The Dark Edge Chronicles - Hardwire

Chapter 10: Enter the Hardwire

It was early the next day that found Kendrick frowning as he went over the most recent communique from the Inner Council at their headquarters in France, outlining his next move. As the regional commander of North America, Preacher had been his responsibility. And now it was his responsibility to clean up the mess his underling had left behind!

He grunted as he read the last line of the communique once again. The renegade had already burned out Preacher by the time Kendrick's clean-up team had arrived, shortly after the office was destroyed. So that part of the sentence was commuted.

But the execution, the second part of Preacher's punishment, had taken place an hour ago, almost before the communique had arrived, in anticipation of the sentence. In Kendrick's experience, he knew the Inner Council dealt swiftly with failure. Despite his high status and power, the heavy-set psionic stood outside of the Council and so had felt the lash of discipline more than once when he hadn't moved fast enough to fulfill the Council's wishes. Therefore he was more than aware of how the Council would've punished the lean Western Canada commander and simply had acted accordingly.

The blocky man's frown deepened as he looked up and out his own rather spectacular view of the downtown core of Canada's largest city, Toronto. Nestled along the northern shores of the great lake, Lake Ontario, Toronto was the business and economic heart of central Canada and, by most accounts, the center of the Canadian psyche.

Of course those accounts had come mostly from Torontonians, so it was difficult to gauge their accuracy. But, as far as the Brotherhood was concerned, it was true.

Toronto's central geographical location also made it perfect, not only as a headquarters for the Brotherhood's operations in Canada, but in all of North American. A great deal of American and international traffic poured through the border city's terminals of travel every day, allowing the Brotherhood to create dependable and strong lines of communication and transportation to nearly every part of their large dominion.

It also took the Brotherhood out of obvious American locations such as New York, Los Angeles and Washington, although they maintained strong presence in each of those, along with a number of other large American cities. After all, when it came to global aggression, who would suspect the Canadians?

Kendrick's eyes narrowed as, absentmindedly, he let his gaze sweep across the glimmering glass towers and blocky turrets of steel that occupied the city's heart. Through the rising smog of early morning rush hour, he could see the CN Tower, Air Canada Place and Skydome in the distance, hugging Union Station. And beyond them the waters of Lake Ontario, the early morning sunshine glinting off the uneasily shifting waves.

As uneasy as the big man now felt, with the loss of his handpicked man, Preacher. It wouldn't take much for the Inner Council to make the jump in blame from the dead psionic to a very much alive one, looking to sear the stump with a heated brand to stop the bleeding. The loss of Calgary and, potentially, the rest of Western Canada were a severed limb the Brotherhood didn't want to consider. 'I just hope my damage control is good enough for them,' he mused grimly.

As if in uncanny summons to that thought, Kendrick's phone rang. A glance at the display was enough to tell him it was from his team in Calgary. A blunt finger activated the phone's speaker function.

"Tell me you've got good news, Horst," he rumbled.

The display flickered. Then, with a surge of holographic light, the rat-faced softwire appeared in miniature above the phone, floating a couple of centimetres off the phone's silvery holographic projection plate. As usual, the thin psionic was dressed in a well-cut, Italian-made suit, a frown on his pinched features.