The Dark Edge Chronicles - Hardwire

A Dark Future

The wind, hot and humid, stank of death as it washed across the unmoving form of a man laying spread eagle on a mass of granite, jutting rudely from the earth, ungainly and ugly. A viper's strike of poisonous fume, the wind rasped along the inside of the man's nostrils and, stirred to restless consciousness by the putrid vapor, he jerked awake.

And he found his eyes staring down the steep slope of the mountain standing at the back of the stone he lay on, to behold a scene of utter destruction. The ground, stretching out in all directions, had been seared dead by raging fires, still smoldering here and there.

The sky overhead, its clouds low and threatening, was painted a lurid red by the fires that still raged here and there, a thick haze obscuring everything. And there, in the distance, wreathed in flame and smoke, her towers of glass and steel melted ruins, Calgary died a slow and agonizing death as dark armies of men marched towards it, clad in the armor of Normality, their weapons of mass destruction poised.

The armies were as vast as the grains of sand on a beach, a tidal wave of grim purpose and singular goal, dark blights upon the earth's broken face, marching in slow cadence as jet fighters screamed by overhead. Hidden from view by distance and the haze, the low rumble of artillery fire and tanks made the ground tremble.

"No," the man moaned in a low, broken voice, the vision searing its hateful image directly onto his retinas.

With a low hum it approached, a blue light hanging in the burnt sky. Larger and larger it became as it drew close, shimmering with unnatural energies nearly fifty meters above the heads of the marching armies. Then it halted, kilometers away from where the man laid on the stone, yet as detailed as it would be if it hovered only a few meters away.

It was an egg of lightning-blue light, its surface rippling with powerful forces, liquid lightning that uneasily shifted in the stiff breeze of death sweeping across the killing fields. Then, like a curtain being drawn aside, the surface of the egg peeled away to reveal a person, dressed all in black.

The person's arms were held out stiffly to the sides, its legs crossed in odd mockery of a crucifix. Almost against his will, the man found himself focusing on the person's face. And he retched at seeing it. The flesh was torn and mangled by ripping claws and hung by tatters from the bone, the eyes sewn shut with thick strands of metal, the remaining features barely enough to make the person recognizable.

But recognize it, the man did.

"Raven," he husked. A lone gunman. As if hearing her voice spoken from the parched throat, the apparition turned its face towards him.

"All shall kneel before the Brotherhood," it croaked, its voice a hoarse whisper in the man's ears, the warm, fetid breath caressing his shrinking skin. Then, with the shriek of wild discharge, massive cables of psyken uncoiled from her body to rip their way through the clustered ranks of soldiery beneath her, sending pieces flying wildly in every direction.

As if unable to see or hear the threat mere metres above their heads, the soldiers marched grimly on, not wavering from their course even though parts of their comrades sleeted by their heads, a grisly hail of pieces that sluiced blood and fluid over them without regard. As they marched on, the man could see other glowing eggs of blue light moving over the armies to lash out with their lightning of psyken, destroying at a thought.

Naming each as his eyes fell on them, the man felt his heart break with each name: Seiji, Brillman, Sonja, Katengaur, Coyote, Athena, Tanaka, Orinoko, Kristophe, Jaguar ... On and on they went, until he had named them all. Every last lone gunman, now warring for the Brotherhood. A single tear, hot as lava, oozed from the man's seared eyes to slowly trickle down his parched cheek.