The Dark Edge Chronicles - Hardwire

Quaydrim

As soon as the robed Brin was gone, Mordecai slowly closed his fingers over the crystals, clenching his fist hard enough to drive their hard edges into his palm with almost painful force.

"Well, ain't this just fucked!" he bit out tightly, his thoughts whirling tautly. 'It's not bad enough that I get my consciousness ripped out of my body and pulled to some lost probability so far off the time stream that no-one has a clue where the divergence happened! But I have absolutely no fucking clue what the hell I'm supposed to do here! At least with Hollis and the station, I kinda knew what was going on, even if I was a bit stunned when I first got there. And I managed to get something out of it in the form of the A.I. download, which gave us the tech to fight the Brotherhood face to face. What am I supposed to get out of this?? Another fucking hole in my belly?'

A ripple of frustration washed through him and, silently snarling, he pried his fingers open to stare once more at the crystals. Then, moving smoothly, he turned to hurl them against the tent wall, meaning only to vent his frustration.

But, as the crystals left his hand, Mordecai was nearly staggered as a wave of psionic energy abruptly washed over him, sending a rush of heat across his skin as pyroken and psyken both without warning flared to life. Immediately he slammed personal shields into place, so tight it would take another lone gunman to even be able to see them in place, expecting a psionic attack from the outside.

The attack, however, never materialized; as the energies continued to rage all around him, Mordecai's eyes flew open in surprise when he found them staring at the crystals he had thrown at the tent wall. Instead of bouncing off the canvas, as he had expected, to fall to the floor, energy spent, they hung in mid air, a mere metre from where he stood.

Each crystal was surrounded by a nimbus of energy and light tinted the same as the hue that had colored the crystals, noticed when they had been sitting in Mordecai's hand. And each individual energy field was interacting with the others around it so that the cluster of five crystals hovered together, gently bobbing up in down in place as if being touched by some unseen wind. Yet they strayed no more than a couple finger widths from each other.

It was as if they were connected, in some mystical way.

"Connected," Mordecai softly said out loud, his mind filling with a strange storm of sensation that seemed to be centered on the floating crystals in front of him. As he concentrated on them, he could almost hear voices out of that storm, like the crystals themselves were talking to him. If he concentrated enough, he could just about make out what they were saying.

With a flare of energy, flows of psyken were pulling elements out of the very air: molecules and atoms of metal and organic substance, weaving them together into long, sinuous structure. The pattern for the structure, much to Mordecai's amazement, was being pulled directly from Caiphus' brain, as if his neurons themselves contained some sort of genetic code for its construction. What had Father Brin said? All he had to do was listen to the god fire and it would tell him what to do? Was this the god fire talking to him?

And then it was done, revealed as a strange looking belt, neither metallic nor organic, but a blend of the two. Mordecai swallowed heavily as he reached out to pluck it from the air, the substance of the belt still warm from the forces that had assembled it. Forces that weren't yet close to being done.

Even as he took the belt from where it had hung in mid air, another object was being formed in front of him, this one quickly taking the shape of a heavy arm guard of some sort, almost like a bracelet. As the dancing flows of psionic energy worked, Mordecai stared down at the belt he now held in his hand.