Mind Storm (3 page)

“Nice of them to leave it accessible,” Threnody said as she dragged her fingers over the controls and started pulling up command windows. “Some of it, at least.”

Quinton peered over her shoulder. “You going to fry it?”

“Soon as Jason wipes us from the system.”

It took her half a minute to find the home feed that showcased the corner right outside the office. She pulled up the log for the past hour, getting all the basic information ready for Jason to parse and do what he did best, outside of flinging things around with his mind. Three minutes later he was there, taking over her spot. He jacked into the system through two neuroports and hacked into the feed, hiding the murders they had committed by wiping the system clean.

“Not even going to bother with a loop. Their server farm is on-site, so the damage needs to go deep, Threnody,” Jason said as he pried the wires out of his arms when he finished. “It's all yours.”

He shoved the chair back and got out of the way. Threnody leaned over and pressed a hand to the console of the terminal. She took a deep breath, steadied herself for the burn, and pushed her power into the electric heart of the system before her. Not the same as burning it through a human body, but electricity was electricity, and enough of a surge could kill anything, especially a machine.

The system crashed. Circuits melted to slag and the vidscreen went dark. Threnody pulled her hand away and clenched her fingers down tight against the heat that tingled across her palm.

“Are you feeling that?” Quinton asked sharply.

“Some.” She couldn't lie to her partner when it might cost them later on.

“I
told
you they should have given you more time. If we had argued, Jael would have allowed it.”

“And I told you we had our orders.” She looked pointedly at Kerr. “What's our destination?”

Kerr's eyes were closed where he stood in the doorway, hands pressed against the frame, head bowed. Sweat dripped down the skin of his face, falling off the point of his chin. “South. Target's broadcasting twenty klicks away. So far I'm not sensing any Warhounds in the field.”

“For once,” Jason muttered. “Even if this is their territory.”

Threnody ignored him. “We'll use that SUV around the corner to get there. The soldiers won't miss it. Or their uniforms.”

Jason nodded at the bags he and Kerr had been carrying. “We've got supplies in there if we need them.”

“Good.”

They stripped the dead for clothes to create the illusion of cartel coloring over the standard black that should have meant neutral, except no one was neutral in the Slums.

Kerr pulled on a flak jacket, buckling it tight over his chest as he glanced at Threnody. “No Stryker has ever discovered the identity of the target since it showed up on the grid two years ago. Jason and I, we've been tracking it off and on for the past few months and have never gotten close.”

“I know,” Threnody said as she added extra ammo to her belt pouch for the gun she carried on her hip.

“What are your exact orders?”

“We can't have a high-Classed psion running around unchecked. The government hates when we're not leashed or dead. We've been ordered to find out who it is and bring them in. If retrieval is impossible, we've been ordered to terminate the target.”

She didn't bother with the rest of the order, about what would happen if she failed. Everyone in the Strykers Syndicate knew about their demotion, this sanctioned death sentence. Threnody stared at Kerr, daring him to say something, anything, in the face of her situation.

Those strange teal eyes of his searched her face for a few seconds before he said, “You belong to one of the best teams we've got this generation. Why are they wasting your life like this?”

“It's not your business,” Quinton said.

Threnody thought otherwise. She didn't experience a traumatic flashback to their last mission. The psi surgeon in charge of putting their minds back together over and over was better than that, but the memory of it was difficult to ignore.

“There was a school,” she said, voice steady, even if her thoughts weren't. “An illegal one, run by unregistered humans. There were children. I wouldn't—”

Her nervous system remembered that nightmare better than her head. She could still feel that Warhound's hand around her throat, his electric power cutting past her defenses and into her body. It was pure damn luck that Quinton had reached her when he did to save her.

“Everyone deserves a chance.” Threnody swallowed tightly. “Even those without identities.”

The Border Wars made this world 250 years ago, and they all survived in the long shadow of that nuclear aftermath. Education was the privilege of the registered elite, not meant for the gene-damaged masses. Population was regulated because there were only so many resources to go around, but laws would always be broken.

Threnody thought about those unregistered children and the handful born with psion potential. She should have killed them to prevent the Warhounds from keeping them, but she was getting old for a psion. She could afford to question their superiors when others would simply obey. She'd lived long enough that the punishment didn't sting as much as it might have if she had more years left to her. Strykers were taught to value human life, or at least the lives of those who belonged to the Registry. The government didn't care about unregistered humans, but Strykers did. She did.

Threnody's body still twitched, even now, from that last remembered electric shock before the Warhounds had disappeared with the children in a teleport.

Kerr pushed the memories aside for her.

They're alive,
Kerr said.
If you can't think about the good somewhere in that, then think about the mission.

It was, after all, what they lived for.

[
TWO
]

JULY 2379
SLUMS OF THE ANGELS, USA

The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels had seen many decades come and go since the ground it stood on was broken and blessed. It survived the upheaval of land and society when so many other structures had not. Perhaps by the grace of God, or so the priests still taught in thinned-out Sunday schools.

While it still stood in all its grimy, gang-marked glory, with its alabaster windows long covered in mold and the bronze on the door stripped and pitted, it had not seen the light of day for over one hundred years. The adobe-colored walls had turned gray over time, marked in layers of ink and grainy pollution that stained the exterior. Generations of gangs had scrawled their call signs on the skeleton of the place even before the city towers were erected over that lonely piece of God's land.

A tiny amount of dim sunlight filtered down through the cracks of metal and the smog-filled air, covering the street just meters beyond the dry expanse of bare earth that once held grass and now only held vagrants. The entrance to the cathedral was located on the south side of the building, overshadowed by a crumbling cement cross that jutted out from the cathedral's wall. The light inside that fifty-foot effigy had burned out before the turn of the century. It had never been relit. Electricity down on the ground was expensive, even back then, and even more so now.

Bishop Michael Santos had spent nearly his entire life in the Slums of the Angels. The only time he had ever left it was when he completed his seminary studies at the Vatican's fortress in the Swiss Alps and earned the right to wear the collar of a priest. The world was in need of men and women who gave their time and effort toward bettering the lives of others. In this secular, technology-filled society driven by desperation and greed, faith burned only in the background, in the cracks, with the forgotten. It wasn't easy living life with faith, but he did it, one breath at a time.

Bishop Santos stared up at the worn and cracked image of Christ on the cross that hung on the wall of the chancel and smiled.
“Otro día, mi Señor.”

No one was in the cathedral except for himself and a handful of Sisters. Mass was only offered on Sundays, confession had to be scheduled in advance, and he was tired of presiding over funerals. Bishop Santos sighed, running a hand through thinning gray hair. He'd been offered other posts over the years, because the pope believed in furthering the education of the faithful, but Bishop Santos didn't believe in neon-colored crosses and biosculpted personalities that preached on vidscreens. Most days of the week he preferred his cracked and dying cathedral to the top of the city towers. But some days he wanted more. Some days he sinned.

It's human nature. Or so it has been said for thousands of years.

Bishop Santos jerked around in response to the voice that echoed in his ears—amused, with a faint English accent—but he didn't see anyone in the vast emptiness of the cathedral.

I never did understand why people would believe in something so limited.

It took Bishop Santos several long moments to realize why that voice seemed so odd as he reached up to touch the side of his head. He wasn't hearing it in his ears, but behind his eyes, in the middle of his brain. Brown eyes darted from side to side, squinting through the sparse brightness that the lights provided.

“Who's there?” he called out, voice rough from years of breathing pollutants.

No one was in the nave. Bishop Santos would have bet his eternal soul on that. Between one blink and the next, a tall young man appeared in the front pew, long legs stretched out in front of him, one elbow propped on the back of the pew so that he could rest his head on his fist. He was dressed all in black, claiming no cartel color when everyone always claimed a side down here on the ground.

Bishop Santos didn't know how the young man had made it into the cathedral without someone discovering his presence. The doors were locked and alarmed for a reason, and he didn't like the faint, mocking smile on the stranger's face.

“The cathedral is closed today,” Bishop Santos said. “I don't know how you got in here, but I'm going to have to ask you to leave.”

“You can ask all you like. I need to be here.”

Bishop Santos bit the underside of his lip, unable to deny that request. Some distant instinct told him he should, but the warning was ignored. “If you've come for confession, you missed the designated day. Tuesday is when the booths are open, and they are booked through the end of summer.”

“I have nothing to confess, at least not to you.”

“Everyone has something to confess, my son.”

That smile got wider. “Your sense of morality is severely misplaced. You're wasting your time trying to convert me. Your God isn't what I believe in. Your God isn't why I am here.”

Bishop Santos watched as the young man pushed himself to his feet and brushed past the bishop on his way up to the marble altar and the table that sat in the chancel on the small dais. He stood there, back to the bishop and the empty cathedral, and stared up at the larger-than-life crucifix for a long moment. Then he picked up the metal tin on the table that housed the thin, expensive wafers used in Communion, pulled a few out, and ate them. The shock that Bishop Santos knew he should be feeling never came. The stranger turned around to face him again.

If this is all you have to offer your followers, no wonder they prefer cartel drugs.

Bishop Santos wrestled with the uncomfortable feeling that something wasn't right. Only when his eyes latched onto that smile, to that mouth that had not moved to speak, did he realize that he could still hear the stranger's voice.

I need this place, this last surviving Los Angeles landmark, for something far more important than evening Mass.
Dark blue eyes that Bishop Santos
knew
should mean something to him didn't blink and he could not look away.
Just think. You've spent a lifetime praying for your God to send his son to save you.

The stranger poured all the remaining Communion wafers on the floor and ground them into dust beneath his bootheel. He spread his arms wide.

Here I am.

His mouth didn't move and still he talked. Bishop Santos flinched. He could feel the blood drain out of his face as the stranger's voice filled his mind.

“Demonio,”
Bishop Santos whispered in a voice that had never shook in the face of countless guns, countless bodies, and countless threats in all his years working in the Slums. But it shook now because understanding wasn't coming to him. He didn't know if this was a test from his Lord or from the devil himself.

Demon? I'm no demon, human.

Bishop Santos blinked, or thought he did. One second the stranger was on the dais, the next he was standing before the bishop, intruding in his tiny bubble of personal space. He tried to run, but found that the only order his body obeyed was one the stranger gave. Bishop Santos watched as the young man raised a hand, palm to the ground, then slowly lowered it again. Bishop Santos's knees bent of their own accord and he slammed down onto the floor in a kneeling position. Crying out in pain, he looked up with panic-stricken eyes.

“Please!” he gasped out. “I don't—”

Understand. Yes, yes, I know you don't. Just like all the children you fucked didn't understand how you could betray their trust.
One long-fingered hand reached out to touch the bishop's wrinkled face, tracing over the lines of age.
You are something I will never be, Bishop Santos. You should be thankful for that. I know I am.

Knowledge finally came to him, too late to mean anything in the face of a disease and a power he had always preached as unholy. “Psion.”

They say your life flashes before your eyes when you die. It doesn't, not really. It was only the neurons in Bishop Santos's head forcibly overloading. Just his mind exploding in a novalike burn that rippled across a small pocket in the mental grid, hidden beneath strong telepathic shields.