Trickster

by J. C. Andrijeski

  Despite all that, someone had figured out a way in.

  Frowning, I motioned to Cat in sign language to collect imprints.

  As I looked around at the screaming, dirty faces, a sick feeling twisted through my gut.

  Something about this facility felt like black ops to me––meaning, blacker than us. Meaning, off-the-grid black: no-names, erased identities, people who didn’t exist in the registry at all. I suspected this was one of those facilities where a certain percentage of the prisoners simply disappeared.

  Remembering the medical research building I’d seen on the site specs, only a few clicks away from the adult paddocks, I brushed the thought aside.

  Even so, images flicked in the darkness behind my eyes.

  Varlan and I, carrying Terian’s limp, broken body back to camp.

  I didn’t want to remember that either, but I couldn’t help it.

  He’d been gone. Really gone.

  His light left faster than I had ever seen with one so recently dead.

  I didn’t feel him at all in the immediate Barrier space, not even in those few seconds of silence following the shot that cracked open his skull, splattering pieces of bone and brains onto Karenti’s armored shirt.

  Immediately following physical death, a period of blackout generally took place, but there was almost always some contact with the deceased. That was especially true of a sudden, violent death. In those instances, the seer usually came back in aleimic form, if only to make sense of what just occurred.

  Usually, they did not fully understand how they had died.

  If they were human, they often did not know they’d died at all.

  With Terian, I experienced none of those things.

  I wasn’t told anything about rituals planned or conducted by Central to guide his aleimic form to the places beyond the Barrier, either. If those rituals took place, I wasn’t invited.

  I tried not to take that personally.

  Really, I’d only known him a few days.

  Even so, it hurt. Not the status part so much.

  The silence.

  Apart from mandatory debriefs with Central following the incident, I never discussed it with anyone, not even members of my own pod. Of course, I was ordered not to discuss it.

  Terian’s name never came up as deceased in the feeds.

  I never even heard rumors, not about him dying.

  I couldn’t honestly comprehend how such a thing could be kept secret for so long, or why Central would even desire that, beyond a certain point. Among seers, Terian’s name was well-known. Like Dehgoies, Terian was known even outside the Org.

  It surprised me, just how effective that blackout was.

  I would have expected some leaks to make it to the feeds––from guards at Guoreum who saw us carrying the body. From Org seers supporting us from Central. From Terian’s direct reports and others he worked with closely. From Adhipan seers who heard or saw the shooting. From one of the Sweeps with us in the jungle––or one of those overseeing our construct from the CIC back at Guoreum.

  Hell, Dehgoies himself could have leaked the news… not to mention the SCARB agents who interrogated those of us who were there.

  How had none of those people talked?

  I didn’t know how to feel about that silence.

  I’d even heard stories about Terian since that time.

  Meaning, as if he were still alive.

  I’d heard rumors through the network grapevine about ops supposedly led by him in other parts of the world. Once or twice, I heard whispers around that South American op, too, but nothing about Terian being shot, much less about him being dead.

  Instead, they spoke of an intermediary who escaped from a Black Arrow work camp, a prescient under the protection of Dehgoies the Defector. They speculated about who the intermediary was, their relationship to Dehgoies––wife, friend, cousin, sister––their possible importance to the Seven. I heard rumored sightings of the Adhipan, as well, and I heard other infiltrators laugh at those rumors, even friends of mine.

  There were rumors of Dehgoies’ death, interestingly enough.

  Some said Dehgoies died in that jungle.

  Some said the female intermediary gave birth to the Bridge.

  As in The Bridge.

  A lot of it sounded like religious mumbo-jumbo to me, and frankly, given the Evolutionist cult, the Rebellion, and the crap I’d just quelled in Egypt, I didn’t want to hear it, even knowing the stories themselves were all bullshit.

  I highly doubted any members of my ex-pod circulated those things I heard.

  A few days after everything went down, we’d been summarily disbanded.

  I got orders to redeploy to the Middle East that very day, along with a list of names, stats and detailed personnel files for my new pod, who would meet me in Cairo.

  I wasn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth.

  We all got drunk together on the flight to Washington D.C., talking excitedly about our new postings and assignments… but no one spoke a word about what we’d witnessed, not even in the most private, whispered conversations between us.

  We’d all been afraid.

  Me, as much as any of them.

  Me, likely more than any of them, given my relationship to Terian in those final days.

  All of us received a bump in our security clearance following the event, but that didn’t diminish the fear; it exacerbated it. Everyone in the pod recognized the connection between our network promotions and what took place out in that jungle.

  We were being rewarded for our silence.

  That meant they’d be watching us.

  Possibly indefinitely.

  We also knew that at some point, Central might decide it was too much of a risk, letting us live. I didn’t fully understand the security risks at stake––I suspected no one in my pod did––but we could feel and observe enough to know they were significant.

  Clearly, something we’d seen mattered deeply to Central, and to Galaith.

  Whatever that thing was, we’d likely never know, not for certain.

  Therefore, I imagine my ex-pod mates did what I did.

  We put our heads down, wiped the incident from our minds, and went back to work.

  We thanked Central for the boost in our clearance, expressed gratitude for any promotions or perks that came our way, and worked our new jobs with nothing but obedience, loyalty, respect… the necessary pillars of the Org’s network.

  And we kept our mouths shut.

  “Race traitor!” a female voice screamed at me in Hindi, shaking the fence.

  I turned to look at her.

  She stared back at me, scowling, her face red with fury.

  I stepped back in reflex when a male seer spat at me, even as a different female, one holding up a cardboard sign with giant lettering spelling out SLAVERY in English aimed spittle at Cat.

  I scowled at the first seer, unable to hide my contempt as I glanced back at the rest of my pod, who had scattered across the front lines of the same fence, watching the raging crowd warily, half in and half out of the Barrier. I sent a ping around to remind them to ignore the chaos on the other side, that we weren’t really here for that.

  We should have taken one of the Org jets to Kiev, Orcai joked through the pod-only link, speaking quietly, so the wider construct wouldn’t pick it up. They generally have better drugs in Kiev, anyway. And softer pillows.

  Or at least better-looking fuck-bait in the fetish clubs, another of my seers, Cleaver, chimed in, grinning both in my light and in real life, from where he stood next to the main entrance to the nearest of the long cement cellblocks.

  I gave each of them a seer’s eye roll, but only grunted.

  Like them, I felt jaded towards these protests, more irritated than moved.

  Maybe I had seen too much of this self-righteousness over the years. The clothes changed, as did specific faces. The content of the signs and slogans did not––apart from an occasionally clever catch-phra
se or alliteration.

  I could only hope some of these seers would live long enough for history to validate the Org for their work.

  I knew it inevitably would, one day.

  “Dugra-te di aros!” another female spat, shoving her face against the wire mesh of the enclosure fence. She shook the wall of her chain link cage violently as I walked by.

  She shrieked as other dirt-bloods and humans shoved into her, slamming into her back, but she continued to glare at me and swear in Prexci, almost like she knew me personally. The Sark switched seamlessly to Spanish then, a human language, and began gesturing at me and shouting at me in that language, too.

  Luckily, I didn’t understand most of those words.

  “Rot in the dregs of the underworld…” another seer yelled at me, another male.

  He wore the Nazi scar on his face.

  I wondered if he noticed the near-identical scars on Cat, Jarvis, or Mugwe.

  I didn’t read him to find out.

  Exchanging looks with a few of the local guards standing by the outer doors, I only grunted when they gave me a series of cynical smiles. From their expressions, I guessed they were enjoying not being the only ones the prisoners spat on for a change.

  “Anything?” I said, addressing my own people through the link.

  My eyes shifted back to the chaos and fighting on the other side of the enclosure. Despite the crude fencing, this part of the facility was mostly state-of-the-art.

  No aging sixties kitsch here.

  No brick buildings or stone huts, either.

  The walls sported top-of-the-line feed monitors, and a number of the walls I’d seen teemed with organics. From the Barrier it appeared that at least part of the building had to be running on artificial intelligence, possibly even sentient AI.

  I gave a last look towards those anti-glare windows, then turned to watch the crush of prisoners surge against the chain-link fence. Security guards beat them back with another round of activating pain sensors in collars, tasering the shit out of the ones who continued to resist.

  The local guards had grown bolder, I noticed, probably from realizing I wouldn’t interfere, or even judge them too harshly.

  Most of them now wielded black, featureless prods, in addition to the security options available to them through their headsets.

  Fully extended, the black-metal wands sparked with current at their ball-like ends, menacing enough to get the closest of the penned seers to lurch backwards. They couldn’t retreat far, though, what with the sweating and filthy bodies shoved against their backs, so a lot of those poor fuckers got tasered anyway.

  I watched one guard, big enough to be at least part Wvercian, hit the screaming, Spanish-speaking seer with a few hundred volts from his prod, pressing the bulb-like end into her abdomen until her eyes rolled up in her head.

  She fell to her knees when he deactivated the charge, and a few of the other prisoners dragged her back, so that she disappeared from my view.

  Good riddance, was all I thought.

  I continued to watch dispassionately as the guards worked over the crowd––several hundred seers and a few dozen humans covered with dirt and sweat and red-faced despite the ice-cold air. My mind returned to Mumbai, where a not-dissimilar crowd had stood a few days before, free but only marginally, waving signs like ants, and just as useless.

  At times, knowing how things actually worked in the world felt more like a burden than a blessing.

  I wished I could take a vacation. A real one.

  I let my mind turn, wistfully, to white-sand beaches and cool blue waves.

  In front of me, the shouts rose, grew more chaotic, harder to pick out.

  Exhaling, I clicked forward, staring at them resentfully.

  I did what I did for them.

  Even if they’d never know it, never appreciate me for it, never thank me for it. They might always see me as their enemy, but it didn’t matter.

  I did it for them.

  I did it for the good of the race.

  Nineteen

  Blackout

  Visitors Barracks, Eastside

  Parvat Shikhar Work Camp

  The Kingdom of Sikkim, Northern India

  March 13, 1979

  I threw down a black duffel on a metal table, still absorbing the intel I’d received from Central about multiple groups skirting the work camp’s perimeter.

  I was already pissed off.

  My aleimi flickered around the small group, letting off charged sparks.

  “So explain. What the fuck happened?” I said.

  Orcai, Ringu and Jaela all looked at one another.

  Cat never took her white-rimmed, nearly-black eyes off mine.

  “You really need us to tell you that, boss?” Orcai asked after another beat.

  No, I thought in irritation, I really don’t.

  We’d just been pulled off the job.

  Central called and told us the rebels would be located via other means. They told me to stick around until the locals got the inventory under control, then return to Moscow.

  I didn’t get any other explanation.

  I got cut off from my remote infiltration team at Central shortly after that final, cryptic message. A few minutes after that, I got cut out of my mid-level intelligence channels, too. The shutters came down one by one, leaving nothing but static, even when we tried to access the camp’s own private-contract infiltrators.

  Anything above a level four or five couldn’t be accessed by anyone on my team, including me. Even early recruits could normally access the levels I’d been left to work with. It was a near-total blackout, something I’d never been faced with out in the field.

  I knew my whole team felt it, pretty much as it happened.

  I thought we’d gone operation-dark at first, meaning, that the compound was under attack. Military engagements were often precipitated by that kind of loss of intelligence, so we’d all been bracing for something big.

  Then Central squawked in my ear, telling me to go do a bunch of fucking grunt work before my team got on a plane and hauled ass out.

  I knew my pod heard that communication, too.

  Things tended to happen pretty much simultaneously for a tightly-knit pod, and I’d gone out of my way to create those receptors in my new team. I knew it would make them a more effective fighting unit, to eliminate communication lags.

  Privacy was not a luxury I cared about enough to die over.

  Moreover, because of the intricacies of the Org’s network construct and the necessities of my new role, I could feel not only the living light of my primary operatives––as well as their thoughts, memories, emotional experiences, personal and non-personal threads to specific other operatives and civilians with whom they’d worked and been involved––I could feel the multitude behind them.

  Meaning, I could, to one degree or another, feel every seer that made up the network of the Org, at least below a certain rung in the ladder.

  Below my rung of that ladder, to be precise.

  Right now, I couldn’t feel shit, however… not outside my own pod.

  I knew it must have something to do with the rebels, but I also knew I was extrapolating, which wasn’t exactly the same thing as having real knowledge.

  All I knew for certain was that I’d been taken off the job.

  I knew the reasons for that likely fell under that same, vague “above my pay grade” quip that Varlan often lobbed at me when I worked for him. I’d hear rumors about what happened here in a few weeks or months, just like we had about South America.

  I’d probably never know the truth.

  Remembering my thoughts in Brazil about riding Terian’s fame to a higher rung in the network hierarchy, I couldn’t help snorting a laugh at my own stupidity.

  What a fucking idiot I was.

  Then another thought skirted in the bare edges of my light.

  They’d blacked out my team like this after that op in the jungles north of Guoreum.

&nb
sp; The memory vibrated in the upper reaches of my light, until I snuffed it.

  Even so, it lingered with me in softer currents. I found myself fighting not to put the pieces together and doing it anyway, seemingly outside my mind’s control.

  After D.C., I’d never heard anything from one of my ex-pod mates again.

  Some of them, I’d worked with for decades.

  I had received no messages, no offers to grab drinks when we worked out of adjacent locales, even though I’d sent messages to let them know where I was. I heard no rumors. I hadn’t glimpsed even one of them in feed broadcasts or heard their names mentioned in bulletins. I’d tasted not a single one of them, even once, from behind the Barrier.

  I’d separated out not a single resonance from one of their lights.

  That meant not one of them had thought about me… at all… in all that time.

  I had thought of them.

  Even when I did think of them, I’d felt not a single warm pulse or friendly ping back, even when that thought had been relatively specific, laden with sincere emotion.

  My ex-teammates had not resonated with me in return. Not a single one of them, who had been my friends, and in some cases more than that, for years and years, had been in a situation that reminded them of me, or of any of the missions we’d done together.

  I realized, suddenly, how unlikely that was.

  Or maybe I’d known before, how unlikely that was.

  Maybe I just hadn’t wanted to think about what it likely meant.

  For the first time, I let it stare me in the face, if only for those few seconds.

  Forcing my expression back to infiltrator blank, I turned to face Cat and Ringu, who both watched me carefully now, a faint concern etched into their irises.

  “We just fucking got here,” Paulo complained.

  “Did something happen?” Orcai asked, jerking my eyes to the left, to the other side of the greenish metal table.

  Orcai looked around at all of us, his face pinched with worry.