Authors: K.M. Ruiz
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 single 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 launchâso close to its goal of escapeâended 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.
Lucas's mind momentarily blanked out beneath the weight of the merge, thoughts and power twisting with something he couldn't identify, some emotion that Kristen refused to let him experience. In that moment where it seemed his mind would tear out of his body, Nathan slammed through his thoughts, fracturing everything.
Lucas's mind didn't break, though it took every bit of skill he had to force it to remain together. He borrowed strength from the merge itself, taking power pulled out of the willing minds of hundreds of Strykers. Aisling had seen this symbiosis years ago, lifetimes ago, in a white room bombed to ashes during the Border Wars. The disparate pieces of a world struggling to realign themselves into something new.
Somewhere, in the space that existed between two heartbeats, in the possibilities that festered in the human mind, Lucas saw it all. In the bottom of his mind, in memories too numerous to count, Lucas thought he could hear her.
Tell me that they're worth it,
Lucas remembered saying once as a child as he gripped his future in his hands, knowing even then that it was too late to back out. Too late to give up.
Tell me that what's left of humanity is worth the future you're trying to give them.
Silence was his only answer then, same as it was now. He'd heard all her excuses before anyway.
He was the means. His daughter was the end.
In the here and now, none of that mattered, not when the only thing that everyone was striving for was survival.
The sound of a gunshot, too close for comfort and too loud to ignore, jerked Lucas's attention out of the merge, instinct pulling up a telekinetic shield around himself. The split-second distraction lasted long enough for him to recognize the voice that started screaming, to feel Jason wrench himself free of the merge. Jason's abrupt exit ripped too many minds apart in the process, ruining the network Samantha had built through Lucas's mind.
Lucas opened his eyes, the world gone bright and liquid as his mind overloaded. He saw a familiar figure standing in front of them, gun leveled at someone else. Lucas watched Gideon smile.
“You couldn't hide Jason forever, Lucas,” his younger brother said. “You didn't mindwipe me deep enough. I still had his psi signature in my memories.”