The Dark Edge Chronicles - Hardwire

Dodging a Bullet

Carefully Mordecai finished repacking his bag before taking one last look around the small hotel room to see if he had missed anything. Aizea and the four breeders had already gone ahead, somewhat secure in their neuron armor, to get them a cab. Since it was close to 10 pm at night, they were quite safe from UV radiation, if not from roving psionics.

While it would be quicker to translocate to the airport, the more they acted like Normals, the less likely they were to be noticed by the swarms of psionics ranging all over the city. Hence the cab.

Seeing that he had not, Mordecai nodded in satisfaction. He then immediately reached into the ether with his senses.

They were out there, somewhere. The lone gunmen, several of them already on route to Calgary as they closed in on the still growing node of Uncertainty that had brought Mordecai to the prairie city nearly a week and a half ago. Much had happened in those nine days since: discovery, illumination and war, mostly. And they were far from done here!

With the fall of Samson and his Alliance, the rebellion had become quietly desperate. The Alliance had been elemental as a driving force against the oppression of the Brotherhood, convincing the other psi nations in the city to actively fight against them. Now that they were gone, the Alliance subsumed by the ESETs, there no longer was a driving force for independence.

Instead, there was a sense of defeat, fatalistically powerful, as the surviving fourteen nations waited for the Brotherhood to complete their re-conquest of the city.

In retrospect, Mordecai knew he could've saved them. He could've easily stopped these other ESETs and prevented the Alliance's destruction. And he could've helped the other nations in their bid for freedom against the Brotherhood when Samson had asked him to.

But, consumed by his personal vendetta, he hadn't and now he had to push aside his feelings of guilt and concentrate on a more essential issue: the Brotherhood and their Armageddon Project. If the Brotherhood indeed had a breeding facility in France, they were closer to implementing the project than he and Jeriko had first thought. That, of course, injected a note of urgency into his own plans of shutting the Brotherhood down before they could initiate their plans.

The penetration of the breeding facility also offered an excellent opportunity to both gather additional information about the Armageddon Project and to destroy more of the Brotherhood's superstructure. If their breeding program was as important to the project's success as he suspected, destroying it would hurt them badly.

Mordecai smiled tightly and quite coldly. 'And hurting the Brotherhood is definitely the name of the game now!' he thought grimly. Jeriko's death wasn't going to be in vain, if he had anything to do with it. And then he was focusing his thoughts as his mind touched the one he was looking for. 'Now to put things into motion!'

By the time Mordecai had reached the street in front of the hotel, not only had Aizea gotten them a cab, but also had all of the vampires' gear already loaded into it. Which was considerable; shortly after he had gotten the plane tickets, Mordecai had then taken a heavily shielded Aizea shopping for clothes and other necessities for her and the breeders. They had been forced to leave the nest with only the heavy 'day' cloaks on their backs when the Brotherhood had stormed the stronghold. If they were to pass themselves off as Normals, they needed to look the part.

So Mordecai had fished out his massive wad of local currency and had proceeded to buy them all complete sets of clothing and equipment, tailored to their measurements, enough to last them several months. Which was more than enough time to find their clan. All that equipment and clothing was then packed and loaded into the large, minivan cab. All they were waiting for was him and his single black bag.