Wind-Scarred (The Will of the Elements, Book 1) (10 page)

“
The other kind of people who come to us are people like you.
People who have, at the very least, a solid background in science.
Some get fed up with the life of a Legacy and run away to join the
Guild of Sundry. Some are disinherited children of Legacy families,
usually because they didn't live up to expectations. Some are
grunts who have earned black marks for stealing or rediscovering
one of the Legacy secrets. Some, like you, are cursed with entirely
too much curiosity and stumble across something they shouldn't
know. These are the people who make up our research teams. They
usually go into relatively stable situations and take a lighter
approach to the problem. I'm not going to lie to you here, there is
always a considerable amount of risk involved in going outside. Our
research teams just tend to mitigate it.”

They stopped in front of the door marked
242. The door Ezra had come out of a lifetime ago.

“
Ah, here we are. Your team is in this room. They've been out
of the action for a few weeks now, after a mission that went bad.
They are professionals, and both have been in this game since their
teens. They'll take care of you. We need you to fix the wormhole
generator that you unlinked, then you will go through with them and
rendezvous with the contact.”

Ezra gulped. He had not expected this so
soon. Maybe a few months of training, learning to be a
smooth-talking killing machine first. Gal squeezed his arm and
smiled reassuringly up at him. “You'll do great.”

Well, he couldn't exactly back down now. He
nodded to Blair and reached out to open the door.

Inside, two young people, maybe a year or
two older than Ezra, leaned up against the wall, chatting quietly.
Both glanced over at him as he stepped into the room, their
conversation stilled. The door slid shut behind him, ushering in
complete silence. Suddenly, he didn't feel quite so confident.

“
Uh, hi, I'm Ezra Hawkins,” Ezra started out
hesitantly.

The young woman was his height, maybe a
little taller. Short blonde, almost white hair was pulled back into
a spiky tail, leaving her high-cheek-boned face free of any
dangling strands. She looked him over with eyes the color of the
sky on a cold, clear day. Ezra imagined that she would be pretty in
a sharp, harsh kind of way. That is, if she wasn't scowling
ferociously at him. “We're being held up here because of the little
stunt you pulled yesterday,” she snapped at him. “Work now, talk
later.”

The room's other occupant was a stocky,
dark-skinned young man. His powerful arms strained against the
fabric of his shirt. He rubbed a hand through his very short black
hair that complemented his flint black eyes as he gave the girl a
reproachful look. “What Sarah meant to say was welcome to the team.
Hi, I'm Matthew Matanane, Mat to friends.” He shot Ezra an easy
smile. “If I may make one suggestion, you look pretty horribly
dressed for, well, anything. They let you take that shirt off the
press before you put on, or just seal it shut around you?”

Ezra smiled, liking Mat already. “Sealed,”
he said, loosening the ridiculous button-down shirt and pulling the
access panel from the base of the wormhole generator. “But I don't
think it goes on any other way.” He glanced over the system
settings, frowning. Apparently throwing a wormhole to an active
port locked that location in as the only acceptable destination.
Making a mental note to check his formulas to see if he could allow
for a bit more flexibility in the future, Ezra pulled up a private
interface and began manually opening the generator up.

“
You know, I could get you a twenty percent increase in
efficiency with that power grid over how it's set up now.” Mat was
looking over his shoulder into the inner workings of the
machine.

Ezra frowned up at him. “Really?” He checked
the part, picking out a small Legacy mark of two L's embossed
clearly on the side. “This one's a standard Lan Legacy unit,” he
said doubtfully.

Mat shrugged. “I landed here by discovering
a more efficient way to route power through their conduits. The Lan
family said it was something they'd already come up with and just
weren't ready to release it yet. Said I stole it. I got myself a
black mark for not backing down, and ended up here.”

“
Wow, I heard they played rough, but that's pretty
bad.”

“
Bad things happen,” it sounded like a mantra. “And yeah,
twenty percent, at least.”

Ezra grinned and disconnected the power
grid, handing it to the big man with a little bow. “Personally,
someone comes up with a better wormhole, and I'd like to meet them.
You know, learn about it, find out how they're thinking, maybe come
up with something cool of my own.”

The girl, Sarah, snorted. “We can't all be
the mighty Hawkins family.”

Ezra glanced over at her as he rebooted the
relay system. “And what's your story? Sarah, right? You have a last
name to go with that?”

She gave him a wintry smile. “Hughes.”

Ah, now the animosity made sense. The Hughes
Legacy had been responsible for the materials used in the creation
of the space elevator and much of the space station itself. Super
strong, light solids were their specialty, but the space elevator
had been their crowning glory. For years they had been the
unrivaled masters of building and travel, government contracts for
expansion and upkeep lining their pockets and filling their
coffers. They were what all of the other Legacy houses aspired to
be. That is, until the Hawkins family rendered the space elevator
obsolete with faster than light travel. The Hughes family's
prestige and profits had plummeted as they were forced to pander
their solids to less notable enterprises. They hadn't exactly
fallen on hard times, but they had fallen, and everyone knew that
the Ezra's family was to blame.

“
So,” Ezra continued carefully as he accepted the upgraded
power grid from Mat and put it in place, “Why are you here, Miss
Hughes?”

Sarah's eyes darted away and she wrapped her
arms around herself. “I don't see any reason to talk about it. I'm
here, so are you. We have a job to do, so let's get it done.”

Ezra started up the systems diagnostics and
was pleased to see that Mat had indeed increased the output of the
power grid by twenty three percent without significantly impacting
the heat generation of the unit. “Okay,” he said, “all set. So,
um... what do we do now?”

“
First,” Mat said, opening up a large container and pulling out
what looked like home-spun clothes, “we suit up. Yeah... these
should fit you.” He tossed a shirt and pants to Ezra along with
some lightweight, skintight body armor. He and Sarah began
stripping out of their uniforms. Ezra looked around in a mild
panic.

“
We're all teammates here, Hawkins,” she smirked at him, “no
room for modesty.”

Ezra sighed and began changing his clothes
as well, doing his best to not stare at Sarah. It's not that he
didn't get out. Well, okay, that was what it was, but still, some
decency, or at least a little warning, would have been nice.

“
We'll be making contact with a local by the name of John
Culbert. He makes cider.” Sarah's voice carried a hint of amusement
that Ezra hoped wasn't aimed at him. “Eight hours ago he placed a
white flag alerting us to the presence of a hostile wind-scarred in
the area.”

“
Wind-scarred?” Ezra asked glancing back to find Sarah at least
mostly decent, adjusting her shoes. “What does that
mean?”

Sarah gave Mat a look, lifting her eyebrows
and slightly nodding her head. “Wind-scarred is the name that
elementalists who can control the wind have taken in the outside
world. All of them, every single one, is covered in elaborate
patterns of scars. They wear them like badges of honor.”

Ezra's brow furrowed at that. He opened his
mouth to speak, “Why-”

“
Before you ask,” Mat interjected, donning a wide-brimmed hat,
“we don't know why they have the scars. It could be some ritual
thing. It could be a symbol of status or denote a hierarchy among
them. It could have something to do with whatever mutation gives
them their powers. What we
do
know is that the scars themselves are practically
invulnerable. You can't break them, you can't cut them. Bullets
will bounce off. That is, if the wind-scarred lets the bullet reach
him in the first place. Can't really count on projectile weapons
against a powerful scarred...” He tossed Ezra a belt with a rather
large knife on it, strapping an honest-to-god sword on his own hip
and tucking a pistol into a well-concealed shoulder rig. “But it's
best to be prepared for anything, just in case.”

“
We've never seen a wind-scarred this far north,” Sarah chimed
in as she checked an assault rifle. “It's a little remote for any
wind-scarred we've run into. Not much to steal.” She nodded to
herself and slung the gun over her shoulder, then deftly strapped a
pair of wicked looking knives to her belt for good measure. Ezra
swallowed and put on the belt Mat had thrown him.

“
The village of Arborlen – that's where we're headed – is
generally pretty low key. Last time we went in for a fire-kissed
who had been harassing the local women. Slipped him a knockout pill
and let him wake up naked in the forest. Apparently they never saw
him again after that.” Mat smiled as he recounted the tale. “The
nearest wormhole is well-hidden and within walking distance of the
town. Chances are, we'll just go in, take a look around, and come
back out for more help or better equipment.” He put a strip of
something that changed color to match his skin-tone behind his ear,
along his the top of his jawbone and held one out to Ezra.
Confused, Ezra followed Mat's example, and suddenly heard Mat's
voice saying, “Test, test, one, two, three.” A slight movement in
Mat's jaw was the only indication he was speaking at
all.

“
Two way simultaneous communication between all three of us,”
Mat said out loud, grinning at Ezra's confused look. “We hear what
you hear, even it's sub-vocal.”

“
But, the neural net...” Ezra began.

“
No net out there, newbie,” Mat slapped him on the shoulder as
he walked past.

Ezra nodded, looking down
at his outlandish outfit.
Well,
he figured,
if you're
going out, may as well wear something
out-landish
.

He stepped over to stand with his new
teammates next to the generator platform. “Okay then,” Sarah said,
a wolfish smile on her face, “let's go get the bad guys.”

The wormhole opened onto a sparsely wooded
hill. Ezra stepped through and looked around in awe. He had never
seen trees so large before. A little animal with a bushy tale went
scampering up a tree, pausing only to chatter at them in annoyance.
It was a squirrel! He had only ever seen pictures of them.

Ezra looked around until he found a small
rod painted to look like a twig standing up from the ground.
Exploring a little further, he found a second one embedded in a
rock, then triangulated to the third nestled in the trunk of an
ancient tree. “Oh wow,” he said as Mat came through the wormhole
and shut it off behind him. “You guys are actually using the portal
rods! My dad proposed these as a light-weight way to set up
temporary ports. Sanctuary officials deemed them innovative yet
impractical, and we never went into mass production. We just get a
few orders a year from...” Ezra blinked at his family's Legacy mark
on the rod's tip. “You, I guess.”

Mat chuckled as he said, “And oh, how we
loathe the little buggers and curse the Hawkins name.” He adjusted
his sword slightly, eyes smoothly taking in the forest. “Hiding
them effectively is just so painful, and you feel like an idiot
stomping around in some armpit of the world trying to find a good
spot to set it up. You can use any of them to call home and get a
wormhole out here if you need it, though.” Mat scratched his head.
“But you probably knew that already.”

Ezra nodded. “Access panels two inches from
the bottom of each unit, if they're standard design. Press and hold
the button for a thirty count, then release. They have a second or
two margin of error. You guys put them out here?”

“
Welcome to the glorious world of the research team,” Sarah
murmured, eyes scanning the area around them. “Probably didn't tell
you about that when they roped you in, huh? Let's move out,
daylight's wasting.”

They hiked down the hill and toward an open
field. Sarah broke off without a word and began to climb a rocky
outcropping that overlooked the clearing. “Always have a spotter,
sometimes two,” Mat spoke through the communicators as they circled
around to enter the clearing from the far side. “Getting surprised
out here is never fun.”

“
Culbert is in the clearing,” Sarah's voice came through
quietly, “alone, unarmed. Everything is green to
engage.”

“
Making contact,” Mat responded, his mouth hardly moving. He
loosened his sword in its sheath, casually keeping a hand near the
hilt.

Ezra and Mat stepped out into the clearing.
Ahead of them an overweight, balding man was wiping his face with a
handkerchief while looking nervously around, his back currently
turned to them. “Mr. Culbert,” Mat said in a quiet voice.