Bridge

by JC Andrijeski

  Declan yelled at her for that, telling her to get her human butt upstairs, and back on the comps, but she’d wanted to see them go. She figured this had to be a pretty big deal, the Sword going out like that, primed for some serious fucking-up-of-shit, even compared to earlier that day.

  Also, she admitted to some morbid curiosity.

  She’d heard by then, the Bridge was dead.

  According to Vik and some of the others, that meant Mr. Crystal Eyes was dead, too, or would be soon. This mission of his was strictly a suicide run––for him, anyway.

  She hoped it wasn’t for all of them.

  Him and his icers were definitely tricked out, wearing those swivel harnesses for guns, anti-grav boots, rappelling gear, stunners, armored vests––so they definitely weren’t going down without a fight. She saw them carrying enough ammo and grenades to take down maybe a dozen floors in one of those glass and steel monstrosities lining the park, even if they didn’t have the Sword’s uber-mind shit for the big guns.

  She’d seen Wreg there, and Jon.

  Wreg’d looked hotter than hell––and more dangerous than she’d ever seen him, with something like eight guns strapped to different parts of his hips and torso. Both of them looked pretty hot, even with how messed up they obviously were from the Bridge dying like that.

  Even as she thought it, that pressure returned to her mind.

  What are you doing? I need you, girl… hurry up.

  That time, Dante found herself rising abruptly to her feet.

  “Hey.” She spoke up before she knew she meant to. Once she had, she felt her face warm when three or four seers looked over. She looked directly at the gray-eyed seer, the one who’d been in charge since the others got back. She cleared her throat.

  “…Balidor, right?” she said.

  The seer took her face and body in with one flickering glance. The look wasn’t dismissive, like the ones she’d gotten from some of the big shot seers around here… but he looked plenty distracted.

  “Did you find the schematics?” he said at once.

  “Yeah,” Dante said, exhaling. “…And no. I mean, I got ‘em. But they’re old. I’m guessing the newer ones got pulled. These are like…” She scanned the dates on the code. “…Fifteen years old. So before the OBEs and organic walls and whatever else.”

  Balidor frowned.

  Unfolding his arms, he walked over to her, resting his hand on the same chair back where Dante’s rested. He leaned down to gaze down at the number one screen tied to her headset.

  After his eyes scanned the blueprints displayed on her monitor for a few seconds, he muttered what sounded like a curse. It wasn’t the seer language, which Dante recognized now, even if she couldn’t always understand it. It was something else.

  “Anything to suggest this has been tampered with?” he said, switching back to English.

  “Tampered with?” Dante let out an involuntary snort.

  His eyes shifted up, meeting hers with a sharper scrutiny.

  Dante shrugged, losing some of the bite in her voice.

  “Not tampered, Sherlock. But there’s stuff missing, yeah.” Leaning back over her keystroke flat, she scribbled in a few commands with her fingers, then used those to open up a second page with her thumbs and forefingers.

  “…See that?” She pointed at a set of numbers. “There’s stuff missing there. File sequences are dated, see? They’ve updated everything on that block but this one. That means either the owner missed their required filing, or…” She shrugged.

  “Or someone pulled the record,” Balidor muttered, finishing her thought.

  “Got it in one.” Letting him look at it, she glanced over his back at Vikram, who gave her a tense smile. “I gotta use the ladies’. Spare me for five?”

  Vikram nodded, waving her off.

  “Don’t get lost, my beautiful cousin,” he murmured, his violet eyes focusing back on the screen in front of him. “We need you to talk to the OBE when you get back. That dog won’t bark for me… or for Anale.”

  Dante grunted as she backed away from the screens, heading for the door to the hallway. “Lost” was the Vik-man’s code word for telling her not to go get stoned in the bathroom. Like she’d really do that in the middle of a friggin’ military campaign, even if her stash hadn’t already been used up. Bat’s balls, he could be an old man sometimes.

  Still, he wouldn’t be happy with her if he saw her now, either.

  Instead of hanging a left for the restrooms next door to the company kitchens, she hung a right, towards the bank of elevators by the etched-glass enclosed floor lobby.

  She didn’t really think about how she knew where she was supposed to be––or why she hadn’t told any of the others where she was going. She tried not to think about how weird it was that she’d just trust some disembodied voice in her head.

  She did trust it, though.

  Besides, the world was ending, right? If she ended up being wrong, or manipulated to dance the wig-wam for some ice-blood with a hard-on for worm meat, who really cared?

  They might all be dead in the next few hours.

  Even so, Dante caught herself glancing up and down the halls nervously after she pushed the elevator call button. Shoving her hands in her pockets, which just about pushed her oversized jeans down over her now significantly slimmer hips, she stood there, foot tapping with nerves as she listened to the wind rattle the organic panes.

  The storm they’d predicted looked to be another doozy.

  No surprise, really, but it made her nervous. She should’ve reminded Vik to do the 1812 thing––although she supposed none of the others would really be in the mood for their weird humor. They were thinking about their friends maybe getting shot.

  They were thinking about that Bridge chick, Allie, being dead.

  Muttering under her breath at the slowness of the elevators, she pressed the up button a few more times, leaning into it. She honestly couldn’t tell if she was more worried about being caught, or that someone might not notice her missing until it was too late.

  Hearing a dry cough behind her, she jumped, turning.

  Another person was walking towards her, from the same corridor where the comp-room lived. The seer’s footsteps didn’t make a sound on the gray carpet. Her dark green and blue eyes scarcely flickered when they saw Dante standing there.

  She walked right up to her and stopped, waiting for the elevator with her as if that was the most normal thing in the world.

  Dante watched with some nervousness as the seer, who happened to be Anale, pulled a gun out of her side holster and turned it sideways, examining it. Dante watched as she popped the magazine from the bottom, checking the number of bullets before she popped it back in, cocked it, then handed it to Dante, handle out.

  Dante took it tentatively, but Anale barely seemed to notice. As soon as she handed it over, she bent to pull another gun from a holster by her ankle. She used that one to replace the one she’d given Dante in the nylon shoulder holster.

  “Sixty-three?” Anale asked.

  Her voice was polite, conversational.

  “Yeah,” Dante said, wary. Unsure what else to say, she cleared her throat. “You?”

  “Sixty-three,” Anale confirmed, with a single nod, seer-fashion.

  Exhaling, Dante nodded back.

  Still at a loss, she looked down at the gun she now pointed awkwardly at the floor. She didn’t know enough about guns to know the brand or anything, but it was some kind of semi-automatic, and it had one of those organic triggers, which usually worked on intent as much as pressure. Firming her jaw, she checked that same trigger (carefully!) to make sure the safety was activated, then shoved the whole thing in the back loop of her leather belt, feeling foolish but not sure what else to do with it.

  She’d screwed around with guns before, sure.

  Mostly she hung around while Mavis shot off his dad’s guns in the swampy area back behind that squatter piss hole they’d called “the office,” w
here they’d stashed their illegal boxes for hacks. Mavis got on macho streaks a few times, probably because his dad was some quasi-military weirdo who mostly got rich on defense contracts.

  Mavis even taught her how to use a carbine once, when he “borrowed” an organically modified version from his dad’s garage.

  Shit, that thing had been loud.

  Next to her, Anale grunted, giving her a wry smile.

  Dante flushed a little, but still found herself thinking about Mavis. It was strange to think she might actually have a reason to thank him, for a change.

  She jumped when a ping came from the nearest set of elevator doors, right before those doors began to open. Dante glanced at Anale, who gave her a grim look. Looking at those dark green and blue eyes, it hit Dante that she’d already committed.

  Although to what, precisely, she had no idea.

  Following the suddenly very military-looking seer into the empty elevator car, Dante shoved her hands deep into the pockets of her oversized jeans and decided it didn’t matter.

  It was important; she could feel that much. It was important, so she was in.

  Remembering Vikram’s words to her before she left the comp-room, she squelched a faint murmuring of guilt that turned her stomach queasy.

  Hell, it was the apocalypse.

  The Vik-man would just have to get over it.

  38

  DADDY’S HOME

  REVIK STARED UP the front of the organic-fronted building, frowning.

  He could feel the secondary construct from where he stood, although he and his team hadn’t yet left the protected confines of the park.

  They stood together in a rough line by the edge of a stone wall, on the opposite side of Fifth Avenue from Gossett Tower East, just north of 79th Street, which bisected the park. They shouldn’t be visible from either road without sensors, and Revik had his people on the lookout for flyers and bar scanners in the park itself.

  So far, they hadn’t found anything.

  A row of elm trees stood by the wall where they crouched, leaves and branches jerking and swaying in sharp gusts of wind. The team was already soaked from a steady drizzle from the heavy clouds, and the rain was coming down harder now. Revik could taste the charge in the cold air, its faint hint of electricity––well enough to know the weather was about to get a lot worse.

  He didn’t much care about that, though.

  The construct captured the vast majority of his attention. His team pulled what little was left. He could feel Wreg, Neela, Loki and Chinja scanning the construct, too. Gar focused on the OBE, which was exactly where Revik wanted him.

  “Awful quiet, laoban,” Wreg subvocalized through the link.

  The muscular seer adjusted the harness of his automatic rifle, wrapping a tattooed hand around the organic-coated body of the gun.

  “I’m getting that we’re expected,” he muttered. “What about you?”

  Revik grunted, not bothering to answer.

  He glanced at Jon, who stood on the other side of Wreg. He felt a surge in the other man’s aleimi, accompanied by a pressurized feeling as the shield around his light densified. He’d noticed Jon tended to obsess on the shield more when nervous, which was just fine with Revik.

  As far as nervous tics went, it was a damned useful one.

  “Do we knock?” Neela subvocalized through the same channel.

  Even through the link, Revik heard glimmers of her wry humor.

  “He does seem to like us to,” Jon muttered, not bothering with the link. “…Dick.”

  His words brought the first low chuckle to the group since they’d left the hotel.

  Even Revik gave him a thin smile, although it didn’t feel overly attached to the rest of him. Still, he appreciated anything that kept his team out of a fatalistic state of mind. He certainly wasn’t capable of pulling them out on his own.

  He touched his headset on impulse, pinging Balidor through the construct, as well.

  He didn’t bother to create a private channel for the exchange.

  He also didn’t bother with a greeting.

  “We’re here,” he said, blunt. “Still in the park, but we’re on the doorstep.”

  “Understood.”

  “Any luck mapping the inside layout? Did you manage to dig up current blueprints?”

  Balidor hesitated. Revik felt the pause more than heard it.

  “What?” he said, sharp.

  The other seer shook his head. Revik saw the gesture clearly through VR, but he also picked up on the vague feeling of being shielded from the other man’s light. Before he could ask again, Balidor broke the silence, his voice businesslike, matter-of-fact.

  “We’ve got preliminary specs, yes, but I’m afraid they aren’t promising. The blueprints are out of date. Dante made a good case that newer versions were suppressed in some way––either never submitted, or pulled from public record. We’ve been able to make some educated guesses using the old blueprints, Barrier imprints, and the structural design of the construct, particularly its defensive features. However, we’re seeing evidence that a secondary construct outside the primary protection grid contains multiple layers. Those internal constructs within constructs make it difficult to map the physical, since they were partially designed to obscure and distort those very features.”

  Balidor clicked softly through the link, his voice holding anger.

  “We’re seeing a lot of these distortions and obfuscations, Illustrious Sword. The structure we’ve mapped is of similar make and complexity to what we saw in Argentina. There’s a primary construct that organizes the rest, which may or may not be tied to the construct over Manhattan. The problem is, most of my team still can’t see the Manhattan construct worth a damn, although the structural points you provided help in mapping some of the stronger currents.”

  Exhaling another series of clicks, he added,

  “Whether or not it’s tied to the one over Manhattan, the construct around the Tower appears to be stabilized via a connection in the Barrier. It doesn’t appear to be tied to specific physical features of the building or any of the surrounding land, or even solely to the city-wide construct. I have to assume they’re using the same main pillar for this––”

  “The one that’s not Menlim?” Revik clarified.

  “Yes.”

  Pausing more meaningfully, Balidor added, “The densest of these structures are housed in the sub-basement. We’re now estimating they’ve added a good ten to fifteen stories below ground level to the original structure.”

  Revik glanced at Wreg, knowing he was hearing this.

  The Chinese-looking seer clicked in irritation, staring at the street, as if trying to see through it to the levels below.

  “The basement,” Revik muttered. “Perfect.”

  “Yes, laoban,” Balidor said, startling Revik by using the more informal moniker for “boss” that Wreg normally used. “I am guessing that is not an accident.”

  Revik’s frown turned into something closer to a scowl.

  The others knew of his dislike of enclosed, underground spaces. Balidor definitely knew––so did Wreg. The only ones to ever tease him about it openly had been Wreg and Allie, and even they’d been careful how they phrased jokes on that particular subject.

  Revik struggled in the sewers with Allie on the way to their bank heist, although he’d been the one to suggest that approach, knowing it made the most sense. He kept the entry point short for that reason. When they ended up wandering in those tunnels for hours afterwards, avoiding NYPD and SCARB and whoever else, he’d more or less blanked out for large chunks of it, even apart from being wounded and light-depleted.

  Like a rabbit caught in headlights, his mind just––stopped working.

  He’d been with her, too, immersed in her light. He never would have been able to do that on his own. At some point, he would’ve been forced to surface, whether that meant calling for backup, or fighting his way back to the hotel on his own.

  He’
d never told her that, but he wondered if she knew.

  Guessed, anyway.

  He’d deliberately given Wreg that part of the op in São Paulo, when they went after the Registry mainframe. Just like with the bank job, he’d known after looking at the blueprints that their main access point had to be underground. He didn’t talk about it, but anyone who’d worked with him for any amount of time knew this about him.

  Menlim knew it better than anyone. He’d been the one to create that phobia, and the one to turn it into something debilitating when it grew prolonged.

  “Recommendation for approach?” Revik said, his voice toneless.

  “You’re going to have to go down, Nenz.”

  Revik felt his fingers tighten around the gun he held. “No shit. Sewers? Front door? Side entrance? Can you tell anything from the construct?”

  “The OBE is stronger underground.” Balidor hesitated. “My recommendation at this point, given the small amount we know, would be the front door. I am basing that on the overall construct layout and design, which seems to have been fortified to ensure much more limited access from below. But Nenz,” Balidor said, his voice holding more emotion. “You’re going to hit some mazes in there. It looks like the same hall of mirrors we saw in that house in Patagonia. Perhaps worse, since there seems to be an additional layer of construct over the downstairs alone, one that’s potentially geared towards hiding any departures.”

  “They’ve got their own access point down there, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fuck.” Revik exchanged scowls with Wreg. “What? Water? Some kind of amphibious vehicle? Train?”

  “Unknown.”

  Balidor paused, obviously looking at something, either on a screen or in the Barrier.

  Revik bit back impatience, waiting for him to finish.

  “I’m not seeing any evidence of you getting cut off in there, Nenz,” Balidor said finally. “From us, I mean. But it’s a distinct possibility. You’d better take whatever imprints we have now, in case they help you down there.”