Allie's War Season Three

by JC Andrijeski

  But it didn't hurt...in fact, it was strangely smooth.

  Then I just hung there, over that blackness...until it wasn't black anymore.

  The infrared kicked in, along with a VR rendition of the ground below. The version it gave me looked more like twilight than full daylight, but the VR image compensated for that eerie green I associated with infrared, and gave me a better sense of the real layout. I also saw the circle of pale light on the ground, which had to be the drop target. Even as I saw it, Revik spoke up in my headset.

  "Can you see it?"

  I nodded, then laughed. He'd sounded so close I'd forgotten he couldn't see me.

  "I see it," I said.

  "Did you check your canopy?"

  I looked up, squinting through the VR rendition. "Seems fine. I'm falling slower..."

  Revik laughed, and I heard the relief in his voice. "You look fine. I can see you. But try to remember to check next time, Allie..."

  I found myself staring at the mountains while I fell, seeing their jagged outline against a pale blue sky that looked like dawn through my goggles. Those mountains looked massive, bigger even from here than the view of the Himalayas from Seertown. Some of that might have been contrast with the valley over which we floated, which stretched out like a plain up to the edge of the highest peak, covered in a dense pack of snow and ice.

  "Can you see Jon?" I asked Revik.

  "Yes." He sent me a pulse of warmth, startling me. "He's fine, Allie. Chinja's falling not far from him, and she's making sure he stays close to target..."

  I felt myself tensing slightly as I looked at the altimeter. The ground was getting closer through my goggles, too. Revik said the VR should compensate for the normal blackout that happened in night drops when reaching the ground, but I still found my heart beating harder, and adrenaline pumping through my veins as the ground came closer.

  Even so, all of my anxiety ended up being for nothing.

  I'd expected to crash down, the way people did in the movies, or even in the feeds when showing military-style drops. Instead, I landed easily on my feet, and only really knew I was down when the chute landed behind me. Before I could fumble with the harness I wore, a gust of wind grabbed it, jerking my balance backwards a little. Then warm hands caught hold of my arms, and someone held me there, while another person unbuckled the harness, pulling it off my shoulders. I didn't really realize that the second person was Revik until the first person let go of my arms and Revik leaned down, smiling into my face.

  "Are you all right?"

  I nodded, then found myself looking up at the sky.

  "You really weren't kidding," I said, hearing the wonder in my own voice. "That wasn't a big deal at all...it was actually kind of nice."

  He leaned down, kissing me, and that time I felt the relief in his light. Pulling me against him, he brought me out of the jump zone even as I realized that other seers were still unhooking harnesses and landing in blank spots all around us.

  "We were lucky," Revik told me, his arm still around my shoulders. "Not much wind. The weather was good...the cloud cover might have even helped us, overall." He pointed up. "But a storm's on its way. In a few hours, we might have had to abort the jump and risk landing the plane anyway..."

  I nodded, still getting used to having my feet on the ground. I held the harness against my chest until another seer came up to us and took it from me. I wondered what they were doing with all of the equipment and saw him walk to a large, canvas-looking bag where he stuffed mine along with a bunch of others. My parachute had already disappeared.

  Forcing my mind back on track, I scanned through the rest of the people on the ground. I saw a lot of seers I didn't recognize, and not just those from the plane.

  In fact, I saw a lot of seers, period...way more than I would have expected, given the numbers I knew we had at our disposal. I remembered where Wreg had been for the last few days and looked up at Revik.

  "I had no idea he'd get so many," I said in a low voice. As I said it, a seer walked by me, giving the respectful sign of the Bridge and smiling. I smiled back, even as Revik slid an arm tighter around me.

  "Yeah," he said, the same surprise in his voice. "Me neither."

  "So you didn't know about this?"

  Revik shook his head, pulling me tighter against him. Just then, he paused in a step. When I turned my head, I saw him staring at Wreg. It probably would have taken me longer to make him out among the other black uniforms, but once I saw him, there was no doubt who it was...or who stood there with him. I looked away a second later, if only to avoid staring while my brother was being publicly mauled.

  Revik only laughed, and kept us walking towards the two of them. Within minutes, we stood right next to them. We might not have been there at all, though, for all the attention they paid us. I tried clearing my throat, but they ignored that, too.

  "Do you mind?" I said finally, smacking Jon on the arm when they still hadn't come up for air. "Superior officers here. Waiting." When Wreg kissed him again, I smacked the seer on the arm, harder that time. "Jeez, Louise...get a room, guys."

  Jon pulled away from Wreg long enough to laugh at me.

  "Karma's a bitch," he said, letting go of the black-suited seer. "Isn't it, little sis?"

  "Hey," I said. "Older than you...remember? You can't call me that anymore."

  "The hell he can't," Wreg said. Despite his tone, as well as all of his protests about bringing Jon along in the first place, he grinned at me, his arm slung over Jon's back. "He's still a good three inches taller than you, princess. He can call you 'little' all he likes..."

  "Says the guy who calls my husband 'runt' even though he's half a foot taller than you..."

  "My memory is longer than my body, Esteemed Bridge," Wreg said with an unapologetic flourish of his hand. "...Can I help it that both are bordering on decrepit?"

  Jon smacked him in the chest with the flat of his hand. When I saw them looking at each other again, I let out another pained groan, but this one more humorous.

  "Aren't you supposed to be ordering him around right now, Wreg?" I said. "Revik put you in charge of keeping him alive. Maybe you should focus on that for awhile...the job is harder than it sounds, believe me."

  Wreg frowned at that, looking between me and Jon. "Is this a story I want to hear?"

  I motioned at Jon, seer-fashion. "Ask him yourself," I grunted. "You can get all over-protective and pissy with him on your own time..."

  Revik was still looking out over the expanse of seers camped around us. I could feel him doing a rough head count, right before he turned to Wreg.

  "What were the totals?" he said. "From the raid at Manaus?"

  Wreg gave a noncommittal shrug. "Maybe sixty...seventy ranked infiltrators from there..."

  "There's more than that here," Revik observed.

  "Yeah, well," Wreg gave another vague shrug, glancing at Jon warily. "I may have hit more than one camp, brother Syrimne...just for insurance, you know. And good karma...we all know how I need it..."

  I laughed, staring at him. "You hit two camps? In six days?"

  Wreg shrugged, smiling a little that time, as if in spite of himself. "I saw an opportunity, Esteemed Sister. I made a tactical decision to avail myself of that opportunity...all for my beloved intermediaries, of course..."

  "Wait, what?" Jon said, looking between the three of us. "Where were you?"

  "Don't blame me, brother," Revik said to Jon humorously, clicking mildly as he held up a hand in mock innocence. "You heard him. He was acting on his own discretion..."

  "Within the bounds of the spirit...or intention...of your original orders," Wreg corrected him, glancing at Jon with a smile. "Aww, don't worry, brother," he said to Jon. He nudged his arm before kissing his cheek. "I was well-fortified by then. Nothing more motivated than a trained infiltrator recently-released from a death camp. Anyway, it seemed a shame not to see what they could do..." He grunted, motioning around at the seers camped all over the ground at the b
ase of the mountain. He turned his words back towards Revik.

  "...Or even if they could follow orders, laoban. We had some logistical problems at first, but I've broken them into smaller squads, and it seems to be sorting itself out. Most had military training at some point, thank the Ancestors above..." He nodded at Revik more seriously then, his words turning into the cadence of a more formal report. "We have a few from our war...although not many. Most worked for humans in one of the smaller conflicts...the Philippines, Panama, that thing in the Congo a few years ago. We have a few who've served longer. One in Afghanistan for the Russians, a few more in Vietnam for the French or the Americans. We have two that were employed by terrorists in Syria and Egypt who have some pretty decent bomb-making skills, although they're shit for this terrain, if you'll pardon my saying it. We have at least a dozen who fought in the second world war...most of them in the Pacific, for some reason..."

  Revik nodded, still seeming to be scanning the crowd. "We should meet with the squadron heads," he said. "...Allie and I. As soon as possible."

  Wreg gave an immediate nod. "Of course. I'll assemble them." He sent a snapshot directly to my mind of the layout of the camp. I immediately saw the highlight of the command tent they'd been using. "One hour?" he said. "We can feed you, in the meantime."

  He'd let go of Jon, but I could tell he'd done it reluctantly. When Jon turned to Revik, and started talking to him about the jump, I hesitated. Then, seeing neither of them watching us, I moved closer to Wreg, lowering my voice.

  "Where are you going to put him?" I said, motioning to Jon. "Military-wise, I mean. What are your plans?"

  Glancing at the other two, Wreg gave me a wary look. "What do you mean?"

  "I mean, will he go with one of the new squads, or –– "

  "He's staying with me, princess," the seer said.

  His voice already sounded as if he were gearing up for a fight. I glanced up at him, and saw that his body had tensed, as well.

  "Good," I said, sighing a little. "No, that's great, Wreg. Seriously. Thumbs up."

  I saw his fighting stance relax perceptibly, right before he glanced at Jon, then at Revik, both of whom had moved away a few steps and now appeared to be talking about the numbers of people on the field. Jon said something that made Revik laugh, right before he glanced at me. Briefly, Revik's eyes turned predatory as he looked at me, right before his light warmed. Smiling back at him, I looked at Jon a last time before returning my gaze to Wreg. Seeing the understanding bloom in the seer's dark eyes through my VR goggles, I gave him a small smile.

  Returning it, he nodded.

  In those few seconds, it felt like we'd signed a pact.

  25

  INVASION

  WE ONLY RESTED a few hours before moving out through the narrow pass between the mountains. Revik told me the whole area constituted a national park of some kind, not far from a stretch of water that would break us away from the mainland of Chile. We'd landed on an island, I found out...or sort of an island, anyway. La Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego actually made up most of the tip of South America, and according to my map seemed to be attached to the main land mass in at least two places. Even so, water surrounded it on just about every side, and we'd be forced to walk a long way around to avoid that water entirely.

  We'd been dropped off a lot closer to Shadow's stronghold than I'd fully realized when looking at the maps on the aircraft carrier...much less while we were still in New York. True, by foot, even omitting the water crossing, which was a good forty miles on its own, we still had more than 50 miles to cover by land, a fair bit of it mountainous.

  On the map, however, that looked like nothing, really.

  Most of the land of Tierra del Fuego had been privately bought in just the last ten years. Privately and quietly bought, I should say. The only tracts that didn't appear to be owned by this same conglomerate of interests were the national parks themselves, and as far as I could tell, those lived entirely on the Chilean side of the border.

  Of course, the land where Shadow's actual house was located had been in private hands for years. The deeds we'd found went back at least ninety years, which also happened to be when they first started tracking land ownership in more remote areas of the continent.

  As of two years ago, the entire of the Argentinian side of the island resided neatly in private hands, too. That included even those human towns that lived along the coast, from the southernmost tip of the continent all the way up to where another stretch of water interrupted the border to mainland Argentina. Every square foot of that land now fell under private ownership, and moreover, seemed to be all owned by the same group of people. As a result, that tip of land that belonged to Argentina in name, in actuality had become inaccessible to any but those invited specifically by the land's owners.

  Further complicating that theoretical invite, the owners themselves remained nearly impossible to identify, at least as individuals.

  Balidor and his people chased documents for months, trying to come up with one name or even a set of names to attach to those particular land holdings. They hadn't been successful. Every shell company they surfaced only seemed to surface more of the same, until the names became so numerous as to be meaningless. The few names they did manage to track down with any certainty turned out to belong to humans who had already died...one of those had been dead for more than a century.

  Everyone agreed surprise was unlikely, if not impossible, given the complexity of the construct and shields guarding every bit of the island's land on the Argentinian side of the border. Really, no matter what we did, we figured it would involve walking up to Shadow's front door, not sneaking around in Shadow's backyard. We had no other means of approach, apart from a clear threat in the form of an offensive deployment, coupled with an open offer to negotiate.

  But Revik hadn't wanted to dump us into the middle of a shooting war, either, which was why he'd chosen for us to land in Chile, just across the border from Shadow's private reserve. He'd already informed me that if armed conflict did break out, he would need me to drop pretty much everything else so I could shield him. His priority would then be to work from behind that shield, doing whatever he could to offset their numbers and home turf advantage.

  If that happened, a lot of seers would die...on both sides.

  Really, our being here at all was as close to an open declaration of war as anything in which I'd been involved in the past. The implications of how we'd arrived and in what numbers couldn't possibly be misunderstood by our host, no matter who they were. They either planned to fight that war, or they were waiting to hear our terms.

  I knew Balidor's team at that very moment was expending every ounce of their infiltration skill to determine which of those two things Shadow was most likely to do.

  We walked through most of the night to reach the gash of water separating Tierra del Fuego from the strip of land that housed the human city of Ushuaia, as well as Shadow's actual headquarters, which were located another forty or fifty miles east and directly on the coast.

  In doing so, we managed to stay on the Chilean side of the border until we reached the water itself, partly to avoid crossing over the construct until the last possible moment.

  When we reached the water, we all climbed into a series of inflatable, portable rafts and paddled over the border into Argentina, aiming for the southern shore at a diagonal angle that would bring us right up behind the stretch of land that housed Shadow's headquarters. That route over the water constituted a good thirty miles, and took us until well into the next morning.

  Still, it was peaceful.

  I rowed alongside Neela in the front of one boat, since we were close to the same size. Revik and Holo rowed behind us in the same boat, with Wreg and Jorag behind them. I leaned out over the water as I paddled, but my eyes remained up, pointed at the stars and the occasional cloud that scuttled past in the wind. The sky had cleared sometime during our hike to those dark shores, and I think I saw more stars in the
sky over the lake than I'd seen since the ship to Alaska. Watching the sun come up over the water, pretty much straight ahead of us as we paddled due east, had also been breathtakingly beautiful. White-capped mountains turned pink and gold, stretching to our left for as far as the eye could see, with green valleys populating most of the right side of that dark blue water.

  The water itself looked and felt like liquid ice, but it remained surprisingly still through most of our trip, given how far and wide it stretched out towards the sea. It was easy to forget what we were doing there, amidst all of that stillness and beauty. I suppose one benefit of the land being privately owned is that, unlike most parts of the world those days, it appeared to be relatively untouched. I'd read that the town of Ushuaia itself had actually shrunk to half its previous size in the past ten years, mainly due to the difficulty in getting supplies now that the air, water and road transport to that part of the world all required special permits for access.

  I knew from the VR maps in my headset that Shadow's headquarters were in the cliffs by the sea, almost due south of Cami Lake, the stretch of water we crossed with those boats. Chandre described a human town below the house in her last transmission before she disappeared, but we couldn't map the area very well, either from satellites or the Barrier, so we only had the coordinates of the house itself and not much about the surrounding area. We didn't have much information on the road into town, either, although we knew from Chan, again, that it had been steep and more of a trail than an honest-to-gods road.

  This whole section of the world seemed to have a satellite block over it. Garensche, who was probably the best we had on machines of any kind, but especially organics, even tried to hack the main satellite feeds to get past that block. He succeeded in getting access to the stream of images, but still got nothing useable on the map coordinates we needed. Gar theorized that the cameras simply turned off when they passed by that segment of the world.

  So yeah, this Shadow guy had connections.