90s (or earlier) book: humanity split between 3 factions (China, America, Russia) which colonized space, and have telepaths/telekinetics individuals

Question

It's been gnawing on my brain for the past 20 years... I love Scifi/Fantasy books and pretty much read all of Isaac Asimov and Piers Anthony books. I hope the collective SciFi mind can help me out:

The premise of the books is that the humans have colonized the galaxy. Humanity was, however, broken up into 3 factions. The Chinese, Americans and Russians (I think) ended up as the primary groups. Each group has its own sectors of the galaxy, and there is a lot of distrust and there are skirmishes (I'm not sure if they were at war).

During this time there were people with mutant powers. Powers such as telepathy and telekinesis. There were also people who were Null (not affected by telepathic powers). I also remember that individuals had tattoos or markings that signify, either their faction or their powers (I'm not sure)

The whole story is that each faction had a military group or squad after SOMETHING in a tower/building. The book would jump from the perspective of faction to faction to tell the story. Each faction, had a protagonist and would have their own storyline. There was one part where 2 of the factions had a firefight: faction A detected that faction B had a telepath scanning their tactics. When the Null person found out, she (I remember that she was a she) changed the settings of the blasters of her fellow soldiers to a stun/spread mode. So when they opened fire, they where able to hit several Faction B people and either advance or retreat to the tower/building.

I kind of remember that the book title had the word "Three" in it. Somehow I thought it went along the lines of "The Three Towers". Also the cover was a 70's dark color theme with a soldier looking towards a tower or building.

Answer 1

Could this be The Quintara Marathon series by Jack L. Chalker? From Wikipedia:

• The Demons at Rainbow Bridge, Ace-Putnam's, hardcover, September, 1989 (ISBN 0-441-69992-8)
• The Run to Chaos Keep, Ace-Putnam's, May, 1991 (ISBN 0-441-69348-2)
• The Ninety Trillion Fausts (a.k.a. 90 Trillion Fausts), Ace-Putnam's, October 1991 (ISBN 0-441-58103-X)

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• humans spread throughout the galaxy, but are caught by three interstellar superpowers in the galaxy. Humans therefore have no "home", but are living amongst the other alien races.
• one protagonist is a powerful telepath, but has one finger on one of his hands extensively tattooed to show his telepathic nature, by law.
• archeologists discover a pair of unknown aliens in a tomb; aliens awaken, broadcast a telepathic interstellar message that gets the three superpowers interested, and then disappear down a wormhole/tesseract
• some of the groups assigned by the superpowers are just whomever was closest, including slavers with a female slave/slaver protagonist. Others included a machine intelligence, near-indestructible dwarf, created faunlike female, etc.
• story evolves into chasing the demons and learning about their physical and metaphysical nature as real demons, including the use of hexagrams for instantaneous teleport
• one of the battles between the superpower teams sounds like your battle vs. the telepath in one of the teams
• chasing the demons goes across several unknown planets and regions, trying to prevent these "forerunners" from waking up their entire demon race
• story ends with a few survivors of the three groups acquiring "angel"-like powers, stopping the traitors on their teams, and stopping the demons