The Dark Edge Chronicles - Hardwire

Chapter 48: Attack of the Wolf Pack

Lash jerked around to face the source of the low voice, teeth bared in a grimace of determination as he brought his Shiva up to bear. Only to let it drop to his side as a wave of relief washed through him at what greeted his eyes. With a grin touching his lips, Lash watched a black sheathed Jeriko step from an inverted bore portal, literally shimmering with inverted psionic energy.

"Nice of you to join us, lone gunman," he rasped hoarsely. "We were starting to worry that our allies had forgotten us!"

Dropping on the ground beside the crouching vampire, Jeriko glanced over her shoulder to watch her bore portal disappear before she looked over at the big Qos Viran commander, a grin of her own dancing on her lips.

"Sorry 'bout that," she husked, a bit out of breath. "We were slightly delayed by a Brotherhood dampening field that was preventing our translocation in. But we're ready to rock now!"

" 'We'?" Lash repeated quizzically, looking around them. "I don't see ..."

It was as the big vampire's night-sensitive eyes were sweeping across a rather black area back dropped by a grove of trees that he caught sight of something shifting within the darkness. Almost as if the darkness itself had somehow come alive, twisting and turning in a desperate attempt to free itself from the fabric of Reality which bound it.

With a snarl it stabbed out of the twisting darkness to almost lazily reach through space to brush against the nearest psionic, a blocky mover doing his best to overturn the chunk of bench that was protecting the last surviving members of Alpha Team. As the tendril of inverted psyken touched the mover's shields, they collapsed with a brilliant flash of bright light.

The implosion immediately staggered the powerful mover, who hadn't sensed the nearly invisible tendril approach and touch him. Nor did he see with his stunned senses the second tendril appear out of the darkness. But he felt it stab him through the heart. With a pain filled groan, he tried to cudgel his brain into healing his torn heart. But he was already dead and, silently he tumbled to the ground.

"What the hell?" Ravage hissed as he lowered his shielding hand to stare at the fallen mover, the flash of light that had announced the collapse of his shields just now starting to fade. Only to find his hand flying again up to protect his eyes as the night exploded with the bright light of collapsing shields.

Lash grinned ferally as he watched the tendrils, at least a couple dozen in number, do their deadly work, ravaging the shields of the clustered Brotherhood psionics with multiple flashes of light. In the next heart beat the tendrils' mistresses appeared, lean and soaked in inverted psionic power as they stepped from the disturbances, which were shielded bore portals, sheathed in black and ready to do battle.

"Ah!" the Qos Viran commander said in satisfaction as his allies moved forward, several already gathering tight knots of inverted psyken in their hands.

"The Storm Wolves!"

The first wave of inverted shockwaves, plasma pulses, artificial lightning and psyken cables brutally tore into the stunned Brotherhood psionics before they could recover from the loss of their shields. Charred and shredded bodies were sent flying in every direction, the counterattack completely devastating. And then the Storm Wolves were amongst the survivors, dark shapes moving with a dark purpose as they engaged the Brotherhood's destroyer cadres in hand to hand combat.

Hands and feet sheathed in inverted psyken, Melanie snapped her body around in a deadly spinning heel kick to smash her left foot into the head of a squareish burner, his scarred face grim and foreboding beneath his sunglasses. The blow, multiplied several orders of magnitude by the psyken, did more than just rearrange that scarred face.