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Contents:
Mind Breaker
A Mile of Ice
Mind Breaker
The ground shuddered beneath my boots. Not a gentle rumble, but a violent, teeth-rattling heave that threatened to throw me off balance. Fortuna was tearing itself apart, the planet’s crust fracturing under the weight of illegal deep-core experiments.
"Seismic instability at eighty-two percent, Ellery," ILEM’s voice came through my earpiece. The calm tone from the ship was out of place in the situation I was in, but I was glad for it.
"Define eighty-two percent," I said, tapping the side of my helmet to clear a layer of falling ash from my visor.
"The tectonic plates are currently undergoing catastrophic subduction. You have approximately nine minutes before the ground beneath the Swift ceases to exist."
I adjusted the grip on my pistol.
"I won't be long."
"I will hold our position and keep you updated on the grounds integrity."
I killed the comms link and focused on the path ahead. The sky above was the colour of burnt orange, choked with thick clouds of pulverised rock. Lightning arced through the dust storms illuminating the jagged, broken landscape. Brandon Filnoir had chosen his hiding spot well. Nobody in their right mind came to Fortuna any more. Not since the mining corporations abandoned it fifty years ago.
But Filnoir wasn’t mining for ore. He was testing deep-core sonic resonators, cracking the planet like an egg just to see if his new tech worked. It worked. And lives and hundreds of millions of credits were on the line if I didn't drag his reckless hide back to the Library to answer for it.
Another tremor hit. A fissure ripped open ten yards to my left spewing a geyser of superheated steam into the toxic air. I kept moving, my mag-boots locking onto the rusted iron grating that led toward the primary processing facility.
The building was a hulking mass of reinforced steel and shadowed alcoves, half-swallowed by the shifting earth. The air filters on my body suit whined as they fought to scrub the toxicity from the atmosphere. I didn't have time for a stealthy approach. Nine minutes wasn't a window for creeping around in.
I stopped at the main entrance. The door was heavy, blast-proof iron, sealed shut. I closed my eyes and let the physical world fade. It was a familiar transition. A slipping away from my own body and into the ether.
I swept the interior of the facility. Three minds. They burned bright in the psychic gloom, radiating a mix of synthetic adrenaline and raw, unfiltered panic. They knew the planet was dying. They were just waiting for their ride.
I brushed against the edges of their subconscious. No discipline. No psychic shielding. Just hired muscle. I could feel their twitchy trigger fingers. The heavy weight of their pulse rifles. Their singular focus on the door I was currently standing behind.
I snapped back to my own body. Setting my weapon to maximum stun I took a step back and waited for what felt like an eternity until…
“The nano-bots have completed their task,” said ILEM.
Without replying I charged at the door and, in its weakened state, it gave way and swung inward with a metallic crash.
Inside emergency lighting bathed the cavernous room in a sickly red glow. The three mercenaries were fanned out across the loading bay, using overturned cargo crates for cover. Their laser rifles were already up, tracking me through the gloom. They wore unmarked tactical gear with heavy plating that were scored with fresh burns. Filnoir paid well, but he didn't buy loyalty. He bought desperation.
"Brandon Filnoir," I said, stepping through the threshold. I kept my hands loose, my pistol angled down. "Where is he?"
The merc in the centre, the largest of the three sporting a jagged scar across his chin, stepped out from behind his crate. He kept his rifle levelled at my chest.
"Facility is locked down," the scarred man said. His voice was entirely steady, masking the terror I’d just felt in his head. "Turn around and walk back to your ship, hunter."
"Your employer has a bounty on his head," I said, taking another slow step forward. "Sabotage. Reckless endangerment. I'm taking him in. You can either point me to his lab or you can go down with this rock. Your call."
The merc on the left laughed. It was a dry, nervous sound.
"You're not taking anyone anywhere."
"Where is he?" I asked again.
The scarred man spat on the grating.
"Dead. Just like you."
He didn't hesitate. But neither did I. I didn't need to wait for his finger to pull the trigger. I was already in his subconscious. I felt the impulse form in his mind a half-second before his brain sent the signal to his hand.
I dropped low just as the red bolt of light seared the air where my head had been. The heat of it blistered the air above me. I didn't bother returning fire yet. I lunged forward, closing the distance before his conscious mind could process that he’d missed. He tried to angle the heavy rifle down, but I was already under the barrel. I swept my right leg out in a vicious arc, catching him hard behind the knees.
The joint buckled. He hit the metal grating with a heavy, breathless thud, his rifle clattering away into the shadows. The other two shouted, their weapons swinging toward me.
I closed my eyes.
The one on the right was firing high. The one on the left was stepping back to find an angle. I rolled over the scarred man’s chest, letting the laser bolt from the right scorch the floor panels where I’d just been kneeling. Coming up on one knee I snapped my arm out. I didn't even look. I just aimed where the mind on the left told me it was going to be.
I pulled the trigger. The blue ring of stun-energy illuminated the room. The merc on the left seized up, his muscles locking instantly, and crashed backward into a stack of empty barrels.
One left.
I pushed into the remaining standing merc's mind. Fear spiked into sheer panic. I planted a simple overwhelming suggestion directly into his visual cortex. I’m right behind you. The merc spun around wildly, firing a blind burst of laser fire into the empty air behind him. It gave me the two seconds I needed. I rose, aimed and fired.
The second blue flash caught him square in the chest. He dropped like a stone. Silence fell over the loading bay, broken only by the distant, muffled groans of Fortuna tearing itself apart.
"Ellery," ILEM’s voice chimed. "Six minutes."
"Understood" I replied.
I looked down at the scarred man. He was groggy, struggling to push himself up off the grating. I kicked his arm out from under him and slammed my knee into his chest, pinning him flat. He gasped, his eyes wide and unfocused as he stared up at me.
"You're out of time," I said softly, grabbing him by the collar of his tactical vest. I pulled him up until his face was inches from mine. "And I am out of patience."
He gritted his teeth trying to turn his head away.
"Go to hell."
I didn't wait for him to say anything else. Words were useless now anyway. People lie. They obfuscate. They try to bargain. But the subconscious never lies.
I locked my gaze onto his widened, defiant eyes and let the physical world fade away once more, ignoring the tremors shaking the facility. I threw my mind forward and plunged straight into his. It was a violent transition. The mercenary’s subconscious didn't welcome me. It reacted like a body fighting a virus. It was a war zone of spiked adrenaline, synthetic combat stims and base survival instincts. I didn’t tiptoe. I didn’t have the luxury of finesse. I tore through the outer layers of his consciousness.
He fought back. A psychic manifestation of a snarling beast, his raw fight-or-flight response, lunged at me in the mental ether. It was a crude defence mechanism, common in hired guns who spent too much time on the rim worlds. I sidestepped the construct, throwing a mental block that shattered the beast into a million fragmented, useless memories. Bar fights. Neon lights. The smell of cheap engine grease.
I pushed past the static, driving deep into his short-term memory centres. I ignored the roaring panic that Fortuna was dying. I needed Filnoir.
There. A flash of recognition. I grabbed the memory and dragged it to the surface, forcing my consciousness into the mercenary's past perspective. The air in the memory was cool and sterile, a stark contrast to the hell of Fortuna.
A laboratory. Gleaming chrome, polished glass and the low hum of high-end quantum processors. Brandon Filnoir stood behind a raised console handing over a heavy, encrypted credit chip.
"Keep them off my back for two days," Filnoir's voice echoed in the memory dripping with arrogant condescension. "Then the planet cracks and you get double. Assuming you make it off the rock."
I looked past Filnoir's smug face. On the wall behind him, etched in frosted glass, was a logo. Two interlocking circles bisected by a jagged line. Hamon.
I shifted the memory's focus, forcing the mercenary's eyes to look out the floor-to-ceiling window behind the desk. There it was. The unmistakable sprawling skyline of Earth's District Four. Rain lashed against the glass. The neon glow of the lower levels bled into the perpetual gray clouds.
He went home.
I snapped back to my own body. The physical world crashed over me. The deafening shriek of tearing metal, the suffocating heat of the loading bay all came back in to focus. The scarred man lay beneath my knee. His eyes were rolled back and a line of saliva had escaped the corner of his mouth. He was catatonic. He’d live, assuming he didn't burn to death in the next five minutes, but his brain would be ringing like a cracked bell for a week.
"Three minutes, Ellery," ILEM said. The ship's voice buzzed with static interference. "Magnetic anomalies are severely disrupting my systems."
"I'm done," I said.
I shoved off the mercenary and sprinted for the door. The floor heaved, a violent upward thrust that threw me sideways. I slammed into a stack of heavy cargo crates, my shoulder taking the brunt of the impact. The metal shrieked as the crates toppled, crashing onto the spot where I had just been standing.
I scrambled to my feet ignoring the sharp flare of pain in my collarbone.
"Warning," ILEM chimed. "Structural integrity of your current location is failing."
I vaulted over a fallen support beam and burst out of the facility back into the storm outside. Fortuna was in its death throes. The sky was entirely black now, lit only by the jagged arcs of atmospheric lightning and the angry, glowing orange of exposed magma. A massive fissure had opened between me and the Swift, tearing through the landing pad like a jagged scar.
"ILEM, get closer!" I yelled over the roaring wind, sprinting toward the edge of the chasm.
"Negative. The thermal updraughts from the exposed mantle will destabilise my thrusters. You must find a way across the gap."
I eyed the fissure. It was twenty feet across and widening by the second. The heat radiating from it baked the underside of my suit, flashing temperature warnings across my HUD.
I didn't stop running. I hit the edge of the twisted metal grating, my mag-boots disengaging at the last possible microsecond, and launched myself into the air. For a split second I hung suspended over a river of liquid fire. The sheer thermal force pushed against me, tossing me like a leaf in a hurricane. I hit the far side hard, rolling over my injured shoulder to absorb the momentum. The rocky ground crumbled under my weight, sliding backward into the abyss. I dug my gloved fingers into the dirt, hauling myself up just as the ledge sheared off completely and vanished into the magma below.
"Your heart rate is elevated," ILEM noted.
Any other time I would have replied with a sarcastic remark.
The Swift’s boarding ramp dropped. I scrambled up slamming my fist onto the emergency seal override before I was even fully inside the airlock. The ramp retracted, snapping shut with a satisfying hiss of pressurised air that instantly cut off the apocalyptic roar outside.
"Get us out of here," I screamed.
"Engaging primary thrusters."
The ship jerked upward as I made my way to the front of the Swift and the pilots chair. On the main viewer, the landscape of Fortuna fell away. Entire mountain ranges were collapsing inward, swallowed by the expanding sea of fire. The crust was glowing with a web of fiery fractures, a dying world screaming its last.
The G-force pressed me deep into the chair as ILEM punched us through the upper atmosphere. The violent shaking smoothed out into a low hum as we hit the cold vacuum of space. I let out a long, ragged breath and unsealed my helmet, tossing it onto the console.
My head throbbed. Forcing my way into a resistant mind always left a hangover. A dull ache right behind the eyes that felt like a localised pressure drop.
"We are clear of the gravitational disturbance," ILEM reported. "Fortuna is currently undergoing total tectonic failure. Estimated time until planetary fragmentation is forty-two minutes."
I glanced at the rear monitors. The planet looked like a shattered marble, glowing from the inside out. Billions of credits in real estate, resources and history, wiped out for a corporate prototype test. Filnoir didn't care about the collateral damage. He only cared about the data.
"He went back to Earth," I said, rubbing my temples to ease the psychic ache.
"Earth? That contradicts standard evasion protocols for a high-value fugitive."
"Filnoir isn't running," I said, pulling a bottle of water from the replicator slot and downing half of it in one go. "He thinks he's untouchable. He's hiding in plain sight."
"Do you have a specific location?"
"Hamon Corporation. District Four."
A noticeable pause stretched over the comms.
"Hamon is a Tier-One corporate entity. Their security algorithms are notoriously aggressive. They employ registered TechPsychers for internal defence. Approaching them directly is highly ill-advised."
I was surprised when I heard the name TechPsychers. I hadn’t had much dealings with them, but they were making noise in the security circles I was familiar with.
"I have no choice. Filnoir is playing a dangerous game using Hamon's resources to fund his little planetary demolition projects."
"If he is operating under Hamon's protection the Library will face significant legal and political hurdles in extracting him."
"Then we don't involve the Library until he's in cuffs," I said. "I'm not letting a corporate lawyer bury this in red tape while Filnoir lines up his next target."
"Calculating optimal hyperspace route to Earth," ILEM said. "Estimated time of arrival, fourteen hours. Shall I initiate the jump?"
"Do it," I said. I leaned back in the chair and closed my eyes, the image of Filnoir's smug face burning in my mind.
The Swift launched itself into the void. Fourteen hours in hyperspace gave me just enough time to sleep off the psychic hangover, familiarise myself with Hamon’s building layout and trade my tactical armour for something that wouldn't immediately draw corporate fire.