The Dark Edge Chronicles - Hardwire

An Untenable Situation

Mordecai frowned as a cowled young woman carefully washed the last of the dried blood from his torso. It wasn't the fact that he had somehow gathered a small retinue of young men and women that was putting the frown on his face, though. It was the information that he was pulling from the young Caiphus' memories.

As he had suspected, once again his consciousness had been pulled into one of the many time eddies that swirled alongside the main time stream as it churned from the past, through the present and into the future. And again he had been pulled into a future possibility that had somehow unfolded according to an event that had happened in the distant past.

But, unlike his first interactive journey of consciousness into the eddies of probability, the individual that he had jumped into this time had no idea of where this time was, in relation to the time stream. There was no reference to a time frame, either implied or explicit, that the young man's mind adhered to. Only a vague reference to a time of darkness and that they were now in the fall of the 24th year of some monarch's reign.

In fact, if anything, he saw that the young man was horribly uneducated in terms of the sciences and physical realities. His education wasn't all that great in the spiritual, either, regardless of the fact that everybody swarming around him was either a brother or sister in the same unnamed order that they all belonged to. And that was bad.

"Are you done?" he grated tightly. He needed to get moving, if he was going to be prepared to face this Vestrun and his followers, who the young monk Felix referred to as the Reavers.

"Yes, Sir Caiphus," the young woman, not more than fourteen, piped up in a reedy voice. "Would you like a new tunic?"

"As quickly as possible," Mordecai growled, feeling a sense of urgency wash through him.

Hopefully he wasn't completely trapped into this reality. But, without a surge of energy like he experienced as Hollis when he ripped open the containment field holding the station together, the big man wasn't aware of an energy source locally that was going to be powerful enough to vault his consciousness from this eddy back into reality. So, the man in black had to learn how to fight, and quickly, in the manner that they did here, or he ran the risk of actually and finally dying, lost in the backwaters of probability with no way of getting back to his natural body.

It was that sense of urgency that pushed him to stand, casting his eyes about the low ceiling'd tent, searching for something that could help him. And he quickly found his eyes falling on the dying bodies of a number of knights like Caiphus that lay scattered about the tent's floor in various attitudes of near death.

Mordecai frowned. From what he could tell, Caiphus' Eye and Finger were easily as powerful as any hardwire he had known in his own time. In fact, he'd almost go far enough to say that the young man might even be of lone gunman caliber. But would it be enough power to do what occurred to him in that instant? Would he be strong enough to reach into a dying man's mind and literally absorb his memories, learning everything that man or woman knew?

The frown vanished as he made up his mind. There was only one way to find out. Stepping to the closest knight, a woman that couldn't have been more than eighteen, her life leaking out a massive gash in her side that had torn her so completely up inside that there was no place to start the healing process. From what he could see, she had perhaps a handful of minutes still left to live. He had to work fast, if he didn't want to be pulling fading memories from dead brain cells.

Kneeling, Mordecai extended a telepathic probe into the young woman's mind, easily slipping past the surface layers as he silently thanked whatever force that had cast him into this place that it had left his own experience and skill untouched. For he needed a nearly perfect touch to make this particular penetration, without his consciousness getting caught in the neuronal backlash of a dying mind.