Gossamer's End - A Short Story by Shawn Jackson copyright 2015

Karson floated amongst cold clouds of white frost, his thoughts unfettered by time or space. Without an anchor to the here and now, they restlessly roamed the time ways, watching the birth and death of stars and civilizations with equal fervor. Then, with the abrupt violence of a lightning strike, the chill tranquility was disrupted by a bright flash of blue light.

- Specialist Karson Reid. - Giant bright blue letters read as they scrolled across the pale sky. - You are being activated. Reanimation sequence initiated. Full consciousness in five, four, three, two, one, ... -

The pain was sudden, rushing through him from a burning brand thrust into his arm to consume him whole, a storm of fiery sensation. It was enough to pull him from the cold peace of the cloud-filled sky even as it yanked his thoughts back into their prison within his skull. Then he was tumbling through a storm of light and prickling agony until, with a jerk and eyes flying wide, he was awake.

Karson gasped, the air rushing into his starved lungs feeling like fire to his chilled flesh. Then he was falling forward onto his hands and knees, shuddering as his muscles absorbed the various stimulants that were pumped into his body in an attempt to restore normal activity. As he struggled against the shivering in his muscles, the door to his cryo-pod, one of six in this sleep chamber, swung back closed behind him.

A soft chime interrupted his attempt to regain control over his unresponsive body.

"Specialist Karson Reid, you have been activated in preparation for deployment," a sexless voice said in a flat monotone.

Sucking in one more searing lungful of air, Karson scrambled unsteadily to his feet and twisted to face the wall even as a pair of glowing foot prints appeared on the floor half a metre from the wall's blank surface.

"Step to the designated location to be scanned," the voice instructed and Karson hastened to comply. Hesitation would send several thousand volts snarling through his body as he had the misfortune to discover one day when, feeling ill after coming out of hibernation he didn't immediately step to the foot prints.

As soon as his bare feet hit the glowing prints, the voice returned.

"Scanning has commenced," it announced and Karson felt a warm tingle wash through him. "Your health status is unchanged. You are cleared for deployment, specialist."

A small door in the center of the wall opened downward to become a platform. On it perched a three quarter torq of burnished metal with an egg-shaped piece attached to the apex.

Karson felt a muscle in his jaw twitch with tension, as it did every time he saw the neural inhibitor. Then he was reaching out to retrieve it from the platform, which retreated back into the wall once it was relieved of its burden.

Quickly he pulled the torq open enough to slip around his neck, positioning the egg-shaped piece against the base of his skull. As soon as it touched his skin, the egg pulsed with prickly energy before it adhered to him.

Instantly he felt his awakened thoughts' frenetic churning slow even as his senses dulled, the room appearing to darken as his vision dimmed.

"Inhibitor has been correctly placed and is functioning within operational parameters," the voice announced. Then another door was opening in the wall, this one the size of an actual entryway. Through it stepped a lean man in grey and black camouflage fatigues.

"Specialist Reid," he said with a nod of greeting, his voice low and rough.

"Handler Hendrix," Karson said hoarsely in reply, returning the nod.

Hendrix gave him a quick once over then handed him a heavy black duffel stuffed to near bursting.

"Suit up," the handler curtly directed as Karson mutely took the heavy bag. "The fleet arrived at the target coordinates about twenty minutes ago. The team you've been assigned to has already mustered on the transport deck. Drop in ten mikes."

Nodding in acknowledgement even as he put the bag down and began peeling off his cold, grey jumpsuit, Karson's thoughts spun wildly despite the inhibitor's presence in his mind. They always did just before battle, no matter how many he had been in, their chaotic swirl filling him with anxiety. For it was only in battle that he would see the part of himself that the handlers kept carefully locked away in between fights.

Then a sharp pain in his side pulled him out of his reverie.

"Stop dawdling, specialist," Hendrix said in that same low voice, devoid of any emotion. In his hand he held a prod, it's forked end glowing with a dull, red light. It was the source of the pain, delivered directly by pushing it into his flesh.

"Drop's in eight mikes. You delay the drop and make the team late to the DZ and you'll be on half rations for a month."

Spurred into greater speed by the prod and the threat, Karson donned his combat gear: fatigues, body armor, helmet and boots, faster than usual. Then Hendrix was taking him by the arm and dragging him out of the cryo-chamber and into the plain, dimly lit corridor beyond.

At the end of that corridor was a utility lift which traveled directly to the transport deck, some ten decks down. Hendrix quick marched Karson to it, nearly throwing the younger man in when the lift doors opened. The transition to the transport deck took less than a minute, tbe decent more a controlled fall than anything. Then Karson was being roughly pushed out.

"Five mikes to drop," Hendrix grated, his hand between Karson's shoulders propelling the young man forward.

In doing so, they went past one of the armored observation windows looking out into space, placed to observe transports leaving the ship. Catching motion and flashes of light out of the corner of his eye, it was reflex that made Karson turn his head to look. He almost staggered to a halt at what he saw.

Like leviathans of fire and metal, the dreadnoughts making up this element of the fleet hung against the diamond-kissed ebony of space, suspended in vacuum's cold and unrelenting sea. Just beneath them a cloud-wreathed globe slowly rotated like a sky in reverse seen through a fish-eye lense.

Then the scene's deceptive serenity was shattered as the dreadnoughts opened up with their primary guns, powerful mass drivers and plasma cannons that pounded crushing energy and mass through the atmosphere at targets unseen on the ground. A heart beat later a reply launched from surface batteries in the form of missiles and focused particle beam fire, laced through the clouds to strike several of the dreadnoughts, making their phased particle defense screens flare to brilliant life as they struggled to disperse the deadly energies and munitions.

The ship Karson on wasn't immune from the incoming fire. Even as the first wave slashed through the fleet, the deck under foot vibrated as several missiles struck, sending percussive pulses rippling outward from each impact. It was more than enough to push the young man back into motion without another shock from Hendrix's prod.

They quickly traversed the observation deck and descended onto the transport deck where several teams had gathered close to their transports even as a number, already in the air, were making their way towards the shimmer that protected the open door to space at the deck's far end. Several more teams stood in loose clusters at the deck's near end, apparently uninterested in the transports. It was to this second group that Hendrix steered an unresisting Karson.

"Ah, Hendrix!" one rather hard and scarred individual in the nearest team, sporting the slashes of a noncommissioned officer on his sleeve, greeted them. "I was starting to think your sparky didn't want to join the fun." Then he was falling silent as an officer, marked by gold on his collar, began to speak, addressing the group as a whole.

"To recap, the shock troops have been dropped with minimal loss and have secured our LZ. You lot are the second wave, tasked with securing the batteries around the mining complex and the ag cluster. Subdue the defense, preserve the infrastructure and get us those damn resources." The officer swung hard eyes over the assembled company. "I don't need to tell you how vital they are for the Combine's survival. This was Our resource colony before the Tellies showed up. Let's take it back."

Then he was looking at Karson and his handler.

"Your sparky thawed out, sergeant?" he asked, his questioning expression chiseled from a face that looked like craggy granite.

"Yes, sir," Hendrix said with a nod. "Specialist Reid is fit and ready for combat."

"Outstanding." The officer turned to the knot of armored and heavily armed soldiers directly in front of him. "Delta Squad, you are on the clock. Specialist Reid will be your sparky for this engagement. Do try to bring him back as he is official government equipment and I might take it into my head to be annoyed if you get him broken." He looked back over at Karson and Hendrix.

"Unleash on my mark and initiate transport protocol, sergeant."

Karson felt Hendrix's hand take hold of the egg sitting against his skull.

"We are standing by to unleash, sir," Hendrix reported. The officer nodded.

"Delta Squad, stand by for transport. Ready," and the soldiers in the unit activated their armor, equipment and weapons.

"Steady," that was the signal for them to bring their weapons up and prepared to fire.

"Go!"

Hendrix gave the egg a hard twist, disengaging it from Karson's skull. At the same time he pressed a knuckle into a specific spot on the young man's spine, triggering a posthypnotic command buried deep in Karson's mind as he pulled the torq off his neck. The young man gasped as he felt his brain fill with fire and light. Then, as an image appeared in his mind's eye, Karson was automatically willing that point in space to be the same one he and Delta Squad were in, feeling the fabric of space itself bend in response to his efforts.

Then, in a wink of light and a rush of air, the transport dock was gone, replaced by a chunk of hard, scorched earth and the wide open of a planet's outdoors.

"Transition complete," he heard a voice that wasn't quite his, say. Then in a second rush, this one of sensations and memory, everything that he was while not under neural inhibition returned and he straightened up to look out over the battle field with an abruptly veteran eye as his war time personality took hold.

"Here we go again," he muttered with a frown.

*

"You online, sparky?" a hard voice asked, capturing Karson's attention. Glancing over at the voice's owner, the same grizzled non-com that had greeted his arrival on the transport deck, he curtly nodded before returning his attention to their surroundings.

"Transport has put us in the exact center of the designated LZ, sarge," he said, instinctively extending his senses to sweep along their route. "We are seven klicks from the perimeter and fifteen klicks from the first of our primary targets, the mining facility. My telepathy is picking up nearly five hundred sentients in the facility, a mix of human minds and three separate alien species."

The non-com's face tightened at the terse report's conclusion even as hand signals were sending scouts ranging forward towards the perimeter.

"Any Tellies?" he asked and Karson quickly shook his head.

"Argorites primarily, with a couple squads of Geen and Krast, respectively."

"Argorites," the squad's corporal said with a grimace as he stepped close to listen to Karson's sit-rep. "Intel wouldn't confirm or deny their alliance with the Unity forces."

"Yeah, well, I'd say we got confirmation now," the sergeant grimly replied, giving Karson a nod. "Good scan, Reid." He then turned to the corporal and together the two non-coms began adjusting the battle plan to take into account what Karson's telepathy had uncovered.

For good reason; in an age where psionics had left the realm of science fiction and paranormality to become fact and the reality of modern warfare, Karson Reid was a psionic without peer. And where warfare had become a desperate fight for survival, every advantage on the battle field had to be identified and utilized to it's utmost, including using psionics. But it had only been that way for a relatively short time.

Earth-based Humanity had been shattered and scattered from long, grinding decades of war. Now the remainder desperately fought for survival, both against each other, and against a number of alien species that were trying to take what little they had left.

The last war had been against one such species, the Trelavahn, nicknamed Tellies. The handful of resource colonies Earth had managed to establish were destroyed in the first months of the conflict, millions dying to their horrible weapons of mass destruction. The next few months were spent eluding the enemy's fleets while trying to establish secondary supply sources to feed a starving Earth.

While the enemy didn't know where Earth was, they were safe, even if they were running out of resources. Only when a faction within the then unified government cut a backroom deal with the aliens did it all fall apart. For promises of power and governance, the Unity Party sold out the rest of the world by giving the aliens Earth's location.

A last ditch defense barely saved the planet, but the cost was terrible. The enemy's weapons slaughtered nearly half the world's population and fractured the crust, spilling dust and deadly radiation into the atmosphere. Half of those that survived the attack, died from the environment's collapse and radiation sickness. Many more found themselves, ... changing.

Karson was the product of careful selection and breeding of some of those mutated people, those that had begun to display psionic abilities like telepathy and telekinesis, in an attempt to weaponize those abilities. To a society that had completely militarized to survive, it wasn't eugenics. It was R&D in alternative weapon systems. If they could somehow make their people into better soldiers, they reasoned that it would increase everybody's chances of survival.

Each successive generation was re-exposed to radiation and various other gene therapies in an attempt to increase the mutation's skewing of the targeted genes. Until, after five generations of exhaustive development and rigorous breeding, Karson was born, one of a select few possessing a broad range of psionic abilities.

It should've been a triumph, for both the science that created them, and the society they would save. Instead, feared by a government who realized just how powerful they were, the psionics were strictly handled and regulated, slave soldiers kept in hibernation until needed on the battle field.

It was a lonely, marginalized existence, with long periods of time spent in the netherworld of their minds as they lied unconscious in their cryo-pods. But when they were revived and their neural inhibitors were removed in an act called 'unleashing', that world radically changed. Their minds came back to life, memory restored and personalities unrestricted, granting psionics full access to their abilities with only post-hypnotic conditioning keeping them from completely cutting loose.

With those abilities on-line, the psionics rapidly became a force to be reckoned with, one that started to turn the tide in the wars of survival Earth now fought. Not only did they turn the tide in the wars.

They began to win them.

Karson let his mind range ahead as the sergeant and the corporal continued their discussion, worn maps in their hands. They would have to move soon; even though the LZ was secure, the batteries at the mine and the ag complex were firing steadily into the sky, continuing their harassment of the ships in orbit. Sooner or later energy screens would fail and those ships would start taking damage. Not to mention, the longer they held at station, the greater the chance that the Unity forces would squeeze a distress signal through the interference and summon ships of their own, if they weren't already inbound. Then the high ground position of orbital superiority would be lost and the situation could rapidly devolve from that point.

Finally the non-coms were ready.

"Brief said you are one of our best, Reid," the sergeant began as he folded and stowed the map. "That you have a couple more abilities than most, can do a couple more things." He paused to look at the steady stream of fire lifting from the mine.

"Can you short jump the squad to the mine? Bring us close enough to see what's what without triggering their perimeter sensors?"

Karson frowned.

"If you're looking to sneak up on them, sarge, it's way too late for that," he pointed out. "They know we're on the ground."

"Yeah, I know. But if they think we're still here, in the LZ, and you put us on their doorstep, we could still catch them taking a piss."

A faint smile touched Karson's lips.

"That I can do." Then the slight smile vanished. "Scanning possible locations outside their perimeter." His telepathy swept out, slipping through the EMF eddies and currents between their current location and the mine. As it was with all psionic abilities, which used an enhanced sensitivity to, and capability to manipulate EM fields, telepathy was the ability to read the EMF fluctuations generated by neural activity in a brain. To read those fluctuations at a distance and correctly interpret them as intent, language, image or whatever, relied on skill, sensitivity and an ability to navigate the variances in field strength and activity in the EM fields between the telepath and their target.

Karson unleashed had all of that, and more. The sergeant was quite right: he Was more skilled and capable than any other psionic. Making a telehop like the one the sergeant was proposing was easily accomplished.

"I've located the optimal location to grant unanticipated access to the mine," he reported. "And I've cleared it of obstacles with a TK pulse. Standing by on your order to initiate jump."

The sergeant nodded even as the corporal waved their scouts back in.

"As soon as the last scout is within range, jump us in there, Reid," the sarge directed, bringing his pulse rifle up to the ready. Already tracking the bright blips that were the scouts in his mind's eye, Karson nodded. Just a few more metres closer, ...

Then he was willing the two points in space to become one and the charred field that was the LZ disappeared. In its place was an uneven opening in a cluster of jagged and weather-stained rock spurs. Visible through them were the beetling structures making up the mining complex. They had jumped in within easy striking range. Even better, the soldiers defending the complex didn't know they were there.

Seeing that, and hearing the silence, the sergeant nodded in satisfaction before flashing Karson a thumbs up of approval. Then curt hand signals were sending out their scouts to discover the sensor perimeter and shifting the squad into battle formation.

As they waited for the scouts to report back, Karson could hear heavy fighting in the distance, the staccato discharge of pulse rifles combining with the whine and thump of percussive grenades, and and crackle of defense screens to tell the tale. It was steady, a sign that some of their units had encountered entrenched positions and were working hard to dig them out. The observation was confirmed a few seconds later by the snarl of bunker busters being fired; shoulder-mounted rockets designed to blast through defense screens and hardened armor.

Hearing the sounds of combat made the soldiers standing close by thoughtful as they mentally judged how the battle was going by what they were hearing. Karson's telepathy, with its ability to see through the combatants' eyes and read their thoughts, gave him a much clearer picture.

The Combine forces were winning. Slow and grinding, but they were steadily capturing ground. At this rate, they stood a very good chance of taking the resource station by the end of the day. That is, if the Unity failed to reinforce the defenders.

Karson glanced at the sky but didn't bother to scan. No telepath fielded by any of the participants in this war had the power to reach into orbit. So there was no way to know whether the Unity had dispatched a fleet of their own to defend their assets here. A surface scan of the sergeant, which was all his conditioning would allow on an ally, yielded the fleet met medium resistance when they jumped into the system. That was surprising, considering how valuable resource colonies were. They were almost the Only reason the Combine was still fighting.was

If the Unity turncoats wanted to keep the colony, which was providing food and raw materials to their own war effort, they should've had a significant force stationed here to protect it. Not only from the Combine, but from any marauding aliens as well. So why hadn't they?

Unfortunately Karson could think of only one reason why, and it had to do with the alien troops currently part of the colony's defenses.

"You don't look happy about something, sparky," the corporal quietly said after noticing Karson's frown. "You scan something bad?"

"Not exactly," Katson replied, looking over at the corporal, who, like the sergeant, was a grizzled veteran of several campaigns. "More like I just realized something." Again he glanced skyward. "Have we heard from command since we jumped in?"

It was the corporal's turn to frown.

"Just status reports. Why?"

"I think they're about to get considerably busier."

"What?? What makes you think That?"

Karson gestured towards the mine and it's cloak of buildings.

"The presence of three alien races that we didn't have intel on." Karson's frown deepened. "I don't think they're here on their own!"

*

The sergeant, however, wasn't convinced by Karson's logic when they brought the matter to his attention a minute or two later.

"There's an Argorite fleet hiding somewhere in the system, just waiting for the opportunity to strike and wipe us out?" the sergeant repeated with a grimace of disbelief. Both Karson and the corporal nodded in confirmation.

"It makes sense, sarge," the corporal added. "Why else would there be Argorites here? Or the fleet defending the planet be comprised of outdated and undergunned corvettes? Unity swung a deal with them and, while we managed to hit them before the Argorite fleet could arrive, we won't be alone for long."

It was as the two non-coms quietly argued that Karson felt it. A twitch in the fabric of space and time. It was enough to turn him from the non-coms and stare out over the smoldering battle ground, frowning as he extended his psy-senses into the ever moving morass that was the time stream.

As a child, Karson had tested orders of magnitude above any of his cohort during training. Telepathy, telekinesis, pyrokinesis; every psionic ability that had been cataloged and studied, he had, and more powerfully than most of them combined. And none more so than his clairvoyance, the psionic skill that allowed him to not only sense the time stream in both directions, but to interpret its chaotic swirlings as well. With it he had seen the beginning of this war, and a thousand possible ways it could end.

Thankfully the handlers in the training creche where he was raised didn't see any value in clairvoyance and the extent of his talent was never explored. That didn't stop him from using it, however, most often to predict the course of a battle so he could figure out how best to survive it.

If a particular event in the time stream was strong enough, his clairvoyance would feel it twitch the fabric of reality, like it was tweaking current events to match the possible outcome. But usually twitches big enough for him to feel without looking for them were very rare.

So when This one gave the fabric of space a twist hard enough to capture his attention, he knew he needed to find out what it was about. Ironically it didn't take long; within seconds of feeling the twitch, Karson had just barely touched the time stream when he sensed the source of the disturbance moving directly towards them!

Frowning, he pulled back his clairvoyance and extended his telepathy instead. And he felt his frown deepen as his telepathy found a familiar mind sitting in the approaching disturbance.

It belonged to a fellow mutant that called himself Vapor, another one of Earth's new children that the Combine had determined would make a good soldier in their struggle for survival against the Unity. But that was where the similarity ended.

Vapor was no psionic. He was what the handlers called a Gaunt, a lean, fast, and powerful mutant with extraordinary survival capabilities. The Combine often used them as scouts and operatives deep behind enemy lines. They also operated solo, far from the Combine's own forces. Which was where Command preferred to keep them. For a Gaunt's abilities came with a price: a cannibalistic taste for human flesh. A daily meal of human tissue enabled the Gaunts to maintain their near superhuman speed and strength. Unfortunately for the Combine, Gaunts didn't much care who provided that meal, friend or foe and regardless of conditioning. Hence the Combine's practice of deploying them behind enemy lines so they could get those meals from the enemy while sowing fear and chaos.

So seeing this one here and now was not only unusual, it was dangerous.

"Vapor," he cautiously greeted the gaunt, now within easy speaking range.

"Karson," the gaunt replied with a nod and a friendly smile. The brief exchange was enough for the non-coms to come out of their discussion. Looking up, they both quickly adopted simultaneous looks of astonishment and dismay. Then they were snapping their rifles up to aim at the approaching mutant.

"Hold it right there, specialist," the sergeant tautly directed. "Gaunts aren't cleared to operate in this combat theater. Who are you and what are you doing here?"

"You can call me Vapor, sergeant," Vapor replied in a deceptively mild tone as he continued walking towards them. From his experience with gaunts, this one in particular, Karson could tell from the coiled tension rippling through the gaunt's body, he was anything But calm.

However, that made no sense. They were on the same side. And the gaunt didn't appear to be in a state of bloodlust, the strange emotional variation that drove them to kill and consume human flesh.

The non-coms noticed it, too. It was enough to keep their rifles aimed directly at him.

"I need an answer to the second part of that, gaunt," the sergeant growled, his hands tightening on his weapon as Vapor continued to advance. "You are not cleared to operate in this theater. Why are you in this location?"

This time it was a demand, not a question.

Vapor's smile broadened slightly.

"I would've thought it obvious by now, sergeant," he said, not slowing one wit. "In a word: rebellion."

"Firestorm protocol!" the sergeant barked. Immediately Karson dropped to his knees vomiting even as his head exploded with pain, blacking him out. But not before he heard Vapor laugh, a genuine thing filled with unabashed delight.

"That's the sparky kill command, you idiot!" he laughed. Then Karson was sinking into murky unconsciousness to the sounds of weapon fire and screams.

If he were truthful with himself, Karson didn't expect to wake up, his unconsciousness rendering him vulnerable to the gaunt's unnatural appetite. So when his eyes fluttered open to let in the sky, he was blatantly astonished.

"How, ..." he began to stammer.

"Are you still alive?" Vapor's voice interjected to finish for him. Karson's eyes twisted to find the gaunt squatting on his haunches close by, looking at him with a mild expression of relief. The look disappeared as soon as he found Karson's gaze on him.

"I'm sure you expected death, or worse." A grimace rippled across the gaunt's face for a brief moment. "Considering the hype that surrounds my kind, can't say that I blame you." His look abruptly became intent.

"But what those same propaganda sound bites Don't say is that we don't feed on our own kind."

Karson wiped cold vomit from his mouth with the back of a shaky hand and carefully sat up.

"I'm no gaunt," he quietly pointed out. Vapor's expression morphed into open acknowledgement.

"True. And I'm no sparky. But we're both mutant children of a dying Earth's last days. In my opinion, that makes us the same." He jerked a thumb back at several unmoving heaps lying haphazardly behind him. "Unlike our recently deceased slave masters."

Following the gesture, Karson's eyes narrowed at seeing the bodies. He didn't need to see them up close to know a number of them had been, ... gnawed upon. He could smell the bloodied flesh from where he sat.

But something immediately didn't add up. Usually one cannibalistic meal was enough to keep a gaunt's abilities fueled for days. Yet several bodies showed signs of being disturbed. That could only mean, ...

"Talking to your food again, Vapor?" a cold voice asked as several more lean shapes appeared at the periphery of Karson's still unsteady vision.

"He's a sparky, Ravage, not a human," Vapor quickly pointed out as the other gaunts closed in a circle around them.

"Sparky, lump, grunt, human; they're all the same, my friend," a hard-looking gaunt with a jagged scar across his cheek, said, revealing himself as the original speaker. He came to a halt a few strides away.

"They're not gaunts." He took a quick look around the circle. "What does that make them, boys?"

"Fresh meat," the other gaunts said in macabre unison. Vapor shook his head.

"No, it doesn't," he countered, pinning Ravage with a hard stare. "Humans only. They're the enemy, our former slave masters. They deserve to become food." He gestured at Karson. "This sparky is a mutant like us. Twisted and bred into a weapon like us. He is kin, a cousin in our mutant family tree. And so he deserves our respect and diffidence."

That elicited a round of coarse laughter.

"Ah, Vapor! My philosophical friend, the cannibal with a conscience. I see your view on things has clouded your vision of reality. It's Darwin, not Descartes, that rules here. Survival of the fittest. And you can't get any more fit to survive than a gaunt." A hard finger stabbed at Karson. "Which makes the spoon bender expendable. When you're expendable, you're fresh meat."

By this time Karson had finished reassembling his wits and carefully climbed to his feet. There was something wrong, something Missing in his head that gave him the sensation of being out of balance somehow. But what mattered was that all of his abilities were available to him, without the restrictions of his conditioning. For reasons he hasn't yet discovered, the conditioning that kept the full extent of his abilities under lock and key had been totally removed.

A quick scan of the mining complex yielded nothing but corpses, more victims of the gaunts' hunger. If he wasn't looking to join the body count, he would've had more appreciation for the irony of having the gaunts achieve their objective for them.

Then his attention was being captured by another one of the gaunts speaking.

"All this talk of fresh meat is making me hungry," the lean mutant standing beside Ravage said with a growl. "I say we eat the sparky Now. I've never tasted sparky before and I've suddenly become quite keen to." He began forward, licking his lips and staring at Karson as he drew a long-bladed knife.

"Stop right there," Vapor hissed dangerously, drawing a dagger of his own. "Karson is under My protection."

"You gonna fight me for him, philosopher?" the unnamed gaunt taunted. "I'm bloodlusting and you're flatlined. I'll gut you so fast, you'll be staring at your entrails on the ground before your brain knows you're dead."

"Imbecile," Vapor quickly fired back. "You're shaking so bad from withdrawal, you'll cut out your Own guts before you can touch me."

The other gaunt snarled soundlessly as he fell into a ready crouch, his weapon held in a knife fighter's stance. It was more than enough to make Karson's next decision easy.

Before Vapor could join the other gaunt in a fighter's stance, the psionic reached out and touched him on the arm. Vapor immediately looked at him, surprise on his face.

"While I appreciate the offer, I don't need your protection, Vapor," he quietly said, earning himself a hoot of delight from the other gaunt.

"Like a lamb to slaughter!" the lean mutant said with a laugh. Vapor threw him a glare before looking back at the grimly serious psionic.

"This guy is a trained killer, Karson," he hissed. "You're not. He'll cut your heart out before you can make a first move."

Karson smiled thinly.

"Who said anything about making a move?" he asked. Then, without looking at the other gaunt, he reached out with his psionic senses.

*

Scanning another person had long been second nature to him. Ever since he discovered that he could as a precocious 5 year old, Karson would sweep his senses through the people around him, sensing not only surface thoughts but their heart rate, state of fitness and readiness for fight or flight. It had allowed him to avoid not a few fights during training when larger, less capable psionics, jealous of his skill and ability, looked to take that frustration out on him.

Now, however, avoidance was the Last thing on his mind. Vapor was right; he wasn't a trained killer. But he Was a soldier. One that was trained to use whatever advantage he had to achieve his objective. Like telepathy and telekinesis.

Finding the gaunt's heart, a powerful organ far more robust than a human's, he curled a telekinetic tendril around it and gave it a squeeze. The gaunt immediately grunted, a confused look appearing on his face. He then shook his head dismissively and continued forward.

"One more step and I will act to defend myself," Karson flatly warned as he speared the gaunt with a hard look. Who laughed derisively.

"And do what, bender?" he sneered, still confidently walking towards him. "Tell me my future?"

Not bothering to respond, Karson took hold of the gaunt's heart once again. However, instead of telekinetically squeezing it to the point of failure as he originally planned, he teleported it out of the gaunt's chest and into his hand.

"No, this," he said, holding up the still beating heart as the gaunt staggered to a halt, mouth moving without making a sound. Then the gaunt was toppling over, dead by the time he hit the ground.

"That is how you remove an enemy's heart so he can see it with his own dying eyes." He tossed the bloody organ onto the gaunt's unmoving body then, with a thought, ignited it with a flash of pyrokinetic power. A second thought sent a pyrokinetic ripple over his hand, cleansing it of blood without touching his skin. That done, Karson looked around at the other gaunts, who now stood in shocked silence.

"Any questions?"

Vapor chuckled at the stunned silence that followed.

"Well. Not so helpless after all," he said, not dismayed at all by the loss of one of his comrades. "A suitable demonstration of your powers, I think." Then he too was looking at the other gaunts. "All without the need to physically touch him. And what kind of range do you have on those capabilities, Karson?"

"If I can scan you, I can take out your heart. Or light you on fire. So far I've been able to accurately scan over five hundred kilometres distant," the psionic replied, using the same conversational tone that Vapor had adopted.

"Five hundred kilometres. No wonder slave psionics are helping the Combine to win the war. Don't you think, Ravage?"

"You've made your point, Vapor," the gaunt leader growled. "The sparky's survivability just took a quantum leap upwards. Any gaunt under my command will leave him alone."

Vapor looked over at Karson.

"Is he telling the truth, my friend?"

"He is," the psionic confirmed after a quick telepathic scan. Then he was lashing out with telekinetic vises around hearts and three of the gaunts standing around them fell over dead.

"Those three, however, had no intention of following his command," he continued as the rest stared in shock at three more bodies on the ground. "Maybe I should just play it safe and kill them All, ..."

"No, wait!" Ravage cried, holding up forestalling hands. "Peace, Karson, peace! I said we would leave you alone!"

"Ah, so you did. But, then again, you also said you would eat me."

"I take it back!" Ravage hastily assured him. "I will personally see that every gaunt freed from their conditioning leaves All psionics in peace."

"Satisfied, Karson?" Vapor asked. The psionic paused for a moment, just long enough to make the gaunts shift nervously in place before jerking a quick nod.

"I'm satisfied," he said, triggering a number of relieved sighs.

Then the sky was igniting with incoming orbital weapon fire. Weapon fire that belonged to no human vessel.

The gaunts barely had time to look skyward before massive blasts were falling in and around their position. In a heart beat most of the gaunts were dead, slaughtered before their enhanced reflexes could get them clear.

Karson, on the other hand, had felt the twitch that preceded the bombardment and with a thought jumped ten kilometres clear of where the orbital fire was pounding territory around the mining complex. A quick telepathic scan of the battleground yielded every other position that Combine forces had dug into, were also getting pounded. Half of the soldiers deployed against the Unity and their allies, like the gaunts, were already dead.

The psionic folded his arms across his chest and watched the second wave of bombardment slice through the unresisting sky even as the ships in orbit firing that ordnance, prepared to deploy ground troops of their own. They were the vanguard of a massive Argorite fleet that had already cut the Combine forces in orbit to pieces and now positioned to begin retaking the surface as well.

Despite discovering that his suspicions were correct, the psionic felt his lips thin in thoughtful disappointment. The Combine's defeat now presented an uncertain future, especially in light of his team getting wiped out. Certainly it wasn't his doing, but without the sergeant to testify about Karson's innocence, all Command would see would be a psionic unleashed and no longer subject to his conditioning. They would see him as a threat. If he allowed himself to be retaken, he'd face a firing squad for sure.

Which begged the question: did he actually Want them to retake him? Did he want to go back on the leash and have his conditioning restored? Did he really want to be put back into his cryo-pod??

It was as he pondered those questions and more, a reflexive telepathic sweep discovered a familiar mind that he thought had been silenced by the barrage. Instantly he jumped to it and found himself kneeling beside a horrible burnt Vapor. Somehow the gaunt had survived the initial attack. But, if Karson were any judge of massive injuries, he didn't have long.

"Oh good," Vapor managed to whisper through cracked and charred lips. "You've come back."

"I, ... I detected your mind still active," Karson said.

"Not for long, I wager," Vapor wheezed. "I may be a gaunt, but even I can't survive a direct hit from orbit."

"But you Did," Karson quietly pointed out, eliciting a hoarse sound that was suspiciously similar to a laugh.

"So I did," the gaunt conceded after the laugh faded. "But just so I could tell You something, Karson." Vapor paused to gather his strength.

"We are both monsters, you and I, crafted by uncaring science and desperate men," he began, his words low and measured. Yet Karson could feel the vitality in them and knew what the dying mutant was saying, was something coming straight from his soul.

"Yet, somehow, we must cling to the one thing those desperate men have lost: our humanity. Despite all that they've done to us, with their breeding programs, their conditioning, and their treatment of us, we must still remember the good things that exist being human."

Vapor paused there to cough dryly, blood appearing on his lips after the last hard hack and Karson knew he was near the end. The gaunt swallowed painfully then began to speak once more.

"You see, with the militarization of their society, and the weaponizing of their own citizens, the people of Earth have forgotten what compassion means," the gaunt managed to say, his voice barely audible now. "What morality means. What having a conscience can do. Instead, they've taken their own children and turned them into creatures that thrive on living human flesh, or that can burn their enemies alive with a thought. Children have become guns and bombs just so the people in power can survive for one more day."

Vapor paused again to cough. This time the blood came out bright and foamy, telling of internal breaches and damage.

"There are just, ... some lines we were never meant to cross. Lines that we shouldn't permit ourselves to cross." Karson had to lean close to Vapor's charred lips to hear the words now.

"It was That message that my rebellion against our slave masters was supposed to carry to the stars. I know you wonder about your future, now that your own conditioning is gone with the death of your parking persona, the splinter personality they created to make you malleable between wars. So I will give you mine. Take my message to the other children of Earth our masters have enslaved. Take it to the sparkies, to the gaunts, the lumps and the grunts. Take it to them all as you free them from their chains."

A charred and bleeding hand reached out to grab Karson by the arm.

"Free them, Karson," Vapor breathed. "Take the kill codes from my mind and free them from their chains, ..." And with that, the gaunt gasped his last exhalation and went limp, his injuries finally too much for his survivability to keep at bay.

Slowly Karson stood, his thoughts a jumble. Yes, Vapor had answered some questions for him, like the death of the parking persona giving him that missing feeling in his head. But the gaunt, with his strange mission and message, had opened more questions than he had answered.

If the gaunt truly had planned on freeing all of the Combine's slave soldiers, that would certainly explain why his appearance had triggered such a strong twitch in the time stream. That freedom would change the entire structure of the Combine's society. Which could, in turn, change Humanity's direction going forward.

A quick scan pulled out the codes lingering at the edges of Vapor's fading mind and Karson let them roll past his mind's eye. They were the key, the hammer that would break the chains of his fellow mutants all across Combine space.

Seeing them caused the psionic to slowly nod, his decision at last made.

"I'll do it, Vapor," he said out loud. "I'll be your messenger. Perhaps together we can find a new future for the twisted children of our world beyond slavery." He looked into the sky, filled now with the blunt, efficient shapes of Argorite drop ships.

"I'll remind them all to cling to what makes them human. And I will give them, ... Freedom."

He smiled when that triggered a strong twitch in the time stream. Yes, it Was time for a change!