No one answered Varlan, though.
Then again, no one really needed to.
Brother Terian’s reputation, even more than that of the defector’s, Dehgoies Revik, required explanation to no one who lived within the Org’s Pyramid.
All of us had heard the stories.
I didn’t realize quite how much I’d drifted into my own head until Varlan gave me a quick smack with his light, pulling me out of my reverie.
The older seer was smiling at me again, I saw, but that denser, colder and significantly more calculating look did not leave those violet eyes. Varlan had already unhooked the jump seat harness from around his traditional-style cloak and proceeded to buckle a semi-organic weapon harness around his ribs and shoulders in its place.
“Five minutes,” the seer said, once more studying my light-gray eyes.
Swallowing, I only nodded.
Still, I couldn’t help but feel that Varlan had glimpsed something far deeper in my living light, something that perhaps lived where I, myself, could not see it.
Further, I could not miss the warning I felt emanating off the older seer.
Whatever danger we would find on the ground, Varlan seemed to think at least some of it would be aimed at me. As in me, personally.
At the time, I didn’t know what to think of that, either.
So I only unbuckled my own seat harness, reaching overhead for my rifle, a thicker pull of adrenaline pooling in my gut.
Varlan had been correct, however.
I was feeling significantly less bored than I had been, when I boarded that plane in Beijing. In fact, I strongly suspected, even at the time, that my boredom would not return, at least not until we finished this thing.
Assuming I survived it.
The thought was fleeting, a bare murmur in the back of my mind, but I found myself expelling it with more force than usual. I’m not particularly superstitious, not even for a seer, but I’m not totally immune to those Barrier pulls, either.
“Two minutes,” Varlan said.
That time, I only nodded.
2
BROTHER TERIAN
WE TOUCHED DOWN on the Black Arrow landing site at oh-nine-hundred, just outside of the main perimeter of work camp Guoruem.
I found myself remembering that Guoruem was a mythological bird, a kind of eagle from the seer pantheon. According to the Myth, his light evoked resolution, firmness, lack of compromise. Guoruem was one of the old ones.
I wondered who had named this place such a thing.
As soon as my pod left the confines of the aircraft’s fuselage, the pilot caused the helicopter to immediately lift off again. Both the pilot and the helicopter belonged to the private-sector, multi-billion dollar defense contractor, Black Arrow, which also operated the work camp on unlimited contract for the World Court.
The helicopter leaving the vicinity of the camp was the law, too.
No operational aircraft support vehicles were permitted to remain within a fifty mile radius of any work camp by order of the World Court. They could come in and go out, but only as part of a direct, ongoing, operational purpose, limited in scope and duration. Which essentially meant: take-offs, landings, emergency refuelings of whatever kind, combat missions, maintenance, equipment drops, food and supply drops, medical and organ transport... etc.
Exceptions could be made for ongoing military ops for which a specific vehicle had an immediate and operation-critical purpose, but those were relatively rare. Usually work camps were off-limits for use as forward operating bases, or FOBs, since they’re considered strategic targets in their own right.
Land vehicles only were permitted, and those only with DNA-coded locks. That had changed recently, too, meaning in the last ten years, when the tech permitted a foolproof means of preventing escaped seers from using them as getaway vehicles.
Looking around at the dense jungle around the landing pad, I already felt sweat popping out on my skin, my breath tightening in my chest as the humidity and heat descended upon me without the free-flowing air of flight. That heat only seemed to grow more intense as I tried to get my bearings with my light and the map I’d memorized in my aleimi.
I felt my sense-suit fighting to adjust, too, but knew that the temperature-moderating panels would never be able to make up the difference, not entirely. The seven or eight pounds of armor I wore didn’t help, nor the thirty pounds of weapons and ammo I had strapped to my person, along with a canteen filled with purified water and the required cache of supplies and basic survival gear, including a compass, waterproof collapsible shelter, water purification wand, pack food and basic first aid.
Water was a big issue down here.
Well, really, water was a big issue in most parts of the world, especially in the last few years. Unlike in the Middle East and some other parts of the globe, though, finding water wouldn’t be the problem here. Rather, the issue would be finding water that wouldn’t kill me.
I also had a small stick of insect repellant. It wasn’t much, not more than two or three ounces in weight, but even the smallest straw counted out here.
I was still looking around, marking the different strategic points close by, including the location of the fenced enclosures in the distance, when Varlan pinged us all, connecting the pod via our portable Barrier construct.
“Come,” he said aloud. “They are waiting for us.”
I glanced at Gregor, who answered my grim look with one of his own.
This had already gone from a routine mission to a potential political land mine, and all of us knew it. No one really liked the political missions. It was far too easy for dumb mistakes to be made out in the field, often for all of the wrong reasons.
I remember one last thing before I saw Terian for the first time.
I remember feeling a strange flicker of déjà vu.
It strengthened, the closer we got to the main structure.
I remember searching my light for the source of that feeling, figuring it had to be something in the construct we were approaching. I’d caught another flicker of that same, slight taste a few seconds later, too faint to pin down.
I tried to ID the specific thread in the construct over the work camp, too, but I couldn’t really do that, either.
That was unusual.
But like most things that only make sense in retrospect, at the time, I blew it off.
WORK CAMPS TECHNICALLY fell under the purview of the Sweeps.
Personally, I hated them.
I often wished SCARB had no jurisdiction over them whatsoever.
I’d already spent enough time in work camps to last me a lifetime, as young as I am, and I would be more than happy to never step foot in another one, for as long as I live.
In those years following World War II, I’d spent the majority of my time on recruitment, like most of the other new agents. After the Geneva Convention classified seers as biological weapons and banned our use in human militaries, a considerable scramble happened on all sides to scoop up those relatively few seers with on-the-ground military experience and decent sight rankings before they got culled by someone else.
During that same time, the World Court was created, along with its ancillary enforcement branches, which included Seer Containment (SCARB), the Department of Registration and Settlement (the Registry), the Agency for Inter-Species Cooperation (Smoke and Mirrors, as most in SCARB called it), and the Bureau for Population Regulation and Control (the Sweeps). All of those departments––apart from SCARB itself––tended to be primarily bureaucratic in nature, although SCARB and the Sweeps had a fair bit of overlap in jurisdiction and a fair few turf battles out in the field, depending on the day and the political climate.
From the perspective of most of those in SCARB, the Sweeps did the petty, clean up work of the Human Protection Act. Filing travel permits. Reported registration violations. National and international work permit enforcement. Basic collaring and association violations.
That kind of thing.
Depending on the scope of those violations, however, any and all of those categories might occasionally slide into murky jurisdictional crossover with SCARB, which handled the serious HPA violations, as well as those impacting larger groups of seers.
When SCARB got involved with a Sweep-jurisdiction crime, it usually meant one of two things: a larger operation got unearthed by a few petty violations, such as my last black market bust, where we uncovered a whole identity falsification ring, where new identities were being reassigned to unreg’d seers using the implants of already-dead seers... or conversely, a lesser violation ended up being committed by seers with connections to terrorism cells.
The Sweeps even handed over a few violators tied to operations where reg tags were being created wholesale using illegal (usually organic) tech.
So yeah, SCARB got called in when shit got serious.
Any encroachments on work camps technically fell under SCARB purview, too.
The brass didn’t screw around when it came to the camps, most of which had direct ties to defense contractor holdings these days, Black Arrow being the foremost of those.
Geneva Convention or not, trade in seers was booming.
Most governments hired seers on as “private contractors” in lieu of incorporating them directly into their military branches... which would have been blatantly illegal, instead of simply illegal in practice, if not on paper. The reality was, however, compared to the piddly number of seers being utilized back when the Geneva Accord had first been signed, the numbers now out in the field would have appeared unthinkably astronomical.
China, not being a participant in the Geneva Convention at all––and not giving a damn anyway, from what I could tell––didn’t even bother to hide their use of seers. The People’s Republic of China had a full-fledged army of ice bloods, and they’d been breeding more as fast as they possibly could since at least the 1950s.
Those Lao Hu seers were loyal, though. You had to give the Chinese that.
Damned loyal.
And tough as hell in a fight.
The Org had their zealots, too, of course––those for whom interventionism was more of a religion than a practical reality. Those types were relatively rare, though, and generally kept their opinions to themselves in the field. Such a pragmatic approach to ideology within the Org had its upsides and downsides. Money could only buy as much loyalty as one had money to give, at least in comparison to the competition.
Then again, since the Seven were chronically broke and the Org had a good handle on organized crime these days, as well as assets in most of the major human governments and top-tier human corporations, that made the Org more or less a monopoly when it came to recruiting the practical set among the current generation of seers.
Back in the early years, the Org had been comprised mainly of ex-Allied seers, although more than a small handful were recruited from among the Axis-owned kraut, wop and Jap seers, as well. Generally speaking, the other trackers and I prowled the camps, looking for any glow-eye with a sufficient sight rank to be worth trying to flip, regardless of affiliation.
Given the Nazi propensity to gas, shoot and conduct medical experiments on seers––along with various ethnic, social and religious groups they deemed inferior from within their own species––the shortage of adult, trained seers with a potential sight ranking above a three or four had been felt keenly in those early years.
Factor in actual sight ranks and military skill, and the problem grew exponentially.
Pretty much all of the world powers at that point were starting from scratch in building their seer auxiliary corps, however they chose to hide them from the World Court. That problem only got worse following the Axis powers’ attempt to bleach any military and infiltration records that listed seer agents––as well as the elimination of those same agents en masse––as Germany’s surrender grew more and more inevitable.
Pretty fucking stupid, really.
Everyone used seers by then, whatever their political rhetoric. The higher-ups figured Hitler must have broadcasted a few too many racist rants on the topic, however, and that maybe the Nazis saw it as an embarrassment.
That, or it was just a big “screw you” to the Allied invasion––akin to shooting their horses and burning their own cities to keep the Allies from enjoying them as spoils of war. The Nazis may have viewed their infiltration units as just one more piece of inventory to eliminate before it became a condition of their surrender.
The other agents and I started by rounding up any ownerless seers we found living in human-designated population centers for assessment.
The categories were pretty simple––flip, fly or fuck, as we joked at the time.
Which meant: bring them into the fold, send ‘em back to Asia, or sell them on the open market as servants or sex workers. We worked with a psych profile, too, in terms of recruitment, but really, beggars couldn’t be choosers back then, and we operated a lot on ceilings and floors for sight ranks and overall intelligence.
We got some real wild cards as a result.
Of course, that was before the work camps got established.
No one knew yet, back then, that the world had changed.
REALIZING I WAS still staring at Varlan’s pale, violet-tinged irises after he’d spoken in my mind, I jerked my eyes off the older seer, feeling my chest clench.
Brother Terian? A psychopath?
Varlan could not be serious.
Galaith would not put a psychopath in charge of the vast majority of his military strength!
Why would any leader do such a thing?
I stared at Varlan after he said it, feeling a strange suspicion growing in my chest. Was it possible Varlan was jealous of the other seer? Varlan acted like he lived far above the more petty emotions, even ambition, but now I found myself wondering.
Did Varlan have a sexual interest in me?
Did it bother him, seeing me check out Terian? Did he pick up the flavor of separation pain in my light, maybe trigger something new in his?
I’d heard the older seer had a preference for male bodies, too, but he’d never tried anything with my light before, despite the mentor-student relationship he seemed to be actively cultivating since Galaith put me under his command.
What other possible explanation could there be, though?
Was this another test of some kind?
A head game, perhaps, to assess my loyalty?
Perhaps they wanted to see whether I would align myself with Varlan over Terian. Or perhaps they merely wanted to ensure I had no propensity to show emotion or overreact under certain sexual psychological stressors?
I had heard all of the other things Varlan listed about brother Terian, of course.
The brilliance, I had heard... even the reputation for erratic behavior, which wasn’t uncommon in seers of such high actual and potential sight ranks. But to out-and-out call one of the most powerful seers in the Org a psychopath?
What kind of game was this?
Despite my whirling thoughts, it also occurred to me that Varlan had potentially risked a lot, in sending such a thing to me, ostensibly to warn me.
I also knew without being told that Varlan was asking me to keep that information to myself... at least until we entered the new construct in full, where it might not be possible for me to do so. So either Terian himself was in on this test or joke or whatever it was... or Varlan did not fear Terian nearly as much as he perhaps should.
Either way, why were they involving me in this game?
I found myself studying Terian’s face anew.
Perhaps it was my imagination, but I could almost see it there, that wrongness to which Varlan had referred... or at least something that didn’t quite connect with the handsome, confident face that I saw on the surface.
Of course, given what Varlan had just said, my mind now extracted and interpreted a subtle spark of crazy in those pale, amber-colored eyes.
Or perhaps not crazy, precisely, but certa
inly some element of instability, only thinly veiled behind the ease of that full-lipped but lazy smile, what bordered on a smirk.
As soon as I noticed it, however, that spark seemed to vanish, shift... perhaps melt away... as if the auburn-haired seer had changed the frequency in which he operated, letting that less public-oriented version of himself recede to the background.
It didn’t occur to me until much later that perhaps Terian knew of that faint stutter in his light, that he’d learned to work around it, particularly when it grew visible in the wrong environment.
It struck me also that brother Terian might have caught my stare.
He might even have caught some of my thoughts in the wake of Varlan’s words.
I shifted my eyes and light subtly away from his, as soon as both things occurred to me.
Whatever that spark or stutter had been, imagined or not, it vanished when I next looked at Terian’s face and light. Any hint of that wrongness disappeared so completely that I could not find it, no matter how hard I looked.
A few seconds later, I found myself dismissing Varlan’s warning altogether.
Perhaps the old seer had his own flair for drama?
Psychopath was a strong word for someone who might be slightly strange due to the unique frequency of their light. I had zero doubt that Terian might act odd, given that he clearly carried a significantly higher voltage than what most seers could carry, given the limits of their aleimic structures. I had heard stories of such seers, whose very own aleimic structures drove them a bit eccentric, simply due to the fact that they could carry so much more light than a normal Sark, even a highly-ranked one.
It made them a bit odd, went the consensus.
For the first time, it hit me just how powerful the seer in front of me really was.
As one of the very few seers who reported directly to Galaith, Terian occupied a unique position within the network hierarchy.
Even among that handful of elites in Galaith’s inner circle, Terian occupied a different place than the rest of those whose names I had heard whispered among lower-level grunts. Terian alone didn’t have a direct affiliation to one of the branches of the Human Protection Authority; instead, he operated under multiple aliases, floating among all of those organizations as well as within the private sector and several human governments.
Allie's War Early Years Page 28
