Allie's War Season Two

by JC Andrijeski

  “Hurry,” I said, urgently. “It knows I’m here...It’s trying to figure out if I’m a friend or not. I can’t confuse it for much longer...”

  Wreg looked at me then. I saw understanding reach his eyes, even as he looked up, at the band of wall near the ceiling, where most of the presence seemed to live. I realized I’d been shielding them so closely, he hadn’t felt the organic wall’s sentience at all.

  “Wreg...” I said.

  Garensche’s face popped up over the rim of the hole in the floor.

  I saw him look around, focus on the organic, then look back at me, his eyes incredulous.

  “Tell him to stop gawking and do something,” I told Wreg through the transmitter. “I’m about to get us all killed...this thing is armed...”

  Wreg gestured to Garensche in a series of quick motions and Garensche pulled himself rapidly and almost gracefully out of the hole. Leaping to his feet, he made it to the section of wall by the door in three strides. After ripping off his gloves, he laid his bare hands on the outside of the smooth surface.

  I shielded his light when I felt it begin to spark, rising closer to the limits of the construct I’d redesigned...pretty much on the fly...twice now.

  “Is it going to set off an alarm, if he fucks with that thing?” I asked Wreg, still fighting panic.

  “No,” he said.

  “Are you sure?” I said, watching the thing and Garensche, doubtful.

  “Garensche will handle it.”

  I saw the massive seer glance at me as Wreg said it, smiling. Then he turned his focus back on the wall.

  Other seers were now coming out of the opening in the floor. One by one, they all looked at me, then at Garensche, then finally at Wreg, who only smiled, shrugging wryly. I didn’t care anymore. I was starting to feel schizophrenic with the projector I was holding, the shield around Garensche while he talked to the damned wall, and the construct the rest of them kept jostling by trying to scan me to see what it was I was doing exactly.

  Finally, my patience grew thin.

  “Do you mind reigning in the freak show tourists?” I said, still not moving my lips. “It’s distracting...”

  Wreg smiled, but I saw him turn his focus back on the others.

  In seconds, their probes receded. I found myself relaxing a little, focusing only on Garensche now, and on the images I continued to flash for the wall. The wall seemed to be listening to the big seer now, too, which took some of the pressure off me trying to distract it alone.

  Finally, Garensche looked over at me, gesturing something.

  Fighting not to roll my eyes when I had to admit I didn’t understand him, I felt a chuckle in Wreg before his voice rose.

  “Doesn’t know hand language,” he subvocalized to me, then likely gestured the same to Garensche. “Princess,” he said to me. “He is done...you can stop the image construct...”

  “The what?” I asked him.

  He pointed vaguely somewhere above our heads.

  “What you are doing right now,” he said with amusement. “The image cage you used to save all of our lives...”

  I started to ask again, then decided it didn’t matter.

  After a hesitation where I worried they might be wrong, I let go of the movie screen of images I’d been managing for the organic wall. I watched it dissipate into the white of the larger construct I’d created over us. I was shaking again, so I gripped my arms in the flak jacket, taking a breath before I focused back on the construct and on Wreg.

  He was watching me curiously.

  “Are you tired, princess?” he said. “Do you need light?”

  I thought about it. I felt strung out, my nerves stretched to the consistency of an overwound guitar string. I’d nearly gotten all of us killed by reacting too slow, gawking up at that wall like a tourist, but my light felt okay.

  I gestured negative.

  Smiling a little again, he indicated with his head towards the organic wall.

  “Come,” he said. “We are ahead of schedule.”

  “Will that be a problem?” I said, using the subvocal also.

  He laughed a little, but soundlessly. “No, princess. In fact, I think I will owe your husband a dinner when this is done...”

  I didn’t bother to ask him what he meant.

  Garensche had coaxed the door into creating an opening for us in the metal. Nervous, I glanced up at the cameras I could see in the corners of the room, but Garensche waved off my fears. When I glanced at Wreg, he smiled.

  “Imaging is no longer functioning, princess. Do not worry. Garensche is good at his job.”

  Nodding, I clicked back into the plans, aligning my mental picture with the layout I’d studied before coming here.

  I marveled again that Revik had not only let me come along for this, he had genuinely seemed to want me along. The old Revik would have left me in the helicopter, likely with some superficial task...if he didn’t handcuff me outright to the seat.

  But this Revik had asked me if I was okay going in without him. He hadn’t really explained why, only that he needed us separated for tactical reasons.

  He was already inside. He’d gone in over an hour before us, I knew, but Wreg already warned me that Revik couldn’t do much to help us down here...especially since he was in another building altogether, at least ten blocks away.

  We were going after the main prize, opening the doors to the mainframe and doing the physical reconnaissance. Meanwhile, he worked from a higher floor inside the Registry building itself, destroying the organic interfaces and their temporary servers, as well as coordinating the overall op, including transport out, and the work that needed to happen to disable the satellites.

  I knew from the plans also, that the higher floor was where they kept the prisoners...so I knew he’d tasked himself with getting them out of those crammed holding cells and up to the roof, as well. He hadn’t come out and said it, but it made sense to me that if we had to kill anyone, it would be there.

  I suspected, from the way he talked, he also hadn’t really wanted me to be up close and personal with the cells themselves. I couldn’t exactly resent him for that, either, given how I’d reacted to the version they’d mapped by hacking the security cameras.

  As far as overprotectiveness went, I ranked that at about a 2 or 3, max.

  I watched Wreg slide through the gap in the wall created by Garensche’s work with the organic. Glancing back at me then, Revik’s second took my hand, leading me through after him. I felt protectiveness in the gesture, but also a different confusion of emotions, as if he were still processing what had happened inside the generator room.

  It occurred to me that he was grateful to be alive.

  On the other side of the door, he indicated he wanted me in front of him.

  I noticed for the first time that the organic gun wrapped around his forearm was live. I glanced at Jax and Nikka, and saw theirs on, as well. I walked somewhere in the middle of the line of infiltrators, with Wreg and Garensche in back of me and Nikka, Ike, Loki and the seer Jax, in front.

  I wondered if I should activate my gun, too. After going back and forth in my head, I decided to wait until I had a reasonably good cause...or at least until I calmed down, so I didn’t end up shooting one of them on accident.

  It occurred to me again, where we were.

  I remembered Wreg’s words as we’d debriefed on this part, in the small airport hangar in Santos. Revik had been in the other room, working through some of the transport glitches, when Wreg went over the basic plan with me. I picked up on part of the reason for that, too. Revik knew I wasn’t military, and wanted to make sure I coordinated well with Wreg.

  Knowing him, he also probably wanted to make sure I could take orders.

  After listening to Wreg detail our role in the whole thing, though, I’d been a little puzzled.

  “So why does he need us in there at all?” I’d asked Wreg. “If he can do it at a distance, why not just have us help him upstairs?”


  Wreg just smiled.

  “You have a lot of faith in your mate,” he’d said then, his scarred lips twitching as he glanced at the others. When I looked around at the same set of faces, I saw more of them smiling, but I didn’t sense anything malicious behind it. I hadn’t heard any condescension in Wreg’s voice when he answered me, either.

  “No, sister,” he said. “Even Syrimne cannot work at such a distance. It is not the distance itself that is the limitation, however...he must have very, very exact information to perform the telekinesis accurately. Normally, he would need to accompany us down there...to see the layout for himself.”

  “So why isn’t he doing that this time?” I said.

  Wreg smiled. “Because he does not have to. You will be there, princess. He can see through you, as if he were in the room himself. Once we are inside, he will use your eyes and the information we can give him regarding the power sources to determine how best to dismantle their physical machines...”

  “Are we going to get blown up in the process?” I’d said.

  I fought for a smile as I looked around at the others.

  “I think he will be careful about that,” Wreg said, smiling back.

  Nikka had glanced over at me, too, and smiled from where she’d been pulling together organic armor suits.

  “Except maybe with Gar, here,” she said, punching the giant seer in the shoulder. “...He might let some stray telekinesis bang his head against a wall a few times...see if he can knock some sense into it...”

  “Hey,” Garensche had said. “Who’s going to get you past the organics? Who, if not the master of machines?”

  “Your machine girlfriend...?” Nikka laughed.

  I smiled a little, remembering this.

  I really didn’t want these people to die.

  At the thought, my mind jerked quickly back to where we were.

  The infiltrators had spread out in front and behind, and I let my eyes scan upwards, seeing what looked almost like some kind of power storage on either side of us. Smooth, vat-like tanks of some organic metal composite stretched several stories high, leaving a corridor lined by ladders up their curved sides. Pipes jutted out of the vats in the smaller aisles between them, big enough for a large dog to walk through. Wheel-like valve turners sat next to flat control panels at their bases, looking strangely anachronistic, like they belonged on old ships.

  I tried to reconcile this with the plans and remembered something to do with coolant tanks. But these were damned big to be coolant tanks...no matter how big the room full of dead machines ahead of us ended up being.

  I found myself wondering what this room was really used for, and suspected, suddenly, that there was something here Revik wasn’t telling me.

  Or maybe something Revik didn’t know himself.

  Movement rippled the construct then, pulling my attention off the vats.

  I sent a pulse through the shield.

  People up ahead. At least four. Human.

  When I glanced over, Wreg was looking at me. He held up a hand to the others, who had also paused, light-footed, when they felt the pulse I’d sent.

  Wreg used a series of hand gestures to signal where he wanted them.

  I swept the area again.

  The people I’d touched on felt like techs, but, given where we were, I couldn’t be absolutely certain. It was the middle of the night, but Revik had said the underground facility would never be completely empty. They might have techs in here 24/7, either as a precaution or for some technical reason.

  Still, for some reason, the presence of four of them, all in one place, made me nervous. Scanning them again, I felt my paranoia ratchet up higher.

  I couldn’t tell if it stemmed from something legitimate, or if my nerves were just fraying the longer we were down there.

  If even one of them set off the alarm, we were too far in to not have to shoot our way out once the Sweeps descended on our location. Plus, given the stakes and how far we’d come already, I assumed we’d at at least try and complete the op...unless the response came down on our heads so fast we could only fight our way out.

  It occurred to me again that this operation would only be bloodless if it went off without a hitch. It also occurred to me how dumb I’d been, to not realize that at a deeper level, before I got this far into it.

  Things could always go wrong, wasn’t that what Revik had said? Something inevitably would go wrong, he’d also said. It was a given, in any kind of field op...nothing ever went according to plan.

  The plan was a starting point, he’d said, but the truth was, running anything on the ground was all about making adjustments as things unfolded, from tiny course corrections to game-changers, depending on what played out.

  That all made sense to me at the time...in theory.

  I’d listened to them joke about the op they’d almost blown because a janitor wasn’t where he was supposed to be, but had been jerking off in the rest room to a portable vid. They’d also told stories about ops that had been blown by equipment failures of whatever kind, bad intelligence they’d gotten off an infiltrator who turned out to be working both sides for the Sweeps, a crappy wire that kept a door from opening to a storage facility right as they’d been trying to break in to steal organic machines.

  Thinking about all this and scanning ahead, my mind went into overdrive.

  What if they had guards who sent out light pulses to confuse their identities, make them look human, or harmless...or simply invisible?

  After all, wasn’t that what we were doing?

  All they had to do was hit the alarms. That was it. Game over.

  At the thought, I stopped dead in the corridor. I did a swift pass on the humans again. Threading my light through them, I changed my frequency, piercing the shield I felt like a few hundred silk threads...hoping like hell it was subtle enough that they wouldn’t feel it.

  The shield around them lit up like a Christmas tree.

  The four humans were still there, but they were no longer alone.

  Six seers. Four of those techs, too. Two of them carrying...security of some kind. I couldn’t get detail around that in such a quick pass, but whatever it was vibrated at a frequency I didn’t much like.

  The four seer techs had some kind of fluid on them. Something from the vats coated the thick rubber gloves they wore up to their shoulders. Being less tightly covered by their own light, I even glimpsed the thoughts of one of them.

  Something wrong in the mixture, I heard. Some of the new stuff rotting, not bonding with the semis...

  Clicking out, I realized why the vats bothered me. I felt sick...sick enough that I almost emptied my stomach right there. Fighting it away from my light, I forced myself to think, to concentrate on holding the shield...but the sickness worsened as I looked up at the vats.

  I gripped Wreg’s arm.

  They were building organic machines in here.

  Wreg glanced at me. Looking at him, I could feel he’d picked up all of it, including the last part, through the construct and our close proximity. Gesturing another series of signals to the others, he pointed at Nikka and another seer, whose name was Torou, I think.

  I only picked out a few of the motions.

  “Stay with the Bridge,” I saw him gesture, his face hard.

  Turning, he jogged up ahead, moving soundlessly.

  I kept my light off the seers I’d felt, but continued to watch them with some part of my light, even as I wrapped the shield closer to Wreg.

  Nikka took my arm, pulling me with her between the vats, even as we continued to make our way down between them, moving in the same direction as before.

  I saw her looking at me, as if she could read something in my face.

  She looked worried.

  I wished like hell, not for the first time, that I knew sign language better.

  The whole group felt tense now, jacked up. Noticing that the white shield I’d created was beginning to change frequency, I switched my focus.
>
  The distraction helped. I pulled hard from above, using my aleimi to bring down more of that white light. I sent it over the top of the shield to calm them down, get them thinking clearly.

  Within seconds, I felt the group begin to stabilize. When I glanced at Nikka next, she was staring at me, her eyes holding an open amazement.

  She clutched my arm tighter, and that time, I felt a surge of protectiveness behind her fingers. Motioning with her head, she indicated that she wanted to move us closer to the main doors that led into the room where they kept the mainframe.

  Nodding, I followed her, aware suddenly that the focus of the entire team now seemed to center on me, not Wreg.

  Up ahead, I felt him. My nerves rose when I realized he could see the group of seer techs and their bodyguards with his physical eyes. Two of the guards were Sweeps, I picked up through the shield. One of the other seers had something different about them too, as if...

  Black Arrow security... I got through the construct.

  Wreg didn’t see the humans anymore. He was hesitating on taking out the security detail before he located them, worried they might hear it if the seers went down.

  I looked at Nikka.

  “Can you get one of the others to knock out the humans?” I asked Wreg through the subvocals. “If I show you where they are?”

  I felt Wreg’s surprise. Then I felt his affirmative, just before Nikka looked at Jax, who sent a signal down the line from Wreg.

  Jax and Ike ran silently to the other side of the long corridor.

  I sent Wreg another faint pulse, telling him to go ahead.

  “Keep one,” I told him silently. “Human.”

  I felt him understand.

  Inside the shield, I saw nine hits from the team, the first cluster occurring almost simultaneously, with three more in rapid succession. The guns made only a pale exhale with each shot, soundless inside the Barrier...and in the physical room itself as the sound was swallowed under the hum of grinding gears and machinery.

  I flinched...then realized they weren’t bullets.

  Darts left the organic weapons on the team’s wrists, hitting seers and humans in the throat and chests. They focused the most firepower on the Sweeps of course, followed by the seer techs, including the one from Black Arrow.