Prophet: Bridge & Sword

by JC Andrijeski

  Balidor stared at him.

  Hearing the other man’s words, he felt his body tighten as their meaning sank in.

  They might actually have to restrain him.

  They might, at the very least, have to order him back to the tank.

  In all honesty, however, Balidor couldn’t be certain that wouldn’t make things worse, if only by giving him too much time to grind over his own fears and lack of control. It was possible at least part of this problem came from having kept him locked up for too long already.

  Feeling another pulse of misgiving as he felt the currents snaking through the Sword’s aleimi, he made up his mind.

  He pinged Wreg.

  He felt the other man’s presence at once, and breathed a sigh of relief.

  I need you up here, brother, he sent, short.

  I can hear it, the other man grumbled. A lot of us can fucking hear it. His thoughts grew more grumbly than before. Why us? You should call her. Tell her to leash her husband. Preferably before he blows up the ship.

  Do you really think that’s such a good idea, brother? Balidor sent, sharper. You do realize that seeing her up here might only escalate this, right? His fear is about her. Getting her involved might only make that worse––or turn it into a domestic dispute of potentially incendiary proportions. Do you really want to see them come to blows over this? Using telekinesis?

  You could probably sell tickets to that, Wreg muttered, chuckling.

  Yes, Balidor returned shortly. Right before the carrier sank. With all of us on it.

  What’s wrong with him? Jon ventured, from near Wreg.

  What’s wrong with him? Balidor laughed humorlessly. The man who tortured and brainwashed him throughout his childhood wants to murder his wife.

  Hearing his thoughts articulated in such a way, Balidor felt his light falter, changing around him as he found he understood more than he realized.

  Hell, Jon, he added. Menlim already succeeded in killing her once. Not only that, he wants their child. He’s already severely harmed Elyashi’s light, perhaps permanently.

  Thinking more about that in the context of the Sword’s request, Balidor felt his jaw harden.

  Look, he is not completely outside of his rights with this, he admitted a few seconds later. He may even have grounds. Technically, I mean. I would have to look at the specific codes, but it sounds like he’s done some preliminary research on this already. And Wreg, I think he’s right in another respect, too. If he’s serious about taking over security for her, we should bring the Council into this… at least consult with Tarsi. We can’t afford to let him go rogue in terms of operational authority, which he might do, if we don’t grant him a fair hearing. That would be an unmitigated disaster in more ways than I can fathom right now.

  At the two men’s silence, Balidor forced his light to calm, fighting to mitigate the charge still feeding his aleimi from Revik’s light.

  Are you coming up here, or not? Balidor sent. Wreg?

  He glanced up as he thought it, measuring the Sword with his eyes where the other man continued to pace on the other side of his desk.

  Clearly, the Elaerian knew Balidor was in contact with someone else. He might even know with who. So far, it didn’t seem to be angering him any more than he was already, so he must have heard at least part of what Balidor was thinking.

  Wreg sighed audibly in Balidor’s mind.

  Your timing is not ideal, Adhipan, he sent.

  Balidor clenched his jaw, but managed to refrain from reminding the other man that it wasn’t exactly his timing driving this.

  Wreg answered him anyway.

  True, Wreg conceded. But under the circumstances, I’m not thinking it would be particularly safe to blame the boss right now… for much of anything. Sighing, he added, Where is Chandre? She is usually good with him.

  Jon is all right now, is he not? From being stabbed? Balidor paused, forcing his light calmer. If he is not up to it, can you come up here, please, Commander Wreg? If Jon is up to it, perhaps both of you could come? I will call Chandre, too… and Yumi. But Jon can usually reason with him better than either of them. Better than anyone, really, including his wife. I could use the help. Sincerely, brother.

  Balidor felt a humorless smile from the other man’s light.

  On our way, Wreg said, his voice still a grumble. See if you can keep him there, Adhipan. It feels like he’s ready to bolt. Jon says he’ll talk to him. But fair warning. The Bridge might not like that much, either, if my last conversation with her is any indication.

  Balidor frowned, feeling a flicker of misgiving at that, too.

  Before he could think of a response, Wreg vanished from his light.

  When Balidor looked up, he realized he’d let himself get too lost in the Barrier, and too lost in his conversation with the other men.

  He also realized Wreg had been right.

  Dehgoies the Sword was gone.

  24

  TANK-1

  REVIK TOOK THE stairs two and three at a time, sliding down the rails between mesh landings where he could. He focused only on moving fast, very little on where he was going.

  He knew they were probably looking for him by now.

  The less he thought about his destination, the better.

  He still didn’t have the carrier’s full layout comfortably lodged in his mind––not in terms of the finer details, details that could have really cut his time from one end of the ship to the other.

  He hadn’t been on many American ships.

  Even during Vietnam, he spent most of his time on land, or in the air.

  This ship might be different from what the Americans used in those earlier wars, but it still had an American feel. Because of that, he struggled more to get his head around the logic of the layout, compared to what he remembered of the big Russian ships from his time there, or even earlier, those he rode for Germany.

  Four decks above hangar hard deck was odd to him. The ships he’d ridden in before had only one deck above the main hangars, with the lower levels taken up with nuclear warheads along with reactors, machinery rooms, laundry, dry storage, chill rooms, even data processing in later years. The hangars sat at water level on this ship, partly because the fusion reactor took up a lot less room and needed the cold of the water less, due to the organic field and buffer units being more efficient than the previous magnet-based variety.

  So yeah, while he understood the tactical reasons for the placement of the hangar, the unfamiliarity disoriented him.

  Balidor and his team had done a lot to modify the standard specs, which didn’t help. Their seers continued to modify the damned thing like crazy, adding organics and even stone, to facilitate the creation of stronger constructs (stone, especially granite, was incredibly helpful in grounding constructs). They’d also converted a good portion of the largest of the three holds so they could grow food and keep domestic animals, as well as run the desalination equipment and store extra water along with algae-growing casks and whatever else.

  So yeah, Revik was still getting a feel for everything Balidor had done, too.

  He’d pretty much given the Adhipan carte blanche over this project while he’d been working out of San Francisco. He found himself somewhat in awe of what they managed to accomplish in so short a time, given the small number of resources he’d funneled towards the project at the time. The carrier would never serve as a permanent base, but for now, while they hunted down Listers and avoided a stationary location for security reasons, Revik couldn’t have asked for anything better.

  Still, he wanted to know the ship better. Given what hunted them, he wanted to know every inch of this fucking ship. He’d done what he could from the tank, memorizing specs and changes Balidor outlined in his log, but nothing replaced time spent on the ground, where he could note details and alterations with his own eyes––and where he could use the spatial areas of his light to take real-time snapshots of particulars.

  He spent the better part of the
morning doing that very thing, walking the ship’s corridors, service walks, upper decks, control tower and security passages to learn his way around.

  He used the task to reassure himself, in part.

  He’d also done it to distract himself from the thought of his wife handcuffed to their bed.

  The memory brought an unwelcome flush of pain, one he shoved angrily out of his mind.

  He couldn’t believe she hadn’t told him.

  Hadn’t they vowed, in front of the gods and everyone fucking else, to tell each other shit? Why hadn’t she called him the second Terian walked into that cell?

  Hell, Balidor talked about mutiny. Why the fuck hadn’t Balidor contacted him while it was happening? Was he no longer Balidor’s commanding officer, either?

  He strongly suspected he knew the answer to that, too.

  He could feel the ship turning.

  He felt it not long after he left the control tower and Balidor.

  He heard whispers of their new orders, of the new destination in the construct.

  He knew Balidor was keeping that destination more or less under wraps for now, on a strictly need-to-know basis, but a lot of seers had already picked up on the change. He knew Balidor was following orders, too, that the idea to change course hadn’t originated from him, or from the Adhipan leadership team more generally, or from Tarsi.

  Which meant those orders could have come from just one place. From one person.

  Allie.

  She’d ordered them to change course.

  She’d ordered them to head for Dubai.

  Remembering Terian’s words to her through the VR construct, Revik felt his molars grind in the back of his jaw, even as he caught hold of an oval, raised doorway and slid past a small group of laughing humans heading in the direction of the ship’s bow. Frowning, he glanced down another set of oval doors as he jumped through the last segment of that particular corridor. Checking the blueprints briefly in his light, he shifted direction, walking out of that row of crew quarters and down a narrow, gray-metal catwalk that led to the open area of the main hangars, a few floors above the hard deck.

  Seeing a few seers working on what looked like a portion of the electrical systems, possibly adding an organic component to one of the breakers, Revik kept a neutral expression on his face as he nodded to them, hoping they wouldn’t think anything of him being down here.

  One problem with being who he was, they all recognized him.

  Like they stared at Allie, they stared at him, too, although more looked away when they felt him notice. Seers and even humans tended to act more entitled when it came to the Bridge, he’d noticed. They didn’t just stare at her; sometimes they followed her. Some even tried to touch her, stroking her hair, her clothes, touching her hands, her feet.

  Most of the time Revik didn’t mind, but right now, everything made him fucking paranoid. He worried about sleeper agents, poison on their skin, organic weapons, assassins.

  He worried about all of it.

  Allie, apparently, worried about none of it. She’d grab the hand of a complete stranger, hold it for minutes while she spoke to them, getting close enough it would be easy to kill her, even for a wholly mediocre hunter.

  Thinking of her, he clicked under his breath, fighting to calm his anger.

  He knew it was irrational to blame her for this. He knew it, but he didn’t fucking care. At this point, she’d be lucky he didn’t lock her to the bed permanently.

  Dubai.

  Jesus fucking christ.

  It was only the most heavily-guarded Shadow city in existence.

  His jaw hardened more. He grabbed hold of a support strut and swung around a narrow corner on the upper catwalk, walking faster towards the stairs at the other end. She’d ordered them to plan an op for Dubai. She’d done it after Terian told her to go there. Fucking Terry. Had she lost her goddamned mind?

  Why didn’t she just hand Lily over to Shadow right now?

  Terry telling them to go to Dubai wasn’t much different than getting a handwritten invitation from Menlim himself.

  The thought made his teeth grind more.

  He tried to tell himself it wasn’t that simple.

  Allie had been dreaming about Dubai.

  She had her own issues with the Displacement Lists, with what was happening in Asia, even with Terian. She’d been watching the feeds about China and Beijing obsessively for the past few weeks––at least, when she wasn’t watching their daughter obsessively, through the organic window.

  Remembering their daughter both softened his anger towards his wife and brought another flush of frustration. She’d sent the order without even talking to him. Given where they’d just left things, given what was at stake for both of them, that single fact made him so fucking angry he didn’t even want to see her. Not now.

  Not until he’d taken care of a few things.

  At the next landing, he found another ladder and took it, bracing the inner arches of his feet on the outside rails through his deck shoes and using his hands to control his speed as he dropped to the deck below. Two more ladders later, and he’d landed back on the water-level deck of the main hangar, where the Barrier containment tank lived.

  The strangeness of the carrier’s design threw him again briefly.

  He looked around, using the blueprints to get his bearings, remembering details from those specs as well as from his passing familiarity with the habits of the United States military, and where they generally liked to put things, compared to the Russians or the Germans.

  Even so, it took him a few seconds to remember where he was, coming in from this side.

  A few of the Adhipan seers jokingly renamed the carrier the U.S.S. Vashentarenbuul after a particularly rough day of prepping the ship on the docks of Portland, Maine.

  The name stuck.

  Half a dozen seers even painted U.S.S. Vashentarenbuul on the ship’s steep stern and sides, priming over the original United States military name, which had been Raptor or Falconer or Bald Eagle or something like that.

  The ship contained three main hangars. Hangars 2 and 3 housed the Barrier containment tanks, where he’d been staying with Allie, and where Lily, Cass and Maygar were also housed. That segment of the hold also contained the armory, some of the more sensitive of their organic machines, and a fully-stocked security station complete with interrogation and holding cells, all of them empty at the moment.

  Surli, their last quasi-prisoner, had been released––also on Allie’s orders.

  He lived somewhere in the seer residency, upstairs.

  Revik kept his mouth shut about that, too, but it irritated him.

  He hadn’t spent much time in Hangar 1 yet, but he knew it was by far the largest, and the one that led to the main docking bay at the front of the ship. That same docking bay, which lived under the shadow of the hard deck on top, had already been opened a number of times, mostly to load passengers following their evacuation from New York.

  They now stored something like ninety percent of their perishable food and water there, along with a few helicopters that weren’t lashed to the runways. Domestic animals, seeds, plants, grains, beans, freeze dried and canned foods, sapling trees and even a small greenhouse all lived in that hangar, along with vertical planter boxes on rotating winches that went all the way to the ceiling. Above him, metal struts crossed back and forth in long x-shapes between the heavier metal beams. The upper floors of the hard deck surrounded him in a broken rectangle lined with catwalks leading back into corridors of the main residential areas of the ship.

  He could see seers on some of those catwalks. A few stared at him, although they seemed to be trying to hide those stares.

  He could feel Balidor looking for him––and now, Jon and Wreg.

  He didn’t much care about that, though, not anymore.

  He’d beaten them down here. That, he cared about.

  Neela saw him only after he stood behind her.

  Revik watched the female inf
iltrator scramble to her feet, yanking her boots off the console before she jerked her body out of the padded security station chair. He had to give her props. She managed to do all of that without changing expression.

  Then again, she was ex-Rebel. They had the chain of command pounded into them even more ruthlessly than the Adhipan.

  Once she stood in front of him, he clicked his fingers.

  “I need your sidearm,” he said.

  Neela stared at him, then at the corridor leading to his section of the Barrier containment tank, presumably where Allie still was, assuming she hadn’t left. Seeing where Neela’s eyes aimed, Revik felt a dense pulse of fury ripple his light.

  Did they really think he’d shoot his fucking wife?

  “Sister?” he said, colder. “That was an order.”

  Reddening, Neela scrambled to comply, reaching down to her gun belt. She unhooked the strap of the holster and pulled out a silver and organic-component SIG Saur P226 from where it rested by her hip. Checking it swiftly, she chambered a bullet where he could see it, unlocking the safety, probably with some kind of impulse-command.

  She passed it to him, handle first.

  Then she just stood there, nearly at attention as he checked the chamber a second time, then the magazine.

  “DNA-encrypted?” he said.

  “No, sir,” she stammered.

  He nodded, once.

  “I’ll bring it back,” he said.

  Neela swallowed, her light still emanating a near-panic.

  “Sir?” She swallowed, but held her ground. “Is there anything else I can help you with, sir?”

  Revik frowned, not answering her probing stare.

  Still, he couldn’t help being relieved to see only ex-Rebels manning the station. He glanced at Raddi, who watched them from a doorway he nearly filled with his broad shoulders. The room behind him had been built by Adhipan seers as well, constructed directly on the cargo hold floor of semi-organic metals, just like the outer hulls of the tanks.

  Raddi’s dark eyes looked wary, too, Revik noted.

  But with Raddi, Revik could feel that wariness openly, as concern for his wife.

  Since Revik knew they had no reason for concern in that direction, it bothered him a lot less when he felt it the second time. After all, he wanted them paranoid when it came to Allie. He wanted them paranoid when it came to Lily, too.