Authors: K.M. Ruiz
“With the cards? Orange square.”
Another card gets set aside. “With where the bombs fall.”
“They're not done falling. I've told you that. This is reeducation on a worldwide level. This is how we start over. Everyone will say the same thing eventually.”
“By killing ourselves?” The expression on the doctor's face is angry, but the grief in her voice is what makes the girl finally glance at her. The look in Aisling's bleached-out violet eyes is startlingly adult.
“You kill us without regret. You're killing me.”
“Aisling, we're not ⦠we're not
killing
you. You've just been a little sick, that's all. We're treating you for it.”
“No, you're not,” the girl whispers, shoulders slumping. “You can't fix me and I can't see the world how you want me to.”
For once, in a long, long while, the machines are quiet.
[
THIRTY-THREE
]
AUGUST 2379
BUFFALO, USA
The lights in the hangar snapped on with a startling, loud hum, blinding everyone who had been sitting in the flight decks of the shuttles. Jason leaned forward, jerked out of the middle another diagnostic test, and stared at the hangar.
“Fuck, they did it,” Jason said as he cut the diagnostics short. He started to upload the destination coordinates that Lucas had given him hours ago into the corresponding shuttles through the hive connection in the computer.
Beside him, Matron opened an uplink on her terminal even as she started to kick the shuttle into full flight readiness. “Alpha shuttle to Beta and all others, do you copy, over?”
She got a multitude of responses, all calling in their status as she strapped into her flight harness. When all thirty-five shuttles came back with positive identification, Matron said, “Do you have power at the launch sites, over?”
More affirmatives.
“Then get the hell into the air, out.” Matron cut the uplink and turned her head to look at Jason. “You ready?”
“Already powering up the launch silo,” Jason said, his hands flying over the controls in front of him.
Outside the confines of the shuttles, the control terminals to the side of the launchpad were picking up Jason's signals. Computers switched out of power-save mode into full activation as Jason plugged in the commands remotely. Above them, in that wide, round launch silo, lights came on in a continuous line. The blast doors at the top of that long open space responded to the orders currently driving its system and began to open. A hole appeared high above, quickly getting larger, allowing rain and mud to drop down onto the shuttles below.
In Alpha shuttle, Jason was trying to contact Lucas or Kerr telepathically, but no one was responding on the shared psi link. Swearing, Jason shook his head. “They're not answering my call.”
“They dead?” Matron asked.
“No. I'd have felt the psi link sever if that was the case. Hurts like a bitch when it happens.”
“We can't wait here. Not for much longer.” Matron switched to an uplink with the other two shuttles in the hangar with them. “Grady, Torrance, get the hell out of here. We're holding for the main cargo, out.”
Jason ground his teeth and dropped his head into his hands.
Lucas, Kerr, I need a response, damn it.
The roar of the first shuttle activating its vertical-takeoff-and-landing (VTOL) function nearly drowned out Jason's thoughts and the faint, telepathic voice that finally crawled through the psi link.
We need a pickup,
Lucas said, mental voice strained and distant, almost fractured.
At power plant two. Teleportation isn't possible.
Understood.
Jason opened his eyes in time to see the first shuttle launching out of the silo and the second already lifting into the air. “They need a pickup.”
“Fuck,” Matron swore as she stabbed a finger at Jason. “Blow the charges.”
Jason picked up the remote detonator from the control panel and unlocked the device. He gripped it tightly as the second shuttle cleared the launch silo, and then it was their turn. Matron was a scavenger, born and bred, part of a people who possessed any number of skills in order to survive. That she could pilot a shuttle wasn't surprising; he just hoped she was good at it. Matron activated the VTOL, and Jason felt the shuttle shake as it lifted into the air. It rose higher and faster through the launch silo, the storm rushing down to meet them.
They cleared the blast doors and Jason pressed his thumb down hard on the detonator's red button. It sent out a limited-range signal, picked up by the receivers far below. The charge coursed through the C-4, and the resulting explosions rocked the stormy air, buffeting the shuttle with shocking intensity. Despite the wind and the rain, the fire they left behind wasn't going to go out anytime soon.
Matron was already pulling away, banking hard to the left, struggling to keep the shuttle steady in the face of turbulent winds. When she spoke, she sounded almost in awe. “Holy mother of God.”
Below them, every street filled with light, was the city of Buffalo. The sprawl stretched from Lake Erie all the way to the east, where it faded into emptiness. The city towers were like burning fingers to the north, a misguided crowning glory.
“Never saw it like this before,” Matron murmured, her sharp eyes studying the shuttle's instruments as well as the view.
“Never going to again,” Jason said as he plotted a course and uploaded the vector onto Matron's hologrid for her to see.
On their radar, they were picking up thirty-five other bogeysâshuttles scattered around the southern edge of the cityâand about a hundred more coming out of Toronto.
“Fuck.” Jason leaned closer to the vidscreen and everything that was showing up. “Matron, the military scrambled their jets earlier than expected.”
“Shit,” Matron said as she accessed the uplink again, getting a chatter of voices coming from all the shuttles. “Crew, this is your boss. We're detouring for the main cargo. Get the fuck out of this airspace. We've got incoming, out.”
She kept the connection open, the chatter filling the flight deck to replace the sound of their breathing. Jason was focused on his half of the controls, and Matron was struggling to fly the shuttle through the derecho, forced lower than she would have liked by heavy downdrafts and the thick cloud cover that made it almost impossible to see. The shuttle cut through the storm.
“Never fucking doing him a favor again,” Matron decided as she held tight to the stick with both hands and felt the drag of the shuttle in her arms.
The storm wreaked havoc on their instrumentation, giving them hope that it was interfering with the military's as well. They couldn't be sure, and the military had better stealth capabilities than Matron and her scavengers had been able to salvage from the deserted cities of America. What the military didn't have sitting in the cockpits of those jets were psions.
The storm dragged them off course for a precious few minutes. Matron struggled to guide them back in the proper direction. They were almost to their destination when a red warning line filled the bottom of every active vidscreen.
“They've got a lock on us,” Jason snapped.
“I see it, I see it!” Matron said, one eye on the red warning cutting across her controls and another on the sky outside the shuttle. She yanked hard on the stick, maneuvering the shuttle into a sharp dive out of the clouds to clear, if rough, skies below.
They were uncomfortably close to the ground, flying over tenements and near-empty streets. A heat-seeking missile, locked onto them, came streaking out of the storm clouds. Jason saw it, on the screen and in the air, and he reached out with his telekinesis, struggling to wrap his power around the fast-moving weapon. He finally caught hold of it. Anchoring his power to that long, dangerous missile, Jason wrenched it around onto a new trajectory.
The military jet that dove out of the clouds could pull all the evasive maneuvers it wanted. That missile was backed by living human thought, not a computer, and Jason sent it straight into the belly of the jet as it rolled. He let go at the very last second so his power didn't block the explosion.
The jet fell in fiery pieces to the city below. Jason didn't have time to worry about the damage the debris would cause. Five more jets were dropping out of the clouds and coming straight at them, requiring his attention, firing a volley of missiles that he didn't have time to grab for independently. Jason erected a wide telekinetic shield between them and the missiles, watching as they exploded in midair. A headache blossomed in the back of his head, but he ignored it.
Some of the jets managed to bank fast enough to get out of the way. Some of them didn't, their technology incapable of identifying a telekinetic shield. Most crashed at full throttle into Jason's shields. Jason was thrown forward against his flight harness, a physical reaction to the sudden mental agony ripping through his mind. He dropped his shields, gasping for air as his entire head throbbed from the impact of jets against his power.
“You still with me, Jason?” Matron snapped at him, her harsh voice cutting through the painful ringing in his ears.
“Yeah,” he ground out, forcing his eyes open. Jason scanned the sky and the shuttle's instrumentation, searching out those last few jets.
They popped back up on radar, coming from behind. Jason focused on the rearview camera feed to guide his telekinesis. It hurt, but he ground his teeth against the pain as he telekinetically ripped the wings right off the fighter jets. They fell to earth, no longer a problem.
Matron let out a breath and guided their shuttle ever lower as the jets disappeared from the radar. So did several of the dots that were identified as transport shuttles, caught in the cross fire of enemy missiles. She tried not to watch the numbers dwindle.
“There,” Matron said. “Down below.
Finally
.”
Jason opened his eyes, squinting through the brightness as he realized that the open space Matron was aiming for surrounded a large power plant with steam blowing out of the single cooling tower. Bodies were scattered on the ground, some wearing uniforms that Jason recognized all too easily. Matron landed the shuttle close to the broken doors, the vertical landing sending hard vibrations through the shuttle. Jason wrapped a telekinetic shield around the shuttle even as he undid the straps of his flight harness.
“Stay here,” he ordered tiredly as he steeled himself for a teleport. Jason arrived near the first set of doors by the security walls and erected a telekinetic shield around himself for protection as he quickly scanned the area.
He didn't know if those lying on the ground were dead or alive and couldn't care. Moving forward, Jason climbed over the downed doors. He was halfway to the power plant's main entrance when someone exited the building. Kerr was a familiar and welcoming sight. Jason was damned glad to see his partner walking on his own two feet, but he could have done without the person that Kerr was helping outside.
Samantha Serca had one arm slung over Kerr's shoulder, limping along beside the other telepath. Jason wrapped a telekinetic shield around the pair as he hurried as fast as he could through the wind to reach them.
“
You're
who Lucas needed?” Jason asked in a disbelieving voice.
Samantha's face was covered in blood from the nose down, her dark blue eyes half-lidded and full of pain. “Fuck you,” she slurred.
“The others are inside,” Kerr said, jerking his head back the way they'd come, expression strained. “The shuttle?”
“Out front. Hold on.”
Jason wrapped his power around them, pictured the shuttle's cargo bay in his mind, and teleported the pair inside the safety of the shuttle. He continued forward, using his power to wrench the second set of blast doors open wider, despite the throbbing in his skull. He swallowed thickly in fear once he got a good look at the group huddled just inside the power plant.
Quinton's arms were a mess, broken to fleshy pulp, white bone sticking out of his skin. His face wasn't much better, but he didn't seem to notice, kneeling as he was beside where Lucas was sitting with Threnody's mostly burned body in his arms. Standing over them was someone Jason had never even known existed. The girl smiled at him, the rictus look pulling at the skin of her face.
“Calvary has arrived,” she announced cheerfully, throwing her arms up into the air victoriously.
“Shut up, Kris,” Lucas said as he dragged open his eyes.
Jason stared in shock at the girl's gleaming dark blue eyes, the eerie resemblance she had to Lucas. “Holy shit,” he breathed. “There's
four
of you fucking Serca kids?”
Lucas glared at him. “Get us to the shuttle, Jason.”
He didn't need to be told twice.
Jason teleported them into the shuttle's cargo bay, where Kerr had already strapped Samantha into one of the seats, the girl fully unconscious now.
“Your sister's mind is a broken mess, Lucas,” Kerr said, not looking up from where he was administering a sedative to Samantha, the hypospray pulled from their first-aid supplies, along with a portable IV that he strapped to her arm.
Lucas shrugged minutely. “She'll live. She's used to it.”
“Matron, get us the fuck out of here,” Jason yelled through the open hatch. “What the hell
happened,
Lucas?”
“Kris, help Quinton strap into a seat. Kerr, you've got another patient,” Lucas ordered even as he telekinetically hauled a supply trunk over to his side and began to dig through it. “Threnody's alive, but not for much longer.”
“I'm not leaving her side,” Quinton said.
“I don't need you yet,” Lucas said bluntly. “And you're useless to her right now, so stop arguing. Let Kerr see to your arms and face.”
Quinton wouldn't move, so Kristen did it for him. The empath touched his arm above the elbow and altered the emotional blocks she'd implanted in his mind, just enough to remind him of the agony his body was keeping from his brain. Quinton's knees buckled and the only reason why he didn't collapse face-first to the deck was because Jason caught him in time.