The Dark Edge Chronicles - Hardwire

Inside the Lion's Den

The big man wasn't even remotely surprised to find that the building was virtually empty. Room after room was devoid of even the essentials, like furniture. The cottage itself consisted of four such rooms, small chambers radiating off a central hallway, which was accessed via the front door. The rooms, a bedroom, a bathroom, a kitchen and what looked to be a general living area, each had one window apiece, which afforded a 360 degree view of the surrounding yard and beyond. 'A shell,' he noted grimly. 

A shell with absolutely no indication of where the men and their captive had gone. 'Not a trace of a teleportal, secret entrance, nothing! There must be some sort of mechanical trap door around here that I've missed. Something they slipped through and closed behind them.' He glanced around warily as a thought occurred to him.

While the big psionic hadn't felt any surveillance activate upon his entry into the cottage, his phased state had dulled his meta-senses somewhat. For all he knew, they could be watching him right now! Then again, if they were and the Brotherhood had been alerted to his presence, they certainly weren't tipping their hat. The small cottage remained empty and silent as Mordecai carefully continued his search for the suspected trap door.

As far as the man in black could tell, the inside of the cottage was without surveillance equipment of any kind. In fact, it didn't even appear to be warded. Again Brotherhood arrogance in assuming that their first line of defense would be sufficient to protect them. 'Either these guys trust their underground wards so heavily that passive detection is useless,' he thought as he carefully explored the cottage. 'Or they're as arrogant as those fools that I destroyed in Calgary, and think they're strong enough to beat back any threat!'

Just then, as he passed out of the bedroom and into the hallway, his eyes caught sight of a strange pattern in the dust at the end of the hallway, which dead ended in some sort of brick wall. 'Eh? What's this?' he silently wondered as he stepped to the end of the hallway and squatted down to examine the patterns. 'Scrape marks?' He looked up at the wall and, using the multiphasic scanner, gave it a quick IR scan.

Almost like ghosts, several hand marks, already fading, appeared. 'Ah! Our hidden trap door.' Quickly forming a tight psyken probe, Mordecai began to push lightly at the wall, being careful not to trigger any wards or traps of the nasty psionic kind. But, again much to his amazement, he found nothing. 'Again I hope this is just a case of false confidence on their part.' Tightening his probe, he grimly resumed his search for the switch to open the door.

But, before his search could go very far, the sound of the helicopter returning without warning filled the tiny cottage. Frowning, Mordecai stepped back from the wall to peer up at the ceiling as he shut down his core processes once again. Would they hard scan the cottage before bringing in yet another captive? And would that scan detect his mirror field?

No use in taking the chance. With a flip of his thumb, he deactivated the mirror field and Mordecai faded back to visibility, his mind working hard. Then, just as abruptly as the helicopter had reappeared, an idea occurred to him.

The door swung open to spill in a handful of grim-looking men, their faces hard as they swept the hallway and those rooms visible from the doorway with a hard, telepathic scan, as was their custom. The young woman they held in tight hands, had long since given up struggling and now only sobbed softly as they dragged her inside, satisfied that the cottage was clean of intrusion. The last two men through closed the door behind them.

"Why are you doing this?" the woman husked, her voice froggy from her tears. Still, the British accent was unmistakable. 'What do you want from me?"

"You'll find out soon enough, softwire bitch," one of the men holding her, growled, his English thickened by a heavy French accent. "For now, all you need to know is that you now serve the Brotherhood and the Inner Council!"