Terminal Point (8 page)

Their anniversary was coming up, the beginning of December. Erik had promised her the stars this year.

“I would rather have nothing,” Sharra said softly, thinking of her daughter and what they would suffer through after the launch. The inevitability of a contract with Nathan she could not rationally escape.

She jacked in the data chip and uploaded the program meticulously created to bypass the World Court's security. Sharra knew her place. It wasn't by her husband's side.

She got up to pour herself another glass of wine.

 

SEVEN

AUGUST 2379
TORONTO, CANADA

The crack of displaced air from a teleport caused Jael Dawson, chief medical officer (CMO) for the Strykers Syndicate, to jerk her head up.

“Jael! Ciari needs you!” Keiko shouted.

Jael was already moving, having been on standby since being notified by a nurse that Ciari and Keiko were on the news streams. Keiko was crouched worriedly over Ciari's still form on the arrival platform. Jael swore, her thin, black dreads swinging around her face as she ran to aid them.

“Get me a gurney,” Jael snapped to one of the nurses. “And prep OR three.”

They had been dealing with the fallout of Buffalo for hours, even before Ciari was ordered to The Hague. The medical level was full of wounded, dying, and dead Strykers, with a handful still unaccounted for. Teams who hadn't been transferred to Buffalo for the initial fight now hunted for the missing in bunkers of that city, looking for bodies. Jael hated retrieval.

She knelt beside Ciari, dropping several layers of her mental shields to see what kind of mess she had to deal with. The Class III telepath swore loudly as the mental trauma of a mind raked through physical torture battered against her own. Jael, the best psi surgeon in the Syndicate, wrapped telepathic shields around Ciari's mind to try to stabilize her.

“We need to move her,” Jael said, glancing up at the crew of medical personnel that swarmed around them. “Let's go, people, we don't have much time.”

Keiko telekinetically lifted Ciari off the floor of the medical level's arrival room and onto the hover-gurney. Ciari's face was streaked with blood and tears, her lips bitten through and teeth flecked with pink-tinged saliva. Her eyes roved beneath her eyelids. When Jael brushed against Ciari's mind, all she got was a tidal wave of emotion. Jael flinched.

“The OR,” Jael said.
“Now.”

Everyone rushed to obey, the medics and nurses working to stabilize Ciari's physical form as they hurried to the operating room. Keiko followed in their wake, the telekinetic pale-faced and angry, a futile emotion, Jael thought.

Don't die on me now, Ciari,
Jael thought grimly as she let her crew pull the hover-gurney into the operating room.
We still need you.

Jael thought for a moment of a time just hours ago when she'd had Ciari on her operating table for a different sort of procedure. Shaking aside that memory, Jael spared a moment to look over at Keiko, the telekinetic standing just outside the tiny sterilization room. “Do you need medical attention?”

“No,” Keiko said, voice tight. “They didn't touch me.”

Jael nodded. “Then wait outside. I've got work to do.”

The door slid shut and Jael continued through to the operating room. She still had to scrub in, standing shoulder to shoulder with some of her nurses and assistants. For all that this was psi surgery, a physical operation was involved as well.

“Marguerite,” Jael said. “Deal with the bleeding. I'll deal with her mind.”

Jael's second-in-command nodded and began barking orders. A nurse cut off Ciari's uniform, another hooked her to an IV and other machines to monitor her vital signs. Electrodes were adhered to her skull, pulling up Ciari's chaotic mental readings on an EEG machine and overlaying it with the baseline in her medical records. Jael closed her eyes against the organized chaos of the operating room as she curled a hand around Ciari's own lax one. She dropped all but a single mental shield and sank her telepathic power into Ciari's traumatized mind.

A maelstrom of agony greeted her on the mental grid, jagged edges cutting into her own mind, psionic pain bleeding through her power. Jael worked to hold on to her own sense of self. She let a little of the pain seep in, needing to know where it stemmed from. The brain was a link between the body and the mind. The neurotracker that every Stryker carried was capable of doing enough damage that sometimes death would have been the preferable option.

Jael focused her power, splitting it through the burned-out pieces of Ciari's psyche. She went deep, letting herself be drawn into the other woman's subconscious mind. Jael knew that Marguerite would be putting Ciari under with as many drugs as her battered body could handle. Consciousness would be a slippery thing to grasp right now, and sometimes healing worked better as a suggestion than as an order. Sometimes it didn't.

Ciari,
Jael said, piecing together the woman's shattered sense of control one thought, one heartbeat, at a time.
I need you to turn off the pain.

Raw emotion flowed over her, no control in the response. Jael struggled to find an answer in a sensory overload where words weren't even an afterthought, but simply forgotten.

Turn it off.

Of all the psions, empaths were the best at altering how they felt pain. It was nerves and tissue, mind over matter, the concept of pain, of an ache that could carefully be denied. Jael used every bit of her power and concentration to guide Ciari into changing how her body felt, so it would change how her mind felt. It was almost a relief when the pain switched off, that all-encompassing drag on Jael's mind disappearing.

“ICP at twenty-one mm's,” Jael heard a nurse say. “Scans are showing possible brain herniation, definite epidural hematoma.”

“Prep for decompressive craniectomy,” Marguerite ordered. “Map out placement of the neurotracker for the operation. We can't take any chances with her.”

The hum of a laser saw was a hideous background noise. Conversation was reduced to medical jargon that only a tiny part of Jael's mind bothered to translate. Jael felt Ciari's mind dip sharply beneath hers, sliding away. She gripped the cold hand tighter, a physical anchor point for the one on the mental grid.

No,
Jael said, holding tight to the other woman's frayed thoughts.
You don't get to leave us yet.

They didn't like each other; never really had. They were trained to handle different tasks, to reach different goals. Ciari led Strykers into harm's way; Jael pulled them out. The only thing they had in common was that they actually gave a damn for their fellow Strykers. In this instance, Ciari was just another patient who needed Jael.

With Marguerite handling the physical operation and Jael refusing to let Ciari's mind die, they managed to keep her alive. This took several long hours and the results could be summed up in a single sentence.

“She's breathing,” Jael informed Keiko and Aidan Turner, the Stryker Syndicate's chief administrative officer (CAO), outside the recovery room. “On her own. Consider it a miracle. The neurotracker did a lot of damage.”

“Erik meant to kill her,” Keiko said, looking through the observation window at the still form surrounded by machines and nurses. “Travis Athe wanted her alive. He managed to get a majority vote to spare her life. They appointed me Acting OIC until Ciari recovers.”

Jael's mouth twisted. “Travis doesn't have a compassionate bone in his body. Why would he spare Ciari?”

“I don't know.”

Possibly because the launch is so close, they can't risk the upheaval appointing a new OIC would cause,
Aidan said, the Class IV telepath drawing both women into a psi link.

Keiko's Acting OIC,
Jael pointed out.

They can risk me being in the public eye during Ciari's absence, but they made it very clear it was to be temporary,
Keiko said.
They need her for the launch.

Did they give you a time frame for when I'm supposed to have Ciari standing on her own two feet and not in a coma?

Aidan winced at that announcement.
Be honest, Jael. What are her odds?

Jael crossed her arms, stepping out of the way of a nurse. The nurse, used to the silent, gesture-filled conversations that happened between 'path-oriented psions, ignored them.
She's in no pain, but only because I was able to get her to turn off part of her mind.

What?

Her system was in overload because of the neurotracker. She's going to need a biotank and regeneration of most, if not all, of her central nervous system. We have her hooked up to an external monitor that's sending impulses directly into her brain to ensure her major bodily functions still continue to work.
Jael spread her hands in a helpless gesture, grimacing.
I've got her telepathically anchored, but there's no guarantee she'll want to live. There may very well be damage to her body, to her brain, that we can't treat.

Erik had his finger on that kill switch for a full five minutes,
Keiko said softly, the look in her brown eyes bleak and hateful.

I still sensed coherency in her subconscious mind during the surgery,
Jael said.

What about her
conscious
mind?

Jael was silent on that, and Keiko let out a harsh little laugh. “So it's like that.”

“It's not like anything.” Jael ran a hand through her dreads, pulling the mass away from her face. She sighed tiredly. “I'll keep you apprised of her condition, Keiko. We're setting up a biotank and will transfer her to it immediately once the swelling in her brain has gone down.”

“Every six hours. I mean it, Jael. We have to be able to tell the World Court how she's progressing.”

Jael didn't argue.

“Keep me updated as well,” Aidan said. “What about the Strykers that were in Buffalo?”

Jael knew he wasn't asking about their condition. Less than half the Strykers that were in Buffalo survived. Those that did had all gone through a tiny, discreet mindwipe performed by Jael herself, their memories of seeing Lucas Serca and his siblings on the field erased. The Sercas weren't supposed to be anything other than human, and the high-ranking officers of the Strykers Syndicate were obligated to keep that secret, even at the cost of their own lives.

“They're recovering,” Jael said, voice mild. “From everything.”

It was enough of an assurance, and the three parted ways. Jael should have gone to her office, where she had space to think that wasn't full of people dying either beneath her hands or beneath her mind. Instead, she detoured into a lab that only had two approved biometric signatures for entry. This, Jael's personal research space, had been used by many CMOs over generations. Jael stepped inside and approached the work area in the back, where an opaque, cylindrical machine sat, surrounded by monitors.

It was securely attached to the countertop, with all readings on the tiny control screen positive and green. Jael checked the numbers, looking for anything out of the ordinary that could possibly harm the growing embryo housed inside the gestational unit. This was going to become a standard part of her routine, a deviation she never foresaw. Caring for Ciari's unborn child could arguably be considered her most important job at the moment.

She grabbed a stool, dragged it over, and reached for the datapad that lay abandoned near the gestational unit. The screen came alive at her touch, and Jael scrolled through the information. It was all preliminary lab work and reports that would need tremendous fleshing out. She wondered if it was worth it to even try. They had a month, maybe less, before everyone died, either by a kill switch, riots, or starvation. She wondered if this was how their ancestors felt during the Border Wars, that five-year span of nuclear hell that gave birth to their current lives; trapped in a situation that had no easy way out.

Stay with us,
Jael thought down the psi link that tied her to Ciari for medical purposes as she looked critically at the program decoding a genome.
We still need you. Your baby will need you.

 

EIGHT

AUGUST 2379
INVERCARGILL, NEW ZEALAND

New Zealand had tried to avoid the conflicts of old, but the shifting tides of war brought Australia's destruction to it just the same. Now it was two long, barren islands, the iron and asphalt skeletons of its cities touched only by the wind and the sea. At the very southern point of the South Island, Invercargill was just a shell.

The silence was shattered by what was left of a rusted metal door on an old river-port warehouse being torn off its hinges and telekinetically hurled down the street. All the broken warehouse windows meant the air inside was as cold and dry as it was outside.

“This way,” Lucas said.

He ran past Jason, expecting the others to follow. Jason didn't hesitate in following his lead. Behind them ran Quinton, Threnody cradled protectively in his arms. She was barely responsive, her comalike state the entire reason why they had fallen off course and detoured here. The last two hours had been hellish, with her intermittently suffering through seizures and Jason unable to stop it.

“Is that what I think it is?” Jason asked. “How did you get it here?”

“I don't care so long as it works,” Quinton said in a tight voice as he skidded to a halt, eyes flickering across the biotank. “Tell me it works, Lucas.”

“I would have risked a teleport to Antarctica that would ruin my own recovery if it didn't,” Lucas said without looking up from the control terminals. Wires snaked across the floor to a portable generator. Tubes connected a small storage tank to the holding tank through a pressure system that whined loudly as everything came online.