The Dark Edge Chronicles - Hardwire

Chapter 10: Enter the Hardwire

"Depends on your definition of the word, sir," Horst replied, his voice soft, yet coming through clearly via the phone's speakers. "Our clean-up teams have finished their sweeps through the city and have completed the task of wiping out any evidence of the Brotherhood's presence here. And our contacts in the police and fire departments have also finished destroying any evidence gathered by the Normals in the various events that have taken place with regards to the conflict with the renegade. As far as the Normals are concerned, it didn't happen."

"Good." Kendrick's eyes narrowed. "But, . . ?"

"But it would seem that the destruction of our network here has not only our employees feeling somewhat abandoned, but has given the local nations the excuse to foment rebellion against us."

Kendrick's bluff features tightened at that news. In every city the Brotherhood held sway, it held the mandate to control the local nations. Nations were groups of psionics that banded together along either familial or ideological lines, or both, creating something very close to the Normals' clan system.

It was a concept as old as Humanity itself: people of like mind banding together for mutual protection and support. With the psionics' rarity in the world, they had done much the same: creating clans or nations, as they preferred to be called, to protect themselves against the numbers of Normal Humanity arrayed against them. Such nations were scattered liberally all over the world, large cities often supporting several at any one time.

Calgary had been home to no less than fifteen separate nations, the prairie city a hot bed of psionic activity from early on in its history. One of the reasons the Brotherhood had chosen it as its Western Canada headquarters. Nations were the fodder for the cannons, their softwires essential in the Brotherhood's plans of world domination as providers of telepathic, mover and burner services across the network. Not to mention what they meant as test subjects for various Brotherhood experiments to refine techniques of torture, coercion and manipulation as well as guinea pigs for experiments to improve psionic abilities.

And so Preacher had been elemental in their control, providing softwires for most of North America from the culling of the Calgary nations. It was the Brotherhood's role as the dominant force in the psionic world to be the masters of the nations. More than that, it was their right. And the softwires of those nations had bowed the knee before them.

Until now: as with most oppressed people, as soon as the oppressor was removed, the people spring to revolt, seeking their freedom. If the Brotherhood didn't act quickly to reassert its control over the city, the fifteen nations of Calgary would revert to their previous unfettered condition and would then seek to either prevent the Brotherhood's return, or leave the city all together. And that translated into a direct loss of valuable resources, a possible additional nail in Kendrick's growing coffin.

Nations preventing the Brotherhood from moving into an area always resulted in direct conflict with the Brotherhood, which always resulted in the nation's destruction. If they would not bow, they would be destroyed. It was a basic Brotherhood tenant.

"Identify the ringleaders and then withdraw to secured positions to await the destroyers," Kendrick grimly ordered. It would be a loss to watch those valuable assets be destroyed, but rules were rules. The Brotherhood would not tolerate rebellion against its control. And it seemed that the Calgary nations needed to be reminded of that.

"Yes, sir," Horst replied with a nod and broke the link, his image dissolving into a tiny cloud of glittering particles before the holographic projector deactivated.

"From bad to worse," the blocky man growled with just a hint of frustration.

As the last word spilled from his lips and into the air, there came a soft tap at the door. A simple scan was enough to tell him who it was. Kendrick then mentally sent his summons to enter and silently the door swung open to reveal the stunning figure of his beautiful, redheaded executive assistant, Sasha, her luscious curves barely fitting into the gray jacket and mini-skirt she wore, her long, curly hair piled on top of her head. Lush lips pursed and she spoke.