The Dark Edge Chronicles - Hardwire

Lilith

Mordecai frowned as he stepped out onto the street, the local temperature already several degrees lower than it should have been.  More Brotherhood wireheads and close, if he was any judge of things.  'Braddox's reinforcements.  I don't think I have the juice to engage in a long-term battle, so I better get scarce.'

But as the man in black began to gather the necessary energy to open a teleportal, his senses detected a resistance to his efforts to fix the magnetic coordinates necessary to open such a gateway.  'Huh?'  Then abruptly he grew grim as he realized what was happening.  'Damn, a dampening field.  I guess they don't want me to leave this party prematurely.'  A tight grin appeared on the big man's face.

"Guess I'm going to have to do this the old fashion way!"  And with that he took off at a dead run, heading roughly north.  He was swiftly out of sight.

Just in time: a mere moment after the powerful man in black had sprinted out of sight two dozen men dressed in dark clothing came running into view, their faces hard and determined.  At their front was the man Braddox sent.  As the others came to a halt in front of Curly's, staring hard at the bodies on the sidewalk, he turned a hard right to grab the door handle.

Braddox looked up as the softwire stuck his head past a stunned Clyve.

"Mr. Braddox?" he began.  Only to fall silent as he watched Braddox's face twist with rage.

"Go after him, you fool!" he screamed, his face livid.

Mordecai rounded a corner and found himself virtually alone on a narrow road that ran parallel to the main avenue he had been traveling on the way out of the city's core.  'Could the Brotherhood have cleared out the Normals to make the hunt for me easier?' he wondered as he flew down the street, his soft-soled shoes virtually silent as they made their way on the swept-clean pavement.  'Do they have that much power in Calgary?'

Regardless of the answer, the big man was a sitting duck out in the open like he was.  It wouldn't take that much effort by the Brotherhood to find him since he had absolutely no where to go.

However, that seemed to change as he caught something out of the corner of his eye just as he reached the end of the street.

There, nestled between two squat office buildings was an oddly shaped building, ultramodern and sleek, looking almost out of place in amongst the larger office and business buildings.  Even as Mordecai skidded to a halt, he could feel a strange sort of energy emanating from it.  'And who the hell does that belong to?' he found himself wondering, his heart pounding from his exertions.

A creature of the hidden world beyond mainstream Humanity, Mordecai had come across more than his fair share of oddities, wanderers and monsters, each wanting to carve their place somewhere close, yet safe from the species that spawned them.  More often than not, he had discovered that the folk tales were true as they described creatures that haunted the fringes of society.  Creatures that shouldn't exist.

Vampires, werewolves and beings with odd and twisted abilities were just examples of what he had found clinging to the underbelly of Humanity, fearing, hiding and sometimes preying upon the Normals that chose to ignore their existence.  At first the man in black had refused to believe such creatures did indeed exist.  But, as he became immersed in the underworld of the fringe, he not only accepted it but also learned to expect them everywhere he went.  They were easy to find, once you knew where to look.

As he had learned about them, Mordecai discovered that they, like he and his people, were created by genetic mutation, products of a shifting gene pool in search of biodiversity as it was assaulted by cosmic and terrestrial radiation sources.  Some were as old as the psionics, created midway through Humanity's evolution while others were older.  In some cases, much, much older.