Preacher was just about to return to his work when his phone rang once again. This time, as he stared at the softly beeping device, he felt a cold chill work its way through his body. Something had happened, something bad. And it didn't take clairvoyance to tell him that it was happening to them.
"Preacher," he growled when he finally found the strength to pick the receiver up and lift it to his ear.
Only to hear Braddox's panicked voice on the other end, almost hysterical.
"Holy shit, Preacher!" the normally calm and collected mover practically screamed. "It's the renegade. He's hitting us hard. Lake Wood, Adanac, Silver Heights, . . . shit, man, he's hitting us everywhere!!"
Blinking rapidly in shock, Preacher slowly replaced the receiver in its cradle, Braddox's voice still yammering away from the ear piece. Carefully he pushed himself back from the desk, sending a tendril of psyken to the small motor that raised the blinds. It whined softly as the blinds were slowly pulled up from the massive bank of windows, revealing the stunning view Preacher had of the downtown core and beyond, reaching almost to the prairies and the mountains in the distance.
A cold constriction snaked its way through his insides as the buildings blurred in the face of what captured his attention: columns of smoke, rising lazily into the early morning sky to be caressed with dawn's first breath of gold, scarlet and mauve. Columns of smoke that marked the positions of Brotherhood safe houses and coordination centers: Lake Wood, Silver Heights, Nob Hill, Adanac, . . . he mentally went through the list as he watched another column abruptly appear, a ghostly finger of death marking yet another destroyed Brotherhood holding.
A tendril of psyken activated the intercom.
"Yes, Mr. Preacher?" came Debra's voice. She was substituting for his regular morning secretary, Angela, who was down with a cold. Lucky her.
"Get me Mr. Henry on the line, Debra. I need to talk to him immediately," he husked in a soft voice.
"Of course, sir. Just a moment." The intercom hummed as Debra put Preacher on hold to dial up his assistant. Then: "I have Mr. Henry on the line for you, sir. Go ahead, Mr. Henry."
"Mr. Preacher?" Henry's voice climbed out of the intercom to rasp harshly against Preacher's ears. "What can I do for you, sir?"
"Call them in, Henry," Preacher whispered hoarsely.
"Call them, . . in, sir? I don't understand."
"Our people across the city. I want you to call them in. Now! Bring them into the office."
"Uh, all of them, sir?"
"Yes, ALL OF THEM!" Preacher abruptly shrieked, feeling his hold on Reality slipping. "Bring them all in. NOW, DAMN YOU TO HELL!" Slamming down a fist onto the intercom to disconnect the call, he opened a teleportal, meaning to meet them down at the front entrance to find out exactly what had happened.
Debra, a pretty redhead with strong telepathic and mover abilities, was just turning back to her work after putting Henry's call through when she felt a puff of cold air. Frowning, she started to bring her head up to look around in curiosity when she felt the first EM surge of a teleportal snapping open within the ward webwork, coming out of nowhere.
Before she could react, a figure dressed all in black materialized a mere pace from the front of her desk. Jaw dropping, she began to instinctively snap her shields up for protection. But they were only partially up when a tight blast directed shockwave hammered into her, picking Debra bodily up to slam her into the reinforced wall behind her reception desk, crushing her bones into jelly with the force.
As Debra slid bonelessly to the floor, instantly dead, Mordecai closed the bore portal, useful since its massive amount of psyken and translocation power could literally bore through a ward webwork to deposit its user inside. It didn't, however, keep the wards from sounding after that user was inside.
As he took a step forward, his mind tightly shielded against psychic backlash, the wards sounded the alert: a high-pitched sonic blast that would render even heavily shielded Normals unconscious in seconds. It was coupled to a psionic explosion designed to fry any neurons it came in contact with.
But Mordecai was unfazed. Shielded against the psionic blast, he had also plugged his ears against the sonic counterattack, being forewarned to Preacher's defenses by files in Samantha's database. He paused as the air was filled with the alarms' shriek to tug on a pair of black leather gloves, matching the heavy leather jacket he already wore, his sunglasses hiding the intensely grim light gleaming from his eyes. The air swiftly chilled around him, fast enough to condense ice onto his jacket as he slowly looked around.
Then three tight shockwaves, blasted in quick succession, ripped Preacher's office door apart like it was made out of matchsticks, despite being heavily shielded. Mordecai stepped inside, a shield gelling around him to deflect anything that Preacher could throw at him.
Only to find, much to his surprise, that the Brotherhood commander wasn't there. As he made a quick telepathic scan of the room, he could detect traces of a recent teleportal having been opened just over by the desk. 'Gone,' he thought darkly. 'No matter, I'll get that sonovabitch later!' He began ripping shockwaves off to the left and right without regard, tearing the interior of the office to shreds.
Before he could render the room a-shambles, however, he found himself staggering forward without warning as several high-powered shockwaves pounded into him from the direction of the secretary's office. The man in black, however, had very, very good shields. Combined with his neuron armor, and properly set, they could handle just about anything. Including a sneak attack from behind.
Quickly recovering, Mordecai slowly turned to look out the shattered portal accessing Preacher's office. Then he was counterattacking, his expression never changing as he used psyken and pyroken together to create a plasma bolt. With the amount of energy already surging through his cortex, it didn't take long for the shimmering mass of superheated plasma to be ready.
Instead of firing it as one mass, however, Mordecai machine-gunned it, or broke it into multiple segments, each moving as fast as its companions in a scan from left to right. The slashing plasma bolts cut through what was left of the wall and doorway.
The man in black was quickly rewarded by screams of pain. But he wasn't done: stepping forward, Mordecai ripped out the wall immediately behind the secretary's desk with a massive surge of telekinetic power, overcoming the wards and psyken reinforcing in the blink of an eye. Roaring with discharge, the wall blew outwards, catching the survivors of the plasma bolt totally unawares. Shields hummed in protest, if they didn't collapse outright, as jagged chunks of plaster, metal and wood scythed through the psionics on the other side.
"Surprise," Mordecai hissed in tight mockery of the psionic that had ambushed him and Jeriko at the hotel. Then, tightening his shields even further, he leapt through the gaping hole left by the destruction of the wall, narrow probes sifting through the dusty air in front of him for EM residue to warn of traps and otherwise still active enemies.
There; two still-standing movers, staggering through the rubble in the aftermath of the wall's destruction. A tight beam of pyroken cut the first one down, slashing aside battered shields to cut her in half in a thin spray of fluids. The second one managed to tighten his weakened shields before Mordecai could scythe him down as well. But the man in black simply punched a probe through the shaky stuff. It was then simplicity itself to locate his heart and translocate it out onto the street outside.
The mover's eyes bulged as he suddenly found himself fighting to catch a breath. A second later he toppled soundlessly over, dead on impact. Stepping over the body, Mordecai did a second sweep of the surrounding offices. Warm bodies all over the place. The man in black's lips twisted into a predatory smile. As good a place to start the havoc as any.
He paused again before the wreckage of the desk to draw in more ambient energy, sucking it so fast from the surrounding air that it cracked and popped loudly as frost began to cover him thickly. Tendrils of bioenergy now danced over his torso and along his limbs, leaping off now and then to strike a nearby wall, the floor and the ceiling with sharp reports of discharge.
Shrieking wildly as he forced it to form, a bolt of artificial lightning appearing in Mordecai's right hand as he sensed something moving at the far end of the handful of corridors that radiated away from the destroyed reception area. Catching the movement out of the corner of his eye, he spun to hurl the lightning bolt down the hallway. It split the air with a static snarl to catch a psionic rushing towards him in the chest, slamming the man back and through the wall at the far end. He disappeared with a loud crash.
Bioenergy snarling as it wreathed his arms, Mordecai then began to stride down that corridor, intending to make it the first in this wave of destruction. As he stepped passed the first door, a mover stepped out, a look of confusion on his face. The lightning bolt's discharge had caught his attention, drawing the man out into the corridor.
"Hey," he began. Then his breath was driven from his lungs by the cable of raw psyken energy that hammered into him, directed at him by Mordecai's clenched fist. Psyken played wildly over the mover's body as the cable picked him up and rammed him through a number of walls before burying his broken body in a concrete support pillar. And then the world and Reality itself seemed to be burned away by the fury of the attack the man in black then launched, making the entire building shudder in pain at its force.
Bodies everywhere, slaughtered in their helplessness before the man in black's deadly rage, the entire floor lay shattered by the time Mordecai's first assault paused. Devastation lay heavily about the man in black as he now seemed to walk in mid-air, the floor beneath having given away early in the attack. No longer capable of holding his weight, Mordecai had simply renegotiated his EM status to negate gravity, ignoring the floor all together.
He was drawing close to the former reception area once again when, with a snarl of energy, Duchesne materialized through a portal just off to Mordecai's right. The man in black's face tightened to a mask of rage at the sight of the Brotherhood's assassin.
"Just the man I was looking for," he hissed coldly, turning his attention to the lean hardwire.
"I don't know how you survived that ambush at the hotel, but you won't be alive long enough to brag about it!" Duchesne snarled as a shield formed around him and the air chilled inside it. "At least I got your little friend."
"You are a dead man," Mordecai bit out, word by word, the tendrils dancing around his body abruptly thick as his arm as the stored energy in his body sought a pathway out.
"You first," Duchesne fired back. "I'm going to cut out your heart and eat it for lunch!" Then four shockwaves were on their way towards the man in black, followed by two plasma bolts.
Almost casually Mordecai let his shields shunt the shockwaves aside before hyperchilling the air around the plasma bolts. With a thought, the shimmering cylinders of energy were snuffed out.
"That doesn't sound too appetizing, Duchesne. Are you sure on your menu choice? How about you suck on one of these instead?"
Duchesne dove to the side with desperate speed, just barely avoiding getting skewered by one of Mordecai's lightning bolts. Hitting the ground hard, he launched another series of plasma bolts, which the man in black also promptly snuffed out.
Snarling at the fact that his attacks seemed to be going nowhere, Duchesne came to his feet. Only to dance back to avoid the floor falling away beneath his feet.
"Whoops," Mordecai hissed, his eyes like two glittering sapphires of intensity as they bore into the lean Brotherhood assassin. "Don't know how to fly yet, little man? Here, let me give you a lesson!"
Gelling the air around the staggering Duchesne with a thought, Mordecai picked up the abruptly encased and immobile man and almost casually slung him through the air and through the massive window wall dominating Preacher's office. The glass shattered with a roar of wind then Duchesne was beyond it. As the assassin sailed out the window, Mordecai vaporized the casing, just to hear the man scream as he fell to his death. With a howl, Duchesne began his drop to the street below.
Mordecai barely managed to resist the urge to step to the window to see the man's crushed body on the street below when the scream abruptly cut off, just to satisfy himself that the assassin was truly dead. For a brief moment he wondered if he should have made the man suffer more.
"Not quite dead yet, superman," Duchesne snarled, almost breathless as he materialized in what was left of Preacher's office, his lean face a-drip with perspiration. "Here's a little kryptonite for you!"
Abruptly a tight band of pain descended onto Mordecai's head and, with a grunt, he found himself struggling to maintain control over his body.
"You see, laughing boy, my specialty is coercion," Duchesne panted, his face twisted with effort as he slowly walked towards the still levitating Mordecai. "I get a special rush out of making punk burnouts like you kill themselves!"
"Yeah?" Mordecai grunted, sweat beginning to trickle down his face from his own efforts as the temperature of the air surrounding him plummeted. "Let's see if you get a rush out of THIS!" Grabbing the band of energy that marked the coercion probe Duchesne was trying to punch through his core shields, Mordecai subsumed control over it before inverting the flow, sending a feedback pulse back along the line that connected the probe directly with Duchesne's mind.
"What?" Duchesne began, eyes narrowed in puzzlement as he abruptly lost contact with his probe. Then, with an almost audible crunch, the feedback pulse slammed into his brain.
The amount of energy that Mordecai had send back was so high that it caused both the blood and cerebral spinal fluid within Duchesne's brain to boil, quickly cooking his neurons. The hardwire assassin gurgled incoherently as his brain began to denature then, with a wet 'splotting' sound, his head exploded like an overripe melon hitting the pavement from a height, spraying brain matter in every direction.
Mordecai grunted in satisfaction as the assassin's abruptly limp and headless body hit the dust-covered carpet, the air around him so cold now that frost had reappeared on his clothing, the sweat that had been trickling down his face frozen solid.
"That'll be a bitch to get out of the carpet," he noted dryly, vengeance, for the moment, satisfied. Leaning forward, he spat on the still twitching body. "That's for Jeriko, you fuck. Rot in hell!" He then turned his attention back to the movers and burners that were charging up the staircase and out of the elevator.
"Ah, the guests of honor at this little shindig have finally arrived!" With a surge of lightning-blue bioenergy, he strode to meet them.
Preacher paused as a series of wild screams, so pain-filled that it was hard to tell whether they came from a female or male throat, echoed down the stairwell. The sounds were enough to make the tight knot of mover bodyguards surrounding him, led by a pasty faced Braddox, murmur uneasily as they worked their way upwards.
As the screams faded, another sound rose above the sound of battle, which filled the air, a sound that made Preacher's blood run even colder: the sound of the Normals' approaching emergency vehicles, alerted to the destruction taking place in one of the largest buildings in the downtown core. If they stumbled into a psionic battle midstream, there would be such a detailed investigation began by the Normal authorities that the integrity of the project and the secrecy of the Brotherhood could be severely compromised, despite having the best protection money and psionic power could buy.
"What the hell is going on up there?" Kyle, the mover responsible for the airport incident, muttered uneasily. Being softwires with talent only in telekinesis, none of them had the telepathic power to look beyond the normal range of vision to see what was taking place several floors above them.
But Preacher could. His jaw tightened at the vision of destruction that floated before his inner eye.
"Someone is going to pay for this!" he growled thickly. "And pay dearly. Where the hell is, . . ?" His voice trailed off as his scan picked out the broken body of Duchesne, minus most of his head, lying in the rubble filling what was left of his office.
"Duchesne," he finished lamely. Then, as a surge of anger rushed through his lean body, he reached over to smack the shoulder of the heavy-set mover standing closest to him.
"Get a move on, Hampton! We need to go up at least five more floors before the Normals get here!"
Scrambling forward, Preacher's small knot of bodyguards managed to climb three more flights of stairs before massive cracks in the ceilings forced them to halt.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Preacher." Braddox growled in a low voice, his broad face apologetic as he faced the lean Brotherhood commander, the small cadre of movers standing uneasily behind him.
"But the building has become too unstable." The big man's eyes rolled up as he scanned the ceiling. "Looks like the renegade has reached the thirty second floor, where the mover barracks were housed. The resulting firefight has reduced the structure to jelly. I can't risk losing you to a cave-in. Not with the rest of the network already destroyed. We need to get you to safety!"
Preacher snarled silently at the uncertain look on Braddox's face before sending another probe upwards. The big mover, usually as reliable as the four seasons, was definitely feeling the nerves and fear of what had happened to him earlier when the renegade destroyed the network around his ears. 'Shit! The battle has extended to take in five more floors going up, and two more going down, with bodies lying all over the place! Looks like bloody Beirut up there!' he thought darkly.
Suddenly the ceiling overhead swayed threateningly and, as a series of 'booms' echoed through the building, a fine sifting of dust and debris began to shower down on the knot of men.
"Sir! We need to get you out now!" Braddox barked with a small measure of his former authority.
Spotting a nearby door, leading out to the thirty first floor, the bodyguards, with Preacher in tow, bolted for it. Just as the lead mover jerked it open, the northern wall of the staircase seemed to ripple before it tore itself to shreds with a loud explosion. Preacher cursed thickly as he ducked the rain of debris and dust that showered out of the open doorway. Then a frantic Braddox, the mover knotting a thick paw in the commander's jacket to pull him away from the door, was dragging him forward.
Together they managed to stagger free of the door's threshold just as the door frame shattered into a thousand pieces, ripped apart by snarls of psyken energy. Then, out of the dust, a man strode. Rather, he glided, nearly a foot off the floor, wreathed in lightning blue tendrils of energy.
Glancing over his shoulder, Preacher could see with his enhanced vision some sort of field was holding the man in the air, a levitation field of sorts, which completely surrounded him. 'How, . . . how can he do that?' he wondered wildly. Then his eyes were widening as a shimmering bolt of lightning formed in the man's right hand.
"Oh, shit," he hoarsely whispered.
Smoothly the man raised the shivering bolt of raw energy to sling it forward. With a flicker of light and the snarl of static discharge, the bolt darted through the air to drill Kyle between the shoulder blades as the mover was running down the corridor. There was a bright flare of brilliance then Kyle was being hammered through a nearby wall, most of his back gone from the bolt's impact
Two more snarls of discharge and two more of his bodyguard were down, smoking holes bored right through the center of their bodies. The remaining five, Braddox included, twisted around to rush towards the man with a shout, shields snapping into place. A pair of broad hands pushed Preacher to the ground. He hit hard, desperation allowing him to still roll to his left, eyes searching for the man and his aura of power.
There, standing with a dark brooding air about him as shockwave after shockwave rolled off him to make the ground and walls around him ripple with discharging psyken. Plasma bolts were having a similarly powerless affect, getting shunted to the side to rip out the walls on either side of the big man in black.
He watched then with stunned amazement as, after shrugging off the last assault, the man in black raised his left arm, crooked at a ninety-degree angle. With a shriek of dying air, a combined psyken/pyroken field formed around the man's clenched fist and forearm. Then he was firing tight bore plasma bolts machinegun style at the remaining movers.
Flat and rectangular, instead of the regular cylindrical shape, the rapid-fire plasma bolts cut down three movers before they could even react. A fourth was roughly picked up by a cable of seething psyken and slammed through a wall before Braddox dropped to his knees with a scream of pain, his eyes bulging out of his head as the man in black superheated the fluids in his head with a thought. With a sickening 'pop', the eyeballs sprang free and Braddox fell bonelessly forward, dead before he hit the ground.
"Fuck me," Preacher managed weakly before the man in dusty black glided up to him, the air now cold enough around him that a fine mist surrounded him like a cloak, moisture instantly condensing out of the air into ice particles. Preacher could only instinctively tighten his shields as the man came close.
But, much to his surprise, the dust-covered man didn't attack. Instead he looked down at the obviously dead Braddox.
"I told you that you wouldn't be so lucky next time we met, Braddox, you dumb bastard," He rasped tightly. Then his intense blue eyes were swinging up to bore into Preacher's.
"Ethan Preacher, I presume. We finally meet."
"The renegade," Preacher husked, feeling true fear work its way into his body at what he had just witnessed, the panic threatening to force his bladder and bowels to release. He had held absolute power for so long, when it was finally and utterly threatened with all-out obliteration, his strength, courage and bravado fled, screaming.
"Renegade? Only in the eyes of the Brotherhood, Preacher," Mordecai grated in reply. "To the rest of the psionic world, and to the Normals, I'm the dark knight, protecting them from the likes of you."
Abruptly a white-hot poker of pain stabbed into Preacher's head and, gasping in pain, he collapsed from his hands and knees onto the ground.
"For your part in the conspiracy to commit racial genocide and for your generally shitty attitude about life, I sentence you to burn out!" Mordecai's voice hissed into his ears even as the pain grew to consume his every sense. "No longer will you be psionic. And no longer will you threaten Humanity with your visions of destruction and death!"
With the same swiftness it had come, the pain was gone. And, with a thought, Preacher knew that every psionic ability that he had, was now burnt from his body by the power of the man looming over him, dust lightly crusting his black clothing.
"You are now dead." Then the renegade was gone, Preacher's retinas burnt with the flare of a bore portal snapping open and closed right before his eyes.
"He's right, damn me to hell," he husked to the dead bodies heaped up around him. "I'm as dead as you all are!" Moaning softly to himself, he slowly curled into a fetal coil just as the sounds of firemen rushing up the staircase began to echo in his ears.
The short, square-looking man in the pin-stripped, double-breasted navy Italian-made suit, frowned as he looked over the destruction. Preacher knelt in the rubble beside him, sobbing quietly and quite hopelessly, his own clothes tattered and torn, his head down as the short man looked on. They were surveying what was left of Preacher's office, minus the bodies, which the Normals had removed.
There were scorch marks everywhere; Preacher's few surviving burners had managed to torch the place before the Normals got there, to make it look like an explosion of some kind. But not before they had suffered horrible losses.
Almost two hundred softwires of all capabilities had died in the all out assault on the Brotherhood holdings across the city, one hundred and twenty alone here, in the office building. And that included Duchesne, the Brotherhood's handpicked assassin. The only sound other than Preacher's sobbing was that of water dripping as the wind blew through the blown-out windows, remainders of the Normals' fire fighting efforts.
Then, with the speed of a striking cobra, the man reached down and grabbed Preacher by the hair, yanking his head up and forcing him to look at the ravaged office.
"One man did this?" he rumbled in a voice that sounded like rocks grinding together. "Just one man? How is that possible, Preacher? No man has this kind of power!" Then he was letting go of Preacher's hair to quickly lash out with the back of his hand in one smooth motion, smashing Preacher's head back and laying open his cheek to the bone with the heavy signet ring he was wearing.
With a cry of pain, Preacher sprawled over the rubble, where he stayed, his sobbing now muted and tinged with pain as he bled onto the debris-strewn ground.
"He's obviously lying, Mr. Kendrick," a rat-faced man standing just behind the shorter man, dressed in a well-cut gray Italian-made suit, commented softly. "No single man could have done all this. It must be a nation in rebellion." The man's voice was tinged with a foreign accent too faint to identify.
"Perhaps, Horst," Kendrick reluctantly conceded in that rumbling voice. "Regardless, his failure has severely compromised our organization in this section of the continent. The Inner Council will not be pleased. None of their foretelling spoke of this!"
"Perhaps it is time we bring in reinforcements," Horst suggested in that same soft voice, his narrow face pinched with strange emotions. "Before the situation grows further out of hand."
"Hmmm," Kendrick murmured thoughtfully, nodding his head in agreement. "A wise precaution. Very well; summon Mindfire."
****