Part 25 (1/2)
He turned a corner blindly and nearly ran into Anchali, the much smaller and older woman catching her balance between her cane and the wall as she pulled up short. ”Erik?” Anchali asked, taking in the fury on his face. Her attention jumped from him to the psion who followed obediently at his heels.
”Anchali,” Erik said, hands clenching and unclenching near his thighs. ”I'm sorry. If you'll excuse me?”
She caught him by the arm before he could walk past, her wrinkled face tilting up to look at him. ”No, I will not. What is going on, Erik?”
He didn't turn to look at Ciari, but he could sense her presence. Erik was struck, rather viscerally, by how useless the layers of security that surrounded the Peace Palace were in the face of losing the upper hand. The military wouldn't be enough against Strykers who might have slipped their leash.
”I'm heading for the command information center.” He was so careful to keep the fear out of his voice, to look only at Anchali. ”Come with me.”
Anchali didn't like what she saw in his face, but she wasn't going to leave him. She followed him to the center of the Peace Palace and the lift that would take them below to the barricaded and burrowed heart of the world's military.
Once there in those steel corridors, Erik headed for the area that handled communications with the Strykers Syndicate, to the officers whose sole job was to monitor and control the psions through technology. The Strykers Syndicate in Toronto was saturated with spyware and monitoring equipment, as well as formal programs for government communications. Through the world's security grid, the military could monitor every single Stryker baseline and their location through the neurotrackers in their brains.
”Show me j.a.pan,” Erik ordered as he strode into the operations hub.
Soldiers rushed to obey. Despite the world's fracturing, it was nice to know that military discipline was still intact. The vidscreens that circled the walls and terminals soon showcased the pulsing dots of nearly a hundred Strykers scattered across the map of the only inhabited island of j.a.pan. The unique neural pattern of a psion's brain was fed through nerves into bioware, which then translated the information into a signal. The output of that signal was fed into the security grid by the neurotrackers. It was those signals that cut across the screens, solid placement of psion baselines pinpointing locations through satellite connections and bioscans in the security grid.
”Bring up the locations of all Strykers on a world map,” Erik said, voice carrying through the buzz of conversation. ”Priority given to my order.”
His order was executed immediately, the data scrolling across the main command screen.
”Erik,” Anchali said in a low voice, ”what are you doing?”
”Laying to rest a problem.”
It took five minutes to bring up and verify all Stryker positions across the globe, the government's security grid showing up in tiny patches across too-empty continents.
”Positions confirmed,” a woman said.
Erik stepped to the nearest terminal, hand hovering over the controls. He turned, just enough that he could see Ciari and the blank expression on her face, but he couldn't find any emotion in her eyes.
”Will you beg now?” he asked, biting out the words. Her silence was answer enough, and Erik pressed his hand down against the sensor. ”Initiate full termination sequence.”
The soldiers overseeing the security grid obeyed instantly, activating the kill switch in every neurotracker the system was linked to. Anchali watched the vidscreens and the data while Erik refused to look away from Ciari.
”You're wiping them all out,” Anchali said, her gaze sweeping across the storm of red that ripped across the map. Solid confirmation of roughly twelve hundred lives snuffed out in an instant.
Only the Stryker with them was still breathing and the signals on the screen were still showing up as active.
Erik staggered against the terminal, legs gone suddenly weak. He pressed his hand against the sensor a second, third, fourth time, but the results didn't change.
Ciari still lived.
”You-,” Erik choked out.
Anchali heard fear in his voice for the first time in her life. She turned to see what could cause the president of the World Court to sound like that.
Erik knew that Ciari was only an empath. He had preferred dealing with that kind of psion over one who could read his thoughts. He had never felt that he constantly needed his hand on the kill switch when facing down an empath over contract issues and Stryker transgressions through the years. It struck him suddenly that he only knew the names of maybe a dozen psions in the entire Strykers Syndicate. The rest had always been nameless numbers on the company's bottom line.
They were never people to him. Never human. Erik had trusted blindly in the chains that science had built to contain the disease psions lived with, but technology could always be subverted. Diseases could evolve.
”We were informed of the World Court's decision regarding Strykers and the launch,” Ciari said into the sudden silence. ”We couldn't fight the orders when you told us to protect you.”
The quads scattered throughout the room sensed the threat and moved, aiming their weapons at the enemy. They put themselves between the government and the lone woman who was still perfectly cognizant and alive in the face of people who had only ever used her kind.
Erik stared past the quads at her, voice coming out ragged and harsh. ”And now?”
”We won't fight you.” Ciari smiled slightly, the expression eerie and wrong on her face. ”And we won't beg anymore.”
”We own you,” Anchali snapped out, wrinkled face ashen from shock.
Ciari pressed her fingers against a small, circular bruise that stood out on the side of her throat, the only evidence of Lucas's deceit, even if the humans didn't know it. ”We own ourselves now.”
”Ciari,” Erik said. He thought of the eleven years he'd ordered her to live by his rules and all the rest before that when she'd fought in the hardscrabble streets of the world on orders from the government. Loyalty wasn't found in slavery.
”Stay on Earth, Erik,” Ciari said. ”If you stay, we can show you a different way.”
”Go to h.e.l.l.”
The quads opened fire, but it was too late. Ciari was gone, teleported out to who knew where by some other newly freed Stryker, taking with her Erik's faith in the way the world worked.
THIRTY-THREE.
SEPTEMBER 2379.
THE SLUMS OF THE ANGELS, USA.
Keiko teleported herself, Jason, and Quinton into a safe house buried in the Slums of the Angels. The broken mess of buildings and roads that surrounded the city towers of Los Angeles were where most of the population resided. She stumbled when her feet connected with the ground, and only Quinton's firm grip stopped her from checking out the floor of the arrival area with her face.
”You all right?” Quinton asked.
Keiko straightened up. She swiped at her nose and the faint hint of blood that leaked from it. ”Yeah, I'm good.”
”I could have pulled this round,” Jason said.
”You teleported the last time, and you spent more time in j.a.pan s.h.i.+elding than I did. It was my turn anyway.”
They'd been teleporting across continents and oceans during the last sixteen hours without rest. That many teleports, across increasingly longer distances, mixed with the arguments and fights that inevitably broke out with every group of Strykers they met, had exhausted them. Quinton looked marginally better. After the first twelve times, he'd been the one to submit to telepathic verification by other Strykers to confirm the truth of their orders, sparing Keiko and Jason from having someone else mucking around in their minds.
Keiko took a moment to stretch her arms over her head, trying to ease the knotted tension in her body. ”At least we've reached North America again. We're almost finished.”
They knew they were working under a time limit and had hit the ground running back in Toronto before moving on to Buffalo. They kept going east, teleporting across the Atlantic Ocean to arrive in London and begin the hard task of giving Strykers the virus beneath the heavy presence of the government's security grid.