Even Revik laughed at that, his face clearing briefly. Something in his light remained hard, however, and clenched a bit around his heart.
Wreg, as if taking my cue, rolled his eyes. "Your protectiveness of your brother is bordering on creepy, princess," he said. "Are you really so worried about having to glimpse us in the throes?"
"Damn straight, I am," I said, giving an exaggerated shudder. "I get that there's a certain karmic appropriateness to the whole thing, but there are definitely things I would rather not know...much less see...about either of you." I smiled at him sweetly. "Especially you, Wreg. I don't need your inner sex-maniac confirmed, thank you very much."
"Who said it's inner, princess?" Wreg said, giving me a mock predatory look, until Revik smacked him on the arm, making him wince. Smiling, Wreg added to me, "Why so squeamish? Are you afraid you'll fall madly in lust with me?"
"Yes," I laughed. "That's exactly it. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that it happens to be my brother you're molesting..."
When I glanced at Revik, his eyes looked thoughtful once more, and slightly tense. Not in the way they had before, but enough to pull me up short anyway. Looking at him, I realized it was something different.
What? I asked him, shielding from the others.
I'll tell you later, he sent back. Just be careful how much you tease Wreg about Jon. He's going to find out eventually, you know.
I looked at him blankly for a few seconds. Then it dawned on me what he meant. In that few seconds of pause, more than one set of images popped into my mind that could get me in trouble with either or both of them, even as my light retracted abruptly, jerking violently back around my form. Feeling my cheeks warm, I glanced away from Revik, even as I blanked my mind, throwing up a real shield that time.
"What? Is the Esteemed Bridge actually blushing?" Wreg said with a grin. He glanced at Revik, chuckling. "You pervert. What did you say to her?"
Revik smiled at me, his clear eyes bordering on predatory, too, although I saw the more subtle look underneath.
"Wouldn't you like to know?" he murmured, still leaning his weight on the padded exam table.
Wreg laughed, but Revik didn't take his eyes off mine.
5
CRATE
WE DECIDED THE sub at the only open port on the entire island of Manhattan.
When we opened the main hatch, we got pretty much the reception Revik and I had been expecting. Meaning, we were hit with pounding rain and gale-force winds, even as the whole land-facing side of the sub was pretty much instantly surrounded by guns. The reception party had already concentrated around the sub’s main hatch before any of us even managed to lift our heads above the lip of the round opening.
Of course, Balidor wouldn't let me anywhere near that top hatch, or any of the other hatches, for that matter.
To be fair, he wouldn't let Revik near them, either, although both of us were on backup duty, using the outer cameras and Revik's know-how for targeting in case I needed it for the telekinesis. Because of those same cameras, I saw our preliminary landing party exit through the hatch, surrounded by all of those guns and buffeted by wind and rain hard enough that they winced and huddled as if from multiple blows to the head and body.
Those guns barely wavered.
It was unnerving.
Jax and Illeg, who'd offered to be the first two to poke their heads out of doors, at once found themselves faced by a dense row of humans in wet suits and military-grade rain gear holding automatic rifles, and yelling above the wind and rain for them to put their hands in the air.
Jorag and Chandre, from just inside the hatch's tunnel, managed to calm everything down, not by using their light, which was restricted via some kind of Barrier field the border authorities had erected, but by flashing official paperwork that claimed we had every right to be there.
The Barrier field itself caused a bit of a stir among our infiltrators.
None of them had ever encountered anything like it before.
Since it acted almost like a sight restraint collar, but appeared to be localized to a particular area, rather than a specific seer, the implications were a bit ominous, too. While definitely not as strong as most sight-restraint collars, the field limited enough to be a problem. Fields that could control seers based solely on geography would change the game, and in more ways than one.
Shadow and his lap-dogs at Black Arrow had been busy.
Luckily, Chandre had already anticipated and planned for a more straightforward approach, via the permit papers we'd acquired from Talei, along with Talei herself, who immediately calmed everyone down once she proved she was still a functioning agent of the D.C. branch of SCARB, as well as being a member of the White House Secret Service and Construct Security. Chandre passed muster not long after, since her status with SCARB remained active, too, just at a lower security level. Between the two of them, they managed to get the rest of the seers safe passage to the main quarantine center.
That sight-restraint field baffled and disturbed Balidor and Revik a lot, though, along with Wreg and just about every other infiltrator who felt it when the submarine first breached. The field meant I couldn't do much with the telekinesis, either. Not because it could block those structures in my light (it couldn’t), but because I needed Revik’s help to be able to aim and control them effectively, and it did block and interfere with our lower-level sight.
Balidor, being Balidor, didn't waste any time.
He had his people attempting to map the field in minute detail, pretty much seconds after we first detected its presence. Wreg volunteered to help, and between them, they quickly improvised a plan to take different pieces of the electrically-charged organism and begin attempting to resonate with the beings that lived inside of it.
By the time Chan got us through, the two of them had already started to break down the field’s basic components and had begun delegating tasks. I knew Balidor would check it out with Arc Enterprises, too, the seer organics company housed in the House on the Hill hotel, but the mere fact that no one knew anything like this was in the works made everyone nervous.
We'd already decided to run the majority of our seers through the standard, quarantine check-in process on the docks. The quarantine itself had been set up by New York's Homeland Security Department, with the help of FEMA and SCARB, as well as private security teams provided by a number of corporations housed in New York City itself.
Most of our seers were likely to pass those protocols, since they were immune to the disease and could show proof of ownership by humans with significant financial assets. Our illegally-obtained but very convincing-looking permits extended to all of the seers except me and Revik, along with a few in our group with outstanding warrants issued by the World Court, including Wreg, Neela, Loki, Jax, Illeg and Varlan, as well as a number of other ex-rebels who directly participated in the break-in at the Registry offices in São Paulo.
Even so, risk remained that one of ours would be ID'd while passing through the grid, by Shadow or whoever else monitored the other end.
If that happened, Shadow would know we'd arrived back here, assuming he didn't have that intel already. Truthfully, we hadn't figured on being able to hide that information for long, either way, so I doubt even Balidor cared all that much. We had no other way to breach those walls, at least not quickly, and getting the humans on the Displacement list out of the worst of the outbreak had to be a priority.
Balidor even worked up ownership papers and aliases for the rest of us, in the event that we needed them inside the city. He'd done that via our contacts at the House on the Hill, relying on a smaller and lesser-known company which provided identification and ’registration problem-solving’ for seers as a profitable side wing of their more legitimate operation as couriers and communication systems specialists.
As a result, most of our seers entered New York City through the front door.
For once, the human authorities weren't looking for seers, anyway. They
were looking for humans who might be carriers of the disease. Since the front door was where the authorities would be most likely to employ actual seers, it made sense to have a legitimate-seeming front for as many of ours as possible.
The only other exception to our 'front door' rule would be Balidor himself, since we knew he would be a priority target of Shadow's people. We'd started to value our high-ranking infiltrators a lot more since Vash's assassination, so Revik insisted on putting Balidor on protected status, even above the Adhipan leader's protests.
Wreg agreed vehemently, which I think surprised Balidor so much that at that point, he stopped arguing. All of us appreciated Balidor a lot more after that mess with Shadow's construct in Argentina, though, Wreg included.
So the four of us, Balidor, Revik, Wreg and I, were tasked with accompanying the other high-risk humans and seers in our party out through the back door.
That back-door consisted of Jorag sending us through cargo protocols on the other end of the docks, accompanied by Talei and Chandre, who went along under the auspices that the military equipment enclosed was 'sensitive' and needed to be escorted by SCARB personally.
Even so, I knew we still might have to shoot our way into the city proper, depending on the toys they employed to scan the crates.
Talei seemed confident it wouldn't come to that.
Of course, since we didn't really know Talei, I didn’t find that terribly reassuring.
I can't imagine what it must have been like, being herded through SCARB and FEMA quarantine protocols like a bunch of cattle, waiting for the alarms to go off any second, even carrying quasi-legal ownership and employment papers.
Our part was surprisingly easy, though, just like Talei said it would be.
Given the number of companies with 'special deliveries' from the mainland, our uniqueness lay more in the number of passengers we claimed, as well as our actual mode of transport and the fact that we arrived in the middle of a near-hurricane...not the fact that we had a bunch of black market cargo on board.
The number of seers we sent through quarantine completely overshadowed the significance of what we might be transporting in the crates, and proved a very effective distraction, which I only realized later had likely been the point when Wreg and Balidor proposed that approach.
The truth was, the shipping and transport areas of the dock really weren't all that well fortified. Clearly, the human and seer authorities expected the OBE field to provide their main line of defense, with the neutralization field for seers providing the second. They likely expected that those two things, along with the more standard guns, infiltrators, x-rays, sniffer dogs and bio-scanners would take care of the rest.
In addition, it was clear that their protocols had been set up for ships, not submarines.
Ships were visible and available for long-range scanning long before they got within range of the coast. They could also be easily neutralized before they got close enough to pose a contamination or security threat. Really, the overwhelming sense I got from the human soldiers on the docks was bewilderment at the number of seers, and confusion as to what to do with them.
We weren't really the threat they'd been trained to combat.
Most of the actual dock workers, from what Chandre told us later, were human, which helped. As soon as she and Talei showed them ownership papers for the seers attempting to pass quarantine, Chandre said they immediately calmed down. They calmed down so much, in fact, that we had to guess that more than one multinational was still getting deliveries of live cargo as well as the other kind, just not usually in such large quantity.
We didn't know any of this until later, of course.
At the time, Revik, Wreg, Balidor and I were stuck in the cargo hold, strapped to the inside walls of one of two organically-shielded crates.
It was a pretty awkward way to come face-to-face with the humans we'd brought back with us from San Francisco. Jon was there, too, but totally down for the count. He hadn’t so much as stirred since we’d entered the cramped, seer and human-filled crate.
Most of the other humans I knew from San Francisco sat directly across from us.
Yeah, it was awkward.
I hadn't gone to see them even once on the aircraft carrier before we left for Argentina; there simply hadn't been time. I hadn't seen them on the sub, either, since Balidor took the precaution of locking all of the humans in the disease-free crates prior to our leaving, so that their human signatures wouldn't show up in any potential scans by seers who might be checking for contaminants. Wreg was pissed off that Jon had been housed with the other ‘worms’ during our trip, but looking at him now, I really couldn’t see how it made much of a difference.
In fact, it was probably a good thing really, since Jon likely wouldn’t have let himself sleep if he’d seen Wreg with a bullet in his arm, much less if he’d been pulled into discussions around OBE fields and Menlim and whatever else.
Jon had an ‘ambiguous' Barrier signature anyway, according to Varlan and Balidor, so we needed to be careful with him until we know how he’d show up in most scans.
Varlan seemed to have a great deal of curiosity about Jon, actually.
After quite a bit of staring after they were first introduced in Argentina, he cleared his throat and openly asked him, "What are you?" As Jon fumbled for a noncommittal reply, Varlan turned to Balidor, asking the same question of him. "What is that?" he said, curiosity audible in his deep, melodious voice.
He stared at Jon as if he were some exotic pet owned by the rest of us.
He might have kept asking that, or something similar, but about then, Wreg lost patience. An edge in his voice, he explained that 'it' was off-limits, and that Varlan had best keep his damned aleimi to himself if he didn't want to lose something he'd miss.
I couldn’t help giggling a bit at that, even though it earned me a dark look from Wreg, too. The answer didn't seem to satisfy Varlan much, either, but he made a respectful gesture to both of them and took himself politely away.
Revik found all of this extremely funny, of course.
I wondered sometimes if it was a ‘misery loves company’ thing, at least to a degree. Wreg and Jon, if Balidor could be believed, were smack dab in the middle of that awkward, volatile and hyper-sensitive stage of an intense seer coupling that hadn't yet figured out where it was going. Those kinds of couplings usually either resulted in a messy breakup involving death threats and a lot of hard feelings...or else an actual mated pair.
Honestly, I wasn't sure which possibility scared me more.
Brushing that out of my mind, too, I tried to mentally prepare myself for what came next after this.
According to 'Dori, we would be taken straight to the back end of the hotel. He only hoped they’d managed to erect the decontamination station they’d planned to build, in the event the disease spread to New York. Wreg’s team designed a specific set of disaster protocols before we left. I knew this in part because Revik and I had been asked to weigh in on those plans a few times and I signed off on the final right before we left for San Francisco.
Since no one had managed to talk to anyone at the hotel yet, we really had no idea what we were walking into, though.
Whatever they’d managed in our absence, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it wouldn’t be enough. I couldn’t tell if the feeling came primarily from intuition or paranoia, but everything shifted over my head as soon as we broke the perimeter of New York City itself.
A heaviness lived here, in the aleimic field over the city, something that reminded me of the Pyramid of the Rooks, back when it still existed.
In that same heaviness, I felt eyes surrounding us, too, as if everything and everyone here was under surveillance, pretty much all the time.
Thinking this, I glanced at Revik and saw him frown.
“Yeah,” he said only.
I reached out more with my light, but he caught my hand, indicating for me to stop.
“Not now,” he cautioned. “We’ll b
e at the hotel soon.”
I nodded, but let go of my light only reluctantly. Even in that brief taste, I’d felt a glimmer of that ‘something wrong’ blanketing the city.
It felt almost like a construct.
“It might be,” Revik admitted, squeezing my fingers tighter. “I feel it, too.”
Nodding again, I made myself drop it.
At least until we got through the docking protocols, and into the city proper.
Still, the thought that someone might have placed a functional construct over the whole of New York, given the sight restraint mechanism we’d just encountered, as well as everything that happened in Argentina at Shadow’s beach-side chateau, was enough to ratchet my pulse up a few more beats per minute.
The crate itself wasn't comfortable, either.
It had been fit with running lights at the base, maybe so no one would freak out in the dark, but the seats were hard, and the straps cut into my skin, even wearing an armored vest. It smelled sharply of disinfectant, too, strong enough to make my eyes sting a little. But then, I’d noticed I’d grown a lot more sensitive to chemicals in general, especially poisonous ones.
Someone had sedated all of the humans.
I'm sure they’d done it to keep them from hurting themselves or trying to get free, but also likely to keep them from making noise. Whatever they’d been given, it didn’t knock them out entirely, probably so they could be shepherded through decontamination on the other end. The single exception was Tina, Jaden’s girlfriend, who had been knocked out, and who lay even more motionless than Jon. According to Balidor and Jorag, they pretty much had to do it.
It was that or strong-arm her, just to get her strapped inside.
In her defense, Tina had been shot in the leg during our escape in San Francisco. So she might still be in shock, or suffering from PTSD.
Allie's War Season Three Page 89