The Inquisition is mystified by the strength of the link between their psychotic psychoborgs and their psychic handlers. They originally thought that forcing empaths who had broken the law to mentally link with psychopaths to keep them under control and useful as cybernetic shock troops would solve several problems at once: what to do about the most dangerous criminals, how to supply more heavy armed and armored shock troopers and how to keep wayward psychics on a short chain.

It may have backfired in ways they cannot yet imagine.

The psychics control their murderous cybernetic partners by creating a psychic private world where they are victim to all of the cyborg's depravity, thus calming him and keeping the public safe. Every night, they must endure this in a mental world that feels more real than the real world.

Somehow, amazingly, this develops an incredibly strong bond....so strong that one of the reasons these duos are so deadly in combat is because they want to get back to their own private psychic world as quickly as possible. Thus, in the field, they can be bitter, callous and tempermental the longer they have to stay in the "real world." As soon as possible, the couple retreat to their chambers and into their private psychic realm of, one would presume, horrors. What is really confusing to the Inquisition is that the psychics who are victimized in these worlds night after night by their combat partners are the ones who seem most eager to return.

Theories on this abound, but the predominant one is that because they are psychically bound, the psychic begins getting pleasure feedback from the experiences of the cyborg. So if a psychic handler (usually called a Soother) is forced to bond with a rapist, even though they are the victim in the psychic world day after day, they also get the exact same rush of both physical and mental stimulation as the monster they are bound to. But the cyborg has been used to these urges for years, the psychic has not...and becomes addicted.

The one reason this theory hasn't become accepted as fact is simple: imagine having someone torture you to death, night after night, and there is no escape. Now imagine you become addicted to the experience. You even go into battle at the side of your tormentor. Think about what that would do to your state of mind.

The truth is that the Inquisition doesn't want to admit that while it appears that they've tamed psychopaths, murderers and rapists and turned them into bloodthirsty soldiers defending humanity, they also may have given them a cadre of well-trained psychics who are being bent into something even worse.

As long as the psychoborgs and their psychic soothers fight alien enemies, the Inquisition sees no problem. But they have begun to dread the thought of peace....and tens of thousands of these pairs being idle with nowhere to unleash their murderous tendencies.