The Dark Edge Chronicles - Hardwire

Gone Fishing

The man in black pulled his rescued companion close to him as he shut down his other senses.

"Be very quiet," he firmly directed as he looked into the woman's wide eyes. "I need to do a little poking around in probability space." Then he was shielding them both as he began to pour mental energy into that portion of the Eye where the clairvoyant senses were resident.

As soon as the big psionic felt them fully charged, he closed his eyes and began to 'cast', or throw his clairvoyant senses into the time stream, the stream sensed by one of the clairvoyant powers as a turbulent river of color, shifting sounds and blurred sensations. He concentrated on the past, going up stream against the flow of time as he tried to catch an impression of Tabitha as she was rushed by, through this very corridor.

Mordecai cast once, twice, and then a third time without success, finding instead a confusing rush of impressions that didn't have any sense of Tabitha in them at all. Grimly he continued to cast, each throw making his teeth grind when it came up empty as it meant he would have to stand there, blind to the world and vulnerable to attack for one more cast.

Then, just as Mordecai was about to give up, he caught a whiff of her presence. Concentrating on it, a blurred picture began to form: there, five men pushing her into a room on the third floor. He focused hard to bring the room number into view: room number, . . . 317. Instantly Mordecai dropped the clairvoyant cloak and pulled his other senses back online.

Just in time to catch a group of eight men coming up to the fourth floor on the elevator, the air around them menacing. He quickly scanned their surface thoughts and found his expression tightening grimly. They were the vanguard of a massive force that was advancing on the psionic anomaly that had taken out their security systems on a section of the fourth floor, the guards on the floor not responding to their summons. It was the response he had expected to his forceful arrival.

"We must go," he tautly indicated.

"Where?" the woman asked, her voice quavering.

"Down a floor," he glanced around for a way down, mind racing.

"How, . . how do you know that?" The woman stared at him.

"Clairvoyance," he replied, scanning the corridor around them. Shit, they couldn't take the stairs; the vanguard was coming up that way. Was there a second flight? Looking back at the woman, he could see confusion on her face at his answer. A flicker of frustration washed through him before he could stamp it out.

"It's not important that you understand how. Just that it is, okay?" A scan of her psionic cortex yielded that she had telekinetic ability and could form teleportals. "Now, can you form a teleportal?"

"No," the woman replied in a small voice. "They drugged me with something that's turned off my abilities."

"Bah," Mordecai hissed in disappointment as he quickly reviewed the floor plan he had managed to pull from his mule's mind. He had hoped to save his energy for keeping off the Brotherhood until he could grab Tabitha and get the hell out of here.  But it didn't take long for his frustration to be swept away by hope: there, a second flight of stairs just fifty metres down the hallway. 

"We'll worry about that later. Right now we need to get down those stairs!" And then he was off, almost dragging the stumbling woman behind him, eyes intent on the doorway that led to the staircase.

A door that abruptly swung open in front of them to spill out a handful of dark dressed men and women, their faces hard as they swung about, visually and psionically searching for the hardwire renegade. Mordecai wasn't about to let them find him first.