The Dark Edge Chronicles - Hardwire

Into the Inner Sanctum

The darkened expanse of Preacher's office was illuminated by the security officer's flash light as he momentarily opened the door to let the beam sweep across the broad space, his eyes narrowed as he looked for anything out of place. In reality of course, the man was a skilled telepath. He needed neither the light nor actual vision to determine whether or not the room had been disturbed since the last time he had visited it, roughly an hour ago. Still, Mr. Preacher wanted him to pretend he was a real security guard and, since the slender commander was the boss, the telepath went through the motions.

Satisfied that the office was still undisturbed, the guard closed the door and locked it, withdrawing his telepathic senses from the partially warded chamber at the same time. The massive wards that had protected not only Preacher's office, but the entire floor as well as the two floors beneath it, were still in the process of reconstruction since the Brotherhood assassin had left nearly twelve hours ago. 

Even with every mover and teep that Preacher had at his disposal working nearly around the clock, it would still take nearly a week to reconstruct the psionic maze that provided the bulk of the security on the restricted floors. Those teeps and movers were even now taking a breather to regain much needed sugars before returning to the reconstruction.

Glancing at his watch, the guard saw that it was 23:30. Time to move to the next floor down and begin his sweep through there.

Behind the guard in the office he had just locked, the shadows shifted uneasily, just beyond the reach of the partial wards protecting the doorway. Then, with a ripple of Reality tearing, a teleportal irised into being, spilling out two black sheathed forms before vanishing. Immediately the two forms moved deeper into the shadows, hugging the floor as they scanned the room with their eyes.

With the tiny watcher embedded somewhere in the room, providing the EM coordinates to Preacher's office and the location of the remaining wards, it was relatively easy to fix the location in the teleporter's mind. Local EM fields were then warped to twist local space/time until two seemingly disparate points along the space/time continuum touched. Without the ward web to alert the guards to their presence, the two shadowy figures had arrived silently and without detection.

Mordecai glanced over his shoulder and tapped his forehead. Jeriko from where she was crouched just behind him, nodded in understanding and both went brain-dead. Just in time: as the man in black began to reach for a utility pouch on his vest, he felt an active scan wash over the room. 'They've increased the active scanning to compensate for the holes in their security grid,' he silently noted with interest.

That suited the big man just fine. Such scans were much easier to elude than static ward webs like the one they had run into their first attempt at a penetration.

A tap on his hip told Mordecai that Jeriko was preparing to scan for mundane security measures like Infrared lattices, ultrasound motion detectors and passive laser nets. He gave a curt nod to acknowledge and slipped his own detection device from the utility pouch he had been reaching for.

It was a small but powerful instrument created to detect psionic concentrations, like cloaking fields. He powered it up as Jeriko slipped forward to extend a sensor wand before her, it's display lit softly with a gentle blue light to maintain night vision.

The multiphasic scanner sent a narrow scanning pulse through the room, a portable LIDAR device whose narrow beam could render passive security webs visible to the enhanced vision of a psionic. And almost instantly it painted a tight lattice of dull red lines covering a majority of the room, an IR heat detection grid. Superimposed over the lattice were a looser, but brighter grid of laser light and the broad, light green swaths of an ultrasound motion detection system.