Genesis Cage
an excerpt

Chapter 3: Abstention [Not beginning of chapter, btw]

Elara hissed angrily, and with a touch of fear as they sat there for an endless moment. Finally she took a deep breath and sighed, the tension flowing out of her to Brian’s empathic senses.
“Damn. We don’t have time to wait around for them to get scared enough to run, or wait for the rest of their buddies to arrive. We’ve also got that hostile esper on our asses too. Do you have any idea how close he is? That’s not the kind of opponent I want sneaking up on us.”
Brian sent his senses out, but other than the three guards ahead of them and two or three other people scattered around the edges of the facility he couldn’t feel anything, except a slowly growing sense of danger, both in strength and proximity.
“I can’t tell, not exactly. He’s blocking my esper senses somehow, but I get the feeling he isn’t that far away either. That’s just intuition though.”
Elara sighed again, and Brian had to agree. Their options weren’t looking good, and getting in a firefight against superior odds with better weapons in close quarters wasn’t the most brilliant thing to do. He understood that the rampaging esper somewhere behind them was much more dangerous though, and he was also fairly sure that he wasn’t a match for him right now either. Brian flexed his hand, staring at it for a second while thinking of the suit’s protective shield, wondering if he could somehow replicate that effect with his esper talents.
The female Newborn held up three fingers as Brian flicked off the safety on his laser pistol and gathered his mind, trying to focus on the idea of protecting himself. As long as he thought about it in those terms, he thought he could shoot the guards. He wasn’t like that other esper, who rejoiced in the pain and death he caused. Even those deaths caused by the other still felt like knives jabbing into him all over.
Brian had missed Elara retract her second finger and barely marshaled himself to rush around the corner with her as she withdrew the third finger and wrapped it around the stock of her laser rifle. The pair rushed around the corner silently and hurriedly, surprising the now four guards standing in front of the mess doors. The first soldier dropped to the floor with a muted scream as a flurry of laser pulses from Elara’s rifle ripped apart the soldier’s energy shield and then into his armor. Brian shoved aside the mental knives stabbing at him from the soldier’s death as he repeatedly fired at another soldier, trying to bring down his shields as Elara walked another extended burst of laser fire across a third soldier, dropping both shields and soldier. In a matter of seconds, Elara had taken out two soldiers while Brian had barely brought down the shields of one, and the other soldiers had barely snapped out of their surprise.
Elara dropped her laser rifle, drawing her monomolecular sword in one smooth motion as she rushed up to the soldier who still had his shields, and as Brian darted forward also, yanking his knife length cutter from its sheath and slamming it into the armored chest of the soldier he’d been shooting at. That one dropped to the ground gurgling from the cutter through her heart, those black knives reaching for Brian again. In the moment it took for him to shunt that pain away again Elara had sliced apart the last soldier’s rifle, battered down his shields, and then cut him deeply and fatally across the upper chest and shoulders.
He’d just about begun to make a comment, keyed up from the adrenaline rush, when the sense of danger that had been present flared up and Brian instinctively did something that blunted the raw wave of force that blasted through whatever barrier he’d thrown up and sent both of them sprawling to the floor, Brian’s shield indicator suddenly beeping insistently in the corner of his visor.
Thanks to that strange barrier field and the armor’s shield system he wasn’t hurting too badly, but he wasn’t sure how well he could block another strike of that strength. He sensed that Elara was struggling wobbily to her feet, and it seemed like she felt the impact of that telekinetic force more than he had. That same feel of malevolence couple with savage glee from several weeks ago blasted past Brian’s tattered mental shields, and he had to struggle to stay upright as the mental assault washed over the pair. Elara gasped and collapsed, Brian sensing that the mental attack had shredded her mental shields in the same way. His must have been stronger since he was an esper, but…
Brian grimaced and tried to extend a wall of will in front of Elara and himself, trying to block the feral esper’s mental and telekinetic strikes. Considering the way he kept striking that wall lightly with both mental and kinetic attacks, Brian had the sickening sense that he was just toying with him. He had to do something to get them out of here, and they weren’t going to be able to escape by Elara’s hovercraft with that esper sitting there.
Barely standing and stewing in his helpless rage Brian got the faintest sense that someone was calling to him, someone familiar, and that he needed to go to that person. The esper cursed aloud and mentally, knowing that he didn’t have the time to entertain his esper intuition, but. But.
He screamed and gathered the shards of his remaining will and psychic power around him, the almost instinctual understanding of how the combat armor’s energy shields worked allowing him to bend space and time around himself and Elara, the thinnest thread of his self and will reaching through to that distant point where he was being called to. He felt rather than heard the electronic pops and a blood-chilling scream of denial as the world surged around him and faded to black.