The Dark Edge Chronicles - Hardwire

Chapter 7: Snoopers

Jeriko looked around the big man's shoulder and sighed softly.

"This one, my friend, is all yours," she indicated in a quiet voice. "There's no way in hell that I'll be able to work my way through that! These guys must be paranoid to the extreme to erect a security barrier like that!"

"That, or they have some real enemies here, in Calgary," Mordecai noted grimly. "An avenue we may be able to exploit. But not now, and not here. I could cut my way through that, but then the whole secrecy thing is shot to hell. So there's no real point."

"So we're bailing out of this place empty handed?" Jeriko looked over at her grim companion.

Mordecai let his eyes scan over the rather plain looking corridor beyond the door to the maintenance hallway, an intersection leading away in three separate directions. It was anybody's guess as to where they led. Still ... The big man frowned as a bud of an idea began to open to flower.

"Not necessarily," he said softly, gathering energy as the idea continued to unfold before his mind's eye. "We might just be able to set a couple of bugs before we're forced to leave by the returning daylight."

"A bug?" Jeriko fought the urge to snort in disbelief. Everybody knew that you had to be in the target location to properly set a watcher. Or, at least reach the target with a probe. But not even one of Mordecai's incredibly powerful mole probes could penetrate this barrier. A mole probe was a type of probe that literally crawled through a substrate, molecule by molecule, by using the atomic bonds that each atom in a molecule had to its neighbor which formed solid matter.

The probe was created with a mixture of psyken and telepathy, along with Farsight and Deepsight. It crawled its way through the atomic matrix of any solid material, using the flow lines of the electrons in the bonds to move from point to point. It was the only way to avoid a molecular ward and was so low level that all but the highest resolution active telepathic scan missed it. Fortunately the crawling part of the probe was metaphysical; the actual probe moved at the speed of thought and light, unless slowed by its user.

But the mole probe required an opening to bore through, even one as small as several micrometres. And this wall in front of them ... from everything her senses were telling her here, that wall was completely solid. While the man in black was strong and talented enough to perform the most complex of neurosurgeries, he still needed a hole to work with. And that didn't even begin to cover the amount of energy required to create such a probe, or the vulnerable condition the man in black would be in as he guided it through the matrix.

Jeriko looked over at a thoughtful Mordecai. And, by the expression on his face, the big man was less than willing to even attempt a mole probe. But, then again, there was definitely something going through his mind.

"You've got a plan, don't you?" she asked quietly in the pregnant pause following her exclamation of disbelief.

"Yup." Mordecai cupped his hands together. "Though I can't claim the original idea." An image of a six-legged mote of light slowly striding across the wall of his hotel room danced in his mind's eye for a moment. "I am, however, making the original much, much better!" Weaves of psyken and pyroken combined with Farsight and telepathic energies to give shape to the tiny entities coming to life in the womb of Mordecai's cupped hands. Tiny motes with ethereal legs of glistening light.

"Since their actual substance is rather ..." He smiled faintly. "Insubstantial ... there isn't enough of each to trip the ward's sensory threshold. And so they'll be able to slip through the ward matrix undetected."

"They?" Jeriko began hesitantly and Mordecai knelt beside her, placing his cupped hands on the floor.

"Yes," he said with a smile. He carefully opened his hands and a multitude of glowing specks of energy unfolded delicate legs and began to slowly walk off his hand, each no bigger than the head of a pin, their gossamer limbs a mere handful of millimetres long. Still, they moved relatively swiftly to cross the space between the cleared area beneath the doorway's arch, to the glowing matrix of the wards.

"They." Mordecai's smile grew as the first of his tiny spies began to carefully climb into the matrix. "I've programmed each to home in on any strong local sources of psionic energy. With any luck, we'll find one or two in a rather important office or room and we'll be able to learn how to circumnavigate these ward walls and see what the Brotherhood is hiding behind them."

With a soft wink of light, the last of Mordecai's tiny, sentient and quite artificial insects disappeared into the matrix, intent on following the brightest psionic energy trail to its source.

"Incredible," Jeriko breathed, eyes wide with wonder. She had never seen anything like the tiny creatures her comrade had just created.

"Only if they work." Mordecai stepped back into the partial shelter of the maintenance doorway, drawing Jeriko back with him. "We'll wait here until the bugs let me know that they've found a place to settle in and watch."

"They can do that?" Jeriko said incredulously. Mordecai winked at her.

"Of course they can," he answered with a soft laugh. "That's the way I made them." He quietly closed the door behind them as they stepped into the uncertain light of the maintenance corridor once again.

"And I suppose you also made them with enough storage to keep whatever they see too." Jeriko crossed her arms as she carefully leaned against the door. "Cause there's no way of getting a probe through that to download their memory cores."

"Nope, no storage. You know how we store our gear in a pocket of sub-space, outside of normal Reality."

"Right." Jeriko nodded.

"Well, just like you can hide physical objects within sub-space, I've discovered that you can also hide telepathic links. Each of my little spies has a tiny opening to sub-space attached to their bodies, through which I've passed through a telepathic link. I can download them at any time I wish, without disturbing that incredibly anal ward net in there."

"Nice." Jeriko smiled and Mordecai nodded.

"Handy," he replied. Then straightened up as a soft chime inside his mind told him that the first of the watchers had found a place to nest, settling down to watch. "We're in business. The first watcher is placed." He looked down the hallway towards the small portal they had made in the venting duct.

"And now I believe we need to get the hell out of here before daylight hits!"