The Dark Edge Chronicles - Hardwire

Chapter 38: The Hunters becomes the Hunted

Mordecai's face tightened as he watched a desperate knot of psionics get mowed down by an unrelenting team of vampires led by Lash himself, the big vampire's face thankfully hidden behind his mask. He could only imagine what the Qos Viran commander was feeling as his people finally had their revenge on an organization responsible for thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of deaths amongst the clans over the years. Lash's face could only be a mask of blood lust combined with glee at his successful finding of ultimate revenge. And, on a vampire, that wouldn't be a pretty sight!

Pushing aside the image that danced in his mind's eye of an enraged vampire, Mordecai turned down a side hallway, his weapon held ready. And almost immediately he staggered to a halt as a dizzying wave of pain and nausea swept through his body.

"Wha ... ?" he began to mutter before the pain stabbed with a white-hot spike through his head, stealing his strength and forcing him to slump up against the closest wall.

Which, to his chagrin, turned into a door instead of a wall. A door that, with a soft whine of hinges, was pushed open by his weight falling against it, spilling him into the room beyond. Staggering, Mordecai fought to regain his balance.

With a jerk, Kendrick spun around from where he had been frantically working on the holo-display on his desk to stare hard at the door to his office as it swung open. And he watched the black clad man stagger inside, a bulky weapon clutched tightly in one hand as the hallways beyond the now open door echoed with strange gunfire and the screams of his dying comrades.

Somehow Mordecai sensed through the pain that he wasn't alone in the room. Gritting his teeth against the renewed pain in his head, now remembered as the agony that had sent him spinning into unconsciousness after his most recent journey into the future, the man in black fought to bring the Shiva up in time to fire at the dimly seen figure standing at the far end of the big office. Was the healing that Olira performed abruptly coming undone??

Only to find a massive shockwave curling itself around his body just as he aimed the powerful machine pistol. With a surge of psyken, the bulky weapon was tossed halfway across the room, well out of reach. And then he was flying backward to hammer hard into the marble and teak wall that made up the back wall of the office, hitting hard enough to make the reinforced wood splinter from the impact.

Knocked senseless, Mordecai dropped to the carpeted floor, unconscious as he fell behind a massive conference table that dominated that end of the big office. But he didn't lay there long.

With the intruder out of sight, Kendrick couldn't bring another shockwave to bear on him. A grimace of rage on the mover's face, the blocky Brotherhood commander quickly and powerfully strode along the table to where the man in black had gone down, the shattered paneling on the wall marking where he had been slammed into the wall with the first shockwave.

Only to stop short and stare in surprise to find the man still alive as he came around the table's far end. Slumped and unmoving, yet the man in black was still breathing, looking relatively intact despite being hammered into the wall with the force of a runaway freight train.

Brutally pushing his surprise aside, Kendrick reached down with a big hand to knot it into the man in black's tunic. He may be alive now, but the Brotherhood commander meant to remedy that shortly! With a hiss of discharge, a ball of psyken formed around a clenched fist as he hauled the big man to his feet, meaning to plow the fist into the man's unprotected face, shattering his skull like an eggshell.

As abruptly as it had appeared, the psyken sheath around Kendrick's fist disappeared as he scowled into the barely conscious man's visage, his rough handling of the man in black pulling him unwillingly back into the conscious world.