War_Apocalypse

by JC Andrijeski

  “But Jon…” Dante said, confused. “He’s human, right? I mean, his parents were human. He told me they were.”

  “Maybe not so much now,” Tenzi said in English. “Not so human.”

  “‘Not so much now’?” Dante said, bewildered. “Not so human? What is that? You mean being a seer is catching?”

  “No.” Tenzi made a negative gesture with one hand, laughing a little. “No… not catching. Not like disease. Not so easy to explain, this. Jon change, very rare. Very, very rare. Only happen ones other times… on Lists. Like people you find. Understand?”

  Dante pulled apart his words, still half-sure she’d heard him wrong.

  Not just about what he’d said about Jon somehow changing into a seer, but the whole crap about seer pairs being monogamous and whatever else. She’d always heard seers were big, walking piles of hormones, that they’d do it with pretty much anyone.

  Or anything.

  “Myth,” Tenzi said, without even sounding offended, or contrite about reading her mind for the millionth time. “Jon and Wreg… marriage. Like marriage. Like Bridge and Sword.”

  “Jon and Wreg are married?” she said, dumbfounded. “After five weeks? They’re married?”

  He made a different hand gesture, tilting his palm back and forth.

  “This is close,” he said. “Not yet, but maybe. Maybe for Jon and Wreg. For now, yes… is okay. Not for sure. Complicates.”

  “Complicated,” Dante said, frowning harder. “You’re saying it’s complicated? So maybe they’re married, but maybe they’re not?”

  He made the hand gesture she now knew meant “thank you,” presumably for the correction to his English. His irises blurred again briefly, right before he nodded, emphatic.

  “Yes. This is good. Close. Much close, cousin. Maybe yes, maybe no.”

  She sighed. But at least she understood him that time.

  Mostly.

  Giving up on the Jon and Wreg thing, she slumped into the open seat with a sigh, kicking at the carpet with her sneakers to make the chair swivel. Reaching behind her, she gripped the back of the chair, without taking her eyes off the lines of code generated by her headset.

  “So what’s the crime today, Holmes? More government databases? Or can we knock over a bank?” Thinking, she frowned, adding in a darker mutter, “…Not that we’ll need to in a few weeks.”

  Tenzi gave her a curious look. “You saw this on feeds? Today?” It wasn’t really a question, more like surprise. He switched to Prexci. “…Already they are saying this? That the currency is failing here? That is very bad news,” came the delayed addition.

  “Yeah,” Dante said, once the translation program finished.

  She tried to keep the rest of her thoughts hazy and in the background, like Jon had started to teach her before he took off, but some of what she’d been thinking must have leaked through, enough for Tenzi to get the gist.

  That time, he didn’t bother trying to speak English, but rattled off words in the seer language, his voice noticeably agitated, his dark eyes serious.

  “You will not die here,” he said, via the translation. “Do not think we will allow anything bad to happen to you, cousin! We will keep you safe, always… dearest of our friends. It is our most important job now, to keep safe all of those named on the Displacement List, so that your race will be able to evolve to its new, most desired form.”

  Dante tried to keep her eye-roll internal, but kicked her toe at the carpet anyway, a bit harder than necessary.

  “Right on,” she muttered, not managing to keep the sarcasm out of her voice. “So we’ll have front row seats when the Big One comes, and wipes our asses off the board.”

  Tenzi smiled unexpectedly, making that soft clicking noise with his tongue.

  “She will like you,” he said, in English.

  “Who?” Dante stared down at the cuticles of one hand, still swiveling the chair absently with sneakered feet. “Who will like me?”

  “Bridge.” Tenzi smiled wider. “She has same humor, same smiling. She laugh when things are dark. The Sword, too.”

  “Awesome,” Dante muttered.

  She stared out the window at the gathering clouds. She’d forgotten a big storm was set to slam the city around noon. There were more earthquake warnings, too. She checked the timepiece and realized it was coming on noon now.

  Leaning over her monitor with an exhale, she added, “Well, they must be laughing their asses off now, then, wherever they are.”

  Tenzi didn’t answer.

  Dante saw his eyes shift to take in the same view out the bay windows.

  In those few seconds, his smile slowly faded.

  11

  THE NARROWS

  THE WATERS OF Raritan Bay slid up, waves lapping the image collection skin covering the front end of the sub as we sank beneath the surface. The greenish-gray, brackish water swiftly covered my view of the clouds and driving rain.

  Only dim light filtered through the water itself, since the sun was already smothered behind the storm.

  Once we’d gone all the way under the surface, however, the view shifted.

  The hull lights switched on in multiple spectrums, illuminating particles in the water in front of us. I watched with my eyes and light as threads from sensors streamed out in front of us on all sides, examining the water closest to the docks.

  According to Chandre’s friend, Talei, the underwater OBE grid didn’t begin until we passed under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and entered New York Harbor.

  We were halfway across the bay when maps of that grid began showing up on navigation charts rotating in virtual over the consoles forming a horseshoe shape around the bow of the sub. I heard Balidor, Chinja and Poresh murmuring about those maps with Talei, but I didn’t try to listen to the details.

  I got the gist.

  If the maps were wrong, we were dead.

  If we screwed up with navigation, or didn’t have the space to turn to accommodate the tighter curves depicted by the route through the OBE fields… we were dead.

  The organic comps were supposed to tell us all of that before we were in danger of actually dying, of course, but if the comps were wrong––or if there was something in place to obscure the route from the sensors, thus confusing the comps––we were dead.

  If Talei worked for Shadow, if this was some suicide trip for her, like Dorje with Vash––we were dead.

  I stood on a slightly higher deck of the bridge, near the periscope, which none on our team was using, likely because it wouldn’t be much help down here. I watched silently as Balidor, two seers acting as navigators, Talei, Yumi, Chinja and Poresh hung over the submarine’s navigation controls, speaking in low murmurs.

  The whole front end of the sub acted as a view port with the image-capture skin, depicting details underwater and even making large sections of the consoles appear transparent. From where I stood, at times it looked like the crew was swimming through the water themselves.

  Sensors lit up whenever they came in contact with: animals, objects in the water, other ships, flyers above the water, weapons systems or other sensors aimed at us. The image capture was overlain with various other displays––a topographical map of the bay floor detailing out the tilting depths that was accurate down to the centimeter I’d been told.

  As we entered New York Harbor, it would show a lot more, I knew.

  I didn’t speak while they worked.

  Honestly, I probably should have done what Revik was doing, and holed up in another compartment to work on plans with the others for when we reached Manhattan. Still, I remained where I was, keeping my light and person out of the way so they could work.

  It seemed like forever before we approached the bridge.

  The view out the front of the submarine changed dramatically as we did.

  Lines grew visible in the dark, delineating the bridge itself, the massive cement piers under the water, even the foundations under the silt and sand making up the bay floor. I
watched sharp, red-white lines emerge out of the dark water just beyond the bridge’s outline, and felt my throat tighten when I realized that had to be the OBE field.

  Glancing up, I looked at the map of that field where it rotated overhead.

  When Balidor glanced back at me, a grim look on his face, I forced a smile and he did the same, giving me a nod.

  Wish us luck, he sent, low.

  I let out a grunt, folding my arms. Please don’t tell me I need to. My swimming’s a little rusty.

  He chuckled, clicking softly as he turned back to the charts. Resting a hand on the back of Poresh’s chair, he leaned forward, staring at the controls as he compared the organic comp’s navigation calculations with what he could see in the map with his light.

  I think all of us were holding our breaths as we approached the opening in the OBE field, which corresponded with the gap between two piers. Red and white lines sparked and crossed on either side as we approached, creating a mesh field closing off eighty percent of the bridge.

  I couldn’t help but notice the shadows drifting in the water between the pillars.

  When I glanced at the stats scrolling above me, I saw that they were animal corpses.

  Fish mostly, but the body parts of a few mammals floated there too, including seals and a small whale that must have come in towards shore for shelter from one of the many big storms. I also saw the DNA of more than a few people light up the grid from where they drifted in the tide around the fields. Several small boats, including two halves of what looked like a fishing boat, cut in half by the fields, sat at the bottom of the bay, as well.

  I didn’t see any other submarines.

  “Okay, we’re putting in the security sequence,” Talei said, raising her voice so everyone on the bridge could hear her.

  I couldn’t help noticing her voice and expression were grim, her face more pale than it had been. Her mouth remained in a hard line, her gold eyes focused with intensity on the display of the OBE gate, despite her assurances of the solidness of her intel.

  All of us fell silent after she put in the sequence to open the underwater gate.

  For a long-feeling number of seconds, nothing happened.

  Then I saw the gate begin to gradually melt away.

  Within seconds, nothing but water was visible in one square opening under the bridge––the same one delineated as a door by the map.

  Even so, I didn’t exactly sigh in relief. The grid sparked and shimmered on either side of the opening, stretching forward in a long, narrow tunnel underwater. I knew getting through the gate was only step one, and the one least likely to get us killed.

  After all, if the gate didn’t open, we wouldn’t enter the deadly maze at all.

  No one spoke as the submarine passed between the two cement and steel pillars.

  The OBE map unfolded as I watched, showing the first curve in the narrow channel we were now entering. I saw three routes depicted on the map overall, but only one of those was lit by the comps. That was the passage leading to our charted destination, which was the East River, and a dock near the neighborhood of Murray Hill in Manhattan.

  I could feel everyone else in the bridge staring as intently as me.

  “All right,” Balidor murmured. “Tell the comps to begin the sequence.”

  I knew the artificial intelligence of the organic comps would be piloting us for most of the way in, since it knew the sub’s capabilities and dimensions far better than anyone on our team could know them––how fast it cornered, where to start the turn, at what speed, at what depth. Even so, Poresh and the others didn’t take their hands off the controls, or their eyes off the map that superimposed itself over the dark water of New York Harbor.

  As the sub began to turn into the east-bound OBE-delineated lane as we left the shadow of the Narrows Bridge, I finally started to breath a little more easily.

  Even so, like Pori and the rest, my eyes never left those sparking white and scarlet lines.

  I WAS STILL staring up at the three-dimensional map of the OBE field when Chandre walked up to stand beside me at the catwalk’s guardrail.

  She glanced over at my face only after she’d leaned her palms on the railing, studying my expression without speaking. A faint smile touched her dark lips when I met her gaze, and I found myself grinning back.

  “Nervous, Bridge?” she said drily. “Should I be the same?”

  I grunted, looking back at the view into the water. “Truthfully? I don’t know. Did you have to listen to Wreg go on and on for over an hour about what death traps submarines are?” At her chuckle, I grunted, shaking my head. “Who would have ever thought a man capable of crushing a grown man’s head, one-handed, could be such a colossal baby?”

  Chandre snorted, clicking softly. “Brother Wreg is… a man of contradictions.”

  “So I’m learning,” I muttered.

  She laughed again, leaning more of her weight on the railing.

  Still, her red eyes remained pensive as she glanced back towards the watery view through the organic glass composite.

  She cleared her throat, motioning towards the view of the OBE lane in the water.

  “I came here to tell you not to worry,” she said. “This is economical. Restrained, even. Compared to your recent plans.” She inclined her head. “…Or so I hear.”

  I grinned wider. I couldn’t help it.

  I knew she’d likely come to distract me, but honestly, I appreciated it. My jaw was starting to hurt from clenching it. I could use the damned distraction.

  “It should have a better chance of succeeding, then,” I said, making my voice as deadpan as hers. “…Especially since I had almost no hand in designing it.”

  Chandre’s lips rose a fraction higher, even as she clicked softly.

  “I don’t know, Bridge.” Her eyes continued to study the view of the bay through the transparent pane. “From what I hear, you’ve done all right.” She gave me a more meaningful look. “I certainly have no complaints about my own rescue.”

  I blinked, a little startled by the sincerity I saw in her eyes.

  The silence stretched.

  Hesitating, I faced her directly. “You probably know this, but Balidor didn’t tell me. Not for months. I had no idea you’d volunteered to go undercover for us.” Pausing, I gauged her eyes. “I might have smacked you if I’d known, honestly. Do you seriously not get how dangerous that was? Because I can tell you… from my end, it was pretty dangerous.”

  Chandre shrugged, her eyes still on the OBE fields. “You were much closer to the danger than me, Bridge,” she said somewhat reproachfully. “Honestly, if we’re going to talk about crazy plans, I might have a few words for you, at that.”

  I grunted, refolding my arms as I faced the view screens. “Okay. Fair.”

  “Maybe we can work it out in the ring,” she joked. “Smack each other?”

  “Or maybe I can just beat Balidor up, since he’s the one who approached you about this crazy plan in the first place,” I muttered. “Come to think of it, I’ve been meaning to have words with him about that…”

  She smiled again, still watching the water.

  Watching her profile, I felt my throat close. My jaw hardened in the same set of seconds. I realized how long it had been since I’d seen her. I remembered how it felt, thinking she’d left me to go work for Revik and Salinse.

  Suddenly, I did kind of want to smack her.

  Clicking under my breath, I shook my head before frowning at her. “It wouldn’t have made a difference, you know. With Shadow. With us going to Argentina. I wouldn’t have left you there, Chan, even if you did work for Salinse. I’d never leave you in a place like that.”

  The tall, muscular seer didn’t answer, but I saw something in her dark eyes change, right before she looked at me. The softer light in her irises grew visible enough to throw me. She looked away in the next set of seconds, pushing back her corn-rowed braids and staring down at the crew working over consoles below us.
/>   “I appreciate that, Esteemed Bridge,” she said formally. She smiled without looking over. “…And for you not punching me when you saw me.”

  I grunted again.

  I still felt vaguely guilty, though. I’d been really hurt when she left.

  Not just hurt––angry. It felt like she chose Revik over me, and while a part of me understood, another part of me was irrationally angry at her, whether I understood her reasoning intellectually or not.

  Moreover, from my perspective, she hadn’t even bothered to tell me––or say goodbye.

  She’d snuck out in the middle of a bomb attack by Revik and Salinse in Delhi, without so much as a “sorry,” or a “see you later,” or even a “fuck you.”

  In all honesty, I’d been mad at her before she left, mostly because of that thing with Revik in D.C., which I’d partly blamed her for, I guess––again, unfairly. I’d been mad at anyone who went along with Revik’s plan in D.C., maybe because it was easier to focus on that than what Revik turned into afterwards.

  Another memory flashed at the thought, and I winced.

  I’d yelled at Cass, too––and Cass hadn’t even been there.

  I’d yelled at Cass for not being there, for not going with Jon and Revik to D.C. I accused her of leaving Jon alone with it, of forcing him to be the only voice of reason on that whole damned team. Remembering the things I’d said, I winced again. I’d apologized to her, that very same night, but was an apology ever really enough for that kind of thing?

  Even Jon was pissed at me for a few days after that. He told me I’d been way out of line. He also reminded me it was Cass who’d taken out Terian, a fact the rest of the team, apart from maybe Balidor, conveniently glossed over due to her “worm” status.

  Remembering that conversation too, I felt a little sick.

  Thinking about Cass wasn’t exactly helpful right now, though.

  Frowning, I looked over at the seer with the dark red eyes.

  She’d been there, in Shadow’s fortress. She watched the whole thing with Shadow and Cass unfold, with Cass learning she was War and everything Shadow did and said to her to convince her that his side was the right one. She’d also seen something in Cass shift enough that she started sleeping with Feigran.