The Dark Edge Chronicles - Hardwire

Chapter 47: Last Stand

Summoning her waning strength, Jeriko grimaced as she looked over at a silent Mordecai, head bent as he struggled beneath the weight of the probability node's physical shift around them, warping Reality itself. While both she and Raven could feel the pain and pressure of the node's final shift, Mordecai's gift would enable him to feel it so strongly that he was nearly incapacitated by it.

It was as she gazed at the man in black, thoughts racing, that Jeriko felt the twist in the magnetic fields in and around the city, signaling a massive teleportation through the disruption field they had erected in an attempt to isolate the beleaguered Normal city. Pushing aside her thoughts with grim determination, she looked up at the monitors, eyes sharp as she searched for evidence of the teleportation. At the same time she reached out to take Raven by the arm.

"Did you feel that?" she rasped softly as Raven's head came up with a jerk. "A massive flux in the magnetic fields surrounding the city. Our disruption field has been penetrated!"

"A teleportation?" Raven husked as she too pushed aside the pain and turmoil she was feeling from the node's shift to stare hard at the monitors.

"What else could it be?" Jeriko frowned as she could find nothing on the monitors, which showed the grounds and the center itself, currently dark, the gloom only sporadically being lit by flashes of plasma fire as Lash and Alpha Team continued to successfully take out the trigger team.

"That could only mean that McMaster has successfully eliminated the last of the mole assassins in the building and has saved the world leaders," Raven pointed out. "And that the Brotherhood is falling back on some backup plan to make sure the place gets leveled anyway."

"Knowing their level of resolve, that makes sense." The blonde lone gunman nodded. "But where are they? I mean, by the feel of that flux there should be hundreds of psionics down there, advancing on the conference center. But we're picking up nothing!"

"Could they have developed some sort of cloaking technique to hide from visual scanning to cover their entry?" Raven leaned close to the monitors, her own eyes finding absolutely nothing new to see.

"I don't think the Brotherhood's that advanced," Jeriko began. "I mean, the lone gunmen have barely ..."

It was the sight of something moving on the monitors watching the far edges of the target area that caused Jeriko's voice to trail off as she concentrated on what the monitors had picked up. It didn't take her long to identify what was moving out there.

"Ho boy," she husked softly as she watched hundreds of black trench coated psionics stream across the screen, heading straight for the convention center. "That is a helluva lot of psionics!" To guess that such a number had teleported into the city and to actually see them was very, very different, as Jeriko discovered, much to her dismay!

"Destroyer cadres?" Agony asked as she watched the dark wave advance on the convention center through her night vision binoculars. Martin nodded as he replaced the holo-communicator into his suit jacket, giving the expensive coat a tug to straighten it before joining Agony at the window to watch the cadres advance.

"At least four of them, authorized to first level the convention center and kill everybody inside. Then they will bring down the city, ravaging this worthless pile of concrete and steel until it's nothing more than a heap of smoldering rubble. That should send a sufficient signal to the world that the Brotherhood is prepared to do whatever it takes to become rulers and masters of this planet!"

With a thin smile playing at the corners of his mouth, Martin folded his arms across his chest.

"Just step back and enjoy the show, Agony. It should be quite spectacular!"