Mordecai frowned as he stared hard at the holographic display shimmering in front of him, hovering a hand span above Paladin's silvery shape, lying flat on the small coffee table. A recent update from his flying probes had painted the downtown core heavily with psionic activity. 'The Brotherhood has come, in force, to clean up the destruction I left behind,' he silently observed as he stared at the brightly colored display. 'And to quell the rebellious psi nations that have risen up against their Brotherhood masters.'
Indeed, in addition to the lurid shades of color marking the core, there were hot spots of psionic activity sprouting up all over the city, some indicating psionic battles between rebelling nations and desperate Brotherhood keepers. Mordecai leaned back and thoughtfully tugged on his lower lip. The city was in chaos, something that would help hide him until he was ready to make his next move. Which would be soon.
With the destruction of his room at the Alec Arms, Mordecai had wisely moved everything to a new hotel room, located nearly three kilometres north of both the Arms and the downtown. The further away he could get from the Brotherhood as they sought to hide any evidence of their existence from the Normals, the better.
It also gave him the chance to recover Jeriko's body from the city morgue, where the Normals had taken her. Before they could perform an autopsy or attempt to identify her, he had translocated in, snatched her cold body and had disappeared before an alarm could be raised. He then took her high into the nearby mountains to bury her in a beautiful meadow high up, near the snow line, where no human had ever been. It was a place he knew she would have loved the instant she had seen it, if she had gotten the chance to. The blonde Swedish hardwire had always loved the mountains. And so it was the perfect place.
The man in black had paused then, exhausted in both body and mind as his ears still rang with the death knell of Preacher's organization. He had lingered there, beside the newly turned soil of his companion's grave, eyes distant as he had stared out over the mountain peaks crowning this hidden valley deep in the bowels of the Rockies.
This new war against the Brotherhood had claimed its first casualty from the ranks of the lone gunmen. But Mordecai knew it wouldn't be the last, by far. The Brotherhood was old, big and powerful; they wouldn't go down without a fight. But, for both the sake of the Shield and the future of all of Humanity, they would go down. Especially if he had anything to do with it. It was his most solemn and angry vow!
After a few murmured words of remembrance over Jeriko's grave and not a few shed tears, the man in black finally buried the last of his feelings for the Swedish long gunman and, with a thought, had returned to Calgary and his new bolt hole.
"Paladin, final update from the probes," he requested, standing to stretch carefully, his body both sore and tired. He needed time to heal and regain his strength.
With the frown still on his face, Mordecai strode into the tiny kitchen nook this hotel room had been equipped with as Paladin established an uplink to the probes and began to download their memory cores. There he flipped open the box of Tim Horton's donuts he had bought before returning this final time to his room. Almost casually he began stuffing the dozen donuts, one by one, into his mouth, washing them down with generous mouthfuls of double caffeine, double sugar cola.
Considering all the work his body and mind had been engaged in recently, Mordecai needed to continue to refuel though it was the day after the massive attack on the Brotherhood's Calgary network. The over-the-top assault had drained even his deepest reserves, and had been launched with micro-fissures still present in his cortical matter. It would take more than one sugarcoated meal to repair and restore what he had burned up!
Paladin's audible alarm softly peeped as the download of the probe memory cores was completed.
"Data update is complete, Mordecai," the tiny A.I. informed the man in black as he stuffed the last donut into his mouth. "Updating display now." Mordecai nodded in mute acknowledgement and raised the bottle of cola to his lips to wash down the last of the confection still floating about his mouth.
But, just as he was putting the bottle's mouth against his lower lip, he felt something odd. Almost like a twist had suddenly formed in the fabric of space and time. 'Wait a minute; what the hell was THAT?' Pulling the bottle away from his mouth, he gathered his depleted resources and formed a tight telepathic scan, using it to sweep through the room.
Just in time to see a sparkle of motes dance across his mind's eye, swirling uneasily in the air with their own intelligence. It took him only a heartbeat to identify them.
"Fuck me. A psi virus!" Then he was throwing himself desperately out of the nook as all hell broke loose.
With a 'roar' and a blinding flash of light, the door and most of the wall on the hall side of the room disintegrated as a massive man stepped through, a brilliant aura of power halo-ing his body.
"Honey, I'm home!" Hammer grunted and, with brutal practiced precision, began to methodically take the room apart, leaning slightly forward as he generated shockwaves and cast them at any target his eyes found for them. Right behind him stepped Viper, her face tight as she narrow beam scanned the room.
"Anything?" Ravage shouted above the din of Hammer's methodical obliteration. Almost with disgust, Viper shook her head 'no'.
As Ravage frowned in disappointment, the counterstrike hit them. Hammer was the first to go. Without warning his shields suddenly flared as a massive surge of psyken slammed into them. But before the massive mover could react, an incredibly powerful shockwave folded around him and brutely slammed him through what was left of the hallway wall and the next, into the room beyond.
"Wha, . . .?" Ravage managed to say, before a scintillating plasma blast ripped aside his hastily erected shields. In almost the same instant a directed shockwave hammered into the lean ESET commander, shouldering aside what was left of his shields to pitch him torn and bloody down the corridor with the impact.
Screaming incoherently as her companions dropped all around her, Viper unleashed her hardwired mind, ripping asunder walls and tearing up the floor with incredible blasts of plasma and shockwave energy. Walls were swiftly reduced to powder and great holes were torn into the outside wall, opening them directly to the great outdoors beyond.
"DIE, YOU BASTARD!" she howled in her fury, not sensing the tight bubble of protection that formed in the far corner of the dying room as she continued her frenzied onslaught.
Mordecai grunted as a chunk of plaster managed to shear through his shields to drop onto his back, albeit somewhat slowed in its velocity. It only hurt instead of injure with its impact.
Shaking the chunk of ceiling off, he glanced around quickly. A Brotherhood attack he had expected, considering how many of them he had left on the ground in their last encounter. But he hadn't counted on the strike force being no less than three ultra-powerful psionics showing up to do the deed. If he was reading their auras right, two of them were even hardwires. 'They must really want me dead now,' he thought, eyes narrowing as they visually scanned the room.
It was then that he noticed the barrage had swung off to the left, opening a considerable space between the hail of psionic energy and his tiny bubble of protection. 'She must not be able to see where's she's going with all that energy she's throwing around,' he swiftly noted. If he worked it right, he could take advantage of that and turn this ambush around somehow.
There, a definite gap in the dispersal pattern of the shockwaves. It created an opening for Mordecai to scramble low on the floor closer, giving him a better shot at the female hardwire than he had now. Keeping his head low, he scrambled forward into the gap, keeping his shields up tight and dense.
Making his way over the debris-covered floor, Mordecai dove behind what was left of his bedroom wall and spun quickly on his hands and knees to bring himself to face the last of the ambushers. Peering through a hole, he saw her. 'Damn shame,' he thought ruefully as he quickly noted her long legs, flowing blonde hair and firm breasts. Then he punched forward with a psyken blast.
The psyken battering ram, a seething cable of blue-white energy, caught the unseeing Viper full in the chest just as she swung around to make another pass through the room. Grunting as the breath was brutally knocked from her lungs, Viper was flung backwards by the impact as if a giant hand had materialized in front of her to slam relentlessly into her body.
Arms flailing akimbo, she struck the hallway wall hard enough to crack the plaster. As Viper slammed into the unmoving structure, her head snapped back and cracked into the hard surface with a loud 'crunch' and, knocked unconscious, she slid unmoving to the floor.
With a frown, Mordecai slowly stood, his eyes carefully scanning the room and the hallway beyond, searching for any more surprises. 'Fucking Brotherhood!' he thought darkly as his eyes fell across the sprawled bodies of Viper and Hammer. The latter was covered with big chunks of broken wall and plaster, blood everywhere. 'If this keeps up, I won't be able to rent a room within a thousand kilometres of Calgary. They'll ban me as a public menace!'
Enough poking around; it was time to get out of there. Slipping back into his room, the man in black quickly scooped up his still packed bag and a miraculously untouched Paladin off the coffee table and, after emptying the room of ambient energy to backfill his already strained reserves, pulled open a portal. Stepping into it, he left the ruins behind.
"Took them all out?" Tantalus repeated incredulously a half-hour later as the spindly Waif nodded fiercely in confirmation.
"I was there, Tantalus," Waif said with a whine, cringing under the blocky woman's hard stare. "I saw the renegade take them apart like they were untrained novices, even after they had ambushed the room!"
"Don't you think we should go back there and get them?" Agony asked with a frown, for once not looking or sounding so perky. In fact, she looked rather grim and business-like. "We can't just leave them there for the Normals to find. Or this renegade, if he decides to come back."
"We could lay in wait for him, if he does!" Scorpion added eagerly, leaning forward with a predatory snarl on her face. "Spring an ambush that he won't be able to get out of."
"Right, right! Then we can take his mind apart, piece by piece," Agony chimed back in, a gleam forming in her eye as she caught the vision of the possible torture. "We'll make him beg us to kill him before we turn him into our lap dog."
"And what makes you think that you'll be able to avoid getting POWDERED LIKE RAVAGE, VIPER AND HAMMER?" Tantalus abruptly screamed, her eyes bugging out of her head. "You heard Waif's report: they had him cold. And still he took them out!"
Then, just as suddenly, she sagged back into a chair that was just behind her.
"And still he took them out," she repeated dully. "Half the team, including the team leader and two of our hardwires, gone. Just gone!"
"We can't just sit around and do NOTHING!" Scorpion snarled, eyes blazing. "At least let us go in and retrieve the bodies. Or give them aide, if they're still alive!" Agony agreed with a vigorous nodding of her head, looking almost fiercely at Tantalus's stunned face.
For a long moment both Agony and Scorpion stared at the blocky second-in-command as she sat silent, gazing wordlessly at the floor. Waif, for the most part, just stood off to the side, nervously shifting from foot to foot. His part in this thing had already been played. There was no way he was going back to the scene of the ambush! He already knew what the renegade was capable of; going back would only risk his life at this point.
Finally, after a more than pregnant pause, Tantalus cleared her throat and spoke. It was only one word:
"Go."
Instantly Scorpion pulled open a portal and she and Agony stepped through, their faces determined as their breath began to plume whitely out of their nostrils. It took only a moment before the portal was opening again and Scorpion was coming through, Ravage wrapped in tight streamers of psyken as he floated in midair right beside her. Agony was right on her heels with both Viper and Hammer, also being towed through via their midair suspension.
As the two psionics stepped into the hotel room Mindfire had been using as a base of operations here, in Calgary, Tantalus could see the flashing red, yellow and blue lights of Normal emergency vehicles through the portal's open iris.
"Any trouble?" she asked quietly and Scorpion shook her head tightly.
Nodding with satisfaction, the square-set second-in-command came forward to examine the face of her ESET commander as Scorpion eased him to the carpet. Seeing the blackened and blistered skin, she grimaced.
"Plasma burst at close range. Somehow he's still alive, though. Thank God for tight personal shields!" she commented flatly.
Common sense was telling her that she should be getting on the horn with Kendrick's toady, Horst, currently in charge of the Brotherhood clean up in the wake of the renegade's attack. The clean-up team had a virtual army of healer wireheads that were working with the survivors. One of them would be very useful in healing their wounded teammates.
She, however, swiftly dismissed the idea. ESETs generally worked in isolation from regular forces, for one reason or another, the least of them being that the ESETs were much more powerful than most of their Brotherhood companions. The rank and file feared them, a condition both the ESETs and the Brotherhood's Inner Council promoted. One never knew when an ESET needed to be used against Brotherhood personnel, to keep them in line. Any request she made to the clean-up team for assistance would be met with fear and distrust.
So Tantalus pushed the idea into the back of her mind. They would deal with this, in-house. She looked over at Agony, who had just finished lowering Viper and Hammer to the carpet to lay beside the unmoving and charred form of Ravage.
"Agony, you're probably the strongest of us in Healing. So you get the task of putting Humpty Dumpty back together again."
"Piece of cake!" Agony stated matter-of-factly, dusting off her hands as she stood once again. A slight smile quirked up the corner of her mouth. "Do ya think I'll get extra brownie points with the boss man for putting his pieces back together again?"
****