Loki wasn’t even entirely clear what the Sword hoped to find, even apart from what he thought might be likely or possible, however. Presumably, the Bridge might know, as this intel reportedly came from her, but if she did, either she had not confided that detail to her husband, or he had not passed on that information to Oli.
When Loki had attempted to probe Oli for additional information, in fact, purely for operational purposes, she said that the intermediary had been even more reticent than usual. The Sword admitted to her, after a few more minutes of roundabout discussion, that he’d received the information from his wife, and that she wasn’t available for him to ask her further questions.
Loki found that odd, to say the least.
Oli did, too, and proceeded to tell Loki so. Loki knew better than to rise to such bait, or to speculate as to the private life of his intermediaries...but yes, he found it odd.
He had heard whispers of the Bridge’s prescience, of course.
All of them knew she supposedly dreamt dreams that contained elements of prophecy. It was rumored that those prescient dreams of hers reached her even inside the walls of the tank where she slept with her husband...even though the tank cut them both out of the Barrier proper. According to rumor among Loki’s ex-rebel friends, including Commander Wreg himself, the Bridge had even dreamed the Displacement Lists...for months prior to the break-in at the New York bank where they were found.
From what Loki could gather regarding his current set of orders, this D.C. op might have similar origins.
Loki did not mind. He knew that some of the seers with him might have somewhat less accepting views, however, which is why he chose to keep that information to himself.
The Sword’s encrypted message had been precise in two critical areas.
One: he had been able to tell Loki where this thing might be located, even if he had not been able to tell him what it might be, in terms of the exact form it might take. The Sword had also been able to tell Loki how to access that thing, assuming he and the others managed to find the place where this maybe thing might be located.
So nebulous, yes...but with enough precision that Loki felt confident that they might succeed in retrieving this thing anyway, particularly if one of the Bridge’s visions was truly involved. Loki knew he might be more superstitious than most of the seers on this mission for believing such a thing. Most of them had grown up in vastly different circumstances than Loki himself. Moreover, most of them were a good deal younger than Loki, too.
Whatever his age and background, however, riding the elevator down to the sub-basement levels, Loki could not help but feel glimmers of emotional impact relating to where they were. To be penetrating the inner sanctum of such a place, the former seat of human power in North America...arguably for the world, at least for a good portion of the 20th Century...Loki found himself watching all of the technical elements of their infiltration with more of a warier eye than normal. Also, with a slightly nostalgic one.
Even with the humans gone, he knew he should not assume this job would be easy. Many seer and human minds had been tasked with keeping this building, particularly its lower levels, impregnable to hostile forces.
Further, Loki did have a personal stake in this.
He could admit that to himself, even while knowing the others knew it, too.
He very much appreciated that the Sword had moved him to the military side of operations, following their last mobilization in New York City. Loki had more than once considered making the request formally himself, after months of feeling uncomfortably out of place among the high-ranked infiltrators of the Adhipan under Balidor and Yumi.
He knew his former assignment had not been a punishment, but had instead likely been meant to flatter him, as well as acknowledge his high sight rank in actual.
While Loki weighed back and forth the risks of offending the Sword by protesting his placement, he kept returning to the faith-based argument that the Sword knew what he was doing. After all, who was Loki to question this? In the end, he decided to give the boss the benefit of the doubt in terms of all of his assignments, and not to question his preferences, or presume he understood their motives.
Regardless, Loki could not entirely disguise his pleasure when the Sword promoted him, following his ground assignment in Manhattan, and re-assigned him to the military division under Wreg.
The latter change had been a profound relief.
Far more than the promotion had been, really...although that had been reassuring, too. If not for that, Loki might have worried that he had somehow disappointed or displeased the Sword within his previous duties under the infiltration division.
Loki had worked for Wreg before, however, under both rebellion hierarchies, and the reassignment felt entirely natural to him within a matter of days.
For that reason, and likely for reasons of pride more generally, Loki felt determined not to disappoint the Sword or Commander Wreg in his first official mission under his new military title. The last thing he wanted, after months of trying to fit in with the Adhipan infiltrators, was to make the Sword regret his choice to move Loki back into forward operations.
Thinking about this now, Loki glanced down at Anale, who crouched on the floor of the elevator by the open control panel. A thick bunch of glowing, jelly-like wires spilled out of the opening and into the hands of Anale and Ontari, who worked beside her, threading through the components, or “squids,” as the techs called organic wiring in shorthand.
Between them sat a portable power source, which pulsed an eerie, red-orange light. That same power source got the elevator car moving in the first place, with all of the local power grids down. Unfortunately, they were unable to power up the elevator’s descent mechanism without powering a good number of the attendant security protocols, too.
The elevator car had already screeched to a halt in the shaft twice, while Loki and Jax accessed the secondary organics panel through the back wall to override and fool the ID scans into thinking they belonged there. Luckily, the gas contingency had been disabled, or they might have spent a lot longer in that elevator car, after waking up with hangovers and with their comms going crazy from their having diverted from mission parameters by six to eight hours...if not longer. The less dramatic scenario would have left them trapped between floors until they figured out a different means of traveling the shaft, likely by cutting through the elevator car floor.
Loki strongly suspected that any course they took would potentially ignite more security measures, however. The boss already warned him they might still have back-up power sources below ground.
If nothing else, they’d potentially alert a lot more people to their intentions, by sounding multiple alarms for secret service agents who were no longer located on site, but who might be monitoring the location from bunkers housed elsewhere.
Something about having those remnants of organic security systems continuing on in their tasks, oblivious to the absence of their masters, struck Loki as eerie, whether the site was still being monitored or not.
He further got the sense he wasn’t the only one to feel unnerved by the silence of the surrounding Barrier space. Jax had been making jokes for the last few minutes as the elevators descended...a nervous tic that had become somewhat unusual for him since he’d been injured during that final op in New York.
Really, Loki had almost wondered if the Sword and Balidor assigned Jax to this mission for that very reason. The younger seer had been noticeably changed by whatever happened to him in Gossett Tower, and Loki suspected it wasn’t only because he’d been shot and nearly died of blood and light loss before they got him out.
All of them had noticed the difference in him.
More than a few had attempted to talk to him about it, too. Loki knew Jax had been ordered by the Sword to see Yumi regularly, too, to obtain more thorough assessments of his light. The Sword informed Loki of that fact, and the fact that they were monitoring Jax’s light periodically via central infiltration, when
he put Jax under Loki’s command. Such disclosures were usual with commanding officers, particularly for the Adhipan. Even so, Loki found himself uncomfortable knowing many of the particulars, and did not ask.
The Adhipan apparently had a long history of seeing to its own in that way, probably because for many thousands of years, they had no choice.
Holo had probably done the most to try and pull Jax back into his former, jovial self, but between the death of Garensche and his lingering injury, Jax still seemed to be in a kind of ongoing shock, or perhaps grief, months after they’d left the Tower and Manhattan behind.
Even now, Jax’s dark, East Indian features held a harder expression than the smile on his lips suggested. Loki saw the dense look behind those dark violet eyes, as well. Hearing Jax attempt to joke around with the rest of them now, when his eyes, voice and light clearly showed him to not be fully engaged in those jokes, was as much unnerving as reassuring, truthfully.
Even Holo seemed to think so. Instead of laughing, he only smiled wanly at Jax’s comments, watching the other seer with a nearly open scrutiny.
Keep an eye on him, Loki sent to Holo. Let me know if you notice any...issues.
Holo looked up at him. He nodded after studying Loki’s eyes.
He’ll be fine, Holo sent.
It is not criticism, brother. Concern only...I assure you.
Something in Holo’s dark eyes relaxed, right before he gave another seer’s nod.
Loki kept his light attuned to all of theirs now.
They descended to the sixth sub-floor below the ground level of the White House.
As the elevator came to a stop, the security protocol switched on once more, bathing them all in a dense field as their physiological idents got scanned by the machines. This time, they should all come up as positive, but Loki did not move while the scans took place, and he glanced back at Illeg where she continued to monitor the open back panel.
Checking the specs the Sword had been able to provide, Loki nodded in assent when Anale gave him a glance. Without a word aloud, the team split, four and five to either side of the doors, rifles out.
Then Anale triggered the correct tendrils in the squids to open the door.
Loki had a light tap on the construct itself at this point, meaning the one he shared with the rest of his team. He used that same tap to pull the construct up slightly, to give them a view of their immediate Barrier surroundings in this underground bunker.
It wasn’t invasive enough to give any of them more than the high-level view, but it would at least give them some indication of what to expect. Mostly, he looked for life forms. Being a Sark, Loki had to depend on living things and imprints, anyway. With the exception of organics, neither he nor any of his seers could access or even see any of the hardware with their light.
It was one large disadvantage of not having Syrimne, the Bridge or Syrimne’s son, Maygar, with them, or in the infiltration team backing them up.
They’d all grown somewhat spoiled with having that additional layer of sight.
“You still with me, Yumi?” he subvocalized.
“We are here, brother. The Barrier space is clear where you are. Are you seeing anything different, from your location?”
“No, sister,” he said. “We are not.”
He scanned through the life forms he could feel.
Humans in the upper floors, likely squatters. He counted around thirty living and sleeping above the ground floor, separate from the half-dozen or so they had already scared off upon entering through the back portico with their rifles. None felt like anything but civilians. He got no ties to SCARB, to Shadow, to any of the militaries whose imprints he knew.
He knew those ties could be hidden, of course.
No seers appeared to be living here, though...meaning in the White House or its surrounding grounds. As a result, the humans had been easy enough to push, which Loki ordered his team to do mainly to avoid unnecessary deaths. It was a risk, but according to Yumi, who had been overseeing the infiltration team that provided them support from the carrier, that risk was an acceptable one, perhaps even a small one.
Anyway, the Sword had told Loki to use his own discretion.
Loki made the judgment call when they got inside, saw his team surrounded by hungry and irrational-looking humans and still felt nothing in the way of a construct or the presence of any other seers. After he confirmed that impression with Yumi and the other Adhipan infiltrators, he made the call as the crowd of humans approached them, probably wanting food. Shadow’s people might have imprint tags on all of the Sword’s people individually at this point, so they all knew the move wasn’t without risk, but Loki made the decision to chance it when he got the go-ahead from the Adhipan.
It was that, or mow down a few of the humans with automatic weapon fire, and hope that made their point.
Loki did not feel good about that, given that they were unarmed, obviously hungry, and desperate. A part of him could rationalize such a thing as a mercy, but he felt it was not his mercy to give, not his lives or fates to determine.
He could only hope the Sword would agree with that decision.
Loki felt no one in the sub-basement levels of the compound, which was not altogether surprising, either. As an added security precaution, no stairs led to these floors from the ground level above, and only one elevator led below the earth’s crust, the one in which they currently crouched. A secondary exit existed below, according to the revised plans provided by the Sword, and emergency stairs provided access between several of the sub-basement floors themselves, but they were cut off from the upper structure totally once the power got cut, unless they climbed up or down the shaft itself.
A potential course of action which came with its own perils, of course.
The Sword warned Loki that they’d more likely be cut in half by fields triggered by separately-powered motion sensors, if they tried to rappel up or down the shaft without finding all of the security measures that had been installed there, often with independent power sources.
Yet another reason your average human likely would only get themselves killed if they happened upon the controls and keypad to access the sub-basements in the first place...and yet another reason why, when Loki felt no living beings on the sub-basement floors with his aleimi, he felt cautiously optimistic that he could trust his light.
Moreover, neither he nor anyone on his team could feel anything approaching a construct down here, either. Granted, they’d gotten a lot more cautious around assumptions related to construct detection following what they’d encountered with Shadow in Manhattan, but even so, Loki trusted the Sword, and the Sword hadn’t felt anything, either.
Changing channels on his headset, he pinged Yumi’s team back at the aircraft carrier to get a second opinion, anyway. He didn’t bother with a greeting when she picked up.
“Still nothing?” he said.
“Nothing, brother,” she confirmed.
Nodding, as much to himself as to the seer on the line, who wouldn’t see him anyway without his avatar function turned on, he motioned for the others to leave the elevator car in pairs. They walked out in front of him, two by two, with him and Anale taking up the rear and still scanning for any secondary security measures that the Sword’s plans might have missed. The Sword cautioned Loki more than once that those plans were a few years old, and came mostly from the Bridge’s and his memories of being held captive down here.
Given what happened in the wake of the Bridge being broken out of this underground prison, the Sword cautioned Loki strongly to keep his eyes open, as it was likely that security measures had been strengthened significantly, or simply changed into new configurations.
For now, however, Loki felt nothing. With the power down, the floors felt dead.
Even as he thought it, Illeg’s voice rose on the comm.
“Clear,” she said.
“Clear,” Ontari seconded from further down the hall.
“Clear,” Holo confirm
ed, from an open doorway about ten meters from the elevator doors.
A few more clears sounded in his headset, even as Loki felt the seers in front of him begin to fan out and scan the corridors and attached rooms. He monitored the careful touches of their light, even as he sent the construct a snapshot of the offices at the end of the hall, with particulars of the room the Sword had shown him.
Glancing at Anale, Loki motioned for her to follow him, right before he entered the pitch blackness of the hallway after the rest of the team.
Loki wondered if he’d ever walked in darkness so complete.
Physical darkness did not bother seers the same way it did many humans. They could use their Barrier sight to compensate for the most part, providing enough imprints lived in the physical space to allow them to make out the outlines of objects. Unlike an Elaerian, like the Sword and the Bridge, ordinary seers could get no insight into those objects apart from their outlines...but they could at least avoid walking into them.
Even so, pitch darkness like this still affected them, psychologically as much as anything, he supposed.
Like now, Loki couldn’t actually see the walls of the corridor.
He could feel imprints, some of them in the shape of fingerprints, handprints, touches of life and light left behind, which left a blurred outline approximating walls for him to follow. He could see the much brighter lights of his team members in the corridor up ahead, and in some of the doorways to either side, checking corners and scanning rooms. He could see organics in some of the walls, too, like faintly shimmering threads that stood probably an inch or two deeper than the physical limits of the walls themselves.
The organics appeared so dense down here, they ran like blood-engorged veins through all four surfaces of the corridor, giving him an incomplete view of the dimensions of the physical structure, but a view nonetheless.
“Corridor, second right,” he said through the sub-vocals. “Fourth door down on the left. Should be a dead-metal, key button security panel under a flip switch on the outside...followed by a secondary with organics, retinal scanner, possibly facial recognition ID.” Pausing as he felt Ontari and Illeg approaching the appropriate door, he added, “If you can’t hack the squids, we may have to use charges.”
Allie's War Season Four Page 78
