Spartan Resistance (6 page)

A big enough laser canon would do something like that, but as the DRS was a free zone, it meant that one of the residents had control of the canon. That was not a cheerful thought.

Kieran cleared his mind of questions and felt ahead mentally. They were there, behind the closed doors of the office block. Someone had covered the broken windows with old bed sheets, but the glass inside what had once been chrome doors was gone. The chrome had rusted over and was dull and lifeless.

Whoever waited ahead of him was masking their mental signatures. They didn’t know that he could detect them by the mask itself. They stood like negative dark space on a mental landscape that, if he chose to extend his sensitivity far enough, could include every creature in the free zone. Thanks to Pritti, his mental abilities had been trained and focused with laser precision. He knew there was more for him to discover, too.

The thought was accompanied by a whisper of a presence. Far back in his mind he heard a soft giggle. The mental sound carried Pritti’s essence. What was left of her sometimes expressed itself this way. He felt her approval. Then the spirit, if it was a spirit, was gone.

Kieran pushed his hands deeper into his pockets and hunched his shoulders inside the coat, stretching and warming the muscles.

Then he straight-armed the right hand side of the door, pushing it open. They knew he was here. He had not masked his presence, even though he could have if he had thought it prudent. They knew, he knew. Coyness was useless.

He stepped inside and looked around what had once been an elegant foyer with black, shiny tiles and lots of chrome and glass. It was very Art Deco, or even Nuevo Art Deco, but elegance had fled long ago. Garbage was strewn across the floor, along with broken glass and dust. The black tiles were scratched and some of them were shattered. They were no longer shiny. The building had been built recently enough to have drop shafts instead of elevators, but they stood open-mouthed, black and lifeless.

The sheets over the windows dimmed the light inside, making it an enclosed and private space. Someone had tried living here once, but had moved on. It was probably the lack of protection from the elements. The foyer would keep rain off, but it would be a cold place in the middle of winter. On the far side, close by the shattered windows, were the remains of a fire, the ashes grey and white, which meant more than just wood had been burnt.

Kieran quartered the area with his gaze and settled on the three people gathered in the deep corner created by the drop shafts, where there was no window. They were the same three people he remembered from the barracks. This was the three who had had walked through a dormitory full of Universal Wardens and laid every single one of them out cold…except for him.

The woman and the older man were the mouthpieces. So Kieran looked at the younger man, who had long black hair and a full beard. “So, you need my help.”

The man considered him. “You are much more powerful, more focused, than when we last met. Someone has trained you.”

“Agreed. Get to the point. I didn’t come all this way just to stand around in this heat and gossip.”

“You can remove your coat if you wish,” the woman said. “You will have no need for physical weapons, with us.”

“But I might need mental weapons?” Kieran grinned. “You aren’t the only predators in the area. Again, let’s get to the point.”

The younger man moved forward so that he was in front of the other two. No mouthpieces today, then. “We find ourselves in a difficult position.”

“That explains the waffling,” Kieran said gruffly.

“Gabriel Miyamoto Terranova. This name is known to you.”

Kieran suppressed his reaction with effort. The hairs on the back of his neck lifted and cold fingers trickled down his spine. “The whole world knows who he is. He likes to splash his face across the nets on a regular basis.”

“But not recently,” the man added.

Kieran dipped into his mind, sliding through the barrier he had erected. He scanned quickly, too impatient to let him get around to his point. Kieran straightened, surprised. “That’s where he’s getting them from,” he said slowly. “He’s stealing them, any way he can. He’s stealing your own people, too.”

While he had been scanning, Kieran had caught the man’s name and identity. Jeremiah was the name he was currently using, although he had others.

Jeremiah developed a sour expression. “It’s not polite to scan a mind when barriers are raised.”

“You’re just miffed because I can do it,” Kieran told him. “It saves time. So you’ve come to see me, to see what I can do about your little dilemma.”

The older man and the woman—Benton and Alice, by name—had been studying him with the sort of intense looks that told him they were trying to scan him. So much for being polite.

Benton, the grey hair, said distantly, “There are limits to your abilities, then. You have not seen the full picture.”

“He knows something about this,” Alice added, just as softly.

Jeremiah didn’t look at them. His gaze remained on Kieran. “Then we were right to reach out to you. Tell us what you know about this matter.”

Kieran squashed the impulse to recall the image he had snatched from Rhydder’s mind just after they had retrieved Baby Jack from Gabriel’s lair. It had been a glimpse of the room where Adán and Rhydder had jumped to. Instead, Kieran threw up a black curtain, smothering the image forming in his mind. Instead he considered the cold reaches of space. The silence and the whirling, infinite stars….

Alice gave a little hiss of frustration and Kieran grinned. “No, you don’t get to scoop whatever you want from me,” he told her. “You get to deal with me on a
quid pro quo
basis and nothing else. So talk.”

Jeremiah sighed. “Gabriel has been recruiting psi-filers for over a year, since before that incident where you and your agency people took back the child.”

“We know,” Kieran said complacently. “And now I know he’s scooping up your own people at the same time.”

“We are
your
people,” Alice said angrily. “You can ignore us for as long as your agency protects you, but you cannot deny that you are one of us.”

“That is totally irrelevant right now,” Kieran said. He looked at Jeremiah, who seemed to be best at sticking to the point. “Go on.”

“Gabriel isn’t just recruiting,” Jeremiah said. “He will shanghai naturals, unnaturals and marginals…anyone with an ounce of psi talent, regardless of how they have come by it. Our own people have been disappearing as steadily as the psi.”

“He hasn’t tried to recruit you three?” Kieran asked.

Benton grimaced. “We can shield ourselves. We have stronger shields than many others.”

“Not strong enough,” Alice muttered, which brought another smile to his lips. He remembered her moving Universal Wardens about with her mind, tossing them against walls and throwing them in high parabolas across the big dormitory. She clearly didn’t like not being the most powerful one in the room.

Kieran dismissed her pouting. She would just have to suck it up, like everyone did sooner or later. Everyone had a natural enemy. There was always someone more powerful.

Instead, he returned to the subject at hand. “If you say that natural psi are—”

“Natural
psychics
,” Benton corrected, sounding offended.

“You say naturals and unnaturals are both disappearing. Okay, fine, I can accept that as self-evident.” He knew they would be right about this, for he himself had an ever growing and elaborate map in his mind of the locations of everyone he cared about, or cared to trace. It was a living map and changed second by second as the mental signatures he kept track of moved. Only if a vampire jumped into the past did he lose track of them and sometimes not even then, if the jump was not long.

If the natural psi—the natural
psychics
—said that psi were disappearing, then he could take their word for it. But…. “What makes you think that Gabriel is behind these disappearances?” he asked.

“We just know,” Jeremiah replied. “So do you.”

“Just because you say he is doesn’t mean I agree with you.”

“You could confirm it is Gabriel in a heartbeat.”

For the first time Kieran felt genuine surprise. “Wait. Wait. You
scanned
him? Gabriel?”

Alice’s lips pushed together and out into a little simper. Her smugness wafted from her in mental waves.

Kieran didn’t know if she was not bothering to shield now, or if he had her registered and could read everything, anyway. “
You
scanned him.”

Jeremiah spoke gravely. “He has collected a mass of psychics around him and their numbers continue to grow. He drives them, whipping them up into a frenzy. He’s igniting all their furious passions.”

“He’s building an army,” Benton added, his tone three steps beyond grave.

“Why would he want an army?” Kieran asked, keeping his tone curious and light, even though he knew the answer.
We’re building an army. Why wouldn’t he
? But there was still something wrong. Something missing from the equation.

“Let me show you,” Alice murmured, looking at him intently.

Kieran opened up his mental shield enough for her to step just beyond it and no farther. “Show me.”

What she delivered was a comprehensive sense package. Snippets stolen from Gabriel and compiled to show an uneasy whole. It was like scanning Gabriel directly and it was pure thought/feelings, more chaotic than any human or psi that Kieran had ever scanned.

Gabriel was dying. He had just turned twenty-eight and he knew his time was drawing near. He could feel the approach of his mortality and it drove his every move, his every thought. He couldn’t stand a day going by without progress toward his goal. A day without success was a wasted day and he didn’t have many of them left.

Kieran shook his head. “He’s fooling you.”

Alice’s face flushed red. Anger tightened her jaw. “I
scanned
him. Are you suggesting he lied in his own thoughts?”

“He lied
to you
. He knew you were scanning him. He let you do it.”

“How can you possibly know that?” Fury heated her words.

Kieran threw the memory/image at all three of them together. He had blocked it earlier, but this changed things. He recalled the memory as Rhydder had given it to him—Rhydder’s recall and transfer had been much crisper and focused than Adán’s had been, which told Kieran the man had experience with sharing thoughts, even though he had no psychic abilities of his own. It was one more secret the Malsinne leader carried, that Kieran had added to his list of mysteries to unravel one day.

Kieran focused on providing the thought/image as clearly as possible so that these three would have no trouble seeing it. He saw/felt in his own mind the chair he was sitting on. The chair in the middle of the room, surrounded by
them
. At his feet and spreading to the far edges of the room, circling around him like a wheel, were the comatose bodies of hundreds of psi. Each psi touched another. That psi touched the next and so on, building an interconnected web that centered upon him. Sitting there, he could feel the pleasure of accomplishment. The growing—

Then the thought had cut off abruptly. Gabriel had become aware of the intrusion and muffled his thoughts.

Kieran passed this memory on to the three of them, complete and unedited, including the abrupt cut-off.

The trio simultaneously focused inwards, absorbing the thought.

“The way he shielded at the end….” Benton murmured, either completing a thought or starting one.

“He wasn’t happy being seen there,” Alice added.

Jeremiah focused upon Kieran once more. “This is disturbing.”

Kieran nodded. “If Gabriel is building an army, how do you explain that room full of unconscious psi?”

This time they didn’t protest about their own being called psi. They didn’t say anything at all for they had no answer.

* * * * *

Hammerside, Detroit-Rocktown Supercity, 2265 A.D.

Marley pulled the battered kitchen chair over to Gawaine’s desk and straddled it so that she was facing him, her arms resting on the back of the chair. “Hey.”

Gawaine looked up from the monitor. A flickering glance. Then back to the screen once more. His fingers didn’t stop sliding across the pad for a moment. The split on the corner of his mouth wasn’t nearly as swollen as it had been a few days ago and the scrapes on his elbows were healing nicely.

“You’ve been sitting at that desk for three days straight,” Marley pointed out.

“I’m working.”

“You don’t have any paid work right now.” She knew that because he had been at her side whenever she headed to the agency. Although he had abruptly declined for the last three days. The excuses he had given for not going to the agency with her had been reasonable. The hours she worked at the agency had put him into serious sleep deprivation and he was going to catch up. Plus, he needed to find paid work, something to top up their dwindling reserves.

Marley couldn’t argue with that last one. The agency was generous in providing absolutely everything they needed while they were there. Food, clothing, anything at all. It was supplied hot, fresh, clean and new, almost as soon as they asked for it. But it hadn’t occurred to anyone that they both lived in a cash-only community. Money was anonymous and untraceable, unlike barter.

Because Gawaine had used finding work as an excuse to avoid the Agency, Marley knew he didn’t have any. He would have been jubilant, if he had. He would have told her, too. “Gawaine,” she said, once more pulling his attention back to her.

He looked. Briefly.

She reached out and grabbed his wrist, halting his swiping. “You’re in the chute, Gawaine. You’re right on the edge of diving into the black hole. You haven’t slept. You haven’t eaten. You’re retreating.”

When Marley had moved into his apartment a few years ago, she had learned first-hand what it was like to watch someone disappear into their own mind. Gawaine had been used to living on his own. He was smart. Marley knew he was smarter than her and she was nobody’s fool. He was intelligent and he was drawn to high-level thinking. He would retreat from the physical world into his mind, where he would play with pure theory and concepts far beyond normal human reasoning. When that happened, when he slid into the hole, it might be days before he emerged.