Terminal Point (4 page)

Outside in the cold morning air, Threnody's body was already regretting this plan of action. Breathing heavily, she took shelter behind a crumbling foundation wall slick with moss, teeth clenched against the pain she was feeling.

Stay low,
Quinton said through the psi link. It was a tenuous connection, all that Lucas could provide.
I've got your back.

He lay on top of the shuttle, teleported there by Jason and spared the heat from the fuselage by a thin telekinetic shield. Rifle in hand, aiming through the sight scope, Quinton shot once to get a read on the air current, purposefully missing his oncoming target, watching where the bullet hit to check wind speed and distance. He adjusted the angle of his rifle slightly, curled his finger over the trigger, and pulled it between one breath and the next.

The soldier was thrown backward to the ground, blood spraying out of his chest as the bullet hit home.

Go,
Quinton told Threnody.
I don't see anyone in that hallway.

She scrambled to her feet, throwing herself forward, eyes on the door the soldier had come out of. Threnody skidded inside, glancing up at the security feed embedded in the wall.

I'm your eye in the sky,
Kristen said cheerfully into her mind on the psi link.
Two soldiers coming your way at fifty meters and closing, second intersection down the hall. One is a Warhound.

Class?
Threnody said.

That would be telling.

Lucas, your sister is a rude little shit.

That Warhound is a Class VI telekinetic,
Lucas said.
You'll have to handle what she throws at you, Threnody. I can't get to you yet. And, Kris?

Yes?
Kristen said.

Don't piss me off.

All that filtered down the psi link from the girl was a sense of sullen discontent. Threnody kept running, using her teeth to pull the glove off one hand. The buildings here were old and patched, metal threaded through the structures everywhere. Threnody took a chance and fell to her knees as the footsteps got louder. She slammed one hand against the metal wall, looking for a conduit, and brought her gun up to bear right as two people came hurtling around the corner.

Bullets cut through the air over her head. She felt telekinetic pressure on her bruised ribs, but her power was already arcing up into their bodies. Threnody's vision tunneled out, a roaring sound filling her ears. For one long moment, she didn't know if she was even breathing, then a sharp pain spiked through one side of her face. Spiked harder on the other. She blinked, vision coming back to her in time to see Jason's hand descending for another slap. She made a wordless noise and he stopped in midmotion.

Threnody was lying on her back, staring up into Jason's face, his hazel eyes wide and worried. He let out a harsh breath. “Shit, Thren, don't go undoing all my hard work.”

It was strange hearing the familial diminutive of her name come out of his mouth. Threnody struggled to sit up. Jason helped her out, bracing her with one arm behind her back as she caught her breath. “My hand.”

Jason looked down at the limb in question, finding red lines spanning across her skin like circuit wires. “Nerve damage. Guess you aren't as healed as I thought you were. I think you might have fried the nanites in your veins, too.”

“Wonderful.” Threnody grimaced. “Help me up.”

Jason got Threnody to her feet. She checked her gun and they got moving again. The faint mutter in the back of their minds was everyone else's conversation on the psi link as they cut through the outpost section by section. Overlaid across that was Kristen's heavy, intense presence that was blocking the Warhounds' ability to teleport away or telepathically get a warning out. Her psionic interference scratched against their shields. Kristen didn't care about harming the Strykers if it meant the humans died, and Lucas was too busy right now to make her see reason. Kristen's help was needed but it was difficult on their end to deal with it.

The sound of an explosion nearby pulled them up short. “That came from outside,” Threnody said.

Was that us or them?
Jason sent out along the psi link.

Us,
Quinton answered.
Samantha just blew up part of a building. We've got fire.

Joining the fray?

No. I'm staying put.

“We need to get to the control room,” Jason said as they started moving again.
Kerr,
sitrep.

You aren't feeling the headache I am,
came Kerr's pained reply.
Remaining Warhounds are in merge. Lucas and I are picking their minds apart, but I'd rather put a bullet in their brains.

And the quads?
Threnody asked.

None in your section. Go knock some sense into Kristen and tell her to stop biting at my shields.

Kerr's mental voice faded. Threnody and Jason were still methodically careful on their way to the control room, but Kerr was right. They didn't find any more quads on their way to Kristen's position, and she greeted their arrival with a soft and raspy “All clear.”

Jason hauled Kristen out of the chair and took her place. She immediately draped herself over the back of it. Threnody eyed the girl, keeping a finger on the trigger guard of her gun.

“Maybe you should go find your brother,” Jason said as he yanked connecting wires from the console and plugged them into the neuroports in his arms and wrists. “I don't like having you at my back.”

“I know,” Kristen said. “It's why I'm staying.”

“I'm not leaving,” Threnody said evenly.

Jason switched on his inspecs, data rolling across his vision, merging with the hologrids that snapped into the air. “I remember your psi signature from a few years ago, Kristen. Every Stryker died trying to get close to you. No one managed a solid ident.”

“You wouldn't have,” Kristen said. “We Sercas are supposed to be human, remember?”

Jason shrugged his opinion of that. “You've fooled the world. Don't expect anyone to be happy about that.”

“You Strykers never are. You should see the faces of the ones we keep when they meet with old teammates. So many tears. So sad.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We retrieve select Strykers for our own purposes and make them loyal to us. We can make them forget where they came from, but we can't make those they left behind forget who they lost.” Kristen stood up on her tiptoes to peer over the seat at Jason. “Your rank and file keep secrets better when dead.”

Her empathy rolled through them, brushing up against their shields, but went no further than that. Lucas's previous warning was enough to make Kristen stay her hand this time, just not her mouth. Pointedly, neither Threnody nor Jason engaged her in that conversation.

Jason set to work breaking through encrypted software, inspecs streaming data over his sight. Lucas arrived several minutes later, looking tired and tense. He pried Kristen off the chair and pitched her toward the hallway.

“Go back to the shuttle, Kris,” Lucas said, not watching to see if she left.

“Maybe you should go with her,” Threnody said. “Make sure she doesn't try to kill everyone else.”

“Kris knows what will happen if she tries.”

“You're in no condition to stop her.”

“Doesn't mean I won't.” Lucas gave Threnody a hard smile before addressing Jason. “Give me an update.”

“That damn mountain is surrounded by artillery,” Jason said as he moved his hands through the hologrid, searching out leads for the hack. “Most of it is still active.”

“I want you to keep anything from coming online when we get up there,” Lucas said. “That's all we need.”

“It's going to take a while. The security up there runs on a different system than the one we hacked flying in.”

“You've got two hours.”

Jason grimaced. “I doubt I can do it in two. It already took us a day to fly to this island and hack the outer security. This is going to take longer.”

“We have less than twenty-four hours to finish this. I'm moving everyone to the airfield that services Longyearbyen. I want you to set up five days' worth of future communications to be sent out during the required status check-in time. The quads up here had a standard security code. I'm sure you can falsify it.”

Lucas left and Threnody followed after him. Jason started hacking into everything the government had built up in Longyearbyen. Novak couldn't help him with this, the scavenger having burned through most of the wiring in his brain and body already. Jason knew the feeling, knew the heat of burned wires before they cooled, the tiny surges making sections of his body go numb. He wasn't looking forward to going through that again.

Two hours later, Jason had to resign himself to the inevitable: he wasn't going to meet Lucas's timetable. Jason rubbed at his eyes, inspecs bright against the darkness. “Shit.”

He was tired. Staring at command windows and the framework of a security grid he had no hope of breaking would exhaust anyone.

Right on schedule, Lucas commed him. “Finished?”

“I finished the communications you wanted, but we've got a problem.”

“That's not what I want to hear.”

“I managed to hack the security feed around here earlier only because it was tied into the same system Novak hacked on our flight over the Atlantic. I got lucky with the artillery, but I can't hack this last system, Lucas. It's completely separate, half of it is tied into biometrics on-site, and I'd need a week, at minimum, to build a back door.”

The comm hummed softly with static. Jason winced as Lucas implanted an image directly into his mind for a visual. “Get back here.”

Jason extracted himself from the hack and closed out before teleporting back to the shuttles sitting on the airfield a kilometer away. Alpha shuttle had its cargo doors open, metal ramp digging into the dirt. Lucas was standing at the edge of the ramp, bright blots of red dripping from his nose to the metal beneath his feet. Lucas might not have been hemorrhaging anymore, but nosebleeds were common while suffering through psi shock. Jason was surprised the younger man was capable of walking, much less pulling off an attack on a government outpost.

Shaking his head, Jason jerked his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of Longyearbyen. “Security grid for the island is set. The artillery on the mountain is dormant now, but the security system tied into the seed bank is something else.”

Lucas wiped at the blood dripping from his nose, flicking it off his fingertips. “If we jacked Novak into the hack?”

“He's burned through all his neuroports.”

“We could strip new ones onto different nerves and modify the ones in his brain.”

Jason stiffened. “That will kill him.”

“Most likely.” Lucas turned his head to stare south at the flat-topped, small mountain that rose into the sky nearby. It was mostly white near the peak, the rest dark rock and dull green moss. “If you can't hack it, we only have one option.”

Lucas headed back into the shuttle, Jason on his heels. Matron and Kerr were huddled near some of the cold-storage units, with Samantha and Kristen sitting nearby, watching them. Jason didn't see Threnody or Quinton.

“Did you scan the terrain?” Lucas asked Matron as they got closer.

“This place don't get tectonic shift like other continents,” Matron said, glancing up from the readouts on the unit's control screen. “That road is stable enough, but I wouldn't want to land a shuttle on it. Lucky for you, two of the shuttles that survived are carrying the gravlifts. We'll be able to transfer whatever Jason can't teleport.”

“I take it I'm the stevedore,” Jason said with a heavy sigh.

Matron smiled at him, showing a line of metal teeth. “You know you're worth more than that, so stop complaining.”

“Is the hack finished?” Kerr said.

Jason shook his head. “No.”

“Then how the hell are we getting inside that mountain?”

“Better question would be how are we doing it without tipping off the government?” Matron said.

“They won't know what's happened up here until it's too late,” Lucas said, heading for the flight deck.

“You sure about that?”

“We'll be in Antarctica by then.”

“We'll be
where
?” Jason said. “What the hell, Lucas? You want to go from polar day to polar night? There are other places in the world we can go to ground that are less extreme.”

“And that's exactly where the government would think we'd go, except we won't be in Norway, Greenland, or Canada. There's no other place to match the Arctic except the south pole. Antarctica wasn't worth the trouble for the government to excavate after the Border Wars, which means they won't be searching for us there.” Lucas glanced over his shoulder at them as he palmed open the hatch to the flight deck. “The seeds need to be kept frozen. These shuttles won't run forever.”

Matron snorted. “Tell me about it. We're gonna have to refuel somewhere between here and there. Hope you've got a place in mind.”

“Just stick to the plan and don't ask questions, Matron. You'll live.”

“You keep saying that. I keep not believing it.”

Lucas ignored her in favor of Quinton's sharp gaze. “I need Threnody.”

“No.” Quinton stood up from the navigator's seat. Threnody was curled up in the pilot's seat, seemingly asleep, but at the sound of Lucas's voice, she opened her eyes. She looked worse than she had before the fight.

“You don't have a choice.”

Quinton put himself between her and Lucas. “She can't handle whatever it is you need her to do.”

“She survived a focused lightning strike. She can survive this. Move.”