Summoning her waning strength, Jeriko grimaced as she looked over at a silent Mordecai, head bent as he struggled beneath the weight of the probability node's physical shift around them, warping Reality itself. While both she and Raven could feel the pain and pressure of the node's final shift, Mordecai's gift would enable him to feel it so strongly that he was nearly incapacitated by it.
It was as she gazed at the man in black, thoughts racing, that Jeriko felt the twist in the magnetic fields in and around the city, signaling a massive teleportation through the disruption field they had erected in an attempt to isolate the beleaguered Normal city. Pushing aside her thoughts with grim determination, she looked up at the monitors, eyes sharp as she searched for evidence of the teleportation. At the same time she reached out to take Raven by the arm.
"Did you feel that?" she rasped softly as Raven's head came up with a jerk. "A massive flux in the magnetic fields surrounding the city. Our disruption field has been penetrated!"
"A teleportation?" Raven husked as she too pushed aside the pain and turmoil she was feeling from the node's shift to stare hard at the monitors.
"What else could it be?" Jeriko frowned as she could find nothing on the monitors, which showed the grounds and the center itself, currently dark, the gloom only sporadically being lit by flashes of plasma fire as Lash and Alpha Team continued to successfully take out the trigger team.
"That could only mean that McMaster has successfully eliminated the last of the mole assassins in the building and has saved the world leaders," Raven pointed out. "And that the Brotherhood is falling back on some backup plan to make sure the place gets leveled anyway."
"Knowing their level of resolve, that makes sense." The blonde lone gunman nodded. "But where are they? I mean, by the feel of that flux there should be hundreds of psionics down there, advancing on the conference center. But we're picking up nothing!"
"Could they have developed some sort of cloaking technique to hide from visual scanning to cover their entry?" Raven leaned close to the monitors, her own eyes finding absolutely nothing new to see.
"I don't think the Brotherhood's that advanced," Jeriko began. "I mean, the lone gunmen have barely ..."
It was the sight of something moving on the monitors watching the far edges of the target area that caused Jeriko's voice to trail off as she concentrated on what the monitors had picked up. It didn't take her long to identify what was moving out there.
"Ho boy," she husked softly as she watched hundreds of black trench coated psionics stream across the screen, heading straight for the convention center. "That is a helluva lot of psionics!" To guess that such a number had teleported into the city and to actually see them was very, very different, as Jeriko discovered, much to her dismay!
"Destroyer cadres?" Agony asked as she watched the dark wave advance on the convention center through her night vision binoculars. Martin nodded as he replaced the holo-communicator into his suit jacket, giving the expensive coat a tug to straighten it before joining Agony at the window to watch the cadres advance.
"At least four of them, authorized to first level the convention center and kill everybody inside. Then they will bring down the city, ravaging this worthless pile of concrete and steel until it's nothing more than a heap of smoldering rubble. That should send a sufficient signal to the world that the Brotherhood is prepared to do whatever it takes to become rulers and masters of this planet!"
With a thin smile playing at the corners of his mouth, Martin folded his arms across his chest.
"Just step back and enjoy the show, Agony. It should be quite spectacular!"
"And just who the hell are these guys?" Ham muttered harshly as Kent swung around to take in the crowd of dark coated men and women that had appeared out of the darkness to the south of the convention center with his camera. Even as he brought his camera into focus, they brushed aside the attempts of gathering special forces outside of the grounds and what remaining security forces inside to slow them down.
Not missing a beat in her smooth delivery, Katherine turned to face the crowd of strangers that had appeared out of nowhere.
"And it would seem that we've been joined by yet another group of individuals," she husked into the microphone in her hand, her eyes darting from one black trench coated person to the next.
"Who they're affiliated with or what they represent is a mystery to us. Hopefully they'll make their desires known shortly. In the meantime, we'll be keeping an eye both on them and on the continuing situation inside the convention grounds. The appearance of this third group could represent an inherently destabilizing factor that may impact the tenuous situation in the convention center grounds where fighting has finally subsided somewhat. Hopefully they don't represent Brotherhood reinforcements, the Brotherhood being the terrorist organization believed responsible for this unprovoked attack against the leaders of many of the world's strongest economic powers, including the United States, Canada, Japan, Britain and Germany."
"Sir, the switchboard is completely blocked with calls from not only all over Calgary, but the entire country!" the harried switchboard operator, a plain-looking sergeant with a perpetual frown on her face, reported as McLaughlin paced tightly inside his office, the small television set in the far corner showing the scene unfolding down at the convention center.
"Including the RCMP, the Department of Defense, the office of the Prime Minister and, the Mayor's Office!"
"As if we can do something about it!" McLaughlin rumbled tightly, not bothering to look up at the sergeant who had poked her head into his office door. "Shouldn't they be talking to Downtown? And what the hell is the Mayor's office doing calling us anyway? As I recall, our precinct washed their hands of this whole affair! At the behest of the Mayor I might add, that fat, sweaty bastard."
Halting, the big police lieutenant let a long sigh whistle out between his clenched teeth as he stared down at the small television, which now showed a large group of black coated people approaching the convention center.
"What we need is the military in here, not just us cops. Whoever these Brotherhood clowns are, they're taking our guys apart down there as if we were throwing rocks and nasty words and they have Abrams M-1 tanks! So take that one from the DoD."
McLaughlin's eyes narrowed as something then occurred to him.
"But before you do that, sergeant, can you get me a cell phone? If I can get a hold of the station that's broadcasting this shit, maybe we can get them to turn it off. If the feed's already going national, there's a good chance that it may inspire some panic in the streets, something we definitely do not want!"
"Damn!" Ham snarled as he slipped his cell phone back into his coat pocket. "The guys at the station want to pull the plug on us! Apparently some flatfoot in a local precinct thinks that our feed will instill panic in the hearts of the populace, or some other such bullshit, along with jeopardizing any military action the gathering special forces are about to engage in. And since they don't want to be responsible for something untoward happening, they're threatening to cut us off!"
"They can't do that!" Katherine hissed back, covering the live mike in her hand with the other to muffle the sound. "The people have a right to know what's going on here. Especially since it concerns the leaders of the ..."
"Hold it," Kent said tautly. "Somebody's coming out of that crowd of black coated people!"
Three heads snapped around to join Kent's as they watched a slender, rather unassuming-looking individual separate himself from the mass of uneasily shifting people in black to take a position some five metres in front of them, facing the darkened convention center. In the light cast by the one or two surviving street lights close enough to spill their pools of illumination onto him, the man didn't appear to be any different than anyone that they'd run into on the street, perhaps middle-aged with short shorn hair and undistinguishing features.
Yet there was something about him, something that demanded respect and attention; a quiet sense of authority that brought every eye to him, speaking of confidence and power. If this man spoke, he would be listened to.
The man frowned as he stared at the dark mass that was the convention center just across the street from him. He looked at the dark mass for a long moment before, without warning, he dipped a hand into his coat to draw out a holo-communicator. Activating it with his thumb, he looked down at the face that appeared above the projector plate.
"Ravage here," he husked softly, his voice tinged by hidden pain, well-controlled but strong enough to make itself known in his spoken word. "The cadres are in position."
Pain was something this husk of a man knew all too well. It had been his constant companion since his former self's defeat at the hands of the dark renegade, the one who was called Mordecai. It continually wracked his body, burned in his rebuilt mind and gnawed at his very soul. Sometimes it was fiery while other times it was dull and aching. Regardless of how it felt, the man that now called himself Ravage knew all the flavors, combinations and permutations of the stuff that ate his nerve endings raw and haunted him every second of every day.
But Ravage didn't curse the twisting, the clawing and the fire that surged through him every damn day. He couldn't; the pain reminded him of a gift he thought he would never have again: his very life.
It was a small tradeoff, payment for the Brotherhood risking its resources to retrieve him out of the Normal hospital his husk had been trapped in after the battle on 16th Avenue and whisk him away to a hidden base deep in the French Alps. There, in the hands of the best psionically-gifted neurosurgeons the Brotherhood had, he had been rebuilt from the burnt out husk he had been back into a semblance of the man he once was.
The reconstruction of one of the Brotherhood's most powerful hardwires was made possible by a secret project known only to the Inner Council itself. During clandestine experiments performed on hundreds of enslaved psionics in a number of their hidden laboratories scattered throughout Europe, Brotherhood scientists discovered it was possible to make an imprint of a mind. This imprint was an exact copy of every memory, every thought that existed in a single mind at the instant in time that the imprint was made.
Not only was the imprint an exact copy of the mind, it also carried an amount of the life force that quickened the body, enough to bring life to a previously dead body. Combined with the ability to map the imprint onto a mind-wiped brain, suddenly it was possible to bring people back from the dead by merely taking their imprint and mapping it onto a body prepared to receive it.
Almost immediately the Inner Council had seen the implications and possibilities the new technique and technology presented them: the possibility of becoming immortal! All they needed to do was take their most recent imprint, made at regular intervals and, when an old body died, they just mapped the imprint onto a body that had been 'scrubbed' and sanitized for the new consciousness placed inside it. And then they just lived on, given a whole new body to continue on in without pause or need for death.
Of course the ruling elite of the Inner Council was also very jealous of its newest discovery and immediately moved all materials, data and personnel involved into a top secret project with dedicated facilities that only they knew about. They code-named the project and its facilities Project Phoenix, possessing the power to raise the dead from the ashes and dust of death back to life. So far Phoenix had been in operation for five years and, until the recreation of Ravage, hadn't been able to prove its worth.
Ravage had been saved by the fact that, along with copies of their own minds, the Inner Council had commanded Phoenix to take imprints of a number of psionics that the Council considered important to the Brotherhood's future. Especially after the fall of the Normal civilization requiring good men and women to help the Brotherhood build their new world order. The powerful hardwire was selected to be part of that rebuilding core of psionics with his unwavering loyalty to the Brotherhood making his broad range of skills invaluable.
Unknown to the then commander of the Mindfire ESET, his imprint was taken during a routine physical. Using that imprint as a foundation, the Brotherhood neuropsych-surgeons went to work rebuilding the man that had been Ravage, the most powerful of the ESET hardwires.
Unfortunately, while the imprint transference process was virtually flawless when the mapping was made on a completely healthy brain, the heavy neural damage that Ravage had suffered at the hands of Mordecai made the process much more difficult. And ultimately painful.
Laboriously the neurosurgeons knit Ravage's nervous system back together, painstakingly repairing the damage Mordecai had wreaked on the man's psionic cortex. With the damage repaired, they then took the imprint and mapped it onto the rebuilt brain.
In a surge of neuronal energy, Ravage's mind was restored as the imprint settled onto the repaired synapses and neurons. But, in that same instant, the pain nearly overwhelmed the man that had been Ravage. The neuropsych-surgeons had to work hard to keep him from going into shock and dying.
It took the Brotherhood's best nearly twelve hours to finally stabilize the remade hardwire, who now lay in a catatonic state of near immobility because of the pain. Only careful and methodical training over a period of five months taught Ravage first how to ignore and then work past the pain. And more was needed to restore his abilities, now being projected from a tenuously repaired psionic cortex.
But, like a sword rises out of the forge's fires, the man that was Ravage passed through the refining fire of pain and torment and was strengthened. Laborious training restored his abilities and he was given purpose by the new memories the Brotherhood implanted into his brain. The newly remade Ravage had an enemy to kill, and his name was Mordecai!
"You are cleared by Operations to commence your assault, commander," the tiny face indicated in an equally tiny voice from the communicator's audio grill. "Good hunting!"
"Acknowledged, Destroyer Control," Ravage stated in return, a small muscle in his cheek twitching in reaction to a stab of pain racing through his torso, a main nerve trunk responding to a slight shift in his standing position. Other than that, there was no sign that pain was consuming the slender man.
"We are commencing our assault. Ravage out." Deactivated with a thumb on its power switch, the communicator was returned to the inner coat pocket from whence it had come with a smooth, effortless motion. Then the air was chilling around the remade hardwire.
"Cadres," the lean hardwire said in a voice that was soft yet easily carried to the furthest edges of the mass of dark coated psionics that stood behind him as his breath plumed whitely from his mouth and nostrils.
"Stand by to attack."
As one the news crew jerked in shock as the massive psyken discharge ripped through the cold, dark air to hammer at the wall surrounding the convention center. The tendril of energy was a ravening bolt of bio-energy as thick as a man's body, tearing aside stone and concrete as it shattered the segment of the wall it struck. Within heartbeats it had chewed away the stone and concrete until a vast opening had been created, a gap easily large enough for the assembled dark coated mass to march through unimpeded.
"Holy shit!" Ham husked weakly as the tendril vanished as suddenly as it had appeared, leaving a strange sort of silence in its wake. He was the only one of the four able to give voice to the astonishment rocking them back on their heels. Unfortunately those two softly rasped words were all he managed to say, his own astonishment overcoming him to render him speechless once more.
If the destroyers heard Ham's husked words, they gave no sign as they advanced. But the camera crew wasn't the only ones that knew the destroyers had made the first move.
"By the Dark Father," Lash husked as the wall's destruction sent a shockwave washing across the convention grounds. Dropping his Shiva as he stood up from the downed psionic he was checking for a pulse, his team having successfully wiped out the last of the trigger team holding the doors leading into the building, he stared towards the source of the shockwave.
But even Lash's powerful vampire vision couldn't see what had caused the massive pulse of compacted and seared air that washed over them through the darkness.
"What ...?"
" ... was that?" Dee finished, staring around her in the darkness of the convention center's main foyer, where she and her team were going over the last members of the mole assassin team that they had just cut down.
The moles had attempted a rush of the stage area to see how much damage they could do before getting cut down, but Dee and the vampires had easily stopped them, finishing the last of them off in short order. They were checking the bodies to make sure they were dead when the shockwave pulse rattled the building's windows and made the floor beneath them rumble.
"Some kind of explosion?" asked one of the vampires with her, a powerful Qos Viran by the name of Jebith who was giving his Shiva a quick visual scan.
"Sounded like it." Dee frowned then reached up to activate her throat mike. "Alpha Leader, this is Alpha Two. Did you hear that explosion?"
"Affirmative, Alpha Two," Lash's voice husked into her earpiece. "We heard something. But we're still not sure what it was. I'm moving around to the front of the building to take a look. What's your status?"
"We've secured the building and terminated the last of the assassination squad," Dee reported, nodding to Jebith and his teammate Danik as they began to pile the dead moles up against the wall.
"And we're preparing to move the delegates out of the building to a secured location. But we have wounded, a couple of them badly. We're going to need immediate medical aid as soon as we evacuate."
"Acknowledged," Lash replied as he indicated that a team slide around each end of the building, working towards where they had heard the shockwave come from. "I would advise that you stay put until we determine what made that explosion. It could be Brotherhood reinforcements. Do you copy?"
"Copy that, Alpha Leader. We are standing by!"
Nodding in satisfaction, Lash deactivated his comlink and moved towards where two of his team were crouching over a still catatonic Duffy.
"Any change?" he asked softly and frowned when both of his Qos Viran shook their heads. "Well, with what could be happening around the front of the building, we won't be able to just leave him here now. Kohl, Radim, stay with our good detective and keep him safe. The rest of us will swing around the building and determine the extent of damage the humans' security forces took at the hands of the trigger team and find out what made that explosion."
"Yes, sir." Kohl nodded in acknowledgement of the order. Satisfied, Lash turned away and jogged lightly to catch up with the team he had sent off to the right.
It didn't take long for the long-legged vampires to move themselves around the building, slipping quickly through whatever trees were left from the trigger team's assault. Jogging from the shadows, Lash lead the combined Alpha Team towards the front of the grounds where he figured the explosion had come from.
"Alpha Three," he subvocalized as he continued on, his dark eyes sweeping through the dancing shadows as they continued on, looking for anything extraordinary. "Do you copy, Tahsis?"
"I copy, Alpha Leader," Lash's second-in-commander replied in his earpiece.
"Did you see what made that explosion, Alpha Three?"
"Negative, commander. I didn't see a thing! But I picked up a pretty significant shockwave surging from the Macleod Trail side of the grounds."
"I copy that. I have the bulk of Alpha Team heading that way now. Stand by."
"Standing by." Then Tahsis was gone, leaving Lash alone in his thoughts as he jogged forward, his mind racing as he examined a multitude of possibilities. Indeed, what had caused the explosion that they were now running to find out about? Could it truly be Brotherhood reinforcements?
Shadows continued to dance fitfully as Alpha Team advanced, cast by lingering flames still licking at the bones of destroyed security checkpoints, the broken bodies of their inhabitants scattered haphazardly about, discarded toys by a whimsical giant. Then they were clearing the last ring of standing trees that had somehow managed to escape the trigger team's wave of fiery destruction.
Lash immediately staggered to a halt.
"By the Dark Father!" he husked in the vampire's sinuous tongue.
Psionics, and a lot of them, advancing purposefully through a hole in the wall that surrounded the convention center grounds. By their dark trench coats and grim demeanor, they could only be Brotherhood heavies.
"Form a line!" Lash commanded hoarsely, the sound of his voice carrying easily to the advancing psionics, now only ten or fifteen metres away.
Several psionic heads came up to regard the ragged line that was hastily forming in front of them with absolutely no change to their blank expressions. Only their eyes seemed to be alive, glittering chips of obsidian in their faces, flickering with inner fires of intense hate and anger as they swept over Alpha Team.
Bringing his Shiva up against his shoulder, Lash called out even as the first wash of psionic energy, kicked up by the energized psionics in front of him, rippled over him, making his skin tingle madly. Silently he once again thanked Mordecai for the neuron armor that sheathed his nervous system and protected him from being instantly immobilized.
"Hold it right there!" he shouted in English. "Advance no further! This area is restricted. Any further move forward and we'll be forced to open fire. To avoid bloodshed, you must leave immediately!"
"Leave?" Ravage husked softly, a slight smile touching his thin lips. "I think not."
Lash grimaced as he shifted the Shiva into a ready firing position, a cold trickle of perspiration making its way down his spine. There wasn't much that made the big Qos Viran commander nervous, but several hundred psionics holding as much psionic energy as their cortices could withstand certainly qualified!
"I repeat, you are all ordered to leave the convention center grounds immediately! If you don't, we'll be forced to open fire."
"You order us?" Ravage said, holding up his hands to halt the cadres, now only five metres from where Lash's line stood, Shiva's held ready. "What a novel idea! Giving commands to those that would be your gods."
As the words fell from his lips, Ravage suddenly frowned as if something had occurred to him.
"Wait a moment," he said on the heels of his second statement, "I recognize that accent." He leaned forward slightly as he stared hard at Lash. "Burn me to ash, you're a vampire!"
A quick glance down the line of black sheathed statues of grim intent confirmed that all of them were vampires as well. There was no mistaking the way they held themselves, something Ravage recognized from years of hunting the blood-thirsty mutants all across the globe in the name of species purity. Like big cats, all sinuous curves and lethal motion. If you turned your back on them for only a second, you were good as dead.
Ravage's smile tightened until it was almost a straight line. He had no intention of turning his back on this lot, not now, not ever!
On the other side, Lash's grimace twisted into a snarl as he heard the slender psionic at the front of the crowd pronounce his race. He had been hoping to keep that secret just a little while longer, right up until he launched his ambush. But it was too late to hope for that now.
"Yes," he defiantly confirmed. "I am a vampire. Commander Ingamon Lash, of the Qos Viran. We have banded together with the humans to stop the Brotherhood from realizing their plans of genocidal destruction!"
"Banded together with the Normals?" Ravage laughed out loud, a harsh sound that had absolutely no humor in it. "Indeed this trip has become worthwhile if just for the punch lines." Then both the smile and the laugh were gone as Ravage leaned forward once more.
"But I have a question for you, vampire, one that I would have answered before I burn your filthy bodies to ash. How is it that you're managing to withstand our presence? The amount of energy being generated by the cadres should be sufficient to render you all quite helpless, if not dead outright!"
"Our secret, psionic," Lash bit out in reply. "Now, withdraw or we'll be forced to open fire!"
"You're going to shoot at us?" The thin smile returned to Ravage's face. "By the sounds of it, vampire, you haven't learned a thing about fighting against the Brotherhood."
Lash's eyes narrowed as a blue dot appeared without warning in the middle of the psionic's forehead. Tahsis. He felt a grim smile turn up the corners of his own mouth.
"Oh, I've learned a thing or two about you psionics over the years, that is certain," he hissed softly, his cold stare never wavering. "But I'm about to teach you a thing or two about us! Like about how you should never count a vampire out of a fight. Especially if he has a trick or two up his sleeve!"
With a soft hiss, the Kala's ceramic round punched through the air between Tahsis, lying flat on the center's roof and Ravage. Only to slam flat against the hardwire's reinforced shields. Still, as Ravage took a surprised step back, it had penetrated enough to make him notice.
"What ...?" the slender hardwire snarled as he felt his shields being damaged by the high-powered projectile.
"Surprise," Lash said tightly, his grin broadening at seeing the consternation appearing on the psionic's face.
Snarling silently, Ravage jerked his eyes away from the big vampire to let his enhanced senses trace along the projectile's path, easily making out both the turbulence and the infrared trail left behind by the ceramic shell's passage.
"There!" he snarled. "The roof of the convention center!"
Lash staggered as a massive pulse of psionic energy, generated by the slender psionic at the head of the mass of Brotherhood heavies, smashed into him, the sensation like a thousand ants gnawing at his nerve endings. Still, thanks to Mordecai's neuron armor he was able to swing his Shiva back into firing position with relative speed and accuracy. With a snarl twisting his face into a mask of rage, he took aim.
Only to drop his weapon away from his face with a gasp as he found himself temporarily blinded by a flare of light so bright it overwhelmed the shielding in his visor. Behind him, reaching down out of the cloud-filled sky, was a column of pure electric blue light that punched down into the convention center's roof, completely ripping the spot it impacted into fragmented debris.
There was a gasp of surprise in Lash's ear then silence. His vampire eyes recovering quickly, he twisted around to see what had caused the flare of light. And found himself staring at the column of light as it ravaged the top of the convention center.
"Tahsis," he husked softly in disbelief. His second in command had been with him ever since they both had joined the Qos Viran nearly a hundred years ago. To think that he was now dead, . . .
"You're not the only ones filled with surprises, vampire." Ravage's hard words slammed into Lash's senses like battering rams.
Words that stirred his hot vampire blood into an instant rage. Snarling silently, he spun around, Shiva up.
"Fire!" he barked and, with the soft chitter of rapid-fire mode, Alpha Team's Shiva's began to speak.
Ravage's eyes nearly bugged out of his head as he watched a number of heavily shielded movers go down under the hail of ceramic ordinance being hurled at them by the Shiva's.
"How ... how is that possible?" he husked softly, mind whirling. Then his Brotherhood programming was reasserting itself. "Burn them. Burn them to ash for this insult against us!" he snarled, twisting back to face the line of vampires to point at them with a stiffened finger.
"Kill them, kill them all!" As the words tumbled from his mouth, the slender hardwire drew his hands back as they began to glow with bright psyken energy. A grim smile appeared on his face as a plasma bolt began to form between his hands.
"And let cry the dogs of war!"