Prophet: Bridge & Sword

by JC Andrijeski

  When Raddi saw Revik looking at him, he gave him a cautious but courteous nod, before motioning with one hand behind him.

  “The station is fully manned as you asked, Illustrious Sword,” he said. “Oli is here. And Torek. We have two more agents, Chandre and Sita, in T2, with your daughter, as well as an additional agent, Wanai, on the door of her chamber.”

  Revik gave him a scarce nod. “Good.” He lowered the gun to his side, aiming the business end towards the floor. “I want you to open T1 for me.”

  Raddi and Neela exchanged looks.

  Neela glanced back at Revik first. Her eyes looked a lot more wary than Raddi’s did, although some of the overt fear had left them.

  Raddi looked almost at ease from the request.

  “Sir?” Neela said.

  “Did I stutter?” Revik gave her a colder look. “Unlock the fucking door. Now.”

  Neela hesitated, as if restraining herself from questioning him again.

  Nerves rippled her aleimi, on the surface, where Revik could actually see it. Given Neela’s sight rank, he must have really rattled her, which meant she was thinking of Allie, and whatever orders Neela imagined coming from his wife regarding this particular point.

  Even as he thought it, he saw Neela glance at the monitor for T3, the Barrier chamber he and Allie shared.

  He could almost feel her wondering if she should clear this with Allie.

  Angry for real that time, Revik sent her a hard flush of light, that time intense enough that Neela blanched, looking up at him with wide eyes.

  Before Revik could speak, Raddi broke the silence from the open doorway.

  “Follow your orders, lieutenant,” he warned.

  Revik glanced over, noting the hard glare in Raddi’s dark eyes.

  Neela jumped a little, looking at him. Then she nodded, once. “Of course, sir.” She turned politely to Revik. “Of course, Illustrious Sword. My profound apologies.”

  Raddi grunted, his eyes still holding a sheen of anger.

  Raddi was old school. One of Wreg’s initial recruits.

  Neela nodded a second time, her eyes still openly worried as she reached for the console. Her fingers moved rapidly through the primary security sequence for T1 quadrant. Revik watched her hands as she manipulated security keys on the board after she’d verified her identity with DNA and retinal scans, using Barrier keys she held in the higher areas of her aleimi.

  Raddi was already walking towards the door.

  Revik turned to follow him.

  He waited behind the other male once they reached the appropriate hatch.

  Raddi took hold of the wheel in one hand and looked backwards, waiting for Neela to finish her end of the security sequence. Unlike Neela, Raddi’s overall light and demeanor exuded approval when he glanced at Revik, especially when his eyes lingered on the gun Revik held in his right hand, its muzzle still aimed at the deck.

  Revik even felt a glimmer of smugness there.

  “Got it,” Neela said.

  Revik’s jaw hardened. They’d put a few extra codes on this particular cell.

  Made sense. He couldn’t say he disapproved.

  He watched Raddi give a single nod to Neela, right before he keyed a whole separate set of security numbers into the outside panel, utilizing aleimic keys shielded from the outer construct. The panel opened, indicating the secondary IDs required, and Raddi leaned over a retinal scanner, simultaneously pressing his palm to a flat sensor panel.

  Revik knew the keys and even the procedures would change with each rotation, and that no one seer would be able to access any of the cells on their own.

  Further, the codes would be checked upstairs. Every time this door opened, someone upstairs got a ping that it was happening.

  The last part meant he couldn’t dick around in there.

  They might know where he was by now, in any case. Knowing Balidor and Wreg, he should expect to have company soon.

  Revik clicked impatiently at the other man. “Almost finished?”

  Raddi gave him a respectful nod and keyed through a last sequence. Once it took and the light flashed red, he turned immediately to the wheel on the door, gripping it in both hands. Revik heard the low tone from the panel as the security code was accepted.

  “Do you require back up or assistance, sir?” Raddi asked politely, even as he gave a hard twist to the wheel. He glanced pointedly at the gun Revik held.

  “No,” Revik muttered, feeling his jaw harden more.

  The man smiled again, subtly that time.

  “Very good, sir.”

  Raddi twisted the organic-component wheel a few more times without speaking.

  Then an audible click echoed in the narrow hall, all the way up to the high ceiling of the converted cargo bay. Revik glanced up at the outer hull of the cell door, just in time to see the main light switch from blue to red, then to pulse, indicating the seal had been broken.

  Revik knew once the red light stopped flashing, the room could be accessed by the Barrier proper. Which meant it could be accessed by the Dreng, or Menlim––or Terian.

  He didn’t intend to leave the door open that long.

  As soon as Raddi swung the heavy, three-foot thick panel open far enough for Revik to squeeze his body through, he was on the other side.

  He found himself in another eight by ten meter cell.

  Glancing behind him, he gestured a brief command for Raddi to close and lock the door. He felt and heard as it clanged shut behind him, but didn’t turn to verify.

  Instead, he began to scan the greenish-lit space.

  He gave the furnishings a cursory look, mainly to know his environment in case something went wrong. That, too, was a habit ingrained from childhood, and one that had saved him more than once. Anyway, he couldn’t shut it off––even if he’d wanted to.

  Still, the look was brief, a mere tabulation of the room’s individual physical components.

  They hadn’t given her much.

  No monitor, console, books, headsets, hand-holds or anything like the size of the bed where he and Allie slept. His eyes glanced over a single, gray-sheeted, prison-type bed, shoved in one corner of the room next to a metal table and chair. The latter two furnishings were bolted to the floor, likely connected to the internal electronics, and therefore at least partly organic.

  The bed and bedding were adequate. Not meant to be punishing, but definitely prisoner bedding, not guest bedding.

  Nothing diverting had been left in the room.

  Revik himself had personally ordered them to rip the one monitor out of the wall before she regained consciousness the first time. Thinking about what Terian had just done, how he’d managed to access his and Allie’s room, Revik could only frown.

  Maybe he needed to rip the monitor out of their room, too.

  Apart from the lack of furnishings and distractions, the room positively hummed with life. Revik could feel the difference in the walls from the one and only time he’d been in here before. They’d definitely upped some of the security measures from the original configuration. If they’d done that since the breach this morning, the security team hadn’t wasted any time.

  From what he got off of Allie, the breach happened roughly fifty minutes or so before he got back to their room. Add in his time with Balidor, the time it took to get down here and breach security, plus the additional twenty or so minutes where he’d been hell-bent on fucking her––

  He brushed that out of his mind, but not before it made his jaw harden.

  Two hours. Three at most.

  Revik found the cell’s occupant in that first, cursory sweep with his eyes. He didn’t bother to focus on her until he’d ascertained every detail of the layout, however. The woman in front of him could access both the table and the bed, despite the long chains she wore that locked her to the furthest wall.

  But only just, Revik noted.

  He made a note of her range, but really, it didn’t concern him.

  He knew if it
hadn’t been for his wife, this room would be significantly less comfortable than it was. Some of the infiltrators on the team still had to be warned against coming in here. Revik heard from Jon and Wreg that Allie issued specific threats to a few of them.

  The threats were neither idle nor unnecessary, from what Revik heard via the infiltrator grapevine onboard the ship. Turns out, a number of their team still held grudges from what occurred over the past year. There had been threats of all kinds, including rape, which wasn’t an idle one for most seers, if only because they didn’t generally threaten it unless they were pretty damned pissed off.

  Revik hadn’t threatened her, though.

  He knew Allie stepped lightly around him when it came to this particular prisoner, but he’d never said a word. He’d never done anything. He’d never interfered in any way.

  He’d never even asked to interrogate her.

  He let Allie decide every aspect of this prisoner’s treatment. He stayed out of every discussion around whether they should kill her or keep her alive. He’d already decided he wouldn’t weigh in on that issue even if Allie asked him outright––which she never did.

  He handed all discretion to his wife, without protest.

  Until now.

  The prisoner looked up at him when he entered.

  Revik saw her coffee-colored eyes widen when she saw him standing there.

  Her now-flawless face went slack in surprise, absent the scar he’d known since he shared a prison cell with her in the Caucasus. He just stood there, letting her look him over, her eyes showing a kind of blank incredulity.

  He saw other things, including the disjointed currents flickering through her light, how they seemed almost entirely out of synch with her body, with her light structures, with the refracted glimpses he could get of her mind. Cut off from the Dreng, whose frequencies had been woven into the very fabric of her newly-activated aleimi, Cassandra Jainkul, or War, looked strangely out of time, as if the different versions of her didn’t quite fit together anymore.

  Revik knew Allie broke a few things, too.

  When his wife smashed through the door of that upscale apartment in New York, where Cass had been keeping their daughter, Allie crushed just about every higher aleimic structure Cass possessed. In particular, Allie more or less annihilated all of those structures Cass would have utilized to perform her nascent telekinesis.

  That thought gave him more satisfaction than perhaps it should have.

  Cass continued to stare at him, as if not sure he was real.

  Then a slow smile spread over her full lips.

  Revik watched the spark fire in those brown eyes––eyes that looked unfocused, even lost, just a few seconds before.

  He raised the gun he held, pointing it at her head.

  He was fine with her smiling at him.

  It made what he’d come here to do easier, seeing that smirk on her mouth.

  “Hey, big guy,” she said.

  Unfolding her body from where she’d been sitting cross-legged on the floor, she pulled herself languorously to her feet, chains and all. Revik watched as she shook out her long black hair, the chains making a dull thud as they hit the floor from where they’d been coiled around her legs.

  He noted that the red tips of her black hair didn’t look quite as dramatic in the green-walled cell as they had the last time he’d seen them, under the bright lights in that monitor of his bedroom suite in New York. Nor did they contrast her skin as dramatically when she wore no make-up on her face, especially without her trademark red lipstick or the dark kohl eyeliner she used to give herself a punk rock geisha-like appearance.

  He let the gun follow her head easily as she rose.

  He didn’t take his gaze off the sight.

  “Hello, Cassandra,” he said, inclining his head. “You’re probably wondering why I’m here.”

  Staring at him, then at the gun, she let her smile widen to a grin.

  25

  PULLING RANK

  “BREAK DOWN THE fucking door!” Balidor thundered.

  He took the stairs two at a time, pausing only long enough to glare at Neela through his virtual link, then harder at Raddi, whose image showed the tall seer leaning against the door jamb belonging to the security station’s back room.

  “…Gods!” Balidor said, exploding in anger. “How could you let him in there?”

  “He’s the boss.” Raddi’s lips curved in a faint smirk.

  “Actually, he’s not,” Balidor reminded him coldly. “Did you raise her, at least?”

  Raddi’s expression remained wholly unapologetic.

  He, like Jorag and a few of the other ex-Rebels, didn’t even try to hide his desire for the Sword to put a bullet in Cass’s brain. It wasn’t a lack of respect for Alyson, or her orders. They viewed it more along the lines of a mate protecting his family, at least when they bothered to rationalize it to themselves at all.

  Either way, the issue struck them as personal enough that it fell outside the normal chain of command altogether.

  Balidor knew the truth of it, though.

  Most of them were just plain angry.

  They were angry Allie had been hurt.

  They were angry Allie’s child had been hurt.

  They were angry wires were used on their beloved and sacred Bridge––that her child had been cut out of her belly while she was blind and helpless with pregnancy. Some were angry at the killings more generally, as well as everything the disease, C2-77, had taken from them.

  Some were loyally attached to the Sword, so angry on his behalf.

  Some were angry about friends and lovers killed in the tsunami.

  Raddi lost his best friend in that tsunami––meaning, the first big wave that hit New York. Jokko, another Rebel from the first war, drowned while working to get his people out of the sewers. They’d been chasing Ditrini, trying to rescue the Sword, Jon and Maygar.

  That entire hit on the hotel had been Cass’s op. Ditrini was the distraction, and the means of clearing the path for Cass to leave with Allie. If it hadn’t been for Cass, no one would have been in those sewers in the first place. If it hadn’t been for Cass, the sewers would have been clear when the tsunami hit.

  Ergo, to Raddi and many of the others, Cass murdered their friends.

  Balidor had known all of this, of course.

  He’d warned Allie as much, since they’d been on board the ship. He knew she’d issued orders, warnings––even out and out threats––in regard to Cass’s treatment as a prisoner. The seers backed off due to her vehemence, but the feelings never really went away.

  At this point, it really did feel like a damned mutiny.

  Balidor was about to say something else to the ex-Rebel, when another voice broke into the security channel.

  “Open the link,” the voice said. “Patch me through to the internal speakers.”

  Balidor nearly stumbled on the stairs.

  Catching himself on the metal bannister, he glanced over his shoulder at Wreg and Jon, who followed at a near sprint. Wreg gave him a returning frown, but didn’t slow his rapid pace down to the mesh landing.

  Focusing back on the virtual half of his split awareness, Balidor stared at Allie, who stood in front of him in avatar form, eyes blazing with sparking light, just enough that he could feel the glimmer of electrical charge in the surrounding Barrier space.

  That told him two things.

  One, she was outside the tank, since he could feel her in the construct.

  Two, she’d probably heard his thoughts about this being a mutiny.

  Her hair hung loose down her back, but she looked strangely formal inside his headset’s imagery, wearing black combat pants and a pale green shirt. That shirt nearly matched the color of her irises where she’d ignited the bare edges of her telekinesis, but she wore boots, he noted, a hand-held wrapped around her wrist in locked position.

  Looking at her for another second, he realized he was seeing her as she actually was, that it w
asn’t an avatar. Even as he thought it, the channel blew out, giving him a perfect view of the security station, and the console where Allie stood.

  The Elaerian clicked her fingers at the woman sitting behind that console.

  “Now.” Allie glanced at the door to T1, where Cassandra was being held. “Raddi, I want you to open the locks. But I want to speak to Revik right fucking now, please.”

  Balidor felt something in his shoulders relax, even as he picked up his speed, vaulting over the railing for a metal ladder embedded in the wall. As he slid down it, gripping the sides for balance, he saw Allie aim a glare at Neela inside the virtual screen.

  Raddi bowed to her, then slowly began to do as she’d asked.

  Allie must have noticed that the male seer wasn’t exactly hurrying to do her bidding, but her lightly sparking eyes remained focused on Neela. Even apart from Raddi’s semi-resistance, she looked furious. Despite that fact, her voice came out smooth, calm, strangely reassuring as she gazed down at Neela’s face.

  “Now, Lieutenant,” she said. “Open the channel.”

  “REVIK?”

  My voice jerked his eyes up, towards the tank compartment’s speakers, right before it caused him to scowl. He didn’t lower the gun from Cass’s face, but I saw his clear eyes shift, this time towards the camera embedded in the interior wall of the tank.

  “Revik.” I forced myself to exhale. “Are you really going to disobey a direct order from me? In front of witnesses?”

  I saw his face harden at the question, right before his shoulders visibly tensed.

  His jaw clenched in the pause after I spoke, and for a second, the barest instant, I could almost see the thoughts running behind his clear eyes. I saw him weigh what he was doing, weigh the consequences of finishing what he’d started. I saw him consider just doing it anyway, just firing the gun, ending Cass’s life and only talking to me about it afterwards.

  Forgiveness rather than permission, I suppose.