Trickster

by J. C. Andrijeski

  Terian nudged me away, directing my attention and light back to the Barrier, along with that of the rest of the group. Once he had us all looking that way, he illuminated the relevant light signatures in the jungle up ahead, lighting them up in a fountain of colored sparks.

  I had already seen it by then.

  A split-second before Terian highlighted the signature in the Barrier space, I pinged my own findings back to Guoreum and to Central.

  Even so, I honestly didn’t know if I saw it first with my own sight before Terian showed all of us… or if I simply saw it a few beats earlier because I was more closely connected to Terian’s light. Either way, while the rest of the group caught up, I was already staring at the set of imprints that materialized seemingly out of nowhere among the trees.

  “They’re close,” Varlan said through the comm. “Very close.”

  I couldn’t see the older seer, but I frowned.

  He was right.

  “Headed straight towards us,” I muttered. I switched my comm back to private, aiming my next words to Terian, even as I thought them. “Could they mean to parlay…?”

  “Galaith thinks so, yes,” Terian said.

  He left his own vocals open on the public channel, but I felt him look over at me, his attention briefly and sharply focused.

  “Do we intend to honor the parlay request?” I said, letting the others hear me that time.

  “We do,” Terian confirmed.

  “Any stipulations?” Gregor said.

  “I’ll coordinate that, through Galaith,” Terian replied, matter-of-fact. “I’m not acting with full discretion in this, not anymore. Please expect some delay in the issuing of commands, and do not get itchy fingers. I have been asked to caution everyone not to make any aggressive moves whatsoever, not without a direct order from me.”

  I didn’t ask the next question dancing at the tip of my tongue.

  I felt it hovering there, though.

  Terian pushed at me subtly with his light, as if asking me not to ask it, at least not in front of the others. I honored the unspoken request, without ever being certain I heard it.

  I knew one thing: Terian wasn’t happy.

  I didn’t know if that came from something Galaith had communicated to him, or from something that one of the other teams of Org infiltrators had picked up about the actions or intentions of the group of seers approaching us… or something else.

  I strongly suspected Terian wasn’t happy about being pushed aside, though.

  “I want two teams to spread out our range,” Terian continued, giving me another hard stare from behind the Barrier. “North and south. Varlan… deploy whomever you think is best. When and if you receive the retreat signal from me, I want you to break off, lose any pursuit if you can and head back to camp. Any problems, use the secure network and stay out of the Barrier. If necessary, we’ll turn this into a full-scale military operation, but for now, we’re assuming normal diplomatic rules, as they pertain to the Seven and their acolytes in the postwar Seertown Treaty.”

  I thought it was an interesting choice of words, if a politic one.

  What the fuck was going on, though?

  Obviously Galaith had hijacked this op from Terian, in the same way that Terian hijacked it from Varlan.

  But why? What had changed?

  Again, I felt a denser pulse of attention and warning from Terian.

  I did my best to shield my light more carefully from view. Even as I did, Terian’s mind whispered through mine, sparking hotter, more dangerous-feeling flames.

  You are smart, brother Quay, Terian sent softly.

  The top-tier seer felt angry.

  Truly angry, perhaps for the first time since I had met him.

  Also for the first time, that anger felt aimed at me.

  Perhaps you are a little too smart, brother. Particularly given your rather amateur shielding abilities. A colder flavor seeped into Terian’s light. I don’t suppose you could at least try to act like an infiltrator out in the field, working a live op, could you, brother? Or am I asking too much? I have perhaps given you too much responsibility too soon, brother?

  Embarrassment wafted off my light.

  I didn’t let the emotion linger.

  I slammed a shield over my aleimi instead, then spent a few more seconds weaving a tighter net over my mind and thoughts, one that even the pod shouldn’t be able to penetrate, apart from Varlan.

  Better, Terian conceded, seconds later.

  The anger remained in his light, and in the thoughts he aimed at me.

  But we might have to up your training in that area, brother. Perhaps I can help some. If nothing else, in the area of inducements. I can be quite creative with the stick, you know, not only the carrot… and it appears carrots might not be quite motivating enough in your case.

  I nodded, letting the other feel my acquiescence.

  Something in my surrender that time seemed to appease the other male.

  Very well, then, Terian lifted his light, making it less overtly angry. In the meantime, if I feel anything like that from you again, brother Quay, with an enemy group of high-ranked seers so close to our collective asses, I will fucking skin you, brother. Live op, or no. I will skin you, and then I’ll feed what is left of you to the jungle.

  That time, I didn’t answer at all.

  I felt the words somewhere in the region of my belly, but I didn’t waste Terian’s time with empty apologies. I knew, somehow, that we were beyond such formalities.

  Terian expected me to make it up in the field.

  As in now––and not in words.

  I could do that.

  I also felt the real source underlying the other’s emotional intensity.

  Dehgoies.

  One of the seers approaching us was likely Dehgoies.

  Even as I noted that, far behind my reinforced shield, I got another flash from the senior infiltrators back at Guoreum.

  Tule confirmed my impression about Dehgoies.

  He followed that immediately with a second dump of information from their combined efforts with Central, as well as the two teams Galaith had added to our overall infiltration support. Seven seers, at least two, possibly three, with unusually high ranks were approaching our part of the jungle.

  Dehgoies was cloaked by two of the high-rankers, and therefore difficult to see, in terms of the status of his own aleimi, but they ID’d him through trauma markers, like Terian intimated, not by his infiltrator actuals.

  I looked at the disjointed array of Barrier signatures and imprints, trying to collate them roughly into individual beings before I passed on the overall findings. I did it quickly, though, as quickly as I could without mistakes, and without causing more than a few seconds’ delay between the original ping and my release of the intel to Terian.

  I waited again while Terian looked at it.

  I let Terian feel I was holding off before disseminating to Varlan and the others.

  The whole team had come to a stop by then.

  I stood next to Gregor by a cluster of giant buttress roots that fanned off the largest of the swamp trees in a smallish clearing. The roots rippled down off the thick trunks like flattened snakes, twisting down from thinner to thicker from the lowest of the trunk-like branches reaching out from above our heads. Ferns and plants with sharper green leaves poked out from between the root folds.

  I looked at their colors and glows with my aleimic sight, then noted the position of the palm trees growing in another dense cluster just to my right, mapping out the physical space.

  Once I’d done so, for the first time, I briefly switched on the infrared I wore under my helmet, confirming my view via the Barrier. In the process, I looked for snakes and other animals, even though I was more likely to see those from the Barrier.

  I paused to smack an insect against my neck, wincing at the sting when I killed it.

  I felt queasy still, maybe from the malaria pills, but I doubted that was all of it.

 
; I could feel the buzz in the construct as it changed. The tension in those vibrating strands increased, accompanied by a sick feeling that might have been adrenaline but had a strangely familiar flavor of darker melancholy woven in.

  I didn’t think the feeling came from Terian alone, or even directly, but somehow that higher-vibrating tension I felt got informed by something related to Terian’s light.

  Even as I thought it, Terian gave me the ping to disseminate the intel to the rest of the pod. I did it without thought. As I did, I found myself unintentionally sharing that emotional darkness I’d felt, what seemed to strangle Terian’s end of the construct.

  “Fuck,” Gregor muttered next to me, his comm switched off. “What is that? What is that feeling?”

  I didn’t try to answer him.

  I saw Cualla and Karenti glance over at me, too.

  I felt their agreement with Gregor’s words, and their unease about whatever caused the emotional flavor.

  Usually Org agents weren’t invited or encouraged to feel things from one another out in the field. It was a distraction. Moreover, since seers are so sensitive to light frequencies in the first place, it could cause a ripple effect that might amplify that emotion, if enough of the others resonated with it on a deeper, less-conscious level.

  No one wanted to feel that kind of thing, anyway.

  It was bad enough when the emotion was positive, but this reeked of the camps, of being left alone, in the dark, powerless.

  It reeked of being a slave.

  Again, I felt agreement from Karenti and Gregor.

  I shoved my emotional reactions harder from my mind, but not before an image of Krikov briefly appeared there.

  I found myself wondering again what the hell was going on, but quieter that time, out of the range of the parts of my light that Gregor or one of the others might overhear. That sick feeling worsened, though, turning into a near anxiety, coupled with what started to feel a lot like jealousy coming from my own light.

  Terian was reacting to seeing Dehgoies.

  He was reacting with emotion. A hell of a lot of emotion.

  More than was considered safe out in the field.

  I felt the realization reverberate in my own light.

  Dehgoies was coming here.

  Not in chains, but to parlay––and moreover, Galaith seemed intent on respecting the rules of that parlay. He was going to allow Dehgoies to speak as a delegate of the Seven or the Adhipan, or whoever the fuck he spoke for now. He intended to treat Dehgoies as a protected diplomat from an enemy force.

  Then, assuming he continued to follow the rules, Galaith was going to let Dehgoies go.

  No wonder Terian was pissed.

  As my mind turned over the reality of those developments, I found another part of my light putting different but similar pieces together, making sense of what this would mean to Terian. Not just seeing Dehgoies in the flesh, presumably for the first time since they were brothers––but being forced to treat Dehgoies as a protected enemy agent.

  I wondered if Terian would be able to handle that according to protocol, particularly given who he believed the pregnant female to be.

  Particularly since Terian believed, I had no doubt, that Dehgoies had been tricked into changing sides in the first place, then brainwashed further in the time since.

  More than any of that, though, I shared his feeling of betrayal.

  Not only by Dehgoies, but by Galaith.

  Galaith had stolen Terian’s chance to make things right. By agreeing to the parlay, Galaith had stolen Terian’s opportunity to take his friend into living custody, to perhaps try and reverse what had been done to him.

  Moreover, Galaith had stolen Terian’s chance to dispose of the female seer.

  From what I could feel, Galaith had done those things without so much as an explanation.

  Terian looked over at me.

  His eyes appeared cat-like in the dark, his amber irises glowing faintly in my infrared lenses. I had already clamped down harder on my aleimi, but Terian’s gaze didn’t linger. Instead, it shifted back towards the tree-line at the edge of the clearing, towards the dark where I could now feel those seven presences approaching our position.

  Seven.

  They had sent seven seers, presumably with Dehgoies in their number.

  Was Dehgoies a follower these days, I wondered? Or still a leader?

  Was the number of seers some kind of message, too?

  I did not know the answer to any of these things.

  All I could do for those twenty or so minutes was wait along with the rest of my pod, listening to the silence, watching the small party approach us through the dense branches with my light.

  Fifteen

  Parlay

  26 clicks east of Rio Negro

  348 clicks west-northwest of Manaus

  The Amazonian Basin, Brazil

  December 1, 1978

  At some point while I stood there, waiting, I lost access to Central.

  I frowned, looking for them with my light, but I could not reach them.

  I still had a direct line to the Guoreum seers.

  Then, a few seconds later, I lost that, too.

  I glanced at Terian, hesitant, then resolved myself and pinged him, showing him the silence I now faced from our infiltration support teams.

  He gestured silently to me that he knew.

  Following that acknowledgment, he said no more.

  I stared at his profile in the dark, my heart beating harder in my chest, but I knew better than to try and press him for more information. I didn’t know if he’d been cut off from Central, too, or how. Still it caused a jolt of fear when I realized the cause of the break in comms might be the seers approaching us rapidly through the dark.

  The idea that they could own sight ranks that surpassed anything the network could penetrate was a shock, to say the least.

  I hadn’t once encountered that in the field.

  I hadn’t once encountered beings who could get past Central, whatever a few of the higher-ranked, off-the-griders could do to a local pod or a field unit with decent averages.

  I reassured myself that Galaith had his own team on the job now.

  Terian must be working directly with that group, bypassing me totally.

  It occurred to me in the same breath that Central may have cut me out of the loop deliberately. Circumstances had shifted enough that the possibility was a real one––they may have decided the parameters of this meeting fell above my paygrade. The realization frustrated me slightly, but only in the background of my light, and only to the extent that I craved more knowledge of this…

  Well, whatever this was.

  I already knew we had stepped into highly unusual territory––possibly even historic territory. Just to be here at all may be a stroke of luck, in terms of the potential significance of whatever agreements came out of this “negotiation.”

  They were almost upon us now.

  I watched the seven seers approach, using my aleimi.

  Now, I got only the basic intel shared by my pod via Varlan.

  Indeterminate sight ranks.

  Unreg’d… which we’d already assumed.

  One had a tag associated with a longstanding arrest warrant we had in the files, but that didn’t tell me anything. Any unreg’d seer caught working outside one of the Human Protection Act agencies was technically a terrorist.

  Hell, any unreg’d seer, period, was technically a terrorist, at least above the age of fifteen.

  Even the clan seers were all supposed to be tagged these days.

  Still, whoever they were, they had a lot of trust to think that the Org would honor the parlay, given that they’d stolen property from us already. Not to mention the fact that Terian and Varlan’s team outnumbered the approaching group by more than three to one, even on the ground.

  Varlan’s pod counted out at sixteen, including me.

  That didn’t include Terian, or the eight guards that accompanied
us from the camp.

  Either way, just in physical numbers alone, these unreg’d assholes were potentially screwed once they crossed Terian’s wing lines, enabling us to cut off their exit.

  That didn’t even include the firepower we boasted from the network.

  It was a risk I would never take.

  It was also one that could backfire badly, particularly if they didn’t have anything with which to negotiate––meaning, anything Galaith actually wanted.

  Of course, I assumed they must have something Galaith wanted, or at least something Galaith thought he might want, or he wouldn’t be honoring the parlay in the first place. Galaith wasn’t the type to abuse the parlay rules to entrap an enemy seer.

  He would simply have ordered Terian to chase them down––particularly under these circumstances, where we’d nearly caught up with them already.

  All of this ran through my mind as I waited.

  Maybe that’s why I didn’t notice the time pass until I got a secondary ping at the edges of the construct.

  They were almost here.

  I found I was nearly holding my breath when the group of seven seers finally broke into the clearing. Well… they melted in, moving the way seers did when they went from disguising their numbers to revealing the truth of them slowly.

  As they did, I got the signal to ditch the infrared.

  Right as I clicked mine off, three of the seers in my pod ignited yisso torches.

  The torches flared bright, illuminating the small clearing.

  I slid the goggles up to my forehead as I blinked against the sickly, greenish light, feeling my muscles tense as I fought to adjust my eyes to the regular visual spectrum so I could make out bodies and faces.

  At first, I only saw three shapes standing at the end of that clearing.

  I didn’t recognize any of them.

  The oldest had to be at least three hundred years, unless he’d aged poorly.

  He had a strange face––handsome, but more like a human’s face than a seer’s, with European-type features and gray eyes. Those eyes weren’t gray like my own, but more of a cloudy-sky kind of gray, bordering on blue, a touch of steel living in their intensity.