"Sorry to disturb you, sir, but I have an urgent communique from a Commander Kensey, Third Cadre, Destroyer Division in Calgary."
"CALGARY?" Kendrick almost screamed, sitting bolt upright in his chair. "Put him through, damn it. PUT HIM THROUGH!"
With a sudden wash of colors, the image of Kensey's square features filled the small holo display hovering over the top of Kendrick's desk. The chunky Regional Director could feel his eyes bulge as he watched three cadre members cut down behind the crouching Kensey even before the muscular Destroyer commander could speak, the image on top of the desk skipping around wildly as if something was interfering with its transmission at the source.
"KENSEY! What the hell are you doing in Calgary? You're four hours EARLY, DAMNIT!" he roared. "And why aren't you communicating with Destroyer Command?"
"All psi-links out of Calgary have been severed!" Kensey snarled, his voice fuzzy with static and feedback, before ducking as something exploded nearby, showering him with fragments of pavement and brick.
"I am requesting immediate reinforcements, Director Kendrick! We are under heavy attack by Avalon forces. I repeat, we are under heavy attack by Avalon forces! Requesting immediate reinforcement ... requesting ..." In a flicker of discharge, the channel went dead, leaving a stunned Kendrick staring into the suddenly empty space in amazement.
"Holy shit," he breathed weakly, not wanting to believe what he just saw. Blinking rapidly to moisten suddenly dry eyes, he looked up at an equally stunned Sasha. "Get me Sorrenson on the line," he husked and Sasha jumped, startled by the sound of his voice.
"Now, Sasha ... NOW!"
Kensey threw Ravage's burnt out holo-communicator to the side with a growl and looked around the side of the battered mailbox he was hunkered down behind, the only available cover within desperation's distance. What he saw did not please the muscular commander one bit!
The street leading past the small apartment block where they had the Avalonians pinned, was now filled with the battered, burnt and shattered bodies of his handpicked cadre. It offered him little comfort that Mindfire's Waif had joined the dead on the road, his wiry body almost burnt beyond recognition after he tried to phase through the left side wall in an attempt to waylay the Avalonians inside.
Somehow the renegades had anticipated the maneuver and had cut him down, even though he had been invisible. How they had managed to detect him while he was phased, was beyond the thickset Destroyer commander. That, and how they had managed to not only block all outgoing and incoming psi traffic, but disrupt a supposedly secure holocom line.
"We are not trained for actual combat!" he muttered under his breath, grimacing at the hot pain his broken forearm made every time he shifted.
At least the all-out counter assault had paused in its ferocity. Shockwaves, plasma bolts and those new weapons, the strange blue torpedoes, which happened to be incredibly effective in punching through the most hardened shields, only appeared now when a cadre survivor or one of Mindfire's survivors shifted enough to come into line-of-sight from the battered apartment block.
Line-of-sight meant softwires. 'And that means it isn't hardwires, at least, that we're facing ...' Just then his eyes caught movement across the street, where an alley ran beside the right hand side of the building. Letting his thought fade, Kensey focused on what was taking place there.
It was Jarker, one of his cadre, dragging the battered body of one of his companions behind the burnt-out hulk of a car. From where he was crouched, Kensey could see that they were easily hidden from all lines of sight from the building. Then his guts tightened into a knot as he watched a blue torpedo suddenly punch through the car and mow Jarker down in a shower of fragments.
As the body toppled limply to the ground, missing most of its chest and left shoulder, Kensey ducked back behind the mailbox, grimacing. 'Strike that! At least one hardwire present.' Then his head snapped around as the howl of a police siren split the air, red and blue flashing lights abruptly visible at both ends of the street. Seconds later a black and white police helicopter roared by overhead, spotlight playing through the cloud of dust and particles that was just starting to dissipate.
"Damn!" Mordecai snarled, beads of sweat running down his face despite the haze of icy particles floating around him from the effort of jamming psi communication and disrupting Normal communication channels both, within range of the building and the cadre outside. He could feel the cordon of Normal law enforcement closing in on this location.
"Normals! They'll be crawling all over this place in minutes. We have to end this now!" Turning to Jenn, he spoke in short, terse sentences. "I'm dropping the dampening field. Go and find the other teams. We need to be out of here in five. Don't take no for an answer. Go!"
"Right!" Holstering her pulse gun, Jenn turned and bolted down the hallway towards the stairs.
As soon as the little brunette was on her way, Mordecai turned back to the door and did a quick scan of the street. 'Hmmm. At least thirty down and dead. Six badly wounded ... that leaves six from Mindfire and twenty-seven still functional cadre members. Time to do a little mopping up.' With a hiss, a virtual blizzard appeared to swirl around the crouching man in black as he sucked more energy out of the air.
The car that Jarker and his comrade had tried to hide behind abruptly moved. The sudden shift quickly caught the attention of every psionic still left alive out on the street. Eyes wide as the psyken wave front rippled over them in a tingling rush, they turned to watch mouths agape as the burned-out hulk slowly lifted off the seared pavement. Then Kensey was throwing himself forward, his own considerable mover abilities coming on line as he focused on the charred hulk.
It was an obvious distraction. With the Normals charging in hard, the renegade wanted to finish this confrontation quickly. And, by using a very old trick, he was hoping to catch his cadre looking. 'Not if I can help it!' he silently snarled, pulling ambient energy in. He would simply knock the car down and ...
The focused shockwave caught the heavyset destroyer commander full in the chest, despite being mostly behind cover. Picking him up like he was a rag doll, the shockwave pasted him back against a nearby building, crushing him against its brick facing like he was made out of straw.
Gasping as his lungs, punctured and ruptured by the broken shards of his own ribs, began to fill with blood, Kensey dropped limply to the sidewalk. His breath began to bubble wetly as he felt his life leaking out of him even as his vision began to swim. But it was clear enough to catch the last moments of both Mindfire and his cadre.
Now a good two meters off the pavement, the car swung smoothly around, shimmering in its sheath of psyken. Then, just as smoothly, it flipped onto its end to drop without a sound onto the pavement, balanced on its crushed from bumper.
The shriek of tearing metal that came next echoed across the battle field as the car abruptly began to rip itself in two, starting at the ground, psyken surging around the vehicle's battered hulk in a veritable storm. As the stunned cadre psionics watched, the tear continued up until, with a final whine of protest, the car tore itself completely in two. The two halves then proceeded to compact as, psyken as thick as fog humming through the air, a second burnt-out hulk appeared, floating silently through the air to position itself a hand span above the two rough cylinders of metal that now stood where a car once had.
Now placed, the second car also began to distort with the scream of dying steel, two roughly equal portions peeling away from a central chunk to compact into two more rough limbs. And the Brotherhood psionics found themselves looking at a headless giant of metal which, with a smoothness reserved for organics, stepped forward with a ground-trembling 'thud', moving straight for the nearest knot of cadre destroyers.
"That ... is not possible," Tantalus breathed in naked astonishment as the Mindfire psionics could only stare in stunned amazement at what had been created right before their eyes.
Then they were diving out of the way as the metal monster impossibly bent at its middle to swing one of its 'arms' around in a tight arc that abruptly terminated in the cluster of shocked psionics it had approached. There were a couple of screams of pain, but mostly silence as five bodies were roughly slung into the building beside them, hammered out of the way by a battering ram of psyken-fueled metal.
The metal giant snapped the same limb around to backhand two more psionics out of the way with bone-crushing force before it moved on, advancing on a cluster of cadre psionics that were cowering behind another burnt out car.
But not all the cadre movers and burners were taken so completely by surprise that they were shocked into immobility. With a shout, a handful appeared out of nowhere, risking blue torpedoes and shockwaves to attack the metal giant. A giant of relatively normal proportions, Hammer had joined them, a look of mayhem on his unhandsome features.
Like rapid-fire battering rams, tight shockwaves appeared a few metres from the giant's legs to hammer into its massive right pedestal. Almost immediately the thing reacted, spinning around roughly with enough speed to send air hissing through its ragged structure. But it was already too late: another series of shockwaves smashed into the leg and, abruptly unbalanced, the metal giant toppled backwards, its mass crashing into the battered apartment block itself, smashing through walls to come to a dusty rest amidst the rubble. Apparently even it couldn't deny the law of physics for that long!
The incredible attack, however, was far from over. As the dust swirled around the fallen giant's suddenly unmoving form, a second ripple of psyken washed over the battlefield. This time it was joined by a wash of pyroken, the two swirling with deadly potential in the darkness of the shattered building's inner space. Then that darkness was being pushed aside by light with the brilliance of the sun as something 'moved' inside.
With the sinuous grace of a reptile it came, glowing silver and gold as it eased itself over the giant's fallen metal body to regard the surviving Brotherhood psionics with a baleful gaze of glowing light. Its body was a shimmering collection of glowing lines and shapes, in one instant suggesting solidity and in the next, filmy illusion.
"Is ... is that a dragon?" Agony stammered in a whisper, unable to comprehend what her eyes were telling her. Then, with a surge of pyroken, a seething wave of plasma fire was sweeping forward, mowing down those that had vanquished the metal giant in a fury of superheated hydrogen gas. Shrieking in pain, Hammer went down with them, his superpowered shields no match for the dragon's pyroken assault.
On legs of pure psyken, the dragon pulled itself out of the ruined building's belly and onto the street, washing the charred buildings with plasma fire as it swung its head back and forth, searching for Brotherhood victims.
"Just how the actual fuck are we going to fight against that?" Agony screamed at Ravage wide-eyed, her face painted pure panic.
Already covered with frost from drawing in as much energy as his mind could hold, Ravage could only glare back at his teammate. He had absolutely no idea how to fight a fire-breathing dragon created from pure psyken and pyroken energy. No Brotherhood manual covered that particular protocol.
But, as another cluster of cadre psionics died screaming beneath the plasma breath, an idea abruptly occurred to him. If he could somehow solidify the air around the dragon, he might be able to snuff out the energy that was feeding its power, cutting it off from the hardwire that had created it.
Bending his own considerable energies to the task, Ravage reached out with a psyken probe. There! The shimmering lifeline that connected the dragon to its maker, the renegade hardwire still sheltered in what was left of the building. Extending his mind, he hardened the probe and, with a smooth downward stroke, severed the lifeline as he, at the same time, solidified the air around the dragon's ten-metre length of fire.
Like a candle being abruptly snuffed out by a pair of pinching fingers, the dragon vanished, so utterly gone it was if it had never existed, but for the seared corpses of its victims lying liberally scattered about the battle field.
Into the resulting silence the renegade came, stepping from the doorway of the battered building the Avalonians had been using as shelter, appearing to be completely unshielded as he strode forward. Stunned by both the amazing attack of the giant and the following draconic assault by the fire dragon, the survivors of the cadre and Mindfire didn't even see him coming.
But the broken cadre commander did. Blood in his throat, Kensey tried to warn them. But it was already too late. He could only watch in helpless frustration as the renegade thrust out his hands, an EM field flaring into existence around the renegade's clenched fists. Then he was slinging a shimmering mass of energy forward, the seething ball of light quickly accelerating until he could no longer track it with his naked eyes.
It exploded with a snarling roar in the midst of a knot of destroyers who had made the mistake of rising from cover after Ravage had snuffed out the dragon, scything them down like stalks of wheat before the reaper, body parts going everywhere. The explosion was enough to jerk every other destroyer and ESET member back to the renegade's dark clad form. And, as soon as line-of-sight fell onto him, Mordecai's shields began to scintillate into visibility with multiple shockwave and plasma bolt impacts.
But, amazingly enough, the renegade merely staggered slightly before regaining his footing, shedding most of the energy slamming into him into the ground, making it ripple away from him in concentric circles, like the ripples in a pond after a stone was cast into the still waters. Setting himself carefully, the man in black continued to pull ambient energy in to fuel his final assault.
Screaming wildly, Viper stood from her cover. With tears streaming down her face, she hurled shockwave after shockwave at the almost invisible figure of the renegade, the fire about him so heavy that it blotted him out with a haze of silverfire, coruscating around his shield like unchained mercury.
With the shocking abruptness of a fall from a cliff, a razor-edged construct of energy the length of Viper's arm appeared. In a blur of motion, it penetrated her shields and sliced down and through her body, cutting Viper's head and shoulders off at an angle from the rest of her body.
Fluids burbling as they were suddenly superheated, the two halves of Viper's body fell apart and tumbled lifeless to the ground. Simultaneously a number of cadre psionics screamed in agony as machine-gun rapid bursts of plasma fire ripped through their bodies even as others were being raggedly thrown aside by psyken lightning smashing into their bodies.
As Mordecai began to advance into the street, a strange ball of energy began to form roughly twenty paces in front of him, a veritable mass of blue light, twisting this way and that in the familiar dance of chained psyken. As the ball grew, the air began to feel flat, almost like the feeling before an electrical storm, a strange sort of calmness. Then, after it had reached the size of a basketball, the strange mass of energy began to change; flattening into an ovoid in a blink of an eye as it began to pulsate with inner forces.
With each pulse, a fork of pure lightning, blindingly white-hot, lashed out to cut down several cadre psionics, cutting through walls, cars and space to seek them out, as if it were alive. With some pulses, there were two, three, and sometimes even four forks at the same time. In the space of several heartbeats, the last of the destroyers tumbled to the ground lifeless, his chest a smoldering mass of seared tissue.
As the burnt body hit the pockmarked pavement, the disk returned to its globular shape, slowly changing color to red, shot through with golden flashes of energy. Which was when it just began to pulse slowly, almost in rhythm with a heartbeat. As the same time the shield around Mordecai finally cleared and he became visible to a stunned Ravage, a shocked Tantalus and an unreadable Agony as they watched him slowly walk towards them.
With a snarl, Scorpion leapt out from behind her cover on the other side of the street, frost forming around her as she gathered the energy for a massive shockwave. In the blink of an eye, the globe, now behind and to the right of Mordecai, gave one last pulse before dividing into four separate disks, each up on its rim. As Scorpion drew back to deliver her blow, the disks darted forward to slice into her, almost cutting her instantly in two.
Blinking rapidly in shock, Ravage watched as her body crumpled into a steaming mess, fluids oozing from the great rents the disks had cut. Thinking that her comrade might still be alive after that, Tantalus began to rise from cover. But, as her head and shoulders came out from behind the wall of the building they were using for cover, a high intensity shockwave rolled into her. With a flicker of light, it overwhelmed the front portion of her maxed out shields and, screaming, her head was squashed like an overripe fruit against the back of her shield, spraying brains in every direction.
Frost appearing around her as she gathered in desperate energy, Agony made to move. But she could do nothing more than draw breath to gasp in shock before she was picked up and pile driven roughly through a nearby wall by a focused shockwave, her slender form disappearing in a cloud of dust.
"Looks like you've run out of soldiers, Ravage," Mordecai commented in a low voice, coming to stand before the shaken Mindfire commander, the lone survivor of the incredible counter attack as blue and red lights began to flash luridly all around them. The air quickly filled with the shouts of men and the scream of emergency sirens.
"Renegade!" Ravage whispered hoarsely, staring wide-eyed at the man that seemed to virtually glow with incredible psionic power.
Then the air was hyper chilling as he sucked every gram of energy out of it to fuel one last strike. With a shriek, a narrow-bladed sword of focused psyken and pyroken hissed into existence in Ravage's hand. Seething with power, Ravage swung it up to the ready, his face abruptly illuminated by the dancing length of energy.
"I must admit, that was pretty damn impressive. But, you're not the only one with tricks, my friend," he tautly hissed before throwing himself forward, the sword of light screaming through the air as he aimed it at Mordecai's head.
With a grimace of effort, Mordecai managed to move out of the way of the wild swing, using almost unnatural speed and reflexes to duck out of the blazing blade's path. Then, snarling with power, a matching sword of his own blazed into being in the man in black's hand. Snapping it around, he blocked Ravage's hard downward cut, the slender hardwire's momentum bringing him face to face with the big psionic.
"Wanna dance?" Mordecai grated.
A snarl of rage on his face, Ravage threw Mordecai back and swiftly advanced on the dancing feet of an accomplished swordsman. The man in black abruptly found himself in a fight just to keep Ravage's glowing blade away from his body.
Back and forth they went, their glowing blades hissing and spitting each time they came in contact with each other, riposte, block, parry, and slash becoming a delicate dance of destruction. If either of them made a misstep, he was a dead man!
The knot of SWAT officers came staggering to a halt as they entered the intersection, the dancing sword fight of light directly in front of them.
"What the holy fuck is that?" one of them husked in a disbelieving voice.
But none of her fellows had an answer as they could only watch in stunned silence at what was unfolding before them. Each man wove a web of deadly light about their bodies, their swords of energy snarling through the air to hammer into defense and block, before the counterattack forced them back.
With a hiss, Ravage caught Mordecai overextending and cut hard at his body. Without effort the sword of psyken and pyroken sliced through Mordecai's shields, his clothing and the neuron armor beneath to cut deeply into the flesh protecting his ribs. Grunting, Mordecai took a staggering step back as he slapped a hand to the wound, which only oozed blood, the edges instantly cauterized by the sword's edge of energy.
"First blood!" Ravage snarled, pausing slightly to mockingly salute. Then he was on the attack again, his veins filled with surging confidence. The renegade wasn't so invincible after all!
But he was clever; as Ravage continued his savage attack, Mordecai allowed him to beat the big man back, making like the wound in his side was more serious than it actually was. Sensing victory and smelling blood, Ravage closed in, cutting hard for Mordecai's weak side.
Only to find the big man suddenly not there. Then his sword was being knocked out of his hand with a powerful sweep of Mordecai's weapon. Desperately he fell back, drawing in more ambient energy for a last defense.
"Bastard!" he husked. "I'll burn you to ash, traitor, if it's the LAST thing I do!" But, before he could move further, Mordecai was stepping in close to clutch him hard by the throat.
"Hold that thought, burnout," he said flatly before looking over at the building the Avalon listening post had just occupied.
With a soft of hiccup, there was a flare of light visible through the various holes in the walls of the gutted structure before a massive explosion ripped the entire building apart, shattering the walls into powder. Using the released kinetic energy from the explosion, Mordecai ignited an equally massive wall of fire that quickly washed over the scattered bodies on the ground, instantly charring them beyond recognition.
That wall of bright red fire was the last thing Kensey saw as he gasped his last breath, wondering how it had happened. How the Brotherhood could have been so utterly defeated. Then it was washing over him, searing the last of his life from him.
As the wall of fire washed over the two hardwires, Mordecai's shields flared into being, protecting them both from the searing heat. Then the wall was past them, burning out just as it covered the last of the slain destroyers' bodies, leaving behind scorched buildings, burnt-out cars and torched bodies laying in untidy heaps across the blasted half-block battlefield.
With the searing wall of white-hot heat guttering out into a simple blue flame dancing along melted pavement, Mordecai turned his grim attention back to the frost-covered Mindfire hardwire. Now at arm's length, he lashed out with the speed of a striking cobra, catching Ravage with a solid right hook.
Frost flying, the Mindfire commander staggered back, caught off guard by the physical attack, his mind instantly reeling and unfocused. Stepping in close and fast, Mordecai cupped his hands on either side of Ravage's face and held him steady while he sent a powerful pulse of telepathic energy directly through Ravage's shaky core shields and into his very mind.
Instantly Ravage's intense training took over and personal defense mechanisms slammed into place, resisting Mordecai's probe even as it began its advance deep into the Mindfire commander's mind. In the space of an eye blink, Mordecai found himself enmeshed in strands of psi-stuff, slowing down the advance of his probe as Ravage's defenses began to rally. Gritting his teeth, the lone gunman poured more energy into his probe.
But slicing into Ravage's mind was like trying to bore through an onion; as soon as one layer of defenses and thought storage was penetrated, another quickly loomed behind it, and another and another! Grimly, the big psionic pushed on, peeling layer after layer back as Ravage continued to desperately rally his defenses.
However, as he saw level after level of his mind fall to the renegade's relentless assault, Ravage knew he had been defeated. Still, he wouldn't yield without one last stab at this, his greatest enemy. He quickly marshaled the last of his abilities, even as they began to wan before the renegade's relentless assault.
Just as Mordecai's razor-edged probe penetrated Ravage's last line of defense and laid bare the final set of gateways into his mind's core, the commander launched his desperate counter attack: a short, but powerful pulse of psyken riding back along Mordecai's probe, right into the dark knight's mind core.
As the counter probe detonated inside Mordecai's mind, he mentally reeled despite his own incredible defenses here, in his mind's core as the burst sliced through several vital neural pathways. With a flicker of psionic energy, portions of the main probe failed and began to wither, their power supplies and support systems eliminated.
But, as he felt several neural pathways fail, Mordecai split his probe into multi-phasic channels, shredding right into Ravage's mind core. There, with a coherent beam of telepathic energy, he wiped the Mindfire team leader's mind clean, destroying every memory the slender hardwire ever had, period.
In that instant the persona known as Ravage disappeared and ceased to exist, his brain becoming an empty vessel without coherent and sentient thought. As the mind, deprived of its memory base and security measures, began dropping its defenses, Mordecai pushed the rest of his probe into the tatters of Ravage's personality. Using a focused beam of psyken and pyroken, he began to systematically burn every gram of psionic ability out of Ravage's brain before his own abilities suffered too much damage.
Opening his eyes to the flashing blue and red lights of Normals' emergency vehicles and the shouts of emergency crews rushing fire hoses and other pieces of emergency equipment into the burning buildings, Mordecai looked down into Ravage's now empty features, all traces of sentience gone. But, before he lowered the blood-streaked body to the ground, trickles of crimson oozing from nose and ears in silent testament to the power of Mordecai's attack, the dark knight planted one last thought in the now vacant mind. Then, after lowering the body to the scorched ground, he began to unsteadily walk away as several SWAT officers and paramedics rushed towards him.
But, before he could go more than a half dozen steps, Mordecai's head began to swim and the scenery, complete with shouting Normals as they suddenly were moving in slow motion towards him, began to whirl sickeningly in a circle. Blinking rapidly, he slowly collapsed onto the ground, Ravage's counterattack finally taking its toll. After a long, shuddering breath, Mordecai activated his self-repair mechanisms as he knelt roughly on the ground. Then, with a final spin, he toppled to the ground and the world was gone.
****