Perhaps they were waiting until they acquired a fresh new face of the Org.
In either case, I didn’t hear a whisper of Terian’s death anywhere––not in any of the network briefs, nor via the black market feeds that normally reported news of that kind, including news that Central tried to keep hidden. I didn’t even hear rumors, like I said.
I expected someone would be tempted to share the information, eventually.
Guards at the Black Arrow facility outside of Manaus. Adhipan seers who heard and saw the shooting from a distance in the Barrier. Dehgoies himself. Org seers who worked at Central and witnessed the death from the Barrier. Hell, human grave diggers.
It seemed like someone would have talked.
But as far as I knew, the rest of the network never heard a whisper.
I heard whispers of Varlan’s new assignments from the network rumor mill and saw a few documented in bulletins coming out of Central. Most of those assignments appeared to be highly prestigious. Most seemed to imply that Varlan had been promoted.
Of course, everyone who witnessed the assassination assumed it had been done under orders, that Varlan acted as Galaith’s proxy by pulling that trigger.
We assumed Terian really got taken out by Galaith himself, for defying him in the field. Most of those in my pod probably thought what happened to Terian was just.
After all, no military unit could function without the chain of command, and Terian crossed that line. He’d done so in front of two different tiers of subordinates, in three different working units, over an issue about which Galaith clearly felt strongly.
So yeah, no one questioned whether it was just.
But the silence was strange.
The fact that the network went on just as if nothing had happened was strange.
It was as if we hadn’t just lost one of our highest-ranked, most insanely talented infiltrators at all. It was as if Galaith hadn’t just killed the Pyramid’s most notorious seer.
I’d even heard stories about Terian since that time.
Meaning, as if Terian were still alive.
I’d heard murmurings through the network grapevine about ops supposedly led by him in other parts of the world, things that had an element of drama and notoriety to them, even now. Members of my own pod disappeared from my awareness, scattered under different commands around the world... but I still heard murmurings around Terian.
Once or twice, I heard whispers around that South American op, too, but nothing about Terian being shot, much less about him being killed. 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 that the intermediary had been stolen from Black Arrow by Dehgoies alone, that she was his wife, mate, sister... some person of importance to the Seven. I even heard rumored sightings of the Adhipan, and heard other infiltrators laugh at those rumors, even friends of mine. There were rumors of Dehgoies’ death, too, interestingly enough.
Dehgoies was said to have died in that jungle.
And supposedly the female in question had given birth to the Bridge.
As in The Bridge, meant to herald the end of the human reign over Earth.
Some even speculated that Galaith had killed Dehgoies personally, as a sacrifice to bring in that new epoch leading up to the Displacement.
A lot of it sounded like religious mumbo-jumbo to me, though, and frankly, given the New Evolutionists and the crap I’d just quelled in Egypt, even if I hadn’t known it was all b.s., I probably wouldn’t have wanted to hear it.
That being said, I highly doubted that any members of my own ex-pod had circulated those things I’d heard. For one thing, no one in my pod had been that religious.
More than that, I assumed they’d all been told, just as I had been, that the usual protocols regarding non-disclosure applied even more severely in this case, and that nothing that happened on that op could be discussed, not even with anyone inside our pod, no matter what happened regarding that information in the future.
Our entire pod had been sent to North America the very next morning.
A few days later, our pod had been summarily disbanded.
I got orders to redeploy to the Middle East that very day, along with a list of names for my new pod, who would meet me in Cairo.
I wasn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth.
Given how that whole thing went down, I couldn’t imagine anyone in my ex-pod would be stupid enough to discuss what they’d seen out in that jungle. We all got drunk together on the flight up to Washington D.C., and even then, no one spoke a word about any part of what we’d witnessed, not even in whispers.
We’d all been afraid. Me, as much as any of them.
More, maybe, given my relationship to Terian in those final days.
All of us received a bump in our security clearances, too, 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 in advance.
That meant we’d be watched, too. Possibly indefinitely.
We also knew that at some point, Central might decide it was too much of a risk, letting us live with what we’d seen out there. I didn’t even fully understand what that security risk entailed, but I could feel enough to know that I didn’t fully understand what I’d seen, or what it truly meant to the security of the Brotherhood, or to Galaith.
I did know I’d be watched, perhaps for a long time. All of us would be watched, perhaps for the rest of our lives.
So I imagine my ex-pod mates did what I did.
They put their heads down, wiped the incident from their minds, and went back to work. They thanked Central for the boost in their clearance, expressed gratitude for any perks that came their way following the events of that assignment. They took their new jobs with nothing but obedience, loyalty, respect... the pillars of the Org’s network.
And they kept their mouths shut.
I usually didn’t even let myself think about those days in the jungle.
Something about being here brought it back, though, standing outside these gates to the work camp cells. Like in Manaus, I’d walked into this particular op blind––as blind as I had been under Varlan, and for the first time since. Something about that simple fact ignited all of those fears again, seemingly outside of my control.
Someone on the ground here had an extremely high security classification.
High enough to block my light from even the regular network.
I got some pretty weird impressions off the camp guards, too, when I read them.
A bunch of them were on the take with local poachers, which was no surprise, but it was more than that. I wondered almost if they knew more about what was going on with these attacks than they were telling us.
They wanted our help, sure, but something was off here, I could feel it.
It also crossed my mind that the interference I was picking up on might come from Black Arrow themselves. These guys might be glorified rent-a-cops, but clearly, this facility had some strange stuff going on. Black Arrow, being the favored defense contractor for something like 70% of the top GNP nations, spent most of their reinvestment dollars––as well as yuan, euros, rupees and whatever else––on experimental weaponry and security apparatus, with an emphasis on quasi-dimensional interfaces.
Which included different ways of blinding seers.
They mainly did this by experimenting with different types of Barrier fields, mostly by employing increasingly sophisticated forms of biotech, commonly known as organics, semi-organics and the vastly more sophisticated sentient machines.
So yeah, given that they often used organic material from actual seers, I didn’t ask a lot of questions when Black Arrow had experimental medical facilities attached to remote work camps, especially those operating in countries where regulation was lax, to say the least.
&n
bsp; Whatever the fuck was going on out here, I didn’t want to know.
Central still hadn’t fed us much usable intel yet, either––nothing but fleeting impressions of the camp stock and which of them might be disguised rebels. They’d only isolated one that was a high-probability hit, and so far, no one had managed to find the fucker inside the enclosures, which frankly blew my mind. I mean, if you couldn’t find a damned prisoner in your own work camp, who could you find?
The seer appeared to have a high rank in actual... but they must have collared the fucker before they put him in here, right? I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how the hell he could be blocking a trace, wearing a collar that had a reg tag built right into it, even apart from the ID chip they were legally required to implant into his neck upon capture, complete with GPS.
Still, he had a strange signature, that one.
Male. Decent sight rank, like I said... with a potential maybe as high as mine and an actual slightly higher, which suggested he’d probably got a few decades on me, too... maybe even more than that. He’d had formal training at one point, so could be ex-Org. He could also be ex-Lao Hu, ex-Adhipan or ex-Seven. All of them had infiltration training to lesser and greater degrees, and so far, I hadn’t seen conclusive markers for any one.
One of the infiltrators watching our back from Central guessed he’d been trained in China, which usually meant Lao Hu.
Wherever he’d trained originally, it looked likely he’d defected to the rebels since.
If this fuck was really ex-Lao Hu, he would be a bitch to bring in alive, even if they had him locked inside the enclosure already. Galaith made it crystal clear he wanted him alive, too... and that he wanted any ID’d rebels returned to their leadership intact.
As usual, we were under a time crunch, as well.
Despite the small number of unconfirmed’s in the no-walk zone, the potential for a full-scale uprising had everyone jumpy. Black Arrow wouldn’t admit to any missing inventory, but I knew that might be b.s., too, especially if they’d killed them trying to escape. The Registry and SCARB didn’t like to advertise when it gunned down unreg’d seers, even with good reason. In addition to the bad publicity to the seer community, it also looked bad to the humans.
I got it. I mean, I hated getting in political arguments with civilians about that crap, too.
Most civilians didn’t know what the hell they were talking about with that kind of thing, anyway. I’d had my fill of protests over the years, both the seer and human variety. I knew a lot of them meant well, sure... but the naiveté really got to me. I also knew from direct experience that if seers didn’t police their own kind, whether under the auspices of working for the worms or whatever else, we’d be wiped out entirely.
I knew that.
After Syrimne, everything changed. To worms, seers had become the fucking Nephilim. The time of the original Evolutionists with their rainbows and the la-de-da of the post-First Contact period was long, long gone.
There could be no reasoning with worms on the topic, not after Syrimne.
I knew, too, that seers would be utter fools to underestimate humans again.
It would take years to remake the world so it would be truly safe for my people. It would take decades if not centuries... especially if we didn’t figure out how to control the breeding habits of humans themselves, which only seemed to worsen as time went on, despite the push for birth control and low-birth policies by humans themselves, as well as by seers working behind the scenes of human governments.
No way would the remaining population of a few million seers ever be able to control nine billion human beings from behind the Barrier, no matter how skilled the average seer got at pushes, taps and other means of direct and indirect influence over human minds.
Anyway, the human powers all employed their own seers now, too, who could push and counter-push, block and shield... conducting silent wars which would only terrify the mass of ordinary, civilian humans if they even knew the half of it.
Moreover, fighting continued between different factions of seers, as well. Not all seers agreed with the Org’s policy of interference with the human world for the betterment and safety of the seer race. To me, those seers were pretty fucking stupid, though.
I knew they had their reasons for believing what they did, but the sheer, magical thinking of the whole thing just astounded me. And yeah, it angered me, too.
So yeah, I believed in what I was doing.
Still, I couldn’t help but react when my own brothers and sisters screamed epithets right in my face.
“Race traitor!” a female voice screamed at me in Hindi, shaking the fence.
I turned to look at her, saw her face red with fury.
I stepping back in reflex when another 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 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, Ondati 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.
Maybe I had seen too much of this angry self-righteousness over the years. The clothes changed, as did specific faces... the content of the signs did not, unfortunately.
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 and shaking it violently as I walked by.
She shrieked from the pressure of other dirt-bloods and even humans shoving and 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, that time.
The male had the Nazi scar on his face.
I wondered if he noticed the near-identical scars on Cat, or Jarvis, or Mugwe.
I didn’t try to read him to find out.
Exchanging looks with a few of the local guards standing by the outer doors to the command center, I only grunted when they gave me a series of cynical smiles.
In this, the human and seer guards didn’t act all that different, I’d noticed.
They both seemed to enjoy 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 to the long, one-way window of the barracks then back to the chaos and the fighting on the other side of the enclosure.
Despite the primitive location, this part of the facility was state-of-the-art, I’d noticed.
No aging 1960s kitsch here. No brick buildings or stone huts, either. Everything here was relatively new, built within the last decade. Not only did the walls sport top-of-the-line feed monitors, but they hosted encryption-based organics, dense enough from the Barrier that at least part of the building had to be running on 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, shaking it as the security guards beat them back with another round of activating t
he pain sensors in the prisoners’ collars and tasering the shit out of the ones who continued to resist.
Those same guards had grown bolder, I’d noticed, probably from realizing I wouldn’t interfere, or even judge them too harshly.
Most of the guards I saw now wielded those long, 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 step back.
Unfortunately, they couldn’t step back much, what with the sweating and filthy bodies shoved against their backs, so a lot of those poor fuckers got tasered, too.
I watched one guard, big enough to be at least part Wvercian, hit the screaming Hispanic 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 back into the crowd when he deactivated the charge, and a few of the others 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 Moscow, 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 really worked felt more like a curse more than a blessing.
But I could see the prisoners’s faces too clearly now, too.
I turned away from those anguished and angry expressions, feeling their futility more sharply than their anger. I adjusted my view in the next set of seconds, focusing back on the flickering screens in my headset and the Barrier signals they represented.
I wished I could take a vacation... a real one.
I wished I could be anywhere but here.
The shouts rose, grew more chaotic, harder to pick out.
I did what I did, I told myself... I did all of it for them, even if they’d never know it, never appreciate it, never thank me for it.
Allie's War Early Years Page 41
