Terminal Point (2 page)

“I'm not a psi surgeon.”

“No. You're something better.”

Jason didn't argue. It was the truth, whether he liked it or not. He sucked in air around his teeth, looking for a balance he wasn't sure he would ever get back. It was different, reaching for his telekinesis now that nothing held it back. The depth of his power, the strength, was frightening. He could no longer trust his control or any of his childhood training in the Strykers Syndicate. Most of that training didn't apply, not when he had the power to see the atomic makeup of cells. Channels he never knew existed were now accessible, areas of his mind geared to see the world on a completely different level all synced up now.

Maybe telekinetics who attained Class V strength and could teleport had the potential to become what he was now. Jason didn't know. All he knew was that he didn't want to be the only person who could do this.

Jason tapped into the wealth of power in his mind and let it pour out of him. He slipped through Threnody's skin down to her bones. An echo of her damage crawled across his own nerves, countless pinpricks of heat and sudden scar tissue that was being absorbed back into her body at an accelerated rate. The new nerve endings created through cellular regeneration were going to take time to rewire, even with Jason able to control the nanites.

“Ow,” Threnody said, grimacing. “That feels—weird.”

“Does it hurt?” Jason asked, gaze blank.

“Not exactly.” Threnody frowned, feeling the muscles in her face move stiffly. She peeled skin over the top of her finger and tossed it away. “It feels like my insides are being moved around.”

“I had the nanites target your organs first. I think they're still working on them.” Jason adjusted the placement of his hands. “The reason you lived long enough for me to help you was due to your electrokinesis. You'd be dead if you were any other kind of psion.”

“That makes me feel so much better. Really.” She flexed her fingers carefully. “How did you fix me without a biotank?”

“Take a wild guess.”

The lightning strike that seared through Threnody's body and jump-started the power plant back in the sprawl of Buffalo had fried her entire body. When Quinton finally found her, he hadn't been sure she was even alive, but her electrokinesis had preserved her brain and central nervous system from total destruction. It shut down her body, then shocked it back to life over and over again, a dangerous cycle that her system had struggled to overcome. Only when Lucas arrived to keep her heart beating to a steady rhythm with his telekinesis did Threnody start to stabilize.

Jason did the rest. He was still doing the rest.

The amount of power Jason carried now left him seeing the world—literally—through new eyes. His optic nerves shifted through spectrums of vision that should have been impossible for any human or psion to process without biomodifications. It made him nauseous, especially when magnification was thrown into the mix, allowing him to see the microscopic with the naked eye.

The nanites were doing their job. Threnody was alive and healing. For now, that was enough.

Jason carefully pulled his power out of her body, letting every last cell and nanite go, until he could no longer even visualize the layers of skin cells and capillaries that made up his eyelids. His head felt heavy. He watched as Lucas changed out Threnody's IV bag. The soft, constant beeping of her cardiac rhythm was almost lulling.

Jason shifted his focus to Lucas, sinking his power into the younger man's body. It showed Jason the dark spots in Lucas where trauma had left ugly pools of damage beneath his skin.

“I can feel you,” Lucas said as he finished securing the IV bag. “Get your power off me. Now.”

“You've got bleeding in your brain.”

“I'm handling it.”

“Not well enough. That subdural hematoma isn't going to fix itself. Let me do something about it.”

“You finally get full access to your power and suddenly you think you can do the impossible.”

Jason arched an eyebrow as he pushed himself to his feet. “That
is
why you were after me, right?”

“I'm not the only one,” Lucas said as he went to toss the used bag in the head's disposal system. “Not anymore.”

Jason grimaced. “Nathan.”

Nathan Serca, the oldest psion alive at the age of fifty-one, was a Class I triad psion that Lucas rivaled in power, if not cruelty. Lucas's father had no equal when it came to cruelty.

Lucas came back out, nodding at Jason's answer. “And every last Warhound at his disposal, so remember to read as human on the mental grid, at least until the launch, or you'll get us all killed.”

Unlike Warhounds, Strykers were never taught how to match their psi signature to a human's, reading as human on the mental grid, that vast psychic plane of the world's thoughts. But Jason wasn't a Stryker anymore, and Lucas had taught him how to shield on the flight over, literally dumping the information straight into Jason's mind and letting the microtelekinetic sort through the overload on his own. There hadn't been time for subtlety, but Jason still got his shielding right.

Jason looked over his shoulder at Samantha and Kristen. Three of Nathan's children were turning their backs on their heritage, but Jason still didn't trust them. One of the founding families of the society that survived the Border Wars, the Serca Syndicate they owned was well-known for its forays into politics and government-restricted sciences. Genetic manipulation and segregation were just the beginning. The Sercas were the ones to force the Fifth Generation Act on the world, beginning the long cleanup of tainted and mutated human genetics. The Act went hand in hand with another Serca creation, the Registry, a list of people whose genetic makeup was clean and utterly human. The Sercas had placed themselves on top of the list, though they were far from human.

The Sercas had freedom and they wanted to remake humanity on Mars Colony, with themselves ruling atop society. The World Court and their chosen elite contemporaries were planning to inherit what the world's ancestors had left them—Mars Colony. They dreamed of a utopia and a chance to start over. Caught in between were the Strykers, psion slaves bound to a paramilitary company, who only wanted to save what was left of the world and their own skins. The whole mess of false fronts and alliances was the reason why they were here, on Spitsbergen, following Lucas. Jason owed him for more than just removing the neurotracker that was once grafted to his brain, but that knowledge was a bitter pill to swallow.

“Sit down,” Jason said flatly. “Let me fix you.”

Lucas seemed amused by Jason's temerity. “Do you honestly think Nathan hasn't inflicted worse on me before? I'll be fine.”

“Don't compare me to Nathan.” Jason scowled, but his gaze held steady. “I'm not going to kill you. Now sit the fuck down and let me take a look at your brain. We still need you, Lucas. Even I know that.”

“How altruistic of you.”

“Just take a damn seat.”

“You should listen to him,” Threnody said. “He does okay work for being such an obnoxious pain in the ass.”

“I'll take that as a compliment because I'm not arguing with someone in your current state.” Jason eyed her. “You should lie down, Threnody.”

With Jason's help, Threnody once again stretched out on the row of seats that was her berth, wrapped securely in thermal blankets and modified harness straps to keep her stable. Once Jason saw to Threnody, he headed over to Lucas, picking up a hypospray half-full of nanites from a case as he moved through the cargo bay. They couldn't afford weakness, and all of them were damaged in some way. Recovery was going to be slow for some, quicker for others, but even Jason knew that if they wanted to survive what was coming, they would need Lucas at full strength.

“Get the bleeding stopped,” Lucas said as he sat down beside Samantha and let Jason inject him in the throat with a dosage of nanites. “The rest will keep.”

Jason braced himself over Lucas with one hand, his other curving carefully over the left side of Lucas's skull, pale blond hair beneath his fingers a dirty mess. Jason closed his eyes, bent his head, and let his power seep into Lucas's skull. Down through the blood-brain barrier, down to the dura mater, into the brain itself with its swollen tear, just a few centimeters long. Jason could feel where Lucas had picked at it telekinetically, struggling to ease the pressure there with a power that couldn't compete with the one Jason now wielded.

“Messy,” Jason muttered.

“I don't need your opinion on how I keep myself alive.”

Jason dug his fingernails into Lucas's scalp. “Be still.”

Jason saw capillaries and cell structure, flash images of hemoglobin and plasma, as he worked through nanites to carefully reattach torn capillaries. Blood flow returned and the swollen tension in the cells around the area began to fade. Jason spread his microtelekinesis through Lucas's skull, helping the nanites chase down stray blood cells that were shifting into clots and teleporting them out of Lucas's body. Tiny drops of red splattered intermittently to the shuttle's deck until Jason was certain he'd done enough to ensure that Lucas wouldn't keel over and die from an aneurysm right when they needed him most.

Jason retracted his power, opening his eyes. The layers in the world wavered and it took effort to fix his vision. He wondered if he would ever get used to this, to the way he could see things, feel things, through his power.

“I never wanted to be this.”

“This is what you were born to be,” Lucas said, satisfaction curling through his voice. “I'm not the only one the world needs.”

Jason's answer to that was a twisted smile that reminded Lucas of Kristen. Lucas found little comfort in the expression. They stared at each other for a moment, the only sounds in the cargo bay the quiet hum of the environmental system and everyone's soft breathing.

“You're awake” came Matron's rough voice a few seconds later. She stood in the open hatch with her arms crossed over her chest, tapping her foot. “Get your ass up here, Jason. Novak needs some help with the hack.”

Jason straightened up, but didn't move. Lucas smiled tightly at him. “Go.”

“All right.” Jason left the cargo bay for the flight deck.

“How come you're the only one not bleeding out their eyes?” Matron asked as he took over the navigator's seat.

Jason reached for a wire embedded in the controls. “I don't know.”

His fingers brushed over faint flecks of blood on the console, his power momentarily slipping free of his control. It seeped into the blood, and the only DNA he could identify in the fluid was Lucas's. He grimaced, clenching down hard on his control.

The world looked, and felt, strange.

It always would.

 

TWO

AUGUST 2379
SVEAGRUVA, NORWAY

“The seed bank is going to be difficult to get into,” Lucas said. He studied the map on his datapad that showed the surrounding terrain of Longyearbyen and the airfield a kilometer away. A bright red dot identified where the Svalbard Global Seed and Gene Bank was located. “It's going to have layers of security, and the first layer we're going to have to take down is the one that breathes.”

“Distraction? Make it a two-group feint, but only one group goes in and the rest draws their fire?” Threnody said, rubbing at her mouth and scratching at her skin. “Everyone's going to have to pull their weight and we're all in crap condition, but we could try a head-on attack. Or maybe something more subtle might work?”

“We don't have time for subtle.”

Quinton prodded at his teeth with his tongue. They weren't broken. Neither were the bones in his face or the ones in his arms. The scattered burns on his hands resulting from his being a Class III pyrokinetic were gone, as were the biotubes. All he felt was their absence when he pressed his fingers down over skin and muscle. The tips of his middle fingers and thumbs no longer had the thin plating of metal needed to spark natural gas into fire. For the first time since being extracted from a cartel drug lord's training camp as a child by Strykers, Quinton's arms were wholly flesh and bone.

“I'm going to need something more than a lighter if you're hoping to work my power into your plan,” Quinton said, raising his head to look at Lucas. “I'd do better with a gun.”

“We've got grenades if you need to make fire,” Matron said, staring down at a list of supplies on her datapad. “Otherwise, I've got guns, but they won't be military grade. Lost most of those when the rest of my shuttles blew getting out of Buffalo. You'll be shooting with bullets, not energy darts.”

“I can work with that.”

Everyone in Alpha shuttle was awake and huddled in the cargo bay, pretending the chrono wasn't ticking away seconds that they needed. Lucas rubbed at his forehead, unable to get rid of the ache building there. “I don't care which weapon you use. This part is going to be a straightforward hit-and-run.”

“You can't have my scavengers for your suicide run,” Matron said. “I only have enough left to pilot the shuttles and you need them for that.”

Lucas waved aside her worries. “When we arrive in Longyearbyen, we'll need to make sure none of the quads manage to send out a signal for help. I wouldn't put it past Nathan to have Warhounds up there.”

“He placed two teams there last month,” Samantha said. “We'll be dealing with both psions and humans.”

“And none of us can even stand up straight,” Threnody said. “Great planning, Lucas.”

“I kept you alive,” he reminded her.

Threnody shrugged, the motion a little stiff. She was wearing an insulated skinsuit beneath her clothes now like everyone else, but still looked as if a good wind would knock her over. Ten hours since landing and Jason had already worked on her twice more. She was healing at a pace that outstripped the regular cellular rate, but was on par with a biotank. It was a tiring process, for both her and Jason.