The Dark Edge Chronicles - Hardwire

Chapter 5: Comrades at Arms

A flicker of light announced the teleportal opening and, with a twisting of reality, Mordecai stepped into his room, a fourth donut already on its way into his mouth. Closing the portal behind him with a thought, he dropped into the small couch sitting in the far end of the room and grimly proceeded to finish off the rest of the donuts, washing down the crumbs with the juice.

That done and the empty boxes tossed into the garbage, Mordecai turned his attention to his probes, still scattered all over the city. It would be good to see what they had seen the Brotherhood doing overnight. Drinking the last of the apple juice, he placed the glass bottle on the floor as he reached out with his mind.

"Update all activity logs and download current mapping information," he said under his breath, tapping into each probe individually to prevent the Brotherhood from tracking Paladin's signal. And for a brief moment, as his mind downloaded the probes' information into his cortex, he was flying high above the city, a bird's eye view of the downtown core stretching out beneath him in the early morning light. Then, with a shifting of perception, he felt the download complete.

Immediately the man in black withdrew his consciousness from the far-flung probes, drawing his senses back into his body to resume full awareness of his immediate surroundings. Just in time to feel the bow wave of a telepathic scanning pulse sweep through the room beside his.

"Shit," he hissed tightly. "Paladin, deactivate all wards. Now!" To feel the bow wave of a scan meant the telepath was close by, maybe even in the hallway just outside. At that range it wouldn't be hard to trace the location of a warded room. If the teep managed to survive the headaches the wards would have given them, that is.

"Wards deactivated, Mordecai," Paladin's soft voice replied from inside Mordecai's coat. The man in black nodded in satisfaction. If a scan had caught the warded room, it would be like he had thrown up a giant billboard, with flashing neon lights, saying a powerful psionic could be found here! With this mystery just beginning to unravel in front of him, and the threat of the Brotherhood beginning to loom in earnest, he wasn't quite ready to be found yet.

Just as he felt the wards fall completely under Paladin's directive, the man in black sensed the scan wash over the room, the EM energy accompanying the sweep making his enhanced senses tingle. Knowing that even the slightest amount of unusual brain activity could trigger the teep's alarms, the big man slammed down tight locks on his neural output to remain undetected. Tight, very tight locks indeed, to avoid the power of this particular sweeps.

For a long moment Mordecai was virtually brain-dead, leaving only core processes functioning in an effort to remain out of sight of the scanning telepath. And then the scan was past, moving on to the next room, apparently without finding him. Breathing a sigh of relief, Mordecai slumped back into the couch's depths, perspiration beading his forehead.

"Burn me, but that was close!" he muttereed to himself.

And far from over: from experience he knew that any teep worth his or her salt made a backhand sweep to confirm their scanning path. Hunkering down in anticipation, he kept his neural activity to a minimum. No sense going out and looking for the teep pushing the scan, only to stumble into a wire fight when he was totally drained of energy. Tensed, he waited for it.

Sure enough, like clockwork, the backhand sweep suddenly was racing back through the room, forcing the big hardwire to drop back to brain-dead status. He peered out from behind tight mental shutters to watch as the sweep went through the room, poking into every nook and cranny in a somewhat more thorough second scan before it finally moved on, going back in the direction it had come from.