His personal issues with the Lao Hu leadership notwithstanding, this job still didn’t sit well with him. The thought of desecrating the holy City bothered him more than he wanted to think about, regardless of what he thought of the current administration.
Images forced their way into his mind: images of him and the rest of the Dreng soldiers dragging out seers, kicking and screaming––seers who had once formed the most powerful cadre of his people known to exist anywhere in the modern world.
They would have to shoot some of them, of course.
No way would the City fall without deaths.
Knowing the Dreng, they’d make examples of some of them in other ways.
Children lived behind these walls. Maybe a significant chunk of the seer children left living after the disasters of the past few years lived there.
So yeah, in addition to Allie, Revik found himself thinking about Lily, too.
He frowned, sinking his weight deeper into the padded bench in the back of the armored transport as he fought to think. Forcing both Allie and Lily out of his light and mind, he tried to think about this objectively. Perhaps he had more options here than he’d taken the time to really contemplate.
He’d gone into it expecting and planning for a military op, of course. It was what he knew. It was what Menlim expected of him.
Allie had always been the one with the diplomacy skills.
Revik was a soldier. Even so, Menlim had specifically left the planning of this op up to him, including discretion in terms of approach and handling of the aftermath.
Revik knew that had to be a test of some kind, as well.
He didn’t much care.
Fitting a headset around his ear, he cleared his throat, feeling it go dry for some reason. It hit him that this would be the first real order he’d given during a live op under Menlim in more years than he really wanted to think about.
He remembered the so-called “compromises” of those years, too. The thought brought a harder pain to his chest. It also brought an unwelcome wave of emotion from that time, one that inevitably made him feel younger.
He hit a code for his current Second, clearing his throat again.
“Sir?” Tan’s voice was clear, alert.
Unlike with some of the others, Revik didn’t sense any resentment on him.
He hadn’t sensed much resentment on any of those he’d hand-picked before he left Hong Kong. The team he’d built via the resources Menlim offered him, first in Hong Kong and then in Lhasa, where he expanded in both numbers and skill sets, had been respectful to a fault.
To his face, at least––and at least where Revik himself was concerned.
The one exception had been Ute.
He’d kept her out of his leadership team as a result. That hadn’t been personal; Revik didn’t kid himself that any of these people were his friends. He simply didn’t have time for that shit in the field, and open insubordination was a morale-killer.
He knew he’d been thinking of Allie in removing Ute, as well.
In addition to Ute’s nearly open defiance of him in their one and only private meeting, she’d also tried to talk him into sex, making it clear how much she despised his wife in the process. Revik knew Allie had believed Ute was in love with him, back when he’d run the Rebels under Salinse. She might even have been right.
Then again, maybe he’d been thinking about Allie more than he should have been, under the circumstances.
“Yeah,” Revik said, clearing his throat a third time. “I want to try something. Before we storm the gates.”
Tan seemed to catch some flavor of Revik’s thoughts in his light.
“A diplomatic approach, sir?” he said.
Again, Revik caught no flavor of sarcasm there.
“Something like that,” he muttered. Still thinking, he said, “Do we have any way to communicate with the seers inside the City? Directly, I mean? Without blowing anyone’s cover?”
Revik felt a flicker of appreciation off Tan.
And yes, no one had told Revik that Menlim would have spies and other operatives waiting for them inside the City walls.
But they would. Of course they would.
“Yes, sir,” Tan affirmed. “Direct line to their infiltration units. Would you like me to patch you through to them now?”
Surprise flickered off Revik’s light. Even so, he barely hesitated.
“Sure.” He cleared his throat, feeling his hands tighten on his pant legs. “Yes. Thank you. I’d like that.”
He knew this wasn’t a battle where surprise would be either possible or necessary.
Therefore, this couldn’t really hurt them, even if it was a complete waste of time.
Even so, Revik found himself wishing he’d thought of it earlier. Like, say, in Hong Kong, before he’d picked the remainder of his team. As it was, he’d be winging it blind––something that was also a lot more his wife’s style than Revik’s own.
He didn’t have long to think about that, either.
“Laiki,” a male seer said into his headset. “Who is this? I’m not getting an ID lock.”
Revik took a breath. “Dehgoies Revik,” he said. “The Sword. I would like to speak to the honorable Voi Pai, if that would be in any way possible, brother.”
Silence greeted him.
He’d more or less expected that.
“Are you leading them?” the other seer said in Prexci. “That kitre-so'h army bearing down on us… is that you, Illustrious Brother?”
“It is.” No point in being cagey. “Therefore there is some time urgency to my request, as you might imagine. I still had some hope that we might avoid violence… of the more serious kind, at least.” Pausing, he asked politely. “Are you now leading the infiltration units for the Lao Hu, brother Laiki?”
“No. That would be sister Jai-Nua,” the other said, his voice holding an edge. “Who is currently working on different ways to cut your army into tiny, dust-like particles, my Illustrious Brother.”
Revik sighed, clicking as he leaned back on the bench.
“My desire to speak to your mistress is sincere,” he said, exhaling. “As is my wish to keep this confrontation from becoming necessary, in terms of serious loss of life.” He paused. “You must know you can’t win this?”
The other seer smiled. Revik heard it through the line.
“You sound pretty confident, my brother,” the seer said next. “Perhaps you are lost? Perhaps you do not remember where you are? I had heard that the Illustrious Sword goes soft in the head when separated from his mate for too long a time. Is that perhaps the problem…?”
Revik felt his jaw clench.
“Perhaps you’ve forgotten I’m telekinetic?” he returned in a harder growl, switching from Prexci to Mandarin like the other had done. “Or perhaps you’re a bit soft in the head yourself, my brother? Given your undoubtedly laudable skills, you must know my orders come from someone other than my wife. Someone with far less generous of a spirit––although admittedly, someone you’ve given far less cause for offense. In this case, I’m not sure that will help you very much though, my brother… given who he’s chosen to lead up his offensive force.”
The silence on the other end grew tense.
“Mistress Voi Pai has agreed to speak with you,” the seer said next, his voice changed, now formally polite. “Please hold the line, Illustrious Brother.”
Revik didn’t have long to wait.
The voice that rose next made him physically wince.
His frown twisted into a full-blown scowl before the end of her greeting, as her words immediately brought a series of memories rushing unwelcome to his light and head.
“Illustrious Sword! I am so very, very honored, my beautiful brother… so honored.”
Her voice dripped with a sickly sweetness he remembered all too well.
His teeth gritted more. Enough to hurt.
“Am I told true, my brother?” Voi Pai lilted into that silence, her voice arch, borderline amused. “Are
you really calling to negotiate with me? I am so… flattered. Truly.”
Revik tried to fight the anger out of his light.
He tried for a few hard beats of his heart.
He failed.
“I’m not making the offer for you, you sociopathic cunt.” His voice came out cold as ice. “I’d kill you without losing so much as a minute of sleep, sister… and I only wish I’d been the one to pull the trigger personally on that raping psychopath Ditrini, to whom you gave my wife as a goddamned birthday present.”
He took a breath, but his anger didn’t lessen even a little.
“I make this offer solely for your people,” he growled. “For the next generation of Lao Hu seers. Perhaps you should think of them before you give me more fucking reasons to ignore my allegiance to my people’s cultural heritage and decide to simply follow orders in killing however many of you as I deem fit to meet my military objective. For either way, the purpose of my employer would be more than satisfied…”
Scarcely taking a breath, Revik added even more darkly,
“If you expect him to reign me in… or to even give a flying fuck what happens to any of you… you’re sadly deluding yourself, sister. So you might want to think pretty fucking hard before you start goading me right now. Really fucking hard, in fact––since I’m the only quasi-sympathetic ear anywhere in the vicinity who could actually keep your people from being slaughtered like cockroaches over the next forty-eight hours.”
That time, when he paused to take a breath, he forced himself silent.
So much for negotiation skills.
SEVERAL HOURS LATER, Revik found himself walking into an audience chamber, surrounded by Menlim’s people, most of whom had weapons up and ready.
For the most part, the weapons were a formality.
As a part of his “negotiation” he’d forced the Lao Hu seers to dismantle the security protocols in their construct.
Since then, Menlim’s people had begun to crack and dismantle it piece by piece, with a methodicalness and speed Revik couldn’t help marveling at, even as it unnerved him.
He watched them pull it apart, examining, mapping, snap-shotting unfamiliar structures for later study, then grinding each piece into Barrier dust.
Every aspect got recorded both in the Dreng construct and via the organic tech mapping program they employed, detailing every nuance into a Barrier map that highlighted any and all engineering feats found inside the previous construct that Menlim’s team hadn’t yet incorporated into their own designs.
The speed and efficiency with which the work got conducted blew away anything Revik had seen before, including in his previous stints working for the Dreng.
Menlim had obviously unearthed a number of resources he hadn’t bothered to share with Revik while he ran the Rebel Army for Salinse.
Some of that was in organic tech.
Some was in actual seers.
Revik found himself cataloguing unfamiliar faces, wondering how many of their names might show up as the missing seers on the Displacement Lists, if he were to go looking.
His eyes flickered around the dimly lit space.
He paused on dead organic screens, got a ping from either what remained of the construct or his own people that they’d been conserving on power, relegated to solar and some fusion cells.
Working feeds got routed through only one room.
He found it with his light and turned, clicking his fingers and giving a hand command to Tan, telling him to take a couple of his people to go check it out. The Lao Hu would be gathering intelligence from there. They also might be putting out a call for help.
Possibly to the Rynak, one of the few groups likely still well-armed and organized enough to respond.
Tan nodded, catching his meaning at once.
Sending a faint pulse of respect, he gestured for three of the others to follow him.
Without waiting, Tan left for the room Revik had highlighted with his aleimi, the other three seers in tow.
Revik turned to the rest of the room, scanning the faces of a group of seers collected in a small crowd on the raised platform of the audience chamber.
Only one of them sat on the chaise lounge that crouched in the center of that stage.
Revik had been in this room before.
Giving a swift glance up at the screen on the wall, remembering what he’d seen on there the last time he’d been at the Forbidden City, he felt his lips twist in a frown.
He’d told Voi Pai to assemble her senior officers here.
He already had two of Menlim’s people checking the names, faces and aleimic signatures against what they found in the higher levels of the security construct.
Watching them cluster in a protective half-circle in front of their leader where she sat on the silk-cushioned lounge chair, Revik didn’t hesitate, but walked directly towards them, feeling his guard follow close behind, their rifles up and aimed towards the seers on the stage.
He stopped around two meters from the base of the platform.
Looking past that line of seers at Voi Pai herself, who stared down at him with those strange eyes of hers with the vertical pupils like a cat’s, Revik folded his arms, rocking slightly on his heels as he studied her expression.
She seemed to have taken his words to heart.
He saw calculation there, certainly. He doubted she could have helped that, no matter how many threats he leveled at her; it was simply part of her nature.
No humor lived in her expression, however, and for the first time he’d ever encountered her, she looked angry, without the faintest trace of that condescending arrogance he remembered, or the false, cloying sweetness she enjoyed using to goad her opponents.
“Voi Pai,” he said, bowing.
“Illustrious Sword,” she said in acknowledgement, her voice stiff.
“I am formally claiming the City of the Lao Hu,” he said, keeping his voice without inflection. “I am now the authority here. Do you acknowledge?”
Around her, Revik felt seers react with horror.
Some of them were crying, but Revik didn’t let his eyes rest on any of those faces for long. He kept his gaze on Voi Pai herself, his expression motionless, his light respectful.
When Voi Pai answered, her voice sounded almost like she might cry, too.
Revik felt the anger under it though. A cold, unbridled fury lived there, perhaps beyond what he’d ever felt from another seer in his life.
“I acknowledge,” she said, aiming that hatred at him.
Revik nodded, once.
Politely, he gestured for her to come down, to join him on the floor.
Staring at him, he could almost feel her fighting back what she wanted to say to him, perhaps what she even wanted to do to him. Clenching her jaw visibly, she rose abruptly yet still gracefully from the silk lounge where she’d sat, ignoring the seers who looked at her in protest, imploring her with their eyes to not follow Revik’s request.
Holding up the front of her long, Hanfu-style dress, she descended the platform with her head held high, but without looking Revik in the face. When she reached the bottom, he stepped aside for her, indicating that he wished for her to walk with him.
When she acquiesced, aiming her feet for the sliding doors on the far end of the audience chamber, Revik glanced at his guard, using sign language to indicate he intended for them to remain in the room with the other seers.
After the barest hesitation, Kidi nodded, her eyes following Voi Pai briefly.
Walking casually and still politely, he led the Lao Hu leader out of the building, his arms still folded. He let the Lao Hu servants open the doors as they always did, standing out of the way to let Voi Pai pass through those doors ahead of him.
Once they’d left the last doorway of the building behind, he walked with her down the steps of the audience hall and then along a stone path between buildings in what had once been the human royal quarters of the City.
Glancing at the canal winding thro
ugh the main thoroughfare, Revik let his eyes pause on a human servant walking, head down, along the grassy area at its edges.
He found himself frowning.
Everything looked the same.
The physical beauty of the City was strangely, incongruously unchanged.
The trees swayed with early spring blossoms and bright green new leaves. Lanterns and multi-tiered kites drifted back and forth in the same light breeze. The colored tiles of the roofs, the detailed stone screens, the painted red doors, elaborate iron and bronze work, ancient Chinese paintings on the fronts of buildings and roof eaves, the perfect symmetry of the rock and sculpture gardens––it was all the same.
Even so, through his aleimi, the City already felt different, almost unrecognizable.
Truthfully, through Revik’s light it felt nothing like the City he remembered, and Revik realized it was because the previous construct had already been more than half-dismantled, including the portions of that construct that kept the modern world out.
The Lao Hu construct had locked in some remnant of the light and Barrier spaces of Ancient China, in addition to older seer spaces Revik knew in his light from the Pamir.
He fought not to react to his part in annihilating that.
Soon, the light of the Dreng would strangle this place.
These walls and walkways and buildings would turn dead and cold, devoid of living light. It would be a physically perfect but utterly empty place.
The Forbidden City of the Lao Hu, which had stood this way for hundreds of years, prior to First Contact with the Western humans, prior to any Western eyes seeing past its walls at all… had been killed in a matter of hours.
It happened so swiftly Revik had almost missed it happening at all.
As if she’d read his light, Voi Pai muttered beside him, “I hope you’re proud, brother.”
Remembering that Voi Pai had meant to sell Allie to the same seer who now gave him orders, Revik only shook his head, clicking softly.
“No,” he said. “I am not proud. Nor do I appreciate your hypocrisy.” He gave her a look. “They were your allies long before they were mine, sister.”
“To preserve,” she hissed at him, showing her anger openly for the first time. “To preserve this, Illustrious Brother! Not to rip it apart, brick by brick! Not to wipe out the last of those ancient energies of our people! Those constructs were imported lovingly from the Pamir itself! Or do you really care so little for our history that you can stand by and watch this happen with nothing more than a few rancid crocodile tears… my very, very young brother?”
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