Sword

by JC Andrijeski

  “Okay, lay it on me.”

  Leaning down over the metal guardrail separating us from the lower part of the room, he clicked his fingers at one of the seers sitting there, motioning that he wanted two headsets. He handed one to me, then fitted one over his ear, watching that I did the same.

  Once I had it in place, I found myself looking at a larger, more detailed, three-dimensional image of a building, this time almost photographically real, although I could see through the walls to elements of the actual structure. Revik did something then, and it looked like we were flying in the air outside the building.

  “SCARB headquarters,” I murmured, reading the outside. “I should have known.” I found myself really looking at it, comparing it to the building I’d seen on the monitor before. “That’s not the same building.”

  “No. It’s not.”

  I glanced at him. The walls had disappeared around us, but I could still see him clearly. He smiled at me, motioning towards the new building.

  “We want to take out the seer registration system,” he said.

  The building rushed at us, and I flinched as we passed through walls, landing in one of the corridors. He took me through a row of desks with expensive-looking consoles and humans wearing business suits lined up in cubicle rows. The low walls made them look like mice in a maze, each hunched over their own particular piece of cheese.

  “The processing happens here,” he said, gesturing vaguely over the room. “They house seers in this building, too. Especially young ones with no tags. But they don’t stay long, it’s more of a holding for transport situation. The numbers aren’t significant.”

  We zoomed down through floors.

  He showed me a few other areas of the building, including a room on the ground floor with a long row of windows like at a bank, or the DMV, or a train station. Seers mostly, from what I could tell, stood in lines, holding what looked like stacks of bureaucratic forms of various kinds and tissue samples. I knew a lot of them were probably relatives and mates, paying fines.

  I felt my jaw harden.

  We didn’t stay there long, either. He showed me the floor below, which housed several levels of holding cells, each containing at least four or five seers in close proximity. They clearly had to take turns sleeping, and I noticed most of the females weren’t wearing any clothes, and appeared to be bruised up and bloodied.

  “Revik.” My throat closed as I grabbed his wrist.

  He took my hand.

  “Sorry,” he said, softer. “I’ll show you the main target.”

  He took me a few floors below the one housing the cells, then through a long, underground hallway. I realized it stretched longer than the building he’d shown me. When I looked up, I saw through the VR reconstruction that the tunnel passed under the city streets, a sub-corridor that ran several stories underground, covered over in rock and cement.

  “They don’t have a networked database,” he explained. “They upload to satellite every twenty-four hours via a proxy that’s only hooked to the mainframe for the transfer, and they do it by hand. Same with inputs. A single day’s inputs goes into secondary storage that is manually transferred to primary storage. That information gets dispersed to a couple of back up systems, which are all organics and networked, for easier access. One of these is housed in the United States, in D.C. There are also sites in Dubai, Argentina, and in South Africa. We think we’ve mapped all but one. Garensche is working on that now.”

  I nodded. By all accounts, Garensche was some kind of savant with organic machines. Wreg and Revik teased him about it periodically, saying he likely had an organic as his girlfriend, seeing as how he was so gifted at getting them to cooperate with his requests.

  “The download sites are just storage, Allie. Copies,” Revik explained. “And they’re all organics, so we can get to them a lot easier from the Barrier. We need to hit the mainframe directly. That’s why they deliberately made it with non-organic parts.

  “The interfaces you saw for data processing are organics, but most people don’t know that the main storage itself is pure dinosaur. It’s all stuff from the end of the last century. It’s slow as hell, in terms of data transfers, but that also means it’s nearly impossible to touch long-distance. You have to be there in person to get access. No way to hack that from the Barrier.”

  Studying my eyes again to make sure I followed, he shrugged.

  “We’ll need two teams. One for the Registry itself, and one for the mainframe. They back up entries on the organics using regular servers, like I said, but those are just temporary storage until they finish processing to the mainframe. Then the servers get wiped… again to avoid record tampering. They never hold more than one day’s entries or changes. SCARB is incredibly paranoid about using organics for anything to do with seer tagging. With good reason.”

  Revik pointed to a series of smaller images, showing me the server room in the Registry building itself.

  “Backups occur at night,” he said. “But they parse those out as well, mainly due to the slow speeds of the mainframe. If both teams went in at night, we could disrupt the download, like I said, but that’s only a day’s worth of registration entries and updates, at most. We need to get to the mainframe, Allie. It’s critical.”

  I nodded. As he spoke, I realized he was probably right.

  I was probably going to be okay with this one.

  “And the people?” I said. “In those cells. You’re going to get them out, too, aren’t you, husband?” I looked up at him. “Since you’re there.”

  A slow smile spread over his face. “Of course, wife.”

  “And you wouldn’t want to go in guns blazing?” I said, my voice still casual. “I mean, this isn’t a media op. You’d want to be in and out, so they don’t even know the data’s gone for a little while, if it’s at all possible. That way you can make sure you’ve got all the back-ups before they try to put them in another non-organic.”

  He nodded thoughtfully. “That would make the most sense, yes,” he said, equally casual. “If we managed to keep it quiet until we’re able to hit all of the download sites, plus wipe anything remaining on the servers—”

  “Which you wouldn’t want to do, of course, until you were sure you had the mainframe down.” I glanced at him. “You know, in case they decided to reroute the data via satellite, to someplace you haven’t found.”

  “Naturally,” he said, smiling faintly.

  His eyes had changed though, studying mine with an intensity that I hadn’t seen in them in a long time.

  “And the satellite?” I said. “That’s organic, too?”

  “Main components are. Garry’s working on it now.”

  I looked back at the building, thinking again about those cages, and the several hundred seers I’d seen crammed in there like rats. Revik had said the numbers “weren’t significant” on site. What was his idea of holding a lot?

  I remembered then, that all of the seers in work camps and seer prisons were hooked into the security systems via ID tags and implants based on the registry system––as were the vast majority of seers held against their will in brothels, corporations and other contracts organized through the bigger traders.

  My jaw hardened, just before I looked up at him.

  He was still watching me, his eyes intent.

  “So when are we going?” I asked him.

  33

  ERRATIC

  I SAT ON the long bench in the back of a military helicopter, feeling a bit of a rush as the construct kicked in, descending into my light.

  I found myself looking at the seers around me with fresh eyes a second later, absorbing the information I got on skill sets, sight ranks, areas of expertise, special training, languages spoken. They even had details of personality and temperament indicators—things that might set them off or calm them down, how to reach them if they got lost in a Barrier space, their typical behaviors under stress or euphoria.

  I found myself wondering if they could al
l see the same information on me.

  Glancing at Wreg, I saw him smiling at me faintly.

  “You don’t want to know,” he said, clicking softly.

  He was taping his wrist from an injury he’d gotten two days earlier in the dry run. I watched him wrap it a second time, when he finally looked up, smiling a little wider at me.

  When I raised an eyebrow in question, he showed me his view of my stats, sending it as a packed slew of information straight to my aleimi.

  Instead of the elaborate list of stats and skill sets, packed with weaknesses and strengths, weapons training, hand-to-hand skills, vehicles I could pilot or not, machines used and hacked, regional familiarities, running speed, endurance, ability to talk to organics and a million other listed traits, what I got was a floating text that looked like it had been hand-written.

  It said this:

  The Bridge. Telekinetic, erratic. High blocking skills. No infiltrator ranking. Rank 14, potential. Decent at mulei. Doesn’t know hand language. Risk taker. Keep her safe, or you’re dead.

  Looking at Wreg, I made a disbelieving sound.

  “Boss wrote that one himself,” he said, laughing.

  “I would never have guessed,” I said, loud over the sound of the helicopter.

  Glancing around, I saw smiles and chuckles on a few other seers.

  I’d noticed more of them had warmed to me, ever since they found out I was accompanying them on this little trip. It started on the plane ride from China, but continued at the staging area in Rio, and then the closer staging site in Santos near São Paulo in Brazil, where the registry offices actually lived.

  In each place we stopped, I found myself amazed at the number of seers who seemed to live somewhere on the network Revik had inherited from Salinse. Everywhere, it was brother this and sister that. They all seemed to believe that their time had finally arrived.

  Not all of them warmed to me, of course.

  Loki still looked at me like I might stab Revik any second when he wasn’t looking, and a few others seemed to be almost afraid of me, likely due to the Bridge thing. Also, a female infiltrator named Ute clearly had a crush on Revik and struggled just to be polite to me.

  But the rest of them were almost collegial.

  I rearranged the armored vest around my middle, tightening the straps as best as I could.

  “What does rank 14, potential mean?” I asked Wreg.

  They all looked at one another; I heard more laughter in the Barrier.

  “It means you’re an intermediary being, Esteemed Sister,” Wreg said, his eyes twinkling at me in humor. “I would not take it as an insult.” He glanced at Garensche. “What is your potential rank, Gar?”

  “Eight,” the mountainous seer said promptly. “Yours, Wreg?”

  “Ten,” the other infiltrator answered.

  Garensche’s eyebrows went up. “Impressive,” he said, whistling.

  “I think so,” Wreg said, smiling at me again. “You understand now, sister?”

  “No,” I said, and all of them laughed again.

  “The ranks are exponential,” he explained. “Fourteen is… ” He raised a hand, illustrating a height well above his head as he clicked softly.

  “…Off the charts, Esteemed One,” another seer, named Nikka finished. “The boss only credits himself with 13, but we think he is lying.”

  A few others chuckled with her after she said it.

  I frowned a little. “But how would he even know that?” I said. “He’s never tested me or anything.”

  The back of the helicopter broke out in louder, more general laughter, some of them looking at me in utter disbelief. I felt myself flush a little, looking around at faces. I also found myself wishing I’d held off and asked Revik.

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “Everyone laugh at the dumb worm-raised girl.”

  “He knows your light,” Wreg assured me. “He is very interested in your light, princess,” he added, winking at me before he laughed with Garensche. “So much so he never seems to get much sleep these days.”

  “Yes,” Garensche said. “In fact, I think I heard him testing your light the other day.” He did a passable imitation of Revik’s voice, probably from that day in the sauna. “Allie… gods… please… do that, jesus… please… please… let me…”

  The rest of them busted up laughing as I felt my face burn hotter. I threw one of the flares in my pocket at the giant seer, hitting him in the side of the head.

  “Asshole,” I said.

  “Ouch,” he said, rubbing his temple, grinning at me. “I knew I should have put on my helmet before I did that.”

  “You’re lucky I didn’t use my ‘telekinetic, erratic’ on you,” I said.

  Wreg and Nikka laughed aloud at this.

  I couldn’t help grinning too. Crammed in the small space with eleven infiltrators, all of us in organic helmets with armor wrapped around most of our exposed body parts, I couldn’t help but share their high spirits, and the sense of camaraderie. Movement felt good. Doing something that actually felt important felt good, too. I realized a huge part of me had been as impatient with all the speech-giving and public face crap with the media as Revik likely had been.

  Remembering the bomb, the people stumbling out of the smoking hotel in Delhi, I felt my elation flag a bit.

  “Wasn’t a bomb,” Wreg said, looking at me.

  When I turned, his eyes studied mine with an intensity that unnerved me.

  I’d forgotten we shared a construct now, a dense, fast-moving one.

  “What?” I said.

  He gestured vaguely. “Your bomb. It wasn’t.” He smiled thinly, and I saw a glint of predator in his eyes as he rubbed his jaw. “Why would we need a bomb, when we have Syrimne d’Gaos with us?”

  A few of the others smiled, nodding.

  I frowned a little. “So he blew up a gas main. What’s the difference?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “He didn’t do that, either.”

  I hesitated, trying to decide if I wanted to ask.

  “Ask it,” he said, smiling. “You’re dying to know.”

  “What did he do?” I said.

  “That bitch,” he said.

  I winced, thinking at first he meant me, but then he sent me a snapshot with his mind. It materialized, three-dimensional, in my head. It was the reporter, Donna, from my time in the White House. She looked just as annoying as I remembered.

  Even as I thought it, I realized she was dead now.

  My irritation twisted into a colder feeling in my gut.

  “He started with her,” he said. “He blew up her car with her in it. That’s probably what you heard, there on the top floor. He had the chauffeur drive it into the lobby first.”

  I swallowed, looking at him. “Oh.”

  “He did the same with a few more cars. Most of them were armored of course. To protect them from the likes of us.” He grunted, glancing around at the others, who also had anger in their eyes. “That asshole Prime Minister who signed the legislation making it okay to sell seer babies.” His obsidian eyes grew harder. “…and the fucker from Italy who is in bed with Black Arrow, that company that fronts for the biggest chain of work camps.”

  Wreg smiled and the coldness in his eyes shone brighter.

  “The really big explosion was when the gasoline lit the organics in the feeds. They’re protected, see, so several of them self-destructed. There was a chain reaction when it hit the main power grid.”

  I nodded, feeling a little sick.

  “Gotcha,” I said.

  He sent me a pulse of warmth, a reassuring bloom of heat in my heart.

  I know you don’t like killing, sister. The flavor of his mind contained empathy, but I still felt that predatory sharpness in his light. The boss tells me you are soft-hearted. That is nothing but a good, Esteemed Sister. The Bridge should be this way. It is a part of the balance, when you are so powerful. You must be the leader.

  He straightened his flak jacket, his tho
ughts turning grim.

  Syrimne does not have that luxury, Esteemed One. He is the foot soldier, the bearer of bad news. It is why you married him. He gets his hands dirty, so you do not have to.

  I just looked at him, not answering.

  Remember this, Esteemed Sister. His near-black eyes grew serious. Before you go judging your mate. Remember who these animals are, what they’ve done to your people. Know that he was more restrained than I would have been. More than most of us in this helicopter would have been. We’ve all of us, at one time or another, seen the inside of those camps. We’ve all of us had family members killed by those animals, and worse.

  I glanced around, saw heads nodding around the cabin.

  They all listened to Wreg, their eyes holding the same understanding.

  I thought of Vash, but didn’t say anything.

  I couldn’t pull off the holy man routine. I wasn’t peaceful the way Vash was; I knew that, and I could never speak for him here, not around seers who had experienced what these seers had experienced. Even for myself, I didn’t have the conviction to be able to say no to violence, ever, no matter what, like Vash did.

  I could admire him for it, but I couldn’t quite feel it myself.

  Anyway, I couldn’t exactly argue with Wreg and the others, given the world they’d been born into. I grew up in San Francisco, thinking I was human. While they were being sold and beaten and collared, I’d been watching movies with my friends, waiting tables at a crap diner, getting drunk at Geckos, buying clothes at high-end thrift stores and worrying about whether my paintings might sell to rich yuppies with cash to burn.

  My father died while I was young, but he hadn’t been lynched by a mob of humans. He died of multiple sclerosis, which meant natural causes, more or less.

  Terian killed my mother, but I was an adult when that happened.

  For most of my life, and all of my childhood, I’d had a mother who loved me. No one tried to take her from me when I was a kid. I hadn’t been sold to a brothel, or passed around by a bunch of Sweeps for kicks while she watched.

  Wreg smiled at me. I saw approval in his eyes.

  Thank you, Esteemed Bridge, he sent. You do understand. You have empathy for your people. You care what happens to us.