Chapter 9
Where Are You?
Saan-Hu walked in the track gap heading in the direction of Blackbrick Central Junction’s main boarding hub. Fifteen minutes ago, the Caravan’s communications equipment lost both Dastou and Nes’ radio signals, and after five minutes of nothing, she got nervous. She shouldn’t have, she’s a Staff Sergeant of all things, but she did, and quickly prepared to head out. With Captain Hays in charge of the six privates, he let her go, and she got ready as fast as she could then ran all the way here. Nes had sent a static code signal to her when his group reached the stairwell into the subway, and she headed in with too little hesitation. After going underground, she was happy that she regained enough of her worry-filled self-control that she didn’t sprint down into the boarding areas.
An arched tunnel was ahead, and Saan paid attention to that more than the empty sleeping areas for the camp of naturals that lived down here. There were no more boarding areas for this stop and if her comrades, her friends, were here, they’d be there. Dead or alive. The heat under her skin rose in temperature a few degrees, but not at the sudden thought of Dastou and Nes dead, which she fully convinced herself was unlikely. What caught her attention was a Stitch on the ground a step past the short tunnel and on the pebbly rubble of the track gap.
She picked up speed, walked faster, and let her right hand float down to her hip as she moved and hover over her machine pistol. To the tunnel, into the tunnel, and out of the tunnel in seconds, Saan stopped at the Stitch. It was in Dastou’s precise ink strokes, his brushwork unmatched since he was the only one that didn’t have to try and keep from going unconscious while creating the hypnotic tool.
“Ignore,” Saan whispered to herself, naming the tool on the ground.
She scanned the area and the saw hundreds of bullet-hole pockmarks in concrete and the cooled, damaged ammunition that made them. This place was a war zone, except that the war seemed to happen in one direction. The sound of this disaster must have carried a decent distance as well, but after the bombing and cancelling of work no one was going to rush out to the embassy, where there was guaranteed to be someone from the Igneous Counterbalance present, and ask for help; better to stay home and safe than risk that.
On the far right, at the bottom of an escalator on the southbound boarding section, were two bodies heaped atop each other, dead. They were dressed the same as the attackers and Trenna when they found her, and near them were discarded assault rifles of the most basic model Saan remembered learning about.
There was a lot of glass on the floor, too. Thicker than what was used for window panes, Saan looked up to see where they came from to find a series of shattered construction lights.
“Hmph...?” she asked herself, then heard a noise upstairs.
The sound was an indescribably small shuffling, like someone trying to adjust their position while hiding. It was enough to pique Saan’s interest, and she bent to retrieve the Stitch from the ground before anything else, folded the paper up, and put it in a pocket. She then drew her machine pistol as she walked up to the boarding platform, then to the bottom of the escalator. Saan couldn’t see anyone, not yet, and began to walk up the metal steps. It took a long, nervous half-minute to get upstairs, and as she turned her head to rescan the area behind her, the stairs, Saan heard the metal of a gun being pulled up immediately followed by a sigh of relief that was not her own. The sound made her snap her head in that direction to see Nes and Trenna standing between a blown-out construction light and balcony above the tunnel.
Saan’s heart was beating out of her chest and she had to control her breathing. She ran here in a panicked hurry, with no backup, putting herself in as much danger as she believed Nes and Dastou might be in – they were her close friends, and she’d never thought much on losing either of them. Then they lost communications and her emotions snatched away control in the way she absolutely hated, and could not stop from rushing here. Yet, seeing at least one of them here, safe, didn’t do anything to make her smarter about her emotional state, and she let anger take over where worry once was.
“Why is your radio device not on?” she asked tersely.
Nes hadn’t been worried about her dying, and the look on his face at her question was one of having been mildly betrayed.
“Hi,” he said with dark sarcasm, whatever he’d been through playing with how short his own fuse was. “My radio is on. It hasn’t been working since the gunfight down here. As you can tell by the blood, bodies, and bullet casings, it’s been rough.” He tugged at his uniform when he mentioned the blood, showing off a big stain of cleaned blood.
Saan had a temper that she rarely let herself exhibit in true form, relying on frightening calmness and hints at anger as her leadership trademarks. When her displeasure was on full display, she was rightfully feared throughout the DSF. There’s nothing quite like an outraged woman who happens to be able to fold you like linen. Frankly she had no reason to be so upset right now, but Nes’ defensiveness triggered her own thanks to her still adrenaline-filled mindset.
“You have been out of contact since you went underground,” said Saan flatly. “Why?”
“Wait, the signal has been cut since back then?” wondered Nes, honestly confused. “I used the mic to plan a counter-attack with Dastou. We went silent after that. I didn’t notice it was busted until a few minutes ago.”
“Hmph,” Saan grunted as she looked around.
When Saan saw the Stitch slip Dastou put on the ground, she already figured out that there was an ambush. The fact that Nes was alive means he and Dastou did not run from it, the tool creating fast cover and controlling enemy movement. With nothing else to go on, she peered around the hub, starting from the tunnel, around the other side, finding corpses in worn, old, dirty clothing with basic assault rifles near them. She grew up tribal, hunting from an early age, and the blood and bodies didn’t bother her. What kept needling her was how this came to pass at all.
“You were taken by surprise on the ground and made your way up,” said Saan, starting down an accusatory road. “And they are all dressed the same way Trenna was when we found her; they are from her camp.”
Another pause, and Saan’s stare settled on Trenna, suspicious of the number of coincidences that connected the girl to all this.
“What were you doing, then?” Saan asked Trenna directly. “How did you survive all this? How did you happen to lead Saint Dastou into an ambush?”
Trenna didn’t seem to know how to answer the questions, and only opened and closed her mouth a couple of times trying to, her hands shaking at her sides. Was that guilt? Saan took a step toward the girl and Nes suddenly blocked her path.
“Saan, dammit, don’t you dare,” Nes said forcefully, getting her attention. “They wanted her dead too, and she saved my life by killing one of her friends.”
“Many of these ‘friends’ were killed thus far today,” Saan said with unfiltered vitriol. She was talking to Nes but staring at Trenna, who herself was looking at the floor. “Along with at the minimum two dozen innocents. These attempts to kill our leader are have been nothing less than savage. Killing one of their own to survive does not seem improbable.”
Nes took a moment to respond, his mouth agape in shock at the accusation. “Shit, Saan, what is wrong with you?” he asked, justifiably. “Hays said he believed her and you know how that guy is. Has he ever been wrong about someone, I mean for a second?”
The question was a good one, and it really did tear Saan’s suspicion apart. Captain Hays was an impossibly accurate judge of character and unrelentingly punishing when it came to those he thought deserved it. He would’ve recommended that Trenna never see the light of day again if he thought she was involved with the bombing. Saan’s hard gray-blue eyes landed on the girl again. Trenna had moved aside and was leaning oddly against the retaining wall of the balcony, a clear indication of a recent injury to her hip. She was fiddling with something in her pants pocket with one hand and it was easy to guess that she thumbe
d at the string of small pearls that were found on her earlier.
As was figured out earlier, Trenna was a far-east tribesperson very far from her home. That area of the world was not developed by the Social Cypher, and nomad tribes – though some have settled on trade or farming centers in the last few decades – make up most of the peoples. To such a tribe, killing an ally or fellow tribesman is punishable by death unless proved to be self-defense. The close-knit nature of the isolationist clans mean that guilt is heavy with all who slay their fellows, no matter if it was a life or death situation. Saan knew all this because that is how she herself grew up. The round objects in Trenna’s pocket would be lined up, and she was thumbing them one at a time, her hand unsteady: she was silently praying. The instinct to pray with the pearls in hand was built into some tribal people from childhood, a need to ask forgiveness, mostly of themselves and their clan, for a heinous act.
Saan’s anger, her nerve-vibrating suspicion, puffed away anti-climatically. She went from fever-hot accusation to being coldly-embarrassed at a pace that, if told someone else did it, she wouldn’t believe them. The look on her face must have revealed very clearly, at least to Nes, how self-conscious she was, because he slowly walked up and put a hand on her shoulder, squeezing lightly. He nodded slowly, smiled forgivingly, and moved away. Another person would have said “it’s okay, I get it,” or “thank you for worrying yourself halfway to crazy,” or “I’d do the same thing.” Nes just shut up, because he knew that’s what he should do. Saan had believed she was better at only allowing her passion and righteousness out when needed, when warranted, but she was given a fear of her friends’ deaths and cracked. Some soldier she was…
Nes went to Trenna, and Saan was still too embarrassed to see how he would smooth things over on that side and instead let her eyes wander to the other side of the hub’s second story. She caught herself staring at one of the basic assault rifles, the ones the enemies used, and remembering that how the Academy, and it’s DSF top-end, made weapons was essentially their biggest secret. The occasional firearm, sometimes a homemade model of some kind, typically pipe-and-hydraulic weapon, made its way to the streets, but that was so rare it bordered on a miracle.
“The weapons lying on the ground near these people, they are all the same model.” Saan said while shifting her view to Nes and hoping that speaking professionally would keep her in check.
“Yeah, I noticed that, too,” Nes said, pulling away from having whispered something to Trenna. “It’s that model we nicknamed ‘Old Reliable’ at the Academy. How these people got guns at all is the problem. Black markets don’t deal in volume.”
Saan caught Trenna’s eyes, the earnest sadness and tear-made redness in them, and had to look away again.
“The IC will have to be informed about these weapons,” Saan said. “Blackbrick must not be allowed to turn into another Davranis South.”
They both knew what that meant.
“Where is Dastou?” Saan added, letting the question finally come to front of tongue. “If this trap failed as incredibly as it seems to have, why is he not here with you?”
“I wish I knew,” he admitted. “I called for him a few minutes ago and got no answer. He should have been finished up before we were.”
He flicked his chin to indicate the three bodies near a construction spotlight behind him.
“That’s his style front to back, am I right?” Nes asked.
One of the bodies had a broken arm and a knife in his chest. It was an old but sharpened kitchen knife, recycled for use in this fight. The second body, very close to the first, looked like her neck was snapped as she lay on the floor in a position that should have been face first, but the injury forced her head to be too far to one side. A broken neck many times won’t kill outright, and this person’s head looked like it was slammed against the floor – Dastou showing mercy by knocking her out so she didn’t experience the horrifying death of conscious asphyxiation. The third victim had been shot by his own gun. In all likelihood he heard one of his comrades scream or make another noise, then turned only to have his rifle taken away, a single shot to the heart following. It was an expertly managed scenario, as the Saint might say.
“Yes, this is without a doubt his work,” Saan said. “Yet he is not here to gloat as he should be.”
“And you how he loves to gloat. He ran off to this side of the hub after ordering me to clear the other and protect Trenna, and hasn’t shown up since. I... we ended up taking out everyone except those three he handled. The last person alive from the ambush group told Trenna about being ordered by someone to take him alive.”
“’Take him,’” Saan repeated. “As in kidnap a Saint? That seems an impossible task to be given.”
“More impossible than making two damn near successful attempts to kill him within three hours?”
“You believe this story of an ordered abduction?”
“I’m not completely sure, but there’s a lot of smart people out there who aren’t Saints or entourage like we are and we both know a lot of smart people hate his guts, rightfully or not.”
Saan took a second to think, trying to figure out something else from the bodies Dastou left behind and his unexpected disappearance. Her lack of a hypothesis did not mean Nes was correct, though it made more sense in combination with the failed bombing earlier. These ragged attackers with all their illicit weapons could have fired on Dastou in the lobby of the embassy when he went to investigate, which he would have avoided. They could have unloaded on him out in the street while Trenna led the way here, which he also would have avoided. The instinctual ability of a Saint to sense that something was wrong around him or her is one of their kind’s most infamous qualities; the only time they allow themselves to be truly hurt is when their hubris makes them act too ambitiously, or they drop their guard for some reason.
“Guys?” Trenna said, interrupting Saan’s admiration of a Saint’s survivability. “That door over there is open.”
She pointed at the entry to a soup restaurant near them, its door propped open with a small pile of bricks.
“Is it not supposed to be?” asked Nes.
“No,” Trenna told him with a light shake of her head. “Without electricity the insides of shops stay too dark. They were all raided for supplies, and then the doors were closed, sometimes barred. I remember walking by that one a couple days ago and it wasn’t open. That table sitting next to the door was blocking it.”
Saan-Hu and Nes had been considering the open doorway as Trenna talked, and now looked at each other. Nes shrugged. Searching it was better than standing here. Saan jerked her head toward the restaurant, signaling her intent to enter quietly. Trenna caught on and stayed silent, too.
A few low, clear clicking sounds from Saan and Nes were them taking small flashlights from their belts and attaching them to magnetic under-barrel mounts on their guns. They both double-tapped flat white diodes on their shoulders that were disguised as buttons to turn them on. Since they already revealed their presence with conversation they may as well have decent peripheral lighting. Saan led the way to the door.
In a few strides they were at the threshold, and Saan did a quick sweep left-to-right with her light. It was easy to see much of the open space inside the restaurant since there was no glass in the large windows flanking the door – all the bits of it on the floor hinted that they shattered along with the construction lights after Nes used some kind of grenade. With nothing about the place telling her to stay away, Saan went inside. She moved only a pair of steps beyond the doorway before stopping, then used her light to cut through oily shadows.
Most restaurants in big subway hubs served the food outside in the public space, so there was never much space inside a shop. As Saan moved her light in strategic, sweeping motions, the surplus furniture and equipment made shadows play around and shift in size. The Social Cypher made this place a ghost town when the street-level trolley system was activated and Saan imagined that every restaurant
here was the same way: gutted of anything useful. She crept forward, the others behind her and equally quiet, though the unavoidable crunch of broken glass underfoot would reveal them as much as their not-overly-quiet conversation outside.
Halfway inside the restaurant ordering space, Saan stood still and collected information. Behind the register counter was an unblocked doorway that led to the kitchen. It was half open, and past that was a barely visible exit to the back hallway, also open. That hallway would connect to all of the stores, used for deliveries and employee entry. Saan went closer to the counter and used her hip to open the swinging waist-high gate leading to the employee-only section, both hands on her weapon. The thin gate squeaked as she pushed it aside.
After a cursory examination of the behind-the-counter space, Saan went into the inky black kitchen and cooking area through the half-open door and then stopped. Nothing of interest here either according to her light, so she gave herself permission to check the hallway. The door was not open so much as it was gone, taken off its hinges. That was not a surprise since these back doors would be hollow, easy to carry off, and made almost entirely of thin sheets of re-usable, easy to melt steel. Saan went ahead into the corridor. To the left, her flashlight revealed only some worn down wooden pallets, lots of cobwebs, and an annoying amount of dust in the air of the long un-utilized hallway. While Saan-Hu peered one way, Nes had come up behind her to look in the other direction, leading to a low, startled gasp from Trenna.
Saan turned around to see what Nes was pointing at, and used her flashlight to further highlight a chest-high stack of wooden pallets a few meters away. Several sets of footprints in a disorganized cluster showed the signs of a brawl. One particular pair that had traipsed along the outside of the mess bore the distinctive tread of the Saint’s boots, which featured the Majella Nonnatus crest that was the Academy’s symbol on the heel. The highest pallet on the stack was cracked in several places, the wooden wounds fresh from the appearance of how pale and clean they were. Another piece of jagged, broken wood at waist level of the pile held a scrap of brown leather, torn off from an article of clothing. Around the leather, on the wood of the same broken skid and on the wall of the narrow hallway, were a few small splatters of blood. There was nothing else to think about the blood other than it was Dastou’s.
Saan moved closer to the suspicious scene, slipping by Nes and Trenna in the now cramped hallway. She was thankful for the need to move around them, as it gave her a second to think.
“I do not understand,” Saan said. “How is this possible with what we’ve seen him do against these people today?”
Nes had no answer for the somewhat rhetorical question. Saan studied the spread and patterns of foot prints, including Dastou’s, to try and figure out why he was able to be taken. Even injured a Saint is formidable, dominant. There was barely any blood here at all, yet her boss and friend was taken by force after a scrap with some civilians?
She finally turned toward Nes again and pointed her gun and light at the wall, using the bounced luminosity to see his face better than the white shoulder diodes alone. He adjusted his rifle to aim at the opposite wall, his shoulder apparently injured during the ambush, and accidentally pointed his light at her chest for a too-long second. He jerked the light away and pointed at the wall he was aiming for to begin with, eyebrows half raised in a joking “oh my, that was not a purposeful look at your breasts at all” apology. She lightly shook her head at how unprofessional, joking or not, he was and moved on.
“Does this scene truly fit what could have happened?” Saan asked. “Dastou fought and...” She hesitated and glanced at Trenna Geil, remembering that these people were her former mates in homelessness, but there was no way around what she had to say. “... Killed three of the people that ambushed you, then was overwhelmed here and kidnapped?”
“It fits what Trenna’s friend, Hundre, told us as he died.” Nes responded. “The how remains a mystery. I mean, maybe he was poisoned before the fight in this dark hallway somehow?”
Trenna chimed in. “Would the darkness matter to him?”
“Ah, yes,” Saan said, “the rumors that Saints have impeccable night vision.”
In truth, when Dastou expanded his entourage – the friends and allies a Saint tends to group up with over time – to become the much larger Davranis Security Forces, those rumors also became linked with all of the agents. Nes once told Saan about the trouble he had getting his parents and sisters to understand that he was not, and never would be, a demi-god. It’s not a surprise fewer and fewer students or ranked agents leave to go visit their old lives regularly when they end up trying to convince people not to leave them offerings, turning down bar bets about their “powers,” or fighting anti-Saintists who see their eyes as an excuse to beat someone to a pulp. Her own reason for not visiting home was a touch more complex than that.
“Trust me, they can’t see in the dark in any special way,” Nes continued from where Saan left off. “Dastou plays a terrible game of darts when the lights are off, and hits any target he wants in light. His eyesight is perfect, but he doesn’t have any sort of animal-like enhanced vision, and neither do the rest of us. Hence the flashlights.”
“Well put,” said Saan. “About the poison theory, it is a possibility with how well our enemy was prepared. However, he would not allow that to happen at close range with his instincts, unless it was a long-distance syringe-like projectile shot on a blindside while he was completely distracted.”
Nes sighed. “And no one has syringe rifles besides us and the Cypher for animal control. Right. Um... a Kaialus seizure might have happened. Maybe he was affected by one mid-fight and taken?”
“Not likely,” Saan said shaking her head. “He would not indulge in trying to meditate while fist-fighting. Did the man you mentioned, this Hundre, say anything else about their plan to take Dastou?”
Nes scratched his chin while answering. “Not really. He told us that someone he referred to as the ‘citizen’ wanted them to grab the Saint. He, uh, couldn’t tell us more than that.”
“I see,” Saan said, the hint about what happened to the man after his revelations clear.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Trenna said, excited and slightly more forceful to get the others’ attention. “What about that over there?”
The girl held up a finger, pointing it down the hallway and behind Saan, past the stack of skids damaged from the fight.
Saan aimed her light in the general direction of where the girl indicated, and saw what caught her attention: a few droplets of blood, shining in the light and obvious against the dusty backdrop. There were also two parallel lines in the dust on the floor heading away. Drag marks.
“There,” Trenna said, “I knew I saw something weird.”
Nes pointed his gun further down the hall, and saw the trail continue. More shoe prints without the Majella Nonnatus crest, more drag lines, a few droplets of blood.
“If you don’t mind me guessing, too,” Trenna said, “I think he let himself be taken.”
The others kept their lights pointed down the hall and let their shoulder diodes illuminate Trenna as they stared at her.
“Um... I just figured that, uh, the way he is,” Trenna said, stammering mildly because she was being focused on, “and the way other Saints are, he’d put himself in danger to get closer to the middle, I mean center of the problem. It happened all the time with Saints, right? Making themselves sick, or visiting dangerous lands, or...”
Saan cut her off with a hand on her shoulder. The girl must have interpreted their stares as annoyance and started babbling. “Calm down,” Saan said, “it is fine, and I am inclined to agree.”
“Same here,” Nes said. “The crazy bastard more than likely would just let himself get snatched to see what happens. I only hope he did it because he has faith in us and not because he didn’t think about our reactions. One of those gets him punched in the temple. And Ms. Trenna Geil,” he added, “have you ever considered the lucra
tive career of Davranis Security Forces agent? The food is good, it pays well, and you get to have an insane person who lets himself get kidnapped as your boss.”
Trenna snorted at the well-earned compliment, and Saan had to smirk. The staff sergeant was also covering up how embarrassed she was – again! – at having joined Nes in making over-the-top guesses only to have a civilian point out exactly what happened moments later. They really were amateurs.
Now that they had a better hypothesis as to what happened, Saan did not want to waste time standing still and figuring anything else out, or going all the way back to the Caravan to report since their radios were dead. She already left orders for Captain Hays and the freshman students to continue doing research into the bombing, and they locked down the place after she stepped out. Her best course of action would be to stick with trying to find Dastou.
“Trenna, stay between us as we go, please,” Saan ordered.
Saan-Hu led the way along the hall and reached the first deep-red droplets they could track, spotting two more splatters down the same line of sight, and found herself hoping they wouldn’t find a bigger, more ominous pool along the path.
Blurred Weaponry (Saints of the Void, Book 1) Page 12
