The Dark Edge Chronicles - Hardwire

Penetration

Slinging the bag over his shoulder once more, Mordecai stepped off the platform and into the station itself, a quaint little building that had managed to remain untouched through both world wars. A handful of steps and he was through it and outside onto the cobblestone street beyond. The man in black then began to do something he didn't do very often. He began to walk.

It took Mordecai a little over three hours to traverse the town, as quaint as the train station with its cobblestone streets, tiny shops and stores, and street-side cafes, and slip into the countryside undetected. That was a feat in itself, considering the town was literally crawling with psionics, a large percentage of them hard softwires and most likely security belonging to the Brotherhood. The man in black was forced to keep his neural activity at an all time low and his fake mental profile pasted over top just to walk down the sidewalk.

Quickly finding a country road that led in the general direction he wanted to go once he was outside of town, the big man set out with a will, his bag still slung over his shoulder. Now that he was clear of all the background noise the psionic-packed town had made in his mind, it was simplicity itself to follow the trace to Tabitha's exact location.

Not because her trail had become clearer. Because her location shone like a psionic beacon in his mind's eye, confirmation that he was nearing one of their centers of power. With every step  he made down the tree-lined back road after leaving the town behind, he could literally feel the psionic energies crackling in the air. That sensation only grew stronger as he closed in on the Brotherhood facility.

By the time he crested the last hill, the man in black expected to find a sprawling complex stretching out to the horizon in front of him. It needed to be that size to be big enough to produce the psionic energies thick enough in the air around him now that he could have cut them with a knife. He figured at least a thousand psionics, hard softwires all, were needed to generate such a field, maybe even a handful of hardwires. And that amount of people also needed a good-sized town to house them.

So he was quite surprised to come over the ridge and find himself staring at, . . . a whole lot of nothing. A small French country cottage there, off the road to the right, was the only sign of human habitation for kilometres in any direction.

"Huh," he snorted in surprise. It wasn't quite what he had expected. He found himself even more astonished when a quick scan yielded that the massive psionic field seemed to be centralized around that tiny little cottage down there. Whatever it was, cottage or not, it bore a closer look.

With a glance around to make sure nobody else was about, he resettled his bag and turned up the narrow lane that ran towards the house, every sense tuned to maximum capacity.

'Doesn't look like much,' he thought, quite underwhelmed as he pushed aside some leafy boughs and bush to peer at the small cottage that sat on the edge of some cleared land, an unidentifiable crop of some sort greening the brown of the tilled soil. An even smaller barn sat off to the side, with a sway-backed horse peacefully cropping grass just beyond and two or three cows grazing in the yard. The idyllic picture was completed with the presence of two chickens sitting on top of the tiny cottage's peaked roof.

It was such a perfectly innocent-looking scene, the big lone gunman knew that it couldn't possibly be real. The postcard-perfect image was hiding something, something that was generating that massive field out there. But it was so cleverly crafted, that he couldn't make out any clues from where he was standing.

That meant he needed to study it from up close. With that goal in mind, Mordecai eased off the lane into some nearby bushes, in case they had more standard surveillance set up to watch the entryway to the cottage. It was from here that he then worked his way through the undergrowth and up onto the crest of a small hill that overlooked the yard. Finding a suitably shielded spot, he hunkered down and studied at length the seemingly innocent looking building.