The Dark Edge Chronicles - Hardwire

Chapter 28: New Allies

The world slid away in a multi-hued dance of motion, color and sound. Mordecai found himself tumbling wildly through a space that he couldn't recognize or sense. Then, with the same abruptness that the world had disappeared with the final hammering blow to his head, dealt by the impact with the pavement after colliding with the support column and dropping to the ground, he had sensation.

It was gravity. Blinking fiercely, the big man fought to clear his vision as light without warning spilled into his brain.

"Dr. Hollis?" a young man's worried voice said, penetrating through the fog that clung to Mordecai's senses with dogged persistence. "Are you alright?"

The final blink was enough to wipe away the last of the blur marring his vision and Mordecai found himself looking down at the obviously wiry body of a werewolf, a young one, perhaps fourteen or fifteen. Unfortunately for the big man's reeling brain, that was the end of what he was familiar with.

As he stared down at the handsome young man, gazing up into Mordecai's face with a clear expression of concern, he could see that he was dressed in what could only be described as a uniform, a snug fitting one piece overall of simple charcoal gray, with matching boots. It was closed tightly to the neck, the collar ending just below which could only be described as a metal dog collar, complete with metal spikes. But, in amongst the spikes were small electronic appliances, winking lights marking their direct positions. And a thick plastic cord had been attached to an eyelet on the collar's dorsal surface.

A cord he found leading to his gloved hand, where it was held in a tight grip. 'What the hell is this?' he wondered wildly as he jerked his eyes off the young werewolf. 'Where the hell am I??'

As his eyes swung up, Mordecai found himself staring out a massive bank of windows, ceiling to floor and curved slightly outward, their absolute transparency providing a spectacular view. A view he had previously only seen in news broadcasts.

"Holy shit," he rasped in a husky whisper, his eyes flying wide at what they saw.

It was the Earth, the blue and green, cloud-wrapped globe that could be seen only from high orbit. Like from a spacecraft, or a space station.

"Quite spectacular, isn't it, sir?" the young werewolf asked as he stepped to Mordecai's side to also look out the window. "No matter how many times I see this view, I never tire of it." His voice, although holding the characteristic harshness of a werewolf's, was relatively smooth and cultured. Obviously this one had been very well educated.

"You, there. The citizen with the lycanth slave," a hard voice in lightly accented English abruptly spoke with enough force that Mordecai spun around to face it.

He found himself staring into what could only be described as some sort of disembarkation area. It was saucer-shaped, with a high ceiling and carpeted floors in charcoal gray, the same color as the young man's overalls. It was at least twenty meters in diameter, with several rows of dark gray plastic chairs on either side of a centrally located kiosk done in matted metal, manned by a number of black uniformed individuals of both sexes. It too was circular and about five meters in diameter.

They seemed to be monitoring what appeared to be a bank of instruments and displays, the light from them dancing patterns in blue, red and green over their faces and uniformed chests. As Mordecai's eyes swept past them, he could see that the chamber's lighting came from both a strip of illumination that ran around the chamber's lower perimeter and several strips of luminescent material attached at regular intervals to the ceiling. Even with such little lightning material present, such a pervasive level of light was cast that no shadow existed in the chamber.