They might always see me as their enemy, I knew.
But I did it all for the good of the race.
I THREW DOWN a black duffel on a metal table, still absorbing the intel I’d received from Central about the groups skirting the outside of 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.
Ondati, Ringu and Jaela all looked at one another.
Cat never took her white-rimmed, nearly black eyes off of mine.
“You really need us to tell you that, boss?” Ondati asked after another beat.
No, I thought in irritation, I really didn’t.
We’d just been pulled off the job.
Central called and told us that 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 teams 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 less than ten minutes earlier, leaving nothing but static, even when we tried to access the camp’s own private-contract infiltrators.
Everything above a level four or five couldn’t be accessed by anyone on my team, including me... so essentially, we got hit with a near-total blackout.
Even early recruits could access the levels I’d been left to work with.
I knew my whole team felt it, pretty much as it happened. I thought we’d gone operational 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... but 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, personally.
Moreover, because of the intricacies of the Org’s Pyramid construct and the necessities of my new role, I could normally feel not only the living light of my primary operatives––as well as their thoughts, memories, emotional experiences, reflections, speculations, personal and non-personal threads to specific other operatives and civilians with whom they’d worked and been involved in the past and so on––I could feel the multitude behind them.
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.
But now I couldn’t feel shit.
Not outside of my own pod, anyway.
I knew it must have something to do with the rebels, but I also knew I was extrapolating, which wasn’t exactly the same as real knowledge.
All I really knew for certain was that I’d been taken off the job.
I’d probably never know the real reason why. I knew the reasons for that likely fell in that same, vague “above my pay grade” quip that Varlan lobbed at me in the past, however. I’d probably hear rumors about what happened here in a few weeks or months, just like others heard rumors 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 Pyramid, I couldn’t help snorting a laugh at my own stupidity.
What a fucking idiot I was, truly.
Even as I thought it, another thought skirted in the bare edges of my light.
They’d blacked out my team like this after that op in Manaus.
The memory vibrated in the upper reaches of my light, until I snuffed it.
It lingered with me in softer currents, anyway. I found myself fighting not to put the pieces together, but doing it anyway, almost outside of my mind and light’s control.
I’d never heard anything from one of my ex-pod mates ever again.
Not a damned thing.
Some of them, I’d worked with for decades.
Yet I had received no messages. I’d 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 gotten no invites for drinks in any of the cities I’d visited, even though I’d sent messages to let them know where I was. I’d separated out not a single resonance from one of their lights, not in over ten months.
That meant not one of them had thought about me... at all... in almost a year.
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, or 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 that might mean.
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.
“Did something happen?” Ondati asked, jerking my eyes to the left, to the other side of the greenish metal of the table. Ondati looked around at all of us, his face pinched with worry.
I looked around at the rest of them again, then shrugged.
“You know as much as I do,” I said.
“Fuck-all, then,” Paulo muttered under his breath, dumping his own bag on a counter.
I scowled, but I couldn’t argue with that.
I let them feel it, too.
Unzipping the bag in front of me, I stopped once I had it open, gripping the metal table and leaning back to stretch out my arms. Letting out an irritated laugh, I shook his head then, looking around darkly at the rest of them––Cat, Ringu, Jaela, Paulo and Ondati––the five seers who more or less formed my leadership team.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You said that, boss,” Ondati said, smiling a little.
But something about my words broke the tension in their faces, causing them all to exhale, even if those exhales were peppered with irritated clicks of their tongues.
“Are we really just off this junket, then?” Cat said. “Going home, brother Quay?”
“I don’t know,” I said, sighing as I ran a hand through my hair. “...Probably. In the meantime, they want us to help the guards get things back under control in the camp.”
“So we really just leave the rebels alone then, boss?” Ondati said. “They really did just pull us off that shit, lao?”
“Or, maybe the opposite?” Jaela reminded us all, quieter.
“Are we going anywhere near that lab?” Paulo asked, his voice deceptively casual. “You know. The one out back. The one those Black Arrow fucks are protecting?”
I gave him a sharp look. “No. And that’s an order.”
“Good,” Cat muttered, unzipping the front of her suit.
“Why good?” Paulo muttered.
“You really want to see that shit, Paulo? Fucking-A. You were one of those kits who likes to pull wings off flies, too, na... ?”
Cat’s voice got sharp, almost openly hostile at the end, and thick with accent.
Clicking softly, I smiled as I looked over at the female seer.
Her dark green eyes flashed at me, too, even as they reflected in the overhead hanging lights. Her muscular arms glistened with sweat outside of the cut-off sleeves of a plaid shirt she’d worn under the snow suit and fur-lined jacket. She’d already done three perimeter walks, moving fast enough to heat herself up under the thermal suit. Now that she was indoors, in the heated bunker, I could see the dampness of sweat on the back of her neck.
I watched as she unbuttoned the front of that lower layer shirt with deft, brown fingers, getting ready to change into the skin-tight, armored, long-sleeved variety that all of us would wear under our vests and jackets before we walked the actual camp.
We’d all seen one another naked so many times, she barely seemed to notice that we could all see her bare upper torso now. Even so, she caught my stare and raised an eyebrow, one that wasn’t devoid of interest.
When I only clicked at her softly, she smiled.
She let the shirt hang open as she propped a boot on the lower rung of another metal table and began unhooking the locks so she could pull on the armored pants that went with the shirt. I watched her pull the boot off a second later, using the toe of her other shoe to wrench it off her heel before she reached into her own giant, black duffel bag, open down the seam and now coated in mud along the canvas bottom from sitting outside.
Glancing up at me again, she shrugged at my distracted look with her muscular shoulders.
“Do you think something more is going on, boss?” she said, her voice deceptively casual. “More than just the op changing priority-cat all of a sudden? Maybe we are on the front lines now, eh boss? Like Jaela was implying in her usual sneaky fucking way?”
I gave Jaela a look, then sharpened my gaze back at Cat. “We don’t know shit. I don’t want a bunch of speculation crap. I mean it. Just follow orders.”
Cat shrugged, seemingly unaffected by my words. “Radio silence while they determine if this is a military op then, boss?”
I thought about that, too. She was my lieutenant for a reason, after all.
It was her job to point that shit out to me, maybe especially when I was pissed off.
It put a different spin on the intelligence blackout, anyway; a significantly less sinister one, and one I hadn’t considered strongly enough in my flash of paranoia. If this op had changed security designation for some reason, maybe connected to the treaty with the rebels, then we probably weren’t supposed to be questioning our role like this. What felt like silence on our side might be closer to the equivalent of a one-way mirror.
Besides, they hadn’t pulled us entirely.
Not yet, anyway.
“Fine,” I said, making my voice as neutral as Cat’s had been. “We assume the blackout is total for now.” I gave Cat a harder look. “But don’t get creative, sister... not until we have a reason. We do the job. In and out. Like always.”
I watched the lights of Ondati and Paulo slowly lose their charge.
Cat’s own light let out a faint flicker of approval, then she went back to exuding that neutral hum, like before. She was damned smart, I thought to myself.
I needed to remember that more often.
At the thought, she gave me a bare glance, and that time, I caught a flicker of pain in her light. It occurred to me again that I hadn’t had sex in a long time. In fact, I hadn’t had anything approximating sex in months, not since...
But I didn’t want to think about that, either.
Shoving the thought out of my mind, I caught hold of my suit jacket lapels and flipped the dark jacket off my shoulders. I tugged the sleeves off my arms, one at a time, grunting a little when the fabric stuck to my shirt and skin with sweat under the oversized coat. I tossed the wrinkled jacket down on the table a second later, the remainder of the civilian clothes I’d worn under my fur-lined coat when landing in Moscow. I untied my tie and slid it from around my neck, as well, unhooking the collar of my shirt.
I could feel Cat’s eyes on me again, and fought to decide if I should reciprocate.
I needed her as an agent. I didn’t know if I wanted to complicate that.
Then again, pods always had their mini-dramas, as well as their long and short-term flings.
Moreover, the hunger in her light amplified mine.
Instead of unbuttoning my shirt the rest of the way, I reached behind my neck, gripping the collar with his fingers and tugging it over my head. I tossed that down on the table, too, once I’d peeled it off the damp skin of my back. He was already unhooking the front of my dress slacks and kicking the shined shoes off the black socks, when I next spoke to the others. Looking down, I noticed the dress shoes already wore a coat of reddish-brown mud, too.
I felt Cat watching me again.
That time, when her light got closer, I didn’t push it away.
“Give me a run-down of what you got before blackout,” I grunted towards Ondati. “Make sure we’re all on the same page before we go out...”
Ondati made a brief gesture of respect. “Specs are in the portable construct, boss, and still loaded on the dead-net for VR.”
By dead-net, he meant the electronic network, not the semi-dimensional one in the Barrier.
We had our shorthands for everything.
“...At oh-five-hundred, at least one untagged, unreg’d asshole wandered inside the perimeter of the main rabbit box...” (work camp yard, my mind translated) “...No age pinpoint. Aleimic signature isn’t in any of the ‘banks, so no criminal record on file or legal human employment. After second contact, at oh-five-twenty-two, several guards took chase. They reached security limits for the pursuit, assessed the threat, and decided they couldn’t reliably pinpoint a single signature. Looks like they followed all the regs to a T, so no issues on the local front that I saw through the last time jump...”
Another A+ for Ondati on the regs, I thought softly, smiling at Cat.
I appreciated the other seer’s thoroughness, though.
“And? What have we got on the unreg’d?” I prompted. “Our team? Anyone pick up a sex? Physical characteristics? Height, weight––”
“No.” Ondati shook his head, once, then made a more conciliatory gesture with one hand. “Not reliable, sir.”
I frowned, straightening from where I’d been pulling off my last sock. “What does that mean? They must have them on the cameras... ?”
“No,” Ondati said, shaking his head. “The locals claim they saw the intruder, meaning with their eyes... but their descriptions all contradict.” At my frown, Ondati added, “Most of them guessed male... presumably from the weight and height averages from the witness reports. At least two, if not three centuries old from the complexity of the aleimic signature.”
Ondati shifted on his thick legs, which were already wrapped in black, armored combat pants, since he’d been the first one to head inside for a shower and to change. Which made sense, as I’d assigned him to be our liaison with the private-sec guards.
“...They picked up some weird signals, too, sir,” Ondati added.
Remembering my own taste of that odd light lingering just outside the compound walls, I frowned. “Define weird.”
Ondati replied stone-faced, as he always did.
“Don’t know,” he shrugged. “They got a few snapshots of aleimic structures they’d never seen before, so they showed me. Some weird shit, boss... so they may not be full of it. I’m still not convinced that’s the original unreg’d they were tracking, though.”
“Network analysis? Or did you not get one before we got shut down?”
“I did, sir. Bare bones, anyway. High correlation to expert-level time jumping skills.” Ondati shrugged again. “...And some documented cases of prescience.”
“Prescience?” I looked up sharply from where I’d been pulling clean clothes out of the open duffel in front of me, frowning at the larger male. “Did you say prescience?”
There was a silence.
The other five seers were all staring at me now.
On
dati only nodded. “Yes, boss.”
I felt my stomach contract into a painful cramp.
I felt that nausea worsen, and squelched it, if only to keep it from the others.
Even so, I saw Cat and Ringu exchange a look, right before Cat fixed her gaze on my naked body, her light exuding another hungry flicker of pain. I felt Paulo and Jaela look at one another too, their glances holding more confusion.
Apparently the prescience thing was news to them, too.
Either that, or they were in on whatever this was, and there primarily to spy on me. Or maybe just to kill me once they got me alone, out of sight of the camp’s cameras.
I shoved that thought from my mind, too.
Prescience, jesus.
Contrary to human myth, prescience as a seer skill was extremely rare, borderline mythological, really.
Most seers could do what we called time jumps, meaning using the Barrier to look at the past... or glimpse pieces of possible futures.
Time jumps were mainly employed as a means of gathering intelligence, usually after an event already occurred. I knew the Org likely had seers at Central devoted to compiling variables for plotting future scenarios, too, trying to mark odds for different outcomes that could culminate in key events, particularly those more critical for broader historical patterns.
But that wasn’t prescience.
Nor was it reliable, not when whole incidents could be blocked from view and manipulated in various ways behind the Barrier by skilled seers. Events could even be rewritten wholesale, particularly if the block had been instituted during the event itself. In those situations, often the best a skilled infiltrator could do was to identify the presence of a construct or manipulation itself. Much more rarely could they determine the nature and extent of the changes.
Rarer still could they determine the truth behind those changes.
Forward time jumps––meaning those involving the future––were even less reliable.
The future, by its very nature, was a constantly moving, changing, shifting, reversing, splitting and recombining matrix of variables, decision points, confluences, coincidences, chaos and collisions... and pretty much at all times.
If ever proof was needed to demonstrate the properties of free will, it lived in the images I’d seen of possible futures. They morphed, wafted, slammed, lingered only to disappear and reappear once again.
Allie's War Early Years Page 42
