The man in black pulled his rescued companion close to him as he shut down his other senses.
"Be very quiet," he firmly directed as he looked into the woman's wide eyes. "I need to do a little poking around in probability space." Then he was shielding them both as he began to pour mental energy into that portion of the Eye where the clairvoyant senses were resident.
As soon as the big psionic felt them fully charged, he closed his eyes and began to 'cast', or throw his clairvoyant senses into the time stream, the stream sensed by one of the clairvoyant powers as a turbulent river of color, shifting sounds and blurred sensations. He concentrated on the past, going up stream against the flow of time as he tried to catch an impression of Tabitha as she was rushed by, through this very corridor.
Mordecai cast once, twice, and then a third time without success, finding instead a confusing rush of impressions that didn't have any sense of Tabitha in them at all. Grimly he continued to cast, each throw making his teeth grind when it came up empty as it meant he would have to stand there, blind to the world and vulnerable to attack for one more cast.
Then, just as Mordecai was about to give up, he caught a whiff of her presence. Concentrating on it, a blurred picture began to form: there, five men pushing her into a room on the third floor. He focused hard to bring the room number into view: room number, . . . 317. Instantly Mordecai dropped the clairvoyant cloak and pulled his other senses back online.
Just in time to catch a group of eight men coming up to the fourth floor on the elevator, the air around them menacing. He quickly scanned their surface thoughts and found his expression tightening grimly. They were the vanguard of a massive force that was advancing on the psionic anomaly that had taken out their security systems on a section of the fourth floor, the guards on the floor not responding to their summons. It was the response he had expected to his forceful arrival.
"We must go," he tautly indicated.
"Where?" the woman asked, her voice quavering.
"Down a floor," he glanced around for a way down, mind racing.
"How, . . how do you know that?" The woman stared at him.
"Clairvoyance," he replied, scanning the corridor around them. Shit, they couldn't take the stairs; the vanguard was coming up that way. Was there a second flight? Looking back at the woman, he could see confusion on her face at his answer. A flicker of frustration washed through him before he could stamp it out.
"It's not important that you understand how. Just that it is, okay?" A scan of her psionic cortex yielded that she had telekinetic ability and could form teleportals. "Now, can you form a teleportal?"
"No," the woman replied in a small voice. "They drugged me with something that's turned off my abilities."
"Bah," Mordecai hissed in disappointment as he quickly reviewed the floor plan he had managed to pull from his mule's mind. He had hoped to save his energy for keeping off the Brotherhood until he could grab Tabitha and get the hell out of here. But it didn't take long for his frustration to be swept away by hope: there, a second flight of stairs just fifty metres down the hallway.
"We'll worry about that later. Right now we need to get down those stairs!" And then he was off, almost dragging the stumbling woman behind him, eyes intent on the doorway that led to the staircase.
A door that abruptly swung open in front of them to spill out a handful of dark dressed men and women, their faces hard as they swung about, visually and psionically searching for the hardwire renegade. Mordecai wasn't about to let them find him first.
The air around the Brotherhood psionics seemed to shiver as it was abruptly filled with several tight shockwaves, one right on the heels of the previous. There was the harsh bark of hard impact, and then bodies were being scattered in every direction. Without hesitation Mordecai and his companion darted through their midst, quickly stepping over the twisted bodies, some still groaning with a measure of life, before they were into the stairwell.
There they took two and three steps at a time down the switchback staircase in front of them. The concrete steps echoed their footfalls loudly in the stairwell cylinder. A cylinder that stretched up for a couple more floors and falling what looked to be a good ten floors down. Such was their frantic pace, that they were down a full floor before the door above and behind them swung closed.
Pushing through the door that led out onto the third floor even as he heard the elevator whine into motion just to their left, Mordecai led them around a nearby corner. And immediately they were forced to skid to a halt when they found three people standing in a tight cluster in front of them, backs to the staircase and dressed in hospital scrubs. They were looking at detailed charts in their hands and talking in rapid French.
Hearing the door to the stairwell bang closed, the three paused to look up and around. Almost instantly their eyes fell onto the black-clad Mordecai and his shivering partner.
"Merde!" one of them had time enough to hiss in dismay before she was being picked up by a shockwave and hammered into the wall behind her. Another was knocked aside by a blurred crescent kick and the third dropped to the ground after getting a right hook to the jaw.
Mordecai expression tightened as they ran past the three downed hospital scrubs. It would only delay them if he had to keep on taking out every knot of Brotherhood they came across in the search. With time against them, he couldn't afford that, especially with a massive Brotherhood security force set to counterattack at any moment.
Spotting a nook set into one of the walls where several carts of medical equipment were stored, he skidded to a halt. Taking the woman by the arm, he quickly pushed her into it.
"Stay here!" he tightly commanded. As a look of panic appeared on her face, he went on. "I'll be right back! I just need to scout ahead." With that, he activated the mirror field generator on his waist and faded from sight, leaving the woman wide-eyed and stunned into silence at his abrupt disappearance.
Re-cloaked in invisibility, the man in black ran down the hallway as quietly and quickly as he could, looking for room 317. There! Almost seventy metres from the staircase doors, he spotted it, one of those carts with medical supplies sitting on it in front of it. Just as the powerful hardwire reached the door, a woman in scrubs came out, pulling off a pair of latex gloves and apparently unaware that an emergency had unfolded around her. Slipping past the bored looking woman and into the room while the door was still open, he managed to get inside without being detected.
Only to find himself facing a sobbing Tabitha as she redid the buttons on her smock. A quick glance as he slid into a corner told him that she had nothing else on. Still crying softly, the young telepath sat on a hospital-style bed, sitting the corner of the spare, cubical and relatively small room, burying her face in her hands. Mordecai waited until the door was fully closed before he deactivated the mirror shield generator on his waist to fade into sight.
"Tabitha!" he whispered hoarsely as he peeled away the vision enhancing goggles and thermal suit facemask to reveal his features. Tabitha's head snapped up like it was on a string.
"W-who? Mordecai!" she husked in disbelief, shock on her face, tears forgotten. She took the thermal suit in at a glance. "How, . . .?"
"Never mind that. I saw what happened to Samson and the rest of the Alliance. I tracked you here so I can get you out of this rather nasty place. Are you ready to travel?"
Snuffling as she wiped the back of her hand across her face, Tabitha nodded vigorously, her despair wiped out in an instant as hope shone suddenly like a beacon in her eyes.
"Good." Mordecai glanced around the room. "You don't have any other clothing, do you?" He asked tersely, looking back at the door.
"No," Tabitha answered softly. "They took everything away from me when they brought me here!"
"Of course they did," Mordecai muttered as he gave the young woman a quick once-over with his eyes. "That's gonna be a little drafty for what we want." Then he shrugged. "C'mon. Let's get the hell out of here!" He was about to wave her closer just when he heard the door open.
Grimacing, the man in black motioned for Tabitha to stay on the bed as he faded out of sight, hand on his waist, just in time to avoid the woman with the gloves stepping back in.
"As soon as you accept your place in the greater plan, the agony of indecision will fade!" The woman, a worn looking brunette with deep lines etched into her plain face, said with a strong French accent, head down as she looked at the results of some tests on Tabitha's chart.
"Good. Your cycle restarts tomorrow. We'll try another implantation then." Without further ado, she wheeled about and walked out.
As soon as the door was closed, Mordecai faded back into sight, frowning as he stared after the disappeared woman.
"A pleasant woman, I see," he tautly observed before looking at Tabitha. "Implantation of what?" he asked as Tabitha stood and quickly walked to him.
"Of one of the Inner Council's semen sample," the young telepath tersely replied, confirming what he had overheard the Brotherhood thugs say earlier. "That's what we're here for: to provide fertile wombs for the Council's plan to breed the perfect psionic race!" As if the realization just occurred to her of what she had said, panic washed across her face.
"Mordecai! There are hundreds of women here that have been implanted against their will. You must help them!"
The man in black's frown deepened.
"And introduce another level of risk to this already over-the-top venture?" he asked. Almost immediately he regretted his cold tone as Tabitha's face fell. "Burn me to ash, can I possibly pick up any more strays on this trip?" He growled, mostly to himself. "May I remind you, Tabitha, I that my neck's already stretched out, doing this act of charity?" His eyes narrowed slightly. "An act of charity I'm only engaged in because I failed to take the opportunity your father offered me back in Calgary to unite against the Brotherhood. A failure that resulted in his death, and the death of your entire family."
Tabitha raised tear-swollen eyes to gaze frankly into the big man's face.
"I don't blame you, Mordecai, for what happened to my father and brother," she whispered hoarsely. "The Brotherhood long considered the Alliance a threat and dealt with us as they deal with any psionic that doesn't bend to their will." Her gaze fell to the floor. "But I also know that you must care, at least a little, about more than just your failure to help my father. Or you wouldn't be willing to come here, after me."
Tears once again sprang to the young woman's eyes.
"All I'm asking is that you care for these other women too! Nobody deserves the fate, the horror that the Brotherhood is pushing onto them."
"No," Mordecai husked, slowly shaking his head, "nobody deserves that." He sighed. "Well, I was going to destroy this place anyway. Might as well take as many out of here as I can, before then." He looked over at the slender Alliance telepath. "But I sure hope you don't think of anything else that'll make this little adventure more difficult than it already is."
Seeing the dark and grim expression on the man in black's face, Tabitha gave a quick shake of her head, but jutted out her jaw, determined to save the rest of the women in the breeding facility. Seeing that determination only brought a grim smile to the big man's face.
"Good. Now, we've got about a hundred movers and burners closing in on us so we need to blow our way out of here and fast! The only way I'm going to be able to do that, with the wards and security in place, is to bore 'port out of here. That means I can't directly bring your associates with us." He quickly went on before Tabitha could protest.
"That doesn't mean I won't! All I need is their individual signatures and I can set up a remote translocation that'll sweep through the building and pick them all out." Mordecai's eyes narrowed. "And we can leave behind anything that's managed to get implanted inside in the meantime. That's where you come in: from what I can tell from our little meeting in your father's study, you should've had the opportunity to pick up most of their signatures as a matter of fact. Have you?"
Mutely Tabitha nodded.
"Good. I'll build a psionic robot to perform the remote translocation at the same time that I'm making the charges that'll rip this place into pieces. The 'bot will sweep the building and pull in everybody whose pattern matches those stored in its memory. It's the only way to 'port so many people from so many different locations without scanning the building first. The robot will do its work passively so our determined hosts out there won't pick up its activity. Hopefully." Mordecai glanced at the still shut door, already sensing the growing storm cloud of psionic activity and anger just beyond the sealed portal.
"When I give you the word, psyk me every pattern you've got bundled up in your head and then we'll blow out of here. I'll set the charges to trigger as soon as the last pattern has been moved. Got all that?"
Tabitha bobbed a quick nod, an expression of apprehension on her drawn face. Seeing that, Mordecai grinned suddenly before he pulled his facemask and goggles back into position.
"No worries, kiddo. We'll get as many as possible out of here without bringing the roof down on our heads, I promise!" Tabitha smiled weakly. Then, with a nod, Mordecai tightened his shields to absolute opaque and began to pull in energy. He was going to need more than just what his reserves could supply, much more!
Instantly the air within the tight bubble he had created around himself dropped below zero and frost formed on the inside surface, hiding him from view. But, before Tabitha could count to ten, the bubble was gone with a soft 'pop' of displaced air. She shivered in the cold breeze that swept through the room, fallout from the energy drain inside the bubble.
"Both the robot and the charges are in place. We're ready to go. So I need those patterns now." At the same time he sent a tight psyk to the woman out in the hall, shivering as she hid behind the carts, watching with wide eyes as a veritable torrent of Brotherhood burners and movers trooped past, their faces intent.
- Get ready to leave. - Feeling her affirmative thought, the only thing she could send in her drugged condition, Mordecai returned his attention to Tabitha, his mind now filled with the images of the charging stormtroopers closing on their position, drawn from the woman's mind.
"Open your mind and give me the patterns," he commanded and, with a nod, Tabitha did so. Reaching in with a telepathic probe, the man in black quickly found the patterns, numbering almost four hundred, ready in a small mental pocket right on the surface of Tabitha's mind.
Downloading them into his own, Mordecai pulled out the probe and quickly routed the patterns to the robot's memory. The robot, existing as a combination of psyken and biomagnetic energy, accepted the patterns from where it hid in one of the stairwells and stored them, acknowledging the download with a mental 'buzz' into Mordecai's mind.
At the same time that he was downloading the signature data to the 'bot, the man in black was activating the timers on the psionic explosives he had scattered liberally all throughout the complex, synchronizing the 'bot and the charges before pulling out.
"The robot is set and will activate in five minutes. The charges will go off 30 seconds after the last pattern is translocated." He grinned tightly. "So I believe it's time for you and I to finally get the hell out of Dodge!"
Nodding, Tabitha stepped into Mordecai's open arms. Closing his eyes as he focused his mind, the man in black punched open a bore 'port. Instantly alarms began to shriek, announcing the breach in the ward webwork, as if the Brotherhood didn't already know the renegade was there. But Mordecai, Tabitha and the woman he had rescued earlier, were well and truly gone, already out of reach of any countermeasure.
They appeared an instant later over a thousand kilometres away on a small, uncharted tropical island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the man in black's ultimate bolt hole. Long ago, when Mordecai first began skating around the globe to hotspots in the Reality matrix, he had discovered this place and quickly saw its value as a safety hatch. Besides him, only a handful of the lone gunmen knew of its existence, some of them using it as their own safe house.
That small number had included Seiji, who, after discussing Mordecai's plan with the man in black back in Paris, had agreed that it would be the logical place to take the survivors after the facility's destruction. So Mordecai had programmed his robot with the island's coordinates, letting it teleport the facility's reluctant residents here.
As soon as they were solid, the three of them looked around, Tabitha's mouth falling open when she discovered their unexpected traveling companion. Mordecai, for his part, nodded in satisfaction when he saw that his safe house, a small tropical bungalow a few metres away from them, was untouched. Then the man in black stepped away from Tabitha and began to psionically back track along his translocation, scattering the psionic trail as he walked away from the house, white sand crunching softly under his booted feet.
"We don't have much time," he noted tightly, pulling off his goggles and facemask. "The robot's going to be bringing your friends here as naked as the day they were born. There's some clothes in the house, in the closet in the bedroom. Select some for yourself and bring the rest out here. We'll have to do some replicating if we're going to get everybody covered. They should be arriving in the next couple of minutes via bore 'port. They'll be confused and anxious and I'll need you, Tabitha, to calm them down."
"Right!" Tabitha replied practically and quickly scampered into the bungalow after a final look at the rather stunned other woman. Mordecai, in the meantime, continued to back track while tightening the wards and shields on the house itself.
What he didn't tell Tabitha was that he had also rigged the robot to send a psychic pulse through the breeding facility as soon as the last woman was taken, a pulse powerful enough to fry any mind remotely psionic, working hand in hand with his explosives. 'That should keep them busy for a while!" he thought grimly.
Without warning and with a 'pop' of displaced air, five women, two of them completely naked, snapped into existence in the middle of the small clearing in front of the house, not but two metres from a frowning Mordecai. He grinned tightly in satisfaction then turned and roared over his shoulder.
"TABITHA!"
****