at ridiculously high prices. Her grandmother—may Marcheline's sadistic soul never rest—had begun the credit buildup that the Warhounds would need for their bottom line once they got off-planet, and Nathan was continuing that effort. They would need that monetary leverage when all the functioning parts of society were transplanted to someplace better. Humanity, what they would allow of it into space, was worth its weight in gold.

The shuttle picked up speed as it descended. Samantha pushed those thoughts aside and focused on the scene around her. Genevieve and her telekinetics were out of their seats, held stable in the shuttle's unsteady course by their own power as they pulled on the oxygen helmets attached to the small tanks buckled to their backs. They didn't need safety lines, not when they had the option of teleportation and the anchoring grasp of telekinesis. The six telekinetics ranged from a Class V to a Class III. More than enough telekinetic power to grab those fuel tanks off the back of the train and 'port them out of human reach.

The only problem with that plan, Samantha mused as the shuttle took evasive maneuvers against ground-to-air missiles, was that the humans employed Strykers.

Open the cargo doors,
Samantha ordered.

Wind whipped through the interior of the shuttle as hydraulics opened the rear cargo doors, the cabin pressure falling. The telekinetics were lined up in pairs at the very edge, gravity and air pulling at their limbs. Genevieve didn't wait for Samantha's order; she had more experience than Samantha at leading these kinds of missions. The telekinetics wrapped themselves in their power and jumped out of the shuttle, dropping in a controlled fall toward the speeding train below.

Samantha closed her eyes, struggling to breathe; easier to concentrate in darkness than the brightness of the shuttle. The roaring of the wind faded as the cargo doors closed back up, the pressure equalizing again. Samantha dropped her shields, slid her power into the minds of her fellow Warhounds, and started to build the merge.

This was something that the Strykers still didn't know how to duplicate, or simply weren't allowed to learn. The layered strength that came with three telepathic minds coming together meant that they had that much more power to draw from. Samantha took up the apex position in the merge and sent their minds skimming over the mental grid toward the bright spots that burned like fire.

“Leaving me out in the cold,” Kristen murmured from beside her.

Samantha felt her sister's bitten-down nails dig into the skin of her left wrist. She ignored the pain that skittered up her arm, the majority of it empathically created.

Ready to break,
Samantha said into Genevieve's mind, her mental voice echoed by the other three in the merge.

Genevieve's answer was calm.
Missiles are diverted.

Samantha couldn't hear the explosions on the ground below; didn't need to. She could hear the panic in the human thoughts of the workers that rode the train as clearly as if she were standing in the cars with them. Samantha felt her mouth curve into a smile, but it was a distant expression.

The merge spread like a net across the mental grid where they fought, telepathic power pressing down like a heavy load onto the Stryker and human minds below. Only when the Warhounds had their positions set did Samantha drop most of her shields, letting her telepathy ram into the minds they had surrounded.

The government had opted for a full squad of Strykers, eight teams, at a pair apiece. Sixteen Strykers of varied types, varied Classes, but none of them could counter a merge backed by her Class II strength. They didn't have the resources available to them, just their orders, and those would get them killed tonight. They would still go down fighting.

Shit,
Samantha said, tapping into Genevieve's thoughts.
They're going to blow the train.

Getting desperate,
Genevieve replied.
That's a fucking waste of perfectly good oil. We're working on getting a grip on the weight. We need a few more minutes.

She was asking Samantha to buy them time.

Samantha did one better.

She reached with the strength of the merge for Kristen's mind, her sister greedily reaching back. The jagged, deep holes in the empath's power bit into Samantha's mind with a viciousness that made her physically flinch. Kristen's mind was a starved thing, twisted into swollen knots as her empathic power fed on itself in a continuous state of desperate survival. Samantha shunted Kristen's mind through the merge, beneath their shields, the other telepaths helping her to control Kristen's descent, as they forced the girl to obey their chosen course of action.

The merged telepathic strike, braced by Kristen's malignant empathic power, broke through the Strykers' defenses with a ferocity that left two Strykers dying immediately of critical psi shock. The rest didn't have the ability to defend against Kristen's need to feed, and the teen had never discriminated between the minds of registered and unregistered humans, nor the distinctive burn of psions who weren't fast enough to escape. They all tasted the same to her.

The mental grid got darker, minds winking out as Kristen's empathy fed on the emotions and thoughts around her. Her power simply ate through the defenses thrown in her way, transferring the foundations of her victims' sanity into her own. Her sanity was makeshift, nothing more, and everything she stole would disintegrate within days, leaving behind yet another hole in her mind.

Samantha left Kristen to her fun, but kept fingers of her power at the edge of her sister's mind even as she checked in with Genevieve.

Forgot how she wrecks everyone's concentration,
Genevieve said tightly.
We need some shields, Samantha. These tankers are heavier than the last shipment we stole.

Can you 'port them?
Samantha wanted to know even as she erected a telepathic shield between Kristen's swath of mental devastation and the knot of concentration that was the Warhound telekinetics.

It's a matter of distance and weight.
Genevieve's mind dipped heavily against Samantha's, power burning through the psi link they shared as she tapped into her telekinetic strength.
We'll get it done before the train crashes.

We still need the maglev platform to remain intact.

Train still has to crash. Trust me. I know what the fuck I'm doing.

Samantha didn't have any doubt. Looking through Genevieve's eyes from where the telekinetic was crouched on top of the train's engine car, all she could see was progress. The line of tankers following behind were slowly disappearing.

“Military jets are scrambling,” the pilot said over the comm system, splitting Samantha's concentration. “ETA five minutes.”

Break away,
Samantha ordered.
We're finished here. Genevieve, you've got five minutes before the government's fighter jets are on you.

We can finish in two.

The shuttle banked hard, throwing Samantha against the straps of her harness and the seat with bruising force. She felt metal bite into the meat of her shoulders, the edge of her cheek. She could feel the shuttle pick up speed as the pilot sought to put distance between them and the jets that appeared on their radar.

Pulling out of Genevieve's mind, Samantha blinked open her eyes, staring hard at the gray wall of the shuttle's interior to ground herself as she untangled her mind from the merge. Something warm slid down her wrist, and she looked down to see that Kristen's nails had cut into her skin, leaving crimson crescent-moon marks across the ridge of her tendon. She flexed her hand, watching the play of muscle beneath her skin.

“I'm not your anchor,” Samantha said as she wiped the blood away on her uniform.

“Of course not,” Kristen replied calmly, sanity creeping into the tone of her voice, cutting through the gleam of her eyes. They both knew this was a temporary state. “Mine left.”

“Lucas isn't coming back.”

Kristen's smile tempered itself into a smirk as she lifted bloody fingers to wipe them over Samantha's throat before the older girl could stop her.

“So little faith, Sammy-girl.”

Samantha reached out and slammed her sister's head against the cradle of her seat. “Keep your hands and mind to yourself.”

Kristen laughed low in her throat. “Never gonna happen. Can't happen.
Won't
.”

Samantha's mouth curled up in disgust as she pulled back. “I don't know why Nathan hasn't killed you yet.”

“For reasons exactly like this.” Kristen licked her lips and shrugged one shoulder. “He still needs me. Same as he needs you.”

“Maybe I'll get lucky and he'll leave you behind when we ship out to Mars.”

A cheerful “Maybe” was Kristen's opinion on that as her mind evened out some. With the death of all those humans and Strykers on the ground, Kristen was gaining back some shred of mental balance.

In the depths of Kristen's twisted mind, at the bottom where her damaged power stemmed from, the psi link that Lucas had buried in her insanity years ago when she was just a toddler switched on at the barest trace of sanity.

Hello, Kris.
Lucas's telepathic power flowed through the swirling madness that was, for a brief moment, dimmed. Controlled.
How was dinner?

Kristen stared at her sister until Samantha looked away, the contempt between them an emotion that Kristen didn't bother to brush aside.

Delicious.

Why don't you tell me all about it?

On the flight back to London, high in the atmosphere, Kristen did exactly that.

PART FOUR

ALLIANCE

 

SESSION DATE
: 2128.09.22

LOCATION
: Institute of Psionics Research

CLEARANCE ID
: Dr. Amy Bennett

SUBJECT
: 2581

FILE NUMBER
: 879

“I want to go home,” the girl says, sounding tired and hoarse, sitting slumped in the same seat as before. She is thinner than she was at the beginning, drawn brittle by time that is running out.

“You know you can leave if you just tell us what we want to know,” the doctor says.

“You want a second chance on Mars.” The girl wrinkles her small nose at the doctor and shakes her head. “But you should want Earth.”

“I think you should tell us how to stop this war.”

Aisling blinks at her slowly, bleached-out violet eyes set in a hollow face. “I'm tired. I want to sleep.”

“Do you know,” the doctor says, voice gone ragged and harsh, “how many countries have been lost to this madness?”

“Yes,” Aisling says softly as she picks at the electrodes on the back of one hand, the machines spiking on a high-pitched whine. “I saw them all die. But don't worry, Threnody. It's going to be okay in the end.”

[
THIRTEEN
]

AUGUST 2379
BUFFALO, USA

Buffalo was where the survivors fled during and after the Border Wars. It was where their descendants remained, locked into underground bunkers and sealed city towers.

In the local parlance, it was a sprawl as opposed to a slum, but it had its borders, it had its limits. Pocketed between the deadzones of the Midwest and the inner areas of the East Coast, with a little slice of toxic water named Lake Erie on one side, Buffalo was sanctuary and hell all in one.