Menlim had obviously unearthed a number of resources he hadn’t bothered to share with Revik while he ran the Rebel Army for Salinse.
Some of that was in organic tech.
Some was in actual seers. Revik found himself cataloguing the unfamiliar faces himself, wondering how many of their names might show up as the missing seers on the Displacement Lists if he were to go looking.
His eyes flickered around the dimly lit space. He paused on dead organic screens, got a ping from either what remained of the construct or his own people that they’d been conserving on power, relegated to solar and some fusion cells.
Working feeds got routed through only one room.
He found it with his light and turned, clicking his fingers and giving a hand command to Tan, telling him to take a couple of his people to go check it out. The Lao Hu would be gathering intelligence from there. They also might be putting out a call for help. Possibly to the Rynak, one of the few groups likely still well-armed and organized enough to respond.
Tan nodded, catching his meaning at once.
Sending a faint pulse of respect, he gestured for three of the others to follow him. Without waiting, Tan left for the room Revik had highlighted with his aleimi, the other three seers in tow.
Revik turned to the rest of the room, scanning the faces of a group of seers collected in a small crowd on the raised platform that formed a stage.
Only one of them sat on the chaise lounge that crouched in the center of that stage.
Revik had been in this room before.
Giving a swift glance up at the screen on the wall, remembering what he’d seen on there the last time he’d been at the Forbidden City, he felt his lips twist in a frown.
He’d told Voi Pai to assemble her senior officers here. He already had two of Menlim’s people checking the names, faces and aleimic signatures against what they found in the higher levels of the security construct.
Seeing that they clustered in a protective half-circle in front of their leader where she sat on the bench-like chair, Revik didn’t hesitate, but walked directly towards them, feeling his guard follow close behind, their rifles up and aimed towards the seers on the stage.
He stopped around two meters from the base of the platform.
Looking past that line of seers at Voi Pai herself, who stared down at him with those strange eyes of hers with the vertical pupils like a cat’s, Revik folded his arms, rocking slightly on his heels as he studied her expression.
She seemed to have taken his words to heart. He saw calculation there, certainly. He doubted she could have helped that no matter how many threats he leveled at her; it was simply part of her nature. But no humor lived in her expression, and for the first time he’d ever encountered her, she looked angry, without the faintest trace of that condescending arrogance he remembered, or the false, cloying sweetness she liked to use to goad her opponents.
“Voi Pai,” he said, bowing slightly.
“Illustrious Sword,” she said in acknowledgement, her voice stiff.
“I am formally claiming the City of the Lao Hu,” he said, keeping his voice without inflection. “I am now the authority here. Do you acknowledge?”
Around her, Revik felt seers reacting with horror. Some of them were crying, but Revik didn’t let his eyes rest on any of those faces for long. He kept his gaze on Voi Pai herself, his expression motionless, his light respectful.
When Voi Pai answered, her voice sounded almost like she might cry, too.
Revik felt the anger under it though. A cold, unbridled fury lived there, perhaps beyond what he’d ever felt from another seer in his life.
“I acknowledge,” she said, aiming that hatred at him.
Revik nodded, once.
Politely, he gestured for her to come down, to join him on the floor. Staring at him, he could almost feel her fighting back what she wanted to say to him, perhaps what she even wanted to do to him. Clenching her jaw visibly, she rose abruptly yet still gracefully from the velvet lounge where she’d sat, ignoring the seers who looked at her in protest, imploring her with their eyes to not follow Revik’s request.
Holding up the front of her long, Hanfu-style dress, she descended the platform with her head held high, but without looking Revik in the face. When she reached the bottom, he stepped aside for her, indicating that he wished for her to walk with him.
When she acquiesced, aiming her feet for the sliding doors on the far end of the audience chamber, Revik glanced at his guard, using sign language to indicate he intended for them to remain in the room with the other seers.
After the barest hesitation, Kidi nodded, her eyes following Voi Pai briefly.
Walking casually and still politely, he led the Lao Hu leader out of the building altogether, his arms still folded. He let the Lao Hu servants open the doors as they always did, standing out of the way to let Voi Pai pass through those doors in front of him.
Once they’d left the last of the buildings behind, he walked with her down the steps of the audience hall and then along a stone path between buildings in what had once been the human royal quarters of the City.
Glancing at the canal winding through the main thoroughfare, Revik let his eyes pause on a human servant walking, head down, along the grassy area at its edges.
He found himself frowning.
Everything looked the same. The physical beauty of the City was strangely, incongruously unchanged. The trees swayed with early spring blossoms and bright green new leaves. Lanterns and multi-tiered kites drifted back and forth in the same light breeze. The colored tiles of the roofs, the detailed stone screens he could see, the painted red doors, elaborate iron and bronze work, ancient Chinese paintings on the fronts of buildings and roof eaves, the perfect symmetry of the rock and sculpture gardens…it all remained unchanged.
Even so, through his aleimi, the City already felt different, almost unrecognizable.
Truthfully, through Revik’s light it felt nothing like the City he remembered, and Revik realized it was because the previous construct had already been more than half-dismantled, including the portions of that construct that kept the modern world out. The Lao Hu construct had locked in some remnant of the light and Barrier spaces of Ancient China, in addition to older seer spaces that Revik knew in his light from the Pamir.
He fought not to react to his part in annihilating that.
Soon, the light of the Dreng would strangle this place.
These walls and walkways and buildings would turn dead and cold…devoid of living light. It would be a physically perfect but utterly empty place.
Dead. The Forbidden City of the Lao Hu, which had stood this way for hundreds of years, prior to First Contact with the Western humans, prior to any Western eyes seeing past its walls at all…had been killed in a matter of hours.
It happened so swiftly Revik had almost missed it happening at all.
As if she’d read his light, Voi Pai muttered beside him, “I hope you’re proud, brother.”
Remembering that Voi Pai had meant to sell Allie to the same seer who now gave him orders, Revik only shook his head, clicking softly.
“No,” he said. “I am not. Nor do I appreciate your hypocrisy.” He gave her a look. “They were your allies long before they were mine, sister.”
“To preserve,” she hissed at him, showing her anger openly for the first time. “To preserve this, Illustrious brother…not to rip it apart, brick by brick! Not to wipe out the last of those ancient energies of our people! Those constructs were imported lovingly from the Pamir itself! Or do you really care so little for our history that you can stand by and watch this happen with nothing more than a few rancid crocodile tears…my very young brother?”
Revik clicked at her, sharper that time.
“What do you think he would have done if you had remained allies?” he said drily.
“Not this! He promised me. We had deals in place. That alliance was mutually beneficial for decades. It would be still, if your d
amned wife hadn’t––”
He cut her off.
“The means matter, sister,” he said, giving her a warning look. “Not only the ends. The ends are corrupted when those means are so foul.”
“Don’t you fucking preach to me, you little shit! Barely off your mother’s teat, and you presume to lecture me about being a protector of our people…!”
Revik turned on her that time. Stopping in his tracks, he swiveled on his heel, his arms folded as he looked down at her, an eyebrow raised.
She glared up at him, her hands balled into fists at her side.
Looking at her, Revik found his anger cooling.
Something about the very realness of the emotion seething off of her light––or perhaps the simple fact of feeling real emotion off any seer––made it difficult for him to hold onto genuine anger.
“Many have lost much, sister,” he told her quietly. “Not only you.”
Staring up at him, she shocked him for real, perhaps for the first time in the years he had known her.
She burst into tears.
17
SECOND OP
I stood by a fence less than a hundred yards from the entrance to the underground bunker, in the pitch black of night. We’d been pushed back more hours than I liked.
I could feel it starting now though. I could feel things going on in faint pulses out of the main construct of the structure below.
Some of those pulses made me nervous.
I was tired, too…and sore. I’d barely had a chance to clean up.
Cleaning up in this case meant having a med tech bandage the burn on my leg while she lectured me about the million things I shouldn’t be doing today that I knew I’d have to do regardless. Then I’d scrounged up some new pants.
When I met back up with Jem, he added a number of new pieces to my wardrobe, including most of a human military uniform.
At least Jem hadn’t started lecturing me.
Weirdly, I found his presence to be the only one I could really tolerate right then, maybe in part because he wasn’t treating me like some kind of broken doll.
I now stood hunched outside the smallest entrance to the complex we could find on the modified plans, feeling more or less like myself again. Situated at the far west-end of the complex, the back door entry had no road or land vehicle access at all; it could only be reached by hiking in on foot. It was also the highest up, so the furthest from the main living and work areas in use by the government, according to both Talei and Brooks.
Dalejem alone crouched beside me, against the wall by the same OBE-protected fence.
Currently, he was muttering under his breath in a language I didn’t know.
“Do you mind?” I whispered, glancing back at him. When he met my gaze I rolled my eyes. “Does the term ‘clandestine op’ still confuse you brother, after all of your years of infiltration…?”
I saw him frown subtly at me, even in the dark.
Granted, we had a little bit of a moon, but not enough of one for me to see much.
“I could be yodeling right now, Esteemed Sister,” he informed me in his regular voice. “They wouldn’t hear us.”
I frowned, but had to concede his point.
There was definitely something going on down there in that security station. I only hoped it came from the projection our side set up, and not from them realizing it was a projection right before they hit the general alarm and started shooting at anything that moved.
I also hoped our side remembered to get the fucking OBE down.
Preferably within the next few minutes.
“So what’s with the muttering?” I said, maybe to distract myself from worrying. “Are you cataloguing my sins, brother?”
“I was praying for your immortal light,” he retorted.
Snorting a laugh in spite of myself, I shook my head.
Just then, the floodlights clicked on, washing out the whole segment of dirt and rocks and scrub oak visible beyond the gate to our right. Dalejem and I remained in shadow behind the cement wall. We both made our lights corpse-still as we heard a confused shout of unfamiliar voices, most of them speaking English, but also some in Prexci.
“It’s a trick!” one of the Prexci voices said. The male’s voice had the stamp of authority. Anger infused his words. “There’s no one out here. It’s a goddamned projection…we’ve got a fucking mole. Check those new seers who came up here, the transfers…check that bitch with the red eyes first.”
Frowning, I glanced at Dalejem.
Seeing him frown, I rose to my feet.
“Bridge…” he hissed. “The OBE!”
Igniting the telekinesis, I reached up with my light.
It didn’t take much. I’d mapped the whole system out already while we’d crouched there, so I knew exactly which transformers held the main current for the gates and which were just limited relays. Flexing the telekinesis the minimum amount, I crushed the nearest of those that fit the former category with my aleimi.
Before my vision cleared, it exploded overhead in a shower of sparks.
It was loud.
Louder than I expected, truthfully.
It made a sound like a shotgun report, echoing like I’d set the damned thing off inside a sewer pipe. The entire fence shimmered.
Then, like mist dissolved by sun, the organic field evaporated off the gate.
“That OBE?” I said to Jem, quirking an eyebrow at him.
He cursed in Prexci, leaping to his feet even as I stepped to the very edge of the floodlights and promptly began firing. I did it as much to get them looking in our direction as anything, using the telekinesis to disable guns that swung our way, cracking one in half when I ignited the fusion cell inside the core. The seer holding it cried out, throwing it away from his body as it burned his hands. I moved to the next one and that seer yelled out too, dropping the gun as he shrieked in fear.
“Manipulator!” he cried out. “It’s the Sword!”
Rolling my eyes, I snorted, glancing at Jem.
“That’s sexist,” I said to him. “Don’t you think that’s sexist? I mean, I outrank him…”
“Eyes on the fucking hotspots, your majesty,” Jem grunted, squeezing off another shot from where he held the rifle pressed against his shoulder.
Returning my eyes to my own sights, I shot a human running for the security room, hitting him in the leg then using the telekinesis to knock him out when he started screaming. Extending my light, I scanned for others inside.
Thank the gods. The shots panicked them. They’d emptied the place out.
As it was, I had to hope like hell that Chan, Mara and Deklan managed to isolate this station’s feeds and breach sirens from the rest of the system…better than they’d managed that fake projection. If they hadn’t this might be a really short breach attempt.
“Alyson!” Dalejem snapped.
He was firing from next to me once more. I didn’t give him a glance that time but felt where his mind pointed, blowing out the floodlights with my aleimi before I stepped fully into where the light had been. He was still firing at the line of seers and humans I could see standing there when I raised my own rifle once more, hitting another two guards in the shoulder and the thigh, trying my best to avoid major arteries.
My light dipped a bit from the exertion, but not much.
Truthfully “stop” was still a lot harder for me than “go” when it came to the telekinesis. Still, I had to conserve my light. The telekinesis still had to be our backup-backup plan if things got too dicey inside.
I still used my light where it made sense, knocking humans out rather than shooting them, knowing I might not have that option once we got inside the construct for real. Well, not without bringing the whole house down on our heads. There were other reasons for that, too, not all of them practical, per se. I still didn’t really like killing people.
And yeah, okay…I didn’t like killing people.
“This is not subtle, Esteemed Bridge,” Dalej
em growled from beside me, stepping around bodies as he followed me to the organic door of the security station. “It might have been better if I’d yodeled earlier…”
I let out a short laugh, shooting a human in the knee and then knocking him out with my light when I felt him trying to get through his jammed headset from the ground. Dalejem shot one more guard, too, in the back as he ran for the security station.
Once he had, things got quiet.
Well, quieter anyway. No one was shooting at us anymore.
Looking around, it hit me that we’d knocked out all of the security guards outside.
I’d already walked past the first line of bodies, wincing as I felt my light meet the main construct of the underground structure…then reacting again as I was enveloped by that same construct. Already crouching behind my denser shield, I glanced at Dalejem, but only after I’d walked most of the way to the security station. Without waiting, I entered, knowing he would follow. Checking the corners and running a quick scan, I tilted my rifle up.
“Clear,” I said. Glancing at him, I preempted the lecture I saw already forming behind his eyes. “The projection tactic was blown. I had to move fast.”
Seeing that same projection that Mara and Deklan created playing on the monitors, I frowned. It showed up via the program as reconstructions of Barrier images of an invasion force in full combat gear heading up the mountain, including paratroopers. It was supposed to get them to open the OBE and send a group down to investigate; that, combined with the re-routed security protocols to Deklan’s team should have given us an easier way inside.
I reached down and hit the keys to erase it before someone tried to access this station from outside and came up here to check it out. Glancing over the rest of the monitors, I made sure the general alarm hadn’t sounded, either.
It hadn’t. The screens showed nothing but green.
Exhaling in relief, I looked at Dalejem again.
“Help me find the file,” I told him. “We gotta move. Someone will notice this.”
Looking out the observation window to the bodies spread around outside in front of the gate, some of them breathing and some not, Dalejem snorted.
Dragon: Allie's War Book Nine Page 34
