Prophet: Bridge & Sword

by JC Andrijeski

  Half the buildings were already falling down, some from human hands tearing them apart, but even more by rising tides, storms and floods from the encroaching river and sea that spilled over the dykes and bulwarks that used to shield Long Island. The energy fields built to protect and reinforce those dykes had failed entirely in the previous however-many months, leaving the residents here vulnerable to the realities of the natural world.

  This whole area would be a saltwater swamp in not too long a time.

  That would be true regardless of what the locals did, unless something happened to bring the wider civilization back online. With zero law enforcement, no centralized power grid, no way to organize the various criminal factions now running Long Island, and zero leadership, there was no way to build something that would benefit everyone.

  Loki would be very happy to leave this part of the world behind.

  “Boss wants us to go to D.C. before we head back,” he said, finishing his thought as he glanced over his shoulder at the other seven seers on his team. His eyes avoided the single human now accompanying them. “I’ve got orders and coordinates for a new rendezvous. South of here. There are things he wishes us to check before we leave land.”

  “Boss?” Jax muttered. “Which one?”

  The words came out half-humorous, but Loki answered him unsmilingly.

  “The Sword,” he said.

  “What’s in D.C.?” Illeg said, from Loki’s other side.

  She jerked up her own rifle, copying Loki’s pose, only with an Belgian-made F2000. The gun was modified, of course, like all the guns they wore, mainly via organic components, but Loki noted a few other toys on Illeg’s particular gun of choice, including a higher-grade scope than what came standard.

  “I haven’t looked at the encrypted files yet, sister,” Loki said, giving her a direct look. “Oli said the boss wants us to look for information on C2-77, as well as any related government disaster contingency planning we might find. There’s a bunker under the White House. He wants us to check it, since we’re so close. I was told that the Bridge has been having dreams about it, that they might be of a prescient nature… like how she obtained the Lists.”

  Pausing when a few on his team made the respectful sign of the Bridge, Loki went on when the religious symbols had finished.

  “From what Oli told me, our Esteemed Sister has concerns that some new danger might be coming. Something related to the remnants of the government here… meaning the former United States. She did not necessarily see the government as the source of this problem, but saw us interacting with them in some way. She wishes to know more about what they knew about this disease, and about Shadow’s plans prior to the human plague being released.”

  There was a silence as his words sank in.

  Then Illeg swore under her breath in Prexci.

  “Oli’s broadcasting that shit over our military channel?” she said. “Maybe you need to give Oli a bit of a lesson on comm etiquette where the Bridge and Sword are concerned, brother.” The infiltrator’s voice grew angrier still. “She must know those fuckers listen for any intel with her name attached. Especially out here. Prescient dreams? Gaos d’ jurekil’a… that fucker Shadow will eat that shit up!”

  Loki gave her a grim look. He nodded, once.

  “Agreed, sister,” he said.

  He didn’t add that he’d already pinged Balidor with a text version of more or less that same thought.

  Illeg must have caught some whisper of that on his light, because Loki saw her relax, right before she gave him a satisfied nod. Her mouth still looked thinner than usual, Loki noted, but they’d all had reasons to be on edge out here.

  Then again, maybe he’d been looking at female mouths a little too often, lately.

  Forcing out the thought, he dropped his eyes to his rifle, checking it to ensure it hadn’t gotten too gunked in the recent raid. He knew it was pure distraction; he’d checked its workings scarcely five minutes earlier, when they first crouched here.

  He’d given the order to halt, partly to give his team a breather, but mainly to answer the ping from Oli.

  Neither Oli nor Illeg were the females pulling at his light, however.

  Nor were either of them the reason he was having trouble concentrating.

  Instead, it was the human woman who stood behind Illeg, who crouched now, next to Holo, a wary look on her tanned face. Her closeness to the other male’s body and light sent a ripple of hostility through Loki’s own, forcing him to pull away from her––and forcing him to notice he’d let his light creep back around hers in the first place.

  He tried not to think about how they’d found her.

  More than that, he tried not to think about how she’d looked in that dank, filthy place, that room of stained mattresses and bloody wires, that smelled of sex and sour sweat, mold from the monsoon rains, rotted food––and yes, sex.

  Even in that filthy, depressing den, his desire to fuck flared high enough to make his knees weak.

  A brief look at her now brought that pain back in a thick pulse.

  He shouldn’t be thinking like this.

  He should not.

  Even apart from who she was.

  Moving his eyes away from her heart-shaped face, those large, dark eyes and full mouth, he glanced down the length of the narrow brick corridor towards where Anale guarded the entrance to the alley. He squinted up at the overcast strip of sky.

  When he returned his gaze to his people, Jax and Holo were watching him, their lights holding flickers of curiosity.

  “Did the mission go well?” Jax said finally. “In Macau?”

  “No.” Loki clicked mildly, although he couldn’t exactly blame them for asking. Moderating his tone, he added with a seer’s shrug, “It did not go well. They were able to pick up most of the humans, but the seers had been sold, relocated to Dubai.”

  They all fell silent.

  Holo grunted then, pulling up his own weapon, a F2000 like Illeg’s. He wiped the sight, frowning down at the cloth as he rubbed it vigorously over the organic lens.

  “I bet the big boss didn’t like that,” he muttered.

  Everyone knew he meant the Bridge. They just looked at him, silent.

  Loki wasn’t sure what to add to his words.

  He could have; Oli had been forthcoming about the Bridge and Sword’s reactions to their failure in Macau. Loki’s team was more or less secure here, as long as they stayed out of the Barrier, and none of what he knew was particularly compromising.

  It wasn’t really in his nature to share that kind of information, though.

  Oli additionally told him about an encounter with a strange seer, who claimed to belong to a mysterious group of seers devoted to the Bridge, and that the Bridge herself had threatened that seer due to some personal interaction with the Sword––or maybe because the same seer had stabbed Jon, Loki was slightly fuzzy on the details.

  In any case, the story clearly had a personal element––personal enough, he’d felt uncomfortable hearing it, especially long-distance, and even apart from the security issues it raised to do so on a military channel. Not only did it make him not want to ask anything further of Oli herself, it caused him to terminate the connection altogether.

  That was when he’d pinged Balidor.

  He knew his own team would likely want to know all these things.

  They craved personal information out here, whatever Illeg’s annoyance at Oli for breaking protocol. They would want to hear everything Oli told him, if only to keep their minds off the grimmer realities they faced, and to feel connected to their friends back on the carrier.

  He still felt uncomfortable sharing such a thing.

  So he didn’t.

  “Do we have an approach plan, sir?” Jax said. “For D.C.?”

  Loki clicked softly, but didn’t answer.

  Mostly because there was no need.

  They all knew the Sword never proposed anything without a plan. Usually that plan would have a
half-dozen contingencies in addition to his recommended approach.

  Jax had merely been using words to pull Loki’s mind back to the present.

  Sharpening his gaze, Loki motioned towards the north end of the alley where they stood, indicating he wanted them to get moving again. While the location had been fine for a short rest, it was far from secure. Anyway, they were back on the clock.

  Anale took lookout duties at one end, and Ontari, who was ex-Ahdipan, stood a half-dozen meters behind them, keeping his gun aimed at the other end of the long passage.

  “Stay with her,” Loki told Mika, motioning with his head towards the female human.

  He didn’t look at her himself, but his mind made a mental picture of her anyway.

  In terms of her physical appearance, she looked a fair bit like her biological daughter, their new comp-tech protege, Dante. Her light felt significantly different, however, in ways that Loki’s light unfortunately wanted to explore in painstaking detail.

  On a purely operational level, Loki felt a slight rush from the victory at having found her at all. None of them expected to find her––much less to find her alive.

  The human had been resourceful.

  Smart. Wise, really––and beyond her years.

  Even Illeg, who could be gruff towards humans, noted that this woman must be highly intelligent, also like her daughter. Her situation was hardly enviable when they found her, but Loki could not help but admire her for having found any means of survival at all, when so many like her died with scarce a whimper.

  She explained to them, in an offhand but endearingly embarrassed way, that when the human bandits came to her, she determined who their leader was, and attacked his second-in-command with a knife, managing to slice him on the arm. When Illeg asked her why she’d done it, she explained she figured there was probably some tension there, since there often was between first and second in command, so she thought it might get the leader’s attention.

  Her ploy worked.

  Amused, intrigued, and––Loki bristled at the thought––no doubt, attracted by her, the warlord offered her a choice. She negotiated, still holding the bloody knife, and in the end, he opted to keep her alive as a permanent part of his crew.

  She’d convinced him she was worth feeding––no small feat out here. She termed it as “worth a longer-term investment,” which Loki found a curious choice of words.

  The human female was attractive.

  A little too attractive for him, at least right then.

  Loki needed sex, and badly. It wasn’t this woman, he told himself. It was him. He’d been looking at seers in his team a little too long, even before they’d found her.

  Of course, he knew that was rationalization.

  Partly, at any rate.

  He hadn’t looked at any of the seers in his unit the way he looked at her. His light didn’t react to theirs with anywhere near the intensity he’d felt since meeting her. Truthfully, he couldn’t remember reacting to anyone in decades the way he’d been reacting to her.

  Still, he knew his more general need for sex must be making this worse.

  He didn’t normally bed males, but he’d even been looking at Jax the other day, noticing the muscles on the seer’s shoulders and back while he washed off in the river following their initial scout of that human enclave at the northern end of Prospect Park.

  Those had been momentary things, though, fleeting.

  He had scarcely been able to tear his light off the human’s since he first laid eyes on her. He still couldn’t seem to keep it away from hers.

  Even as he thought it, he caught her looking at him, her dark brown eyes appraising.

  Whoever these assholes are, they’re all pretty hot.

  He realized with a jolt that had come from her, her mind. He had gotten too close to her light; he could hear her thoughts.

  He looks Middle Eastern. But damn. Like a movie star of the hot sheik. Why does he keep staring at me, though? He looks at me like I annoy him or something.

  She continued to stare at Loki, seemingly oblivious both to the fact that he could read her thoughts, and that he was staring back.

  She did seem to notice him reacting to her, but he couldn’t tell how she interpreted that exactly, despite her fleeting thoughts. Those thoughts seemed to occur on several levels, as if she tried to talk herself into one interpretation even as she reacted to him in other ways in different parts of her light.

  He tried to follow both trails, but parts of her still eluded him.

  Unfortunately, the fact that she was able to block him, at least to a degree, only managed to turn him on more.

  God, she thought then. I wonder if they really do know where Dani is.

  A different kind of separation pain infused her light, one that touched him enough that he had to look away.

  Even if they don’t, belonging to them can’t be any worse than being one of Balucci’s women… and none of them has tried to touch me yet, at least. Her dark eyes focused back on Loki. He seems to be in charge. Wonder where he’s from. He doesn’t talk much, compared to the others. Not even in that other language.

  He listened to her, fighting not to react to her open appraisal of his body.

  Still, more than anything, Loki could feel the woman’s puzzlement, her attempt to wrap her mind around who they were, whether they were friends or foes, what they wanted from her, her fears about the safety of her daughter, whether she could believe anything they told her.

  Most of her surface thoughts held an element of bravado, but the vulnerability he felt below made him sick with want. He couldn’t look at her at all now, even as he continued to strain for pieces of her thoughts, seeking the underlying emotion.

  She seemed to think they’d rescued her from that fortress by the park.

  That should work to their advantage in persuading her they meant her no harm.

  Even as he thought it, Loki felt another dark flicker of pain, seeing her staring at his body through the bulkiness of the organic armor he wore. He didn’t manage to suppress the pain fast enough that time, and Mika, the small, Asian-featured seer from Seattle, grinned at him, thumping his back with one small hand.

  You need to get laid, brother, Mika told him teasingly. Are you really going to try and bed that woman? Her eyes flickered to Dante’s human mother. You might do better to try and court Illeg, brother… although I’ve heard Chinja can be possessive, so maybe you’d have a fight on your hands there, too.

  Loki didn’t answer, but turned his head to gaze down the alley, using his light in subtle touches to assess whether anyone had noticed their small group, either from the street or one of the nearby buildings. They’d managed to shake, push or knock out all of the human soldiers and muscle who tried to follow them after their extraction of the woman.

  He still felt no one.

  Glancing at Mika, he motioned his head towards the open end of the alley.

  Move ahead, sister, he sent politely. Head west. Towards the landing area.

  Smiling, Mika touched his back a second time, right before she leaned deeper into his light. You know, Dante may not thank you for trying to get into her mother’s pants, brother Loki.

  Loki suppressed a grimace, and did not answer.

  Still patting his back, Mika grinned. She obviously enjoyed teasing him for some reason, since she’d been doing so off and on since they’d left the aircraft carrier. That was in spite of the Sword putting him in charge of their little group.

  His personality had that effect on some seers, he’d noticed.

  Even the Bridge, at times.

  Dante really may not like it, Mika teased again. Which means Vik won’t like it… or the Bridge. Or even the Sword. Not even if you ask nicely and give her many favors with your tongue and cock. Not even if you don’t push her too hard with your light to get her to comply. Remember, brother––the Bridge, she thinks a bit like a human with that kind of thing.

  Loki gave her a flat look, and Mika laug
hed.

  I’ll suck you off as a favor, brother, she grinned. If you really need some relief––and it looks like you do. If it cannot wait until you return to the fodder of the refugee pens, then just ask. Are you any good with your light, though, brother? Or has it been too long?

  Loki felt his skin warm, especially around his neck and ears.

  It wasn’t really embarrassment.

  Instead, she’d managed to re-ignite the separation pain in his light, intensely enough that he couldn’t control it for those few seconds.

  He found himself thinking about the American-accented seer’s offer almost objectively. Maybe he could use the light contact, no matter how brief––even if she meant the offer partly in jest. He had little to offer her in trade, though, given that money was mostly useless now. He knew Mika worked as a professional prior to joining the military arm of their group, so she might expect payment of some kind, or a trade.

  He wondered if he had anything she might want in trade.

  A gun, perhaps? One of his knives? He didn’t look at her as he catalogued his meager belongings, but wondered if he should ask.

  He knew the whole thing might be a joke, anyway.

  He also knew he did not really want her.

  Loki knew the female seer did not really want him, either. His pain had turned her on. She found him attractive in the physical sense, but it did not go beyond that for her, which was pretty much exactly how he felt about her.

  Loki did not really like the feeling of charity, either.

  Mika must have picked up on some of that, because she laughed.

  Rationalization… she sent, her thoughts sing-song.

  Loki followed her gaze to the human woman, feeling his pain worsen when he saw her staring at the two of them, a faint crease between her eyebrows as she looked from him to Mika, her full mouth puckered in a frown.

  He hadn’t yet managed to tear his eyes off her brown-skinned face, when Mika spoke once more in Loki’s mind, her words holding more compassion that time.

  Fair enough, my handsome brother, she murmured softly.

  Leaning closer, she kissed him on the cheek, ignoring Loki’s surprised wince as she straightened. She winked at him when his eyes followed her up to a standing position. Massaging his shoulder again briefly, she began to walk, following the direction of his earlier gestures down the trash-littered alley.