The Dark Edge Chronicles - Hardwire

Chapter 31: Hardwired Confusion

As three sets of eyes tracked over the building Dee had indicated, they discovered the fire escape leading to the roof than ran vertically up the wall facing the street. A perfect route upward.

"Here," Mordecai barked, tossing Dee and Duffy thick woven nylon straps, ceramic clips on their ends. "They fit here, and here." He demonstrated how the clips attached to recessed loops built directly into the Shiva's chassis. Following suit, the two humans attached their clips then slung the bulky machine pistols over their shoulders, mimicking the big man in black. Then the three of them were sprinting across the street, heading towards the apartment building and its fire escape.

By the time a gasping Duffy dropped onto the flat roof of the apartment building beside Dee and Mordecai, thoroughly winded from both the sprint across the street and the charge up the fire escape, the man in black and the red haired detective were already scanning the street below.

"Holy shit, Mordecai!" Dee rasped disbelievingly, not wanting to believe what her eyes were telling her about what was happening below them as she peered over the edge of the roof. The three of them now lay flat on their bellies.

"What the hell is going on down there?"

"War!" Mordecai grated tightly in reply.

And war it was, but unlike any war that Dee and Duffy had either experienced directly, or had seen on TV. There were no screams of the dying, no hum of bullets passing through the air, and no harsh crunch of explosions. Yet there were plenty of bodies, scattered haphazardly across the battleground that the intersection had become. And the wild, seething energies that had cut them down surged freely through the air below them, searing it with actinic discharges and rendering the very air itself deadly.

Squinting against the discharges and the flares of psionically created light, Mordecai grimly began to search for the sources of the energy bursts, his hand on the Shiva that lay close to his head. It didn't take his expert eyes long to find them.

There, dressed in their characteristic black leather trench coats stood a cluster of determined Brotherhood psionics, surrounded by heavily battered shields as they grimly returned fire across the intersection at their attackers, hurling shockwaves and plasma bolts with experienced efficiency. There were perhaps fifteen of them in total, not counting the unmoving Brotherhood bodies already lying in the intersection. And, just as the destroyer cadre had when they had first began their attack against the Avalon listening post on 16th Avenue, these psionics were standing out in the open, relying on their shields to protect them instead of physical shelter.

Frowning at that as he remembered the futility of the Brotherhood's assault on the Avalon listening post, Mordecai tracked his eyes along the intersection, following the incoming fire that was hammering away at the Brotherhood psionics. And just as quickly he found their source.

Two women, sheathed in black from head to toe were standing about a meter apart, legs braced shoulder-width as their psyken shields rippled from the impacts of multiple shockwaves. They seemed to be waiting for something, as if they were prepared to watch the Brotherhood heavies do their worst before actually retaliating. Mordecai grimaced as he recognized the one on the right, her short-cut blonde hair and boyish figure almost unmistakable.

"Can you see them, Mordecai?" Dee hissed tightly. "Are they advancing towards the chopper? Do we need to jump in there to try and stop them? Or do we wait for backup?"

"Want my vote?" Duffy rasped, looking shell-shocked.

"Not really," Dee fired over at her partner before addressing Mordecai again. "But I do want yours, mister."