The Academy

by Zachary Rawlins

  “Huh,” Alice said, sounding genuinely surprised. “I’d have figured people would be more interested in smack during a recession.”

  “Nguyen Exports handles a broad range of products for an array of reputable clients,” Tung sputtered defensively. “I do not appreciate the implication that we would deal in anything untoward. Our firm has operated for decades and enjoys an excellent reputation, here and in Central.”

  The woman nodded and crossed her legs. She was attractive, if a bit too pale; even Tung, who wasn’t the biggest fan of Caucasians, had to give her that, with her long legs and lithe figure. Or she would have been pretty, rather, if she hadn’t had that ludicrous smirk plastered on her face.

  “You have no need to be concerned about that, Mr. Do. The Audits Department is well-aware of everything that your company transports, even when it somehow doesn’t make it on the manifest,” Alice observed dryly. “If we had a problem with it, we would have gotten involved some time ago. Moreover, the quality of the services you provide is universally recognized. At several points, we have contracted work to your organization, as a matter of fact.”

  “I hope the services were rendered to your satisfaction?” Tung inquired politely. He was impatient to get the Auditors out of his office, but he couldn’t think of any way to do so. The right of an Auditor to compel cooperation was absolute, when conducting an Audit, and he’d already inspected the paperwork. Tung shifted in his expensive chair, and wished he could go change his shirt.

  “Yes.” Alice waved her hand dismissively. “Enough of these trivial matters. You are a busy man, and I do not wish to waste your time. I wonder if I might show you something, Mr. Do.”

  Alice dug through the duffel bag she brought in with her, and Tung panicked briefly. He hadn’t had the right to demand a search of the bag – he could not interfere with an Audit – and he tensed up, aware that he was being ridiculous and unable to stop himself. After a moment’s search, Alice produced a stack of printouts, each page a photo headshot of a Vietnamese or Cambodian man.

  “Do you know any of these men, Mr. Do?”

  Tung made a show of putting his glasses on, and then looking closely at each of the photos in turn. Alice’s smile broadened a notch, and he felt slightly queasy, like the whole affair was turning into a farce.

  “I have never seen any of these men before,” Tung said honestly. “I am sorry I cannot be of more assistance.”

  “The first part is true,” Mitsuru said, her voice devoid of emotion. Her entire contribution to the conversation up until this point had been limited to occasional confirmations of what he’d said – she was obviously running an Audit protocol, some kind of lie-detector. “But he isn’t actually sorry.”

  “Good for you, Mr. Do!” Alice said enthusiastically. “But if I’d asked if any of these men had been clients of yours, it would have been a different answer, right?”

  “Nguyen Exports does business with many different clients each year. Only a fraction of them ever deal with me personally. And even then, many of our clients employ another agency as a buffer, to ensure confidentiality,” Mr. Do explained patiently. “There is no way for me to be totally certain that my firm has not contracted with these men, indirectly, at some point.”

  “It was a trick question, Mr. Do.” Alice’s expression was smug. “These men are all members of a Hmong Weir tribe, one that has done contracting work for your little operation before. Surely you remember that little deal-gone-bad in Myanmar that they helped you resolve? We know that your cartel recently arranged transportation for them to the United States, on one of your vessels. That was a big mistake, Mr. Do.”

  “Please. Do you have any proof to support these outrageous claims?” Tung said indignantly, waving his finger as he spoke. “Auditors or no, speculation of this kind is meaningless.”

  “Tung, shut the fuck up, before you piss me off,” Alice said coldly, her smile bright and cruel. “Mitsuru isn’t here to determine whether or not you are telling the truth. I don’t need her help to figure that out. She’s been acting as a conduit for one of the best telepaths in Central, who has been quietly ransacking your brain during our little chat, while I kept you nervous enough not to notice.”

  Alice stood up and slammed her hand down on Tung’s desk, causing him to flinch backwards.

  “Guess what we found, asshole? Any ideas? Mitzi?” Alice glared down at Tung, eyes hard and brilliant.

  “Don’t call me that,” Mitsuru said coldly, her eyes focused and aware. Clearly, whatever protocol she’d been running had been allowed to dissipate, and for the first time, Tung felt the red eyes studying him. It was not a good feeling.

  “We have indisputable proof, Mr. Do, of the Terrie Cartel’s involvement in the smuggling of Weir to California, and additionally of your own personal involvement in said transaction,” Alice said cheerily. “These Weir were used in the commission of an attempted assassination of an Operator, which you have kindly confirmed was also contracted by the Terrie Cartel.”

  “This is outrageous!” Tung protested, his eyes bugging out of his head, turning red in the face. “You cannot simply invade my mind at your discretion! I have rights under the Agreement!”

  “Wrong,” Alice gloated, slamming a document down on the desk in front of Tung. “This writ is signed by the Director. As far as the purposes of this Audit go, your rights have been suspended until such a time as we decide to return them to you. Do you think I’m the kind of woman who would return them, Tung?”

  Tung looked at the woman, and her terrible smile, his mind gone blank with panic. He hadn’t wanted in on the deal the cartel had brokered in the first place – he had no love lost for Central, but the whole affair seemed destined for trouble from the start. Still, he hadn’t expected Auditors, with a mandate for the dissolution of his cartel from the Director no less, to be staring at him like he was a gift they were dying to unwrap.

  He hadn’t expected them to be so damn unnerving, either. Beneath his desk, he started to slowly shift his foot.

  “Let me make our position clear, Tung.” Alice leaned over the desk, her face inches away from his, her grin a mile wide. “Your whole damn cartel is dirty. We’ve already got enough on you to make it stick – which means that somebody set you up for a fall, right? Because as stupid as you are, there’s no way the whole Terrie Cartel decided to commit mass suicide like this. Whoever hired you for the job, well, now they’re trying to feed you to us. And the bitch of the situation,” Alice continued gleefully, “for you, anyway, is that we are very hungry. We could just eat you and your whole operation up right now. You see, Mitzi over here…”

  “Mitsuru,” the red-eyed woman said, her voice icy. “Please.”

  “Right, Mitsuru,” Alice said dismissively. “Anyway, my very good friend here, she got caught up in your little scheme. She had to bust up your trap, over in California, and she’s real fucking pissed about it. And I’m sure you heard about those two Operators in San Francisco – that was a real fucking shame, wasn’t it, Tung? We are none too happy about that, either. Do you appreciate how precarious this makes your position?”

  Tung nodded, sweat pouring down his face. With one foot, he gradually eased the thing he needed into place. It was good that he’d prepared for all eventualities, even one as unlikely as this, and a good thing that this Alice Gallow person liked to talk so much. If the mirror wasn’t in exactly the right spot, it wouldn’t work, and then he wouldn’t have a way out of this terrible situation.

  “Please – there must be some way we can resolve this,” he implored, nudging the mirror into place. “I am willing to cooperate with your Audit. I will assist your investigation, if only you would…”

  “You will do exactly what I want you to, Tung,” Alice advised, folding her arms. “What happens after that, nothing you do can change.”

  “You stupid bitch,” Tung spat, red-faced. “That doesn’t give me much incentive to cooperate, does it?”

  He inched the mirror int
o place, and then dove underneath his desk. He saw understanding flash in Mitsuru’s eyes, right before he dropped, and knew that she would be too late, even as she stepped forward. He slipped underneath his desk, and then kept falling, through the mirror he had hidden there, like breaking the surface of cold water. The destination had been prepared in advance, so that he could operate the protocol without thought; he passed through the rigid surface of the mirror, and then beyond that, the stifling fog of the Ether. The apport was as efficient as he could manage; he hung in the cold grey for only a moment, and then he was out, standing up on the other side on shaky legs and brushing the dust from his pants.

  Tung hated the jungle, the humidity even more than temperature. Not to mention the bugs that found him upon arrival, and immediately set about making his life miserable. The camp was a miserable collection of shacks and Quonset huts, populated by a large number of shabbily-dressed, heavily-armed Philippine men, most of whom were shocked to see Tung emerge from the mirror that he had hung, suspended five feet above the dusty ground, on the outside of one of the storerooms several months ago, as an insurance policy.

  “Get ready,” Tung hissed in mediocre Tagalong at the nearest of the men, his coat and skin still steaming with the vapors of his transit through the Ether, his chest laboring with the effort. “We will have company shortly.”

  --

  After Tung disappeared Alice paused briefly, then giggled and walked casually around the desk. Mitsuru stood in the middle of the room, halfway to where Tung had disappeared from, and looked at Alice in confusion. Xia stood impassively in the corner of the room, aloof and unconcerned.

  With the worn toe of her heavy boots, Alice pushed the mirror out from under the desk. It was a cheap bathroom mirror, just wide enough to accommodate Tung’s plump frame. The glass was uniformly smeared with grease, as if someone had run their hand across the whole of the surface, and it was warped in the middle. At the very center, the glass had already begun steaming and running, rapidly becoming a hissing pool of silvery liquid on the office carpet.

  “Amateur,” Alice laughed to herself. “Calls himself a transporter, but still needs a mirror to do a port.”

  The remains of the mirror continued to boil and steam, gradually eating away at the floor beneath. The room filled with the stench of melting plastic and burned carpet.

  “Cooperate?” Alice spat, sounding genuinely angry. “I didn’t want you to cooperate, asshole,” Alice said to the vaporizing mass at her feet, “I wanted you to run. Are you really so stupid as to think you could close the way behind you? This won’t even slow us down.”

  Alice walked over to the desk, nudging out several of the larger fragments of the mirror in front of Mitsuru.

  “There should still be traces,” she said firmly. “Tell me where he went.”

  Mitsuru was as good as Alistair had described. The time it took her to determine what protocol was needed, and to download it from the Etheric network was barely noticeable. The actual download itself took bit longer, and looked alarmingly like a brief seizure. Mitsuru bent down to her knees, her eyes furiously red, and peered into the broken mirror.

  “Okay,” she said, after a few moments, her eyes twitching rapidly. “I can see him. They broke the mirror on the other end, after he came through, but one of the pieces is still big enough… I think it’s the camp, the one Alistair was talking about.”

  Alice nodded thoughtfully.

  “Tell me again, Mitsuru, what was the briefing on this place?”

  Mitsuru looked up from the fragments of mirror.

  “The Philippine Army and the CIA both believe it to be an Abu Sayyaf camp,” Mitsuru said, voice dead as she consulted her Etheric uplink. “It isn’t, of course. Its run by the Witches, the terrorist angle is just to keep the curious away. Satellite shows fifteen structures, arrayed in a rough semi-circle, on the bank of the river. The terrain around it is primarily jungle; the only road access is a dirt track. They’ve got a crude airfield, too, big enough for private planes.”

  Alice nodded again, and Mitsuru went back to surveying the mirror shards, which were beginning to melt into the carpet.

  “The strip is empty right now,” Mitsuru said distantly. “Barbwire around the perimeter. The angle is terrible, so I can’t see much else.”

  Alice inspected her chipped nail polish critically.

  “What kind of nonconventional assets can we expect, Mitzi?”

  The glare Mitsuru gave her went way past insubordination.

  “I told you already. My name is Mitsuru. Alistair tried to scan it a couple times already – he says it’s shielded, by someone who knows what they’re doing. They definitely have some fairly capable Operators, to keep a telepathic barrier like that up twenty-four hours a day. I can’t see anyone at all.”

  “Could be a Witch,” Alice suggested. “They make artifacts that do stuff like that. It could have been set up in advance, or there could even be one there now, maintaining it.”

  “That is entirely speculative,” Mitsuru said woodenly, still connected to Etheric network. “During attempts to scan the site, Alistair reported a number of Etheric signatures in the nearby wilderness, very probably Weir.”

  Alice gave Xia a look. He gave her a very small nod in return.

  “So, we’ll assume they have Operators and Weir, at the very least. Witches are a possibility too – though they tend to bail before things get heavy, unless they think they have all the cards. Plus probably a handful of normal humans.” Alice though for a moment, glancing over at Xia, then nodding in agreement, as if he had said something. “We’ll wait until twilight. They’re probably running around in a panic right now, waiting for us to come busting in. Let’s give them some time to start thinking that they got away. They’ll be more lax in a few hours.”

  “Can we clear the camp on our own?” Mitsuru asked, her voice normal, disconnected from the uplink.

  “Xia could clean that place out by himself,” Alice snorted. “I probably won’t even have to take my hands out of my pockets. I brought you along,” Alice leered at Mitsuru, “’cause I like watching you cut people up, baby. It makes me feel all funny.”

  Alice winked at Mitsuru, who stared at her, mouth half-open.

  “Don’t be dense,” Alice said sympathetically, “this is a big job. We’re not just going to take care of it – we’re going to make sure that you’re there, helping out, every step of the way, Mitzi. And once we wrap up a successful Audit, no one’s going to be able to argue with Gaul making you an Auditor, right? So, be a good girl for a little while longer.”

  Alice giggled at her shocked expression.

  “Oh, dear me, I said it again, didn’t I?” Alice gave her arm an affectionate pinch. “I swear, I meant to say Mitsuru…”

  --

  As the sun hid itself behind the low hills beyond the river, the camp fell into shadow.

  The air was so humid it felt dense, and Alice felt the sweat bead on her neck the moment she stepped out of the shadow of a storehouse on the eastern edge of the compound, near the fence. She crouched and then surveyed her surroundings, her finger tight on the trigger of her shotgun. She needn’t have bothered. Aside from the sounds of the insects and the ever-shifting wall of vegetation, the area was deserted.

  Even the best trained guard will fall into routines when patrolling the same ground every night – inevitably, given the boredom inherent in the job, and the limited number of routes available. The camp was protected by guards with sufficient professionalism to shift their patrol routes, but they’d been stationed there long enough to fall into a routine anyway. The jeep that they were using to patrol was on the other side of camp; Alice could see the mounted spotlight on the back from where she crouched. She reached one hand into her own shadow.

  She pulled Mitsuru from the shadow first, but she emerged stumbling. Mitsuru shook her head several times, before crouching beside Alice, disoriented. Alice reached down and rested her hand on Mitsuru’s cheek, gently
pressing the dizzy Operator’s head against her leg, reaching back into the shadows with her other hand.

  Xia stepped out a moment later, in his heavy black coat and surgical mask, clutching Alice’s hand with his own latex gloved one. He glanced at the still dazed Mitsuru, and then looked questioningly at Alice. She nodded curtly.

  At that moment, the night was rent by the sound of gunfire, followed by panicked yelling in a cacophony of Tagalong, French and English. There were two groups of guards approaching, and in the distance a gunman had climbed to the flat roof of one of the temporary structures and was taking potshots with his AK-47. At that distance, there wasn’t much chance of him finding a mark, particularly as they were only partially exposed to his aim, but Alice tugged the befuddled Mitsuru back behind the protection of the outbuilding, just to be safe.

  “Alright, Xia. No point in subtlety now. Let ‘em know we’re here.”

  Alice helped Mitsuru to her feet. She shook her head again, cautiously, and then nodded at Alice, apparently steadied.

  Xia walked casually out into the open, rounding the storehouse corner and exposing himself to fire from both of the patrols, as well as the rooftop sniper. The 7.62mm rounds made a strange hissing sound as they hit the field of intense heat that surrounded Xia, visible only by the distortion in the air around him, then flattened and melted like solder into hissing pools on the muddy ground.

  Xia closed his eyes, and then slowly raised both of his arms until they were above his head, palms to the sky. Though there was little wind, his heavy coat rippled and swayed, and the grass around him wilted and charred. A white luminescence appeared at the ends of his hands, and then slowly expanded, covering his entire body in a translucent shell. Xia spoke then, just once, but what he said could not be described as a word.

  One of the Jeeps caught flame, burning from beneath its undercarriage. There were angry voices yelling in Tagalong, as some of the guards attempted to douse the flames with an extinguisher, while others milled about in confusion. The first explosion was dramatic, a terrific bang that sent chunks of metal flying in all directions as the jeep tore itself apart. The gas tanks on the other vehicles followed shortly, all three detonating in rapid succession, each sending a ball of black smoke and flame skyward. Looking through the filter of a combat protocol, Mitsuru watched the guard’s Etheric signatures snuff out, torn apart by shrapnel, their bodies left to turn to charcoal in the flames.