by J M Guillen
“I agree!” I waved at the ship. “Tell those guys and we will!”
I do not remember Gideon ever arguing with his cadres, Anya mused.
“No,” I chuckled. “That would never happen. Argue with Gideon DuMarque? He’d probably send you to Antarctica through the nearest aperture.”
So why are we arguing now? She reached out with her left hand and pulled at an invisible strand. The cadre, I mean.
“Well, we were talking about what to do next. First, Wyatt and Sofia seemed to kinda agree with me. Then, the more we talked—”
No. Anya reached up and put her fingertips against my lips, a move I found odd. It felt more… familiar than most interactions with Anya. I’m not asking why the discussion began.
I guess I don’t understand.
I’m asking why my Alpha is having a discussion. Is your mind not made up? She moved her fingers away.
“Well, mostly.” I actually did feel a bit uncertain; it had simply been harder to admit that while the other three disagreed with me. “I think.”
You need to make a decision and be certain.
“That’s the thing, Anya!” I waved one hand, frustrated. “I told them my decision. They didn’t respect it.”
She gazed at me for a moment, her eyes the color of the sky in June. Then, she gave me the tiniest nod as if she’d decided something. Gideon DuMarque remains one of the greatest men I have ever worked with.
“Yeah.” I let out a huff. “It seemed like he always knew what to do.”
Do you think so?
“Yeah.” I popped my knuckles and thought. “It didn’t matter how deep in the hole we were. Gideon always had a plan.”
That is not true, Michael. She gave the slightest shake her head. I cannot count the times Gideon expressed concern to me or asked me if I thought one of his plans too risky.
“Really?” That truly surprised me. I’d never imagined Gideon confided in anyone, much less asked for advice.
I had extensive conversations with him in Dhire Lith. She raised one eyebrow at me. We were castaways, completely adrift from Rationality, and it was his responsibility to get us home.
“I don’t know how he did it.” I caught myself grinding my teeth and stopped. “We’ve had exactly one encounter with the enemy on this incursion. In that time, I almost lost half of my cadre and became a host for an aberrant amphibian.”
Gideon had a gift for making choices. She stepped a bit closer to me as she adjusted her stance. I cannot count the times he made a decision he felt uncertain about. He understood the importance of someone who could make a decision, whatever it may be.
“I never would have guessed he was ever uncertain.” The idea seemed completely foreign. “Gideon’s confidence was contagious; something that could infect you and lead you to believe you could do the impossible.”
I’m certain you knew him better than anyone. She placed one hand upon my shoulder. If he were here and faced with the same choices, what do you think he would do?
“You mean between chasing down Amir and stopping the plague-toads?” I shrugged. “Gideon wanted Amir. That’s for certain.”
So he would have chosen to pursue the Irrational? And allow the aberrations access to Rationality?
“Hell no,” I couldn’t help but smile at the memory, envisioning Gideon’s cobalt blue eyes, the mad steel that lurked within them. “If Gideon DuMarque had to make this choice, there wouldn’t be a choice. He wouldn’t allow some two-bit Irrat to outmaneuver him.”
So what would he do? If this were his call, without Designate support, how would he handle this circumstance?
“Gideon wouldn’t leave anything on the table. He’d take out the monsters and take down the bad guy.” The smile on my face grew wider. “No option for failure. No capitulations. He’d figure out how to do the impossible, and he’d smile the entire time.”
I agree with your assessment, Alpha. Anya cocked her head the tiniest bit and then brushed a stray hair off my shoulder. The concept you have outlined is exactly what strong leader would do.
“I never once saw him second-guess himself. He simply made up his mind and then told us how things were going to be.”
A cadre needs that. We often face impossible odds.
“Yeah, he always made certain we felt…” The slightest frown grew on my face.
Yes, Michael?
Slowly—perhaps too slowly—I pieced together what my Preceptor had actually said. I shook my head in disbelief.
The answer had been right in front of my face the entire time.
“Anya,” I gasped. Then I shook my head, all but incapable of grasping how deftly she handled me. “You’re absolutely brilliant.”
Yes. The tiniest bit of that smile touched the edge of her lips again. My functional IQ is one hundred and fifty-three, although there are reasons to suspect that calculation.
“I could absolutely kiss you.” I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face. “I should have known what to do all along.”
I don’t see how kissing someone has anything to do with their IQ. She shook her head and seemed somewhat taken aback.
“It usually doesn’t.” I laughed as I turned back toward the Corvus.
Then I do not understand. It looked as if just a hint of rose had spread across her cheeks
“Come on.” I put my hand on her shoulder. “We need to get some things figured out.”
5
“There you are.” Rachel held up the pincers and snapped them closed. “We have some unfinished business, you and I.”
“We do.” I stepped inside the realmship and headed directly over to the seat where she’d worked on me before. I thought we might go over our plans while you cleaned out my sinuses and patched up my shoulder.
“Do we have a plan?” Wyatt sat in the pilot seat, the Tangler on his lap. He held an elongated tool I hadn’t seen before and used it to adjust something within the barrel of the device.
“Maybe we shouldn’t be planning while I’m working.” Rachel raised her eyebrows. “Lean your head back.”
I did, and she pressed the tool into my other nostril. I watched her frown a bit as she struggled to get a fix on the parasite.
I can just blow my nose, if you like?
“I love working on you while you think you’re being clever.” She adjusted her angle a touch, and I saw her smile fiercely.
“Got you, you little shit.” She began to pull the atrocity out.
Fuck! The sensation remained exactly as horrific as I remembered. I watched as she pulled the tail end of the wormlike creature from my nostril, and I felt its slender wetness all through my sinuses, even the back side of my skull.
“Ha!” Rachel held the aberration up where I could see it. “Good news is we’ve learned they don’t survive for very long outside of the body. Bad news is the ones I took as samples are already dead.”
“Eww. That’s just…” Sofia shook her head. “I’m so disappointed I didn’t get to be part of the parasite party.”
“I’m not interested in a repeat.” I blinked my watery eyes and sniffed.
“You said something about a plan?” Wyatt didn’t even glance up at me. “I assume this involves the conversation we tabled earlier.”
“I have untabled the conversation.” I sniffed again, trying to lose the scent of rotten brine.
“We talked a little more,” Wyatt admitted. “Came up with a whole mess of reasons behind why maybe we should just let Amir be, at least for a bit.”
“I can appreciate that.” I eyed Rachel. “Are you cool if we talk while you patch up my shoulder?”
“Your viral mecha have done most of the heavy lifting. The biotoxins have been processed and the wound is clean.” She shrugged. “All I really need to do is seal the wound.”
“I’m going to take that as a ‘yes.’”
She said nothing but nodded.
“Anya, Sofia has a map of the entire necropolis. You have readings on Amir, as well as on the rifts you
picked up. Can we have a combined packet with that data?”
Of course. Would you prefer that packet ported to memory?
“Assuming we all have enough space.” I peered around, and everyone nodded.
Moments later, the packet hit our Crowns.
“Amir is halfway across the city,” Sofia noted.
“Three of them?” Dismay wound through Rachel’s tone. “Alpha, it’s unreasonable to simply allow those rifts to stay open.”
“It’s quite literally an X factor,” Wyatt butted in. “One rift could produce dozens or hundreds of creatures.”
“I’ve heard all this.” I raised one hand.
“We have more data.” Rachel turned first to Wyatt and then to me. “There’s a lot we didn’t consider before.”
“I’ve heard you. I know your opinions, and I know what we’re going to do.”
Wyatt winced the moment I said the word ‘opinions.’
“Yeah?” He glanced back down at his equipment, almost as if he didn’t want to meet my gaze.
In that moment, I knew what he expected. He thought I’d chase Amir, no matter what. In his heart, he thought I wanted revenge so badly that I couldn’t see straight.
I hated that. Wyatt had been my closest friend for as long as I could remember. Now it seemed as if he thought I was making poor decisions, and he wasn’t saying anything.
Was this the way things were going to go now? Did the fact I was his Alpha preclude me from being his friend?
I shook my head and put on my game face. That would have to be a problem for another day.
“What’s the play, Alpha?” Wyatt glanced up. “What are we going to do?”
They all stared at me.
Anya gave me the tiniest of nods.
“The impossible.” I tracked distances within the packet and gazed around at my cadre.
“Yeah?” A slow grin began to spread across Wyatt’s face.
“Yeah.” I nodded at him. “Just like we’ve always done; we’re going to do the impossible, together.”
Fifteen minutes later, we had everything hammered out. Just like any harebrained scheme, it had a lot of moving parts.
A single error might throw us off.
“Igniting aperture one.” Sofia glanced toward me.
I gave her a thumbs up.
The tier two conduit housing within the Corvus blossomed into a crimson aperture.
Sofia and I, both under the cover of the Wraith, ran through.
This location had been the closest we could get to what we’d termed Rift One. I would have preferred an incursion site that placed us nearer, but this had been our best choice.
Honestly, as Sofia reminded us, we were lucky we had Gatekeeper locations hidden down here at all.
Passageway clear, I linked to the cadre.
Before I’d finished sending, Sofia had already raised the gatekeeper and fired a quarrel down the hallway. It struck in the floor, right in the corner where the passageway turned.
Instantly, she ignited the quarrel into an aperture. Once she’d linked it to the rift directly behind us, we peered through.
Second passageway clear, she linked. Together, we stepped through, and Sofia repeated the process to leapfrog us along.
At the end of the hall, the portal she opened overlooked a small room. The white-bricked ceiling had been set low and, in fact, I wondered if Wyatt might not need to duck a bit. Two large fires burned in braziers to either side of the room I watched the smoke climb along the ceiling and vent from one corner, where apparently a natural hole formed a chimney.
Four figures stood within, three men and a woman. They wore black utilitarian clothing, and three of them carried handguns.
Four hostiles. I peered about the room. I can’t see the pool.
It will be in the far corner, Michael, Anya provided. Based upon your current location and my readings.
The map isn’t exact, Rachel reminded us.
Igniting aperture, Sofia linked and shot the gatekeeper’s bolt across the room so her quarrel stuck in the wall.
Copy that, Wyatt linked.
“Hey!” One of the men called. “What is that? That red circ—”
I shot him in the head before he could finish, and blood sprayed behind him in a fan.
For the briefest of moments, I saw the beatific art in that spray of blood. It arced behind the man, a paean to a thousand thousand years of his people. Millennia of pleasure, of pain, writ large in those splattered droplets.
“Holy shit!” one of the other men cried.
They all opened fire, spraying randomly in our general direction.
Sofia and I slipped to one side while we remained beneath the Wraith, comfortably invisible. We still had no concept why the toad-beasts had been able to see through my pseudo-invisibility, but that didn’t seem to matter now.
I shot a second man as Wyatt, Rachel, and Anya came through the aperture on the far side of the room.
Anya’s right, Wyatt linked. The pool is over here. Delacruz put us less than three meters away from it.
“We’ve got hostiles!” The woman yelled into a radio. “No idea how many—”
Anya shot the woman in the back, a conclusive double tap.
The one man remaining turned toward the gunfire, utterly confused, and raised his arms in the air.
Can’t let you surrender, buddy. I’d already charged within five steps of the guy. Before a single word came out of his mouth, I shattered his skull with my Stiletto.
His body hit the floor with an anti-climactic thump.
Fuck! Wyatt linked. There’s more. Along a hallway that sprouts off from the northeast corner!
Close the pool, Wyatt! You’ve got one job here!
Roger that, Alpha.
No sooner did I receive the link than automatic fire sounded from the far side of the room.
Wyatt added, More! More of those froggy-fucks, beneath the surface!
“Aaah!” Rachel cried, though I couldn’t tell if from pain or frustration.
I’m headed your way, I linked.
WHUF! The Tangler’s sound was followed by WHOMP!
As I sprinted past one of the fires, I saw the silvery shine of Wyatt’s stasis field.
Plugged the hole, Alpha. Through the link, I felt the shadows of his panic.
Excellent, Guthrie.
Initiating secondary conduit on your mark, Sofia linked.
Perfect! Do it! I glanced around for a quick visual check on my cadre.
As far as I could tell, everyone was fine.
Delacruz ignited the conduit just behind Anya and Wyatt. She connected it to a different location, one already saved within her Temporal Corona.
Engaging aperture, she informed us.
Right behind you, I confirmed. Excellent work, guys! This may not be as impossible as we thought. I stepped through with no concept of what awaited us.
One would think that by now, I would know to keep my big mouth shut.
6
Hallway clear. Sofia linked as we stepped through. We’ve got a little bit less of a run on this one.
We are behind you, Anya linked. We have too many hostiles here.
Copy that, Preceptor. Delacruz and I are pulling point down the hallway.
As we trotted through the darkness, Sofia fired the gatekeeper. As before, she aimed as far as she could past the corner, where the passageway turned.
We’re through, Gatekeeper. Wyatt’s link felt somewhat calmer. Cadre secure.
I watched as the quarrel in front of us blossomed into a scarlet aperture.
Sofia effortlessly linked the two together, even as she closed the one in the room we’d just left.
It amazed me how quickly Delacruz juggled apertures without creating paradox looping. The one time I’d geared the thing, I’d hurled most of my spine through space-time.
Hallway ahead is clear of hostiles, Wyatt informed us. Stepping through. He, Anya, and Rachel took control of the passageway.
&nbs
p; This place smells like ass, Wyatt complained.
I’m surprised it doesn’t smell like corpses, Sofia responded. Although I suppose most of the corpses down here decomposed a long time ago.
Cadre together, Sofia killed the aperture behind us, and I peered down the new hallway. Not twenty steps in front of us, I saw something that hadn’t showed up on any of Sofia’s maps.
A metal door.
“Well, that’s unexpected.” Rachel bit her lip. “I don’t suppose we know what’s on the other side of it?”
“This area of the map has a maze-like series of small rooms,” Sofia responded. “Over thirty of them, approximately five meters by five meters. Each is connected to the others by a short hallway less than ten meters long.”
Am I reading this right? Wyatt linked. We think the puddle portal may be just off the fourth room?
It’s kind of hard to tell, I responded. The overlay of Anya’s readings on Sofia’s maps isn’t quite perfect.
It is an approximation, Anya informed us.
I’m happy to attempt to create an aperture on the far side of the door. Sofia raised one eyebrow. We’d be able to look through, if nothing else.
That’s not a problem? I raised an eyebrow back at her. What about aberrant vectors? You said the pools caused problems.
They do, she confirmed. But if I miss my cast, it’s not that big of a deal. We’ll still be able to see.
I jumped through one of your portals where the vectors were all wonky on Ar’Ghosa. I seem to remember throwing up on a Sadhana agent.
The conversation abruptly halted when the Zealator threw open the door, screamed, and shot Rachel twice in the chest with a semiautomatic pistol.
“Arrrckk!” she cried, and two blossoms of blood appeared on her white and blue jacket. She fell.
Wyatt swung the Tangler toward the man.
WHUF! WHUF!
Before I had time to respond to any of it, a silvery stasis field filled the doorway.
“Rachel!” I crouched next to her and held up her head as I dropped the Wraith. “Can you hear me?”
“System shock protocols initiated,” she whispered, flecks of blood on her lips.
“She’s lung-shot.” Sofia stood stock still, a hand over her mouth. “[Mother of God.]”