Bridge

by JC Andrijeski

  They had Syrimne.

  “Fifteen seconds,” Revik said, his voice sharp.

  They all stood in a line that aimed at the back entrance.

  Revik stood more or less at the head of that line, with six infiltrators in front of him for cover. Allie, Balidor and Yumi stood at the back of it, with only the pilots, Jorag and Illeg, behind them. Jon had seers on all sides of him now, since some still crouched in the areas of their seats, waiting for the back hatch to open and let them all out.

  Despite the cramped and close quarters, Jon grew conscious of the silence.

  He reached for Balidor, knowing the senior infiltrator would be responsible for keeping enough light on the four of them for Revik to work unencumbered. Jon didn’t ask where that light came from, but he had his suspicions. After all, it likely wouldn’t be coming from the other infiltrators. Telekinesis or not, Revik needed them all operating at full capacity.

  “Five seconds,” Revik said.

  A bump told Jon the Chinook had touched down on the dirt.

  Gripping the seats on either side as he swayed on his feet, Jon felt his pulse pounding sideways in his throat and chest, making his whole body vibrate.

  He gripped the threads holding him to the other three, glancing one more time at Allie even as he heard the gears fire up for the back door. He couldn’t see her face anymore, but he felt her, stronger than the other two, a sharp, white light wrapped in his.

  “Two seconds,” Revik said.

  The hatch door at the back of the Chinook was already halfway to the ground. Sunlight poured through the opening.

  Then gunfire erupted from the two seers who mysteriously stationed themselves on either side of the lowering door in front of Revik. The other six fanned out, covering every inch of the space where Revik and Jon stood. Jon knew they were laying covering fire, so barely tracked them as he clung more tightly to Allie’s light, tightening the shield around Revik through her with every ounce of his concentration.

  Then a bolt of electricity exploded out of the seer standing in front of him.

  It nearly knocked Jon down.

  He gasped in shock, gripping the seats on either side of where he stood.

  He hadn’t been hit. The bolt didn’t drain him, didn’t touch his own light at all––unlike the way the telekinesis had done in the past. This time, the power source came from elsewhere, from whatever pool of light Balidor channeled to Revik to keep him fully juiced.

  Even so, the sheer power behind that first bolt nearly brought Jon to his knees.

  He felt an exhilarated charge off Revik, along with a focus that put Jon in open awe.

  He had an irrational urge to yell, “Fuck, yeah!” but he didn’t do that either.

  Even so, adrenaline shot through his limbs, bringing an odd grin to his face.

  This was it.

  This was finally it.

  For the first time in over a hundred years, Syrimne was fighting a war.

  25

  FIRST STRIKE

  A FAN OF infiltrators shielded them, in front and behind.

  All but a few stood with rifles raised, firing with a kind of synchronized precision Jon found strangely reassuring, if only for the depth of concentration on their faces. Even so, he knew their jobs were mainly defensive, as odd as that seemed.

  Revik crouched behind them, and behind a mobile organic shield, in addition to the segment of wall they’d taken from the opposing side for cover.

  Revik was the offensive team.

  He’d already personally disabled a good chunk of the SCARB and federal military’s first wave of defense. Jon didn’t even know if they were facing Shadow’s people, per se, or if the human forces still operated more or less autonomously.

  Revik didn’t seem to care.

  Either that, or he figured hitting them hard, and head-on, would make an effective message, no matter who bore the brunt of it. It didn’t occur to Jon until later to think about the lives involved. He was too jacked up on adrenaline and too wrapped up in Revik’s light to think about much of anything but the targets in front of them as they walked down that ramp and onto the packed-dirt landing pad.

  Anyway, this was war. He’d known it would be different.

  Even now, gunfire exploded out of infiltrators’ rifles on all sides, deafening him.

  He saw uniformed soldiers firing back from foxholes in the field, as well as from the few remaining vehicles. An explosion from a rocket launcher made him duck in reflex. Revik hit the missile off-course with another blast of his aleimic light, working so fast it happened before Jon could even make out the thing’s exact route. He watched in awe as the missile slammed at breakneck speed into a row of planes, knocking them back and plowing a hole through the middle of them with a deafening screech of metal.

  A bare second’s pause––

  Then the first of those planes exploded, shooting up green-tinted flames. White and black smoke belched out of the hole in the side, and the flames shot higher, igniting the nearby trees. Jon barely had time to stare before another explosion sent his eyes forward.

  He saw the man holding the rocket launcher on fire, along with the man next to him.

  Jon looked behind them, but the Chinook had already taken off.

  Jon didn’t know where it had gone.

  He was too focused on holding the shield around Revik to think about it for more than a fraction of a second.

  He flinched again violently, jerked back to the present when an armored car exploded abruptly in front of him, shooting hot metal in a near-perfect ring from around the vehicle’s shell––or at least the rear end of it, where Jon imagined the fuel tanks lived. Soldiers were thrown back from both sides. Most were on fire, screaming from shrapnel wounds as they fell.

  Jon saw more running, presumably those who’d been using the full-sized Humvee as cover.

  He winced again when two of the larger weapons cracked with loud, unnatural-sounding reports as the metal fissured. Another missile headed for them and that one plowed into the row of smoking planes as well, exploding into two more of them.

  A set of gat-like guns on turrets exploded within a few heartbeats of that larger blast.

  When not in danger of running out of light, Revik seemed to be able to work pretty much non-stop, without so much as a breather between hits. Gaps took fractions of a second, from what Jon could tell––less than that, in the last dozen or so targets.

  If anything, those gaps shortened the longer he worked.

  He didn’t seem to be tiring, either, or showing any signs of strain.

  Jon glanced at the Elaerian’s face periodically, even with his own focus locked obsessively on the shield around Revik’s light. That focus required that his attention be almost perfectly split between the resonances he shared in Allie’s light, the light supply from Balidor, and the integrity of the shield where it wrapped around Revik’s aleimic form.

  Jon also had to be aware of any attempted incursions from the Barrier, as well as the line he held to Maygar, who crouched down behind the same wall as Revik, providing support to the other seer with his telekinetic structures, even as he set off a few fires of his own.

  Jon knew Revik mostly used the headset for targeting, since he crouched behind the wall, but he used his eyes, too, from where he could see through the transparent shield.

  He also used his light.

  Maygar seemed to need to rely more on his eyes, whether via VR in his headset or in the physical, but maybe that was partly psychological. He’d been put in charge of watching their flank, and as far as Jon could tell, he hadn’t missed much.

  Maygar’s normally-dark eyes now glowed with an unearthly golden-green light, slightly different and darker than the shade of either Revik’s or Allie’s while they operated those Elaerian frequencies. Jon watched as Maygar used the VR feeds of the structure behind them to make a gun explode in the hands of a soldier who’d been heading their way.

  Jon realized only then that a segment o
f the SCARB team had split off from the rest, trying to get behind them, using the nearby rec center as cover.

  The explosion from Maygar’s telekinesis was smaller, cruder somehow than Revik’s, but Jon saw Maygar flinch as it happened anyway, almost as if his own success surprised him, or bewildered him, maybe.

  Then Maygar sent a short impulse to Revik, letting him know about the SCARB forces that continued to regroup behind the cinder-bloc structure.

  Right as Jon felt the communication pass between them, he felt another attempted hit at Revik’s light. Pulling his mind off of Maygar, Jon focused solely back on the shields.

  He’d spotted a number of attempts to penetrate his and Allie’s shield already, both from the construct and from what felt like individual seers, working for whichever groups fought back inside the Barrier.

  Jon thought he felt Cass in one of those.

  He thought he felt Feigran in one, too.

  Both made him flinch, particularly the probe from Cass.

  Jon jerked at the contact, then pinged Balidor the same instant, just as he’d been trained to do. His alarm mostly felt wasted, though. Cass’ presence withdrew fast, pretty much the instant she touched the shield.

  The sensation reminded Jon of a child touching a hot stove.

  Not long after that, Jon felt glimmers of Wreg and Balidor, and knew they were likely tracking that thread back to its source, probably so they could pinpoint her location when Revik finished his…

  …Well, this.

  When Revik finished this.

  Jon flinched at another concussive blast.

  That one came from behind them, and was followed by an even louder groan of metal.

  Jon peered around the larger of the two walls behind where they crouched, still gripping the shield with every conscious element in his light. Looking up, he saw that one of the back wings of the recreation center itself belched black smoke, presumably from another diverted missile. Flames rose above the roof as Jon watched, right before a second area exploded outward, raining down bricks, glass and cement, trembling the ground under Jon’s feet.

  So much for the SCARB commandos trying to get behind them.

  Jon felt glimmers of Revik’s light as it snaked through walls, floors and furniture inside the still-standing segments of the structure. The intent there bewildered him, the stripped-down feel of his light, the sheer single-mindedness of it––coupled with a technical knowledge that frankly blew his mind. The Elaerian scanned not only the organics, but the physical structure of the building itself, meaning those components seers referred to as “dead.”

  That included everything––rock, earth, run-of-the-mill brick, concrete, glass, stone, wood, metal, gasoline, water. He could even see physical substances invisible to the naked eye––natural gas, oxygen, hydrogen, carbon dioxide, propane.

  Revik mentioned that a few times, during the training.

  He’d sounded so blasé about it at the time.

  He made it seem like a detail.

  Jon knew that Revik’s ability to see the physical world from the Barrier constituted one of the racial differences between Sarks and Elaerian. Sarhaciennes couldn’t see physical objects with their seer sight, no matter how highly ranked they were in actual. They could see impressions of it, sure, mostly based on imprints left there by other living beings––but they couldn’t see the physicality itself.

  Revik could.

  That ability to see the physical from inside the Barrier provided a distinct advantage when it came to telekinesis, Revik had remarked dryly, while he’d been explaining how he intended to combine and connect their aleimic structures.

  Obviously, it would make it easier to pinpoint the telekinesis––Jon got that, even then, but he didn’t really get it, not until he watched Revik in action.

  Revik told him once he could see the physical past the microscopic level with his light, and even beyond that, since the limits in the Barrier were less “hard” than those of the physical world. It allowed him to split atoms, if he so desired.

  Well. Theoretically, anyway… Revik had added in that offhanded way of his.

  Jon found the idea terrifying now––well, then too, but the fear had been more abstract before. Anyway, as far as he knew, Revik hadn’t actually done that, at least not that ended up in the history books, not even back when he’d been Syrimne.

  The idea that he could, though––and that Allie could, in theory or otherwise––set off a nuclear bomb with his mind alone, struck Jon as wrong on more than one level.

  Looking around at the smoking and burning field, he also found himself thinking Revik probably hadn’t tried it yet––meaning created fission or fusion reactions with the power of his mind––because he hadn’t needed to. Revik’s more conventional approach to weaponry seemed to be highly effective all on its own.

  It was a wonder, really, Jon thought, looking around at the devastation Revik wrought in less than an hour’s time, that they’d ever brought him down in the first place.

  Revik had the other side on the run now.

  He didn’t waste a lot of thought on that, either.

  Jon felt the Elaerian’s attention start to move pretty much the instant he no longer perceived a direct threat coming from the soldiers who’d met them upon landing. The split in Revik’s consciousness grew more pronounced; Jon felt him tracking those men and women running across the grass and into the trees, counting the weapons they still carried. He also felt an ongoing assessment by Revik of whether and where they were likely to regroup for a second assault, and what they might try to hit them with, if they did.

  Jon could practically feel him calculating risks, odds, likely scenarios.

  A portion of Revik’s attention returned to the air strip.

  A few of those planes already burned from diverted missiles. Even so, Jon jumped half a foot when the first small plane exploded outward.

  Jon saw its wheels lift off the ground when its fuel tank ignited. The fuselage broke in half in midair, right before the pieces fell abruptly to the scorched and burning grasses just outside the dirt oval of what remained of the meadow.

  The sound echoed loudly across the park.

  It shocked Jon into near-paralysis, even after the last hour of smaller booms and blasts, the constant rat-a-tat of automatic and semi-automatic gunfire and the last big explosion caused by the gas lines Revik ignited inside the rec center.

  Before Jon finished staring at the first plane, and the smoke and flames belching out of the hole in the Fiberglas fuselage and the shattered cockpit glass, the larger Cessna next to it went up, exploding out at twice the volume of the first.

  Then a military helicopter ignited.

  Then another.

  Despite the volume of the explosions, what struck Jon more than anything was the methodicalness, the utter lack of fanfare in the elimination of each aircraft. In some respects, it reminded him more of watching a planned demolition of a building––or perhaps, more aptly, the routine crushing of cars to make space in a junkyard.

  Revik continued to work systematically through the remainder of the parked airplanes, exploding the gas tanks of each, one by one, before moving to the rest of the military helicopters, and then what remained of the ground transport.

  He moved next to stationary guns, all of which were unmanned by now––then to underground ammunition storage.

  The last of those caches created earthquakes and near-craters where they went off, but Jon still felt nothing but an underlying “ho-hum” attitude from Revik, like he was just ticking off another item on a checklist. Only when he finished with the weapons and ammunition stores did that sharp, green light fade slightly from the rings of his irises.

  In that bare instant of relative quiet, Jon heard Revik’s mind inside their mobile construct, for the first time since they’d left San Francisco.

  His message was brief, chilling in its lack of inflection.

  Have the others empty the last storage locker for sup
plies, he sent. We’re moving on.

  Understood, Jon heard from Balidor, who stood somewhere on the other side of that wall.

  Revik looked at Jon, his clear irises curiously blank, still sparking with the vaguest hint of that sharper, green light.

  The OBE gates next, he sent. We’ll start with the one in the north. I want to lock down the city before they have time to react.

  That time, his mental voice bordered on polite.

  Making a strangely understated gesture with one hand, he indicated towards the nearest Humvee, which Jon realized only then that Revik spared for their use. Four more armored vehicles stood in the opening of the fence nearest to where they stood, and Jon saw seers jogging for two of those already.

  The OBE around the base was clearly down.

  As if in response to his thought, one of the transformers overhead exploded in a cascade of white and blue sparks.

  Revik followed Jon once he’d started walking to the armored vehicle, and Jon found himself looking around at the burning holes in the ground, then up at the clouds formed by the columns of black smoke that doubtless could be seen all over the city.

  The airstrip was pretty much gone.

  He ducked his head to climb into the Humvee when Neela held open a door for him, her rifle still up and aimed at the wider field.

  Jon slid over on the Humvee’s back seat.

  Staring out the windows, he took in the burning roof of the rec center, the sparking transformer bleeding blue sparks. He glanced over blackened jeeps, tanks and planes, cars whose tires had melted and pooled from fire, the sharp crack of glass panes in the fires’ heat, the drifting black and gray plumes of smoke. Clods of dirt and pieces of guns littered the meadow, and the hood of their Humvee. He heard the distant sound of ammunition continuing to ignite somewhere underground. Smoke poured out of most of the underground hides he could see.

  He tried not to think of the smell that filled his nose, which had flavors of burnt flesh along with burning rubber and cordite, and a heavier smell of burning oil and gasoline. The stench was overpowering through the open door of the Humvee; it didn’t really get better until seers finished piling into the three rows of seats and shut the doors.