The Dark Edge Chronicles - Hardwire

Chapter 11: Psionic Nation

Mordecai frowned as he stared hard at the holographic display shimmering in front of him, hovering a hand span above Paladin's silvery shape, lying flat on the small coffee table. A recent update from his flying probes had painted the downtown core heavily with psionic activity. 'The Brotherhood has come, in force, to clean up the destruction I left behind,' he silently observed as he stared at the brightly colored display. 'And to quell the rebellious psi nations that have risen up against their Brotherhood masters.'

Indeed, in addition to the lurid shades of color marking the core, there were hot spots of psionic activity sprouting up all over the city, some indicating psionic battles between rebelling nations and desperate Brotherhood keepers. Mordecai leaned back and thoughtfully tugged on his lower lip. The city was in chaos, something that would help hide him until he was ready to make his next move. Which would be soon.

With the destruction of his room at the Alec Arms, Mordecai had wisely moved everything to a new hotel room, located nearly three kilometres north of both the Arms and the downtown. The further away he could get from the Brotherhood as they sought to hide any evidence of their existence from the Normals, the better.

It also gave him the chance to recover Jeriko's body from the city morgue, where the Normals had taken her. Before they could perform an autopsy or attempt to identify her, he had translocated in, snatched her cold body and had disappeared before an alarm could be raised. He then took her high into the nearby mountains to bury her in a beautiful meadow high up, near the snow line, where no human had ever been. It was a place he knew she would have loved the instant she had seen it, if she had gotten the chance to. The blonde Swedish hardwire had always loved the mountains. And so it was the perfect place.

The man in black had paused then, exhausted in both body and mind as his ears still rang with the death knell of Preacher's organization. He had lingered there, beside the newly turned soil of his companion's grave, eyes distant as he had stared out over the mountain peaks crowning this hidden valley deep in the bowels of the Rockies.

This new war against the Brotherhood had claimed its first casualty from the ranks of the lone gunmen. But Mordecai knew it wouldn't be the last, by far. The Brotherhood was old, big and powerful; they wouldn't go down without a fight. But, for both the sake of the Shield and the future of all of Humanity, they would go down. Especially if he had anything to do with it. It was his most solemn and angry vow!

After a few murmured words of remembrance over Jeriko's grave and not a few shed tears, the man in black finally buried the last of his feelings for the Swedish long gunman and, with a thought, had returned to Calgary and his new bolt hole.

"Paladin, final update from the probes," he requested, standing to stretch carefully, his body both sore and tired. He needed time to heal and regain his strength.

With the frown still on his face, Mordecai strode into the tiny kitchen nook this hotel room had been equipped with as Paladin established an uplink to the probes and began to download their memory cores. There he flipped open the box of Tim Horton's donuts he had bought before returning this final time to his room. Almost casually he began stuffing the dozen donuts, one by one, into his mouth, washing them down with generous mouthfuls of double caffeine, double sugar cola.

Considering all the work his body and mind had been engaged in recently, Mordecai needed to continue to refuel though it was the day after the massive attack on the Brotherhood's Calgary network. The over-the-top assault had drained even his deepest reserves, and had been launched with micro-fissures still present in his cortical matter. It would take more than one sugarcoated meal to repair and restore what he had burned up!