Allie's War Early Years

by JC Andrijeski

  But a pro hit on a camp was a whole different story.

  The fact that whoever it was already nabbed their target and rabbited past the secondary Barrier constructs told us that this might even be interesting.

  Bets had already been placed on capture-to-kill, as well as time in the field for the re-acquire. One of those had us on a five-day hike through Sweaty Shitsville, South America, so I knew a few people in my pod had been impressed with the Barrier signatures spotted in those preliminary reports. I couldn’t help hoping that guy wouldn’t end up winning the pot, though.

  I placed mine on two days, and hoped it wasn’t wishful thinking.

  The fact that these jerk-offs risked a life sentence in a work camp of their very own, and for such a small number of seers––possibly even a single target––told us that the run still likely had personal motives at base, versus a pure military extraction, or a terrorist hit by one of the underground, anti-human groups.

  The other things was possible of course... but unlikely.

  According to the intel from Central, no high-sensitivity targets had been housed in that particular camp, not currently. The female seer missing from their roster had been a nobody. Apolitical, according to her file. She hadn’t even been a ranked infiltrator.

  So yeah, personal.

  Probably a mate or boyfriend who had connections. That, or her family had money and paid cash for the hit. Since they were smart enough to hire someone else to get her out, instead of doing the normal, desperate-mate thing and attempting to get her out on their own, they probably found some up-and-coming ex-military, private sec team off the Rynak, or one of the other black market feeds. They knew enough to pay them via barter or black market currency, too, since the Org hadn’t been able to successfully nail down the money trail yet, either.

  So when I rode the flight out of Manaus to the camp, we still didn’t know anything.

  Meaning, we didn’t know anything important yet.

  Truthfully, if I felt anything, it was bored. Bored, hungry, horny.

  I’d been thinking about getting laid, even then.

  I remember staring sightlessly down at the jungle canopy as we flew over a dense ocean of green. I’d been going over the light signatures of the individual operatives in my head.

  Black Arrow security forces nearly caught up with three of the seers from the extraction team already, directly following the hit. Because of that, we had the light sigs from their reports, but I’d still only seen a few high-quality aleimic imprints that struck me as definitely authentic. I’d already noted more than one indicator that the extraction team might have some skill at concealing their specific aleimic structures, so I’d been looking for secondaries and even tertiary markers in case the initial signatures ended up being bogeys or fronts.

  So yeah, not amateurs.

  At some point in that, Varlan pinged me.

  I looked over when he did, meeting those violet-tinged eyes. Once I had, I realized he’d been watching me work. I could tell he agreed with my assessment of our prey.

  He didn’t think they were amateurs, either.

  Varlan and I get on okay, we always have. We seem to play off each other’s strengths well, too, as is right for a first and second tier command structure in a field-op pod at our level.

  Truthfully, though, Varlan makes me nervous.

  Then again, I suppose that’s pretty normal for a seer like Varlan.

  Anyway, I figured that one’s supposed to feel a bit in awe of their commanding officer, right? Unlike some of the pod commanders I’ve worked under, Varlan actually has a sight rank truly worthy of that awe. Varlan is one of those seer’s you’ll never get on top of, no matter how much you fool yourself that you’re hiding something from him, or learning something he doesn’t want you to know, or picking up on intel he missed.

  If you know that, all’s good. If you lie to yourself on that score, you’re fucked.

  I mean, seriously fucked.

  Maybe that’s why we got on okay. I never let myself forget what Varlan was, not even for a minute. Not at any point in even one of our interactions.

  In any case, after giving me that longish stare of agreement, Varlan’s eyes returned to the distant, vaguely unfocused look that told me he’d returned to the Barrier.

  Probably scanning intel, like me.

  I looked back down at the jungle. My eyes didn’t see much below the fuselage of the military transport helicopter apart from a blur of verdant green, and within a few minutes, I’d gone back to work, as well.

  While pulled out by the occasional break in the foliage caused by the river or a distant hill, most of my consciousness remained focused on work for the next half-hour or so. Mostly, I continued looking for identity markers distinctive enough that the individual might have difficulty hiding them, even with a Barrier shield. I saw a few on what were probably the lower-ranked ones, but yeah, these jokers were surprisingly good for such a small unit.

  Ten in total. Six males, four females.

  The numbers and sexes made their origins ambiguous, which again pointed towards a freelance group or private security. Most of the private sec teams employed seers out of Asia, apart from China itself, tended to be predominantly male, too, though, due to the shortage of females resulting from the slave trade in the West.

  In the West, those ratios tended to be flipped.

  A few of those in our mystery team appeared to have a better-than-decent sight ranking, though, especially in potential. It was harder to gauge actual––meaning the sight ranking they’d actually operationalized in the field, versus the potential they’d brought in as their birthright. That would get easier on the ground, of course.

  Of course, then it might be too late.

  I definitely got some intimation of a formal military background from this group, even then. I remember thinking maybe they’d formed into a team after working together during one of the human wars. Possibly Afghanistan or Vietnam... if not World War II. It wasn’t uncommon for military-trained seers to stick together, anyway. They often worked together for years following their initial training and military exposure. While to some extent this formed a generational split, a fair-few older seers got militarized in those early years, too.

  Really, the older seers––like Varlan––were usually the truly dangerous ones.

  Still, there was no denying that those of us seers who grew up post-First Contact had a lot less reason to want to adhere to the peaceful and nonviolent Codes of the earlier generations of seers. Then again, those pre-First Contact seers had the luxury of hanging out in the Himalayas and singing kumbaya for a couple of centuries before they got their assholes torn open by the human rapists and torturers who swarmed over those hills since.

  My generation didn’t have any of that.

  And yeah, most of the military-trained seers came from my generation.

  So, statistically-speaking, these jokers were probably on the young end of the spectrum for seers, meaning less than two-hundred-years-old, and probably came up in human infantry and espionage together in the forties or fifties.

  World War II. Korea. Russia.

  They could even be out of the recent wars in Turkey and Syria, or the one in Vietnam, but I had my doubts, unless it was their second or third tour together.

  Whoever they were, they acted like they’d been working together for awhile.

  The sheer impenetrability of the primary construct they’d used during the op itself suggested they knew one another’s light intimately, which generally meant at least a few decades of working together, if not centuries.

  So yeah, military trained, probably young, probably from a human ground force, after which they likely kept some semblance of their old ranks, which was what I’d been sniffing in their light around how they interacted with one another. They might even be connected to one of the Eastern European militaries currently, as a lot of private sec did freelance for human governments, too. The Ukraine, maybe. Possibly Slovenia
or Belarus. Those countries still incorporated seers almost openly into their rank and file, even if they lied about their race-cat to the World Court, as well as to international watch groups.

  Those militaries also did a fair bit of freelance work, mostly because their human masters didn’t pay shit, and they needed the additional cash flow for insurance purposes.

  “Focus on motive, brother,” Varlan advised me through the comm link. “...And on target. There is a particular interest among our betters in the specific target of extraction. Which is why I asked you to go over the files of those held in the work camp with special attention.”

  I nodded to that, too.

  I knew his words as a rebuke, though, so I felt my face warm. It’s really damned hard, sometimes, to not not to feel like a crippled child next to a seer like Varlan.

  Still, at the time, I didn’t really get where Varlan was going with the target thing.

  I’d looked over all of the specs by then. All of them. Including those of the target. Nothing really jumped out at me regarding her profile.

  Female. Early stages of middle age, so around three hundred, maybe three-fifty years old. Not ranked. No political or military background.

  But after Varlan said those words, I noticed something else in her Barrier stats.

  Once I did, I swore out loud.

  Di’lanlente a’ guete... how the fuck had I missed that?

  “Pregnant?” I’d looked right at Varlan that time, speaking aloud. “Is that right? They really think she might have been pregnant? The target?”

  Varlan just smiled, like I’d finally caught up.

  Smug bastard.

  “Interesting, do you not think?” was all he’d said. “The Sweeps believe that, given her mapped aleimic structures, they likely would not have been able to capture her at all, if she had not suffered from the blindness of pregnancy when they happened upon her.”

  “Picking up pregnant females is illegal,” I pointed out. “Putting them in camps is even more illegal, brother... even under World Court law.”

  Varlan only smiled at that, too.

  When he didn’t answer in words, I tried again.

  “I thought she was unranked?” I said.

  “She is,” Varlan replied at once. “It does not mean that she is blind, brother Quay. Not everyone with significant structure chooses to be registered with a working rank.”

  I frowned at that.

  Still, my mind couldn’t help but turn over the implications.

  An unranked female with significant potential. Possibly even a working rank she’d chosen not to register for some reason. That still happened with younger seers, of course, especially those who managed to escape registration with the human authorities. But she wasn’t young. She had to have been in hiding for over a hundred years to have escaped the notice of the Human Protection Act authorities for all of this time.

  Either that, or she had connections to someone who deliberately kept her off the rolls.

  The pregnancy thing was even stranger.

  Female seers lost access to their sight once they’d been pregnant for more than a month or so. That blindness lasted up until they gave birth, some sixteen months following conception. It was an incredibly vulnerable time for seers, both those pregnant and their mates, who couldn’t help but be affected by that blindness.

  So yeah, it made sense that they’d be able to catch her then.

  But it made no sense why they would.

  Pregnancy was also a time in which mates, boyfriends and other family members normally took their pregnant loved ones into hiding... .and protected them with a viciousness that bordered on psychopathic.

  That this female had successfully hidden her aleimic capabilities from the authorities for over a hundred years, only to peer her head aboveground while pregnant, made no kind of sense whatsoever.

  Galaith was pretty old-school on the pregnancy issue. He also seemed pretty intent on keeping faith with some of the more touchy of the treaty stipulations put in place with the old world seers. Anything to do with pregnancy or seer children usually headed that list.

  “Any thoughts on the identity of the father?” I asked Varlan finally.

  Varlan only smiled at that, too.

  Again, I couldn’t help but feel about ten steps behind the older seer.

  At least I could tell Varlan thought I was asking the right questions now, though.

  IT SHOULD BE noted, for those of you civilians reading this, that in the Org, we aren’t really set up with military ranks.

  We have assigned numerical positions instead.

  Those numerical positions can change at any time, and often without us knowing they’ve been changed, much less why they changed... or what the change means. The Org is organized primarily via a semi-dimensional network structure housed in the Barrier, the space where we seers operate our sight functions. We call that structure the Pyramid... mostly because it looks like that to us from behind the Barrier. It functions more or less like that, too. The Org’s network Pyramid rotates over time, with numbers denoting position within, rather than ranks, which means that no one has any absolute, one-to-one peers.

  That being said, tiers exist within the Pyramid, sure.

  Moreover, those tiers change a hell of a lot less often than our numbered ranks.

  I’d risen through those tiers over the years. No matter how often my own number changed inside the network hierarchy, though, I knew I’d never been anywhere close to Varlan’s tier, nor had Varlan ever been close to mine.

  Varlan is a rank-11. Actual.

  Let me just say that again.

  Fucking rank-11. Actual.

  For those of you humans out there who don’t know what that means, suffice it to say, if that guy wanted you to dance... you’d motherfucking dance. If he wanted you to put a gun to your head and pull the trigger, you’d do that, too. So would a lot of seers. I don’t give a damn what kind of badass you think you are, or how many seers you hired to protect you. You wouldn’t have a prayer against a seer like Varlan.

  The gods alone even know the truth of Varlan’s potential sight rank, but I’ve heard that only an intermediary seer, meaning, one of the old souls, could rival it.

  Varlan is older than me by about three centuries, too.

  The guy exudes warrior in every whisper of his light, no matter how unassuming and nondescript he makes his physical appearance on the outside. It’s been rumored that he came out of the Adhipan itself originally––meaning the real-deal Adhipan, the original, old-school military seers from back before First Contact.

  The scar across Varlan’s face showed the only true sign of vulnerability or weakness I’d ever seen on the old guy... and even that added to his mystique more than detracted from it. Varlan wore one of the infamous Nazi scars, which meant he’d been in a concentration camp himself for a time, during the last world war.

  It also meant he’d survived that camp.

  Those facial scars were the means by which the Germans marked seers in their camps so they could recognize us on sight, in the event those seers ever became uncollared, and therefore able to access their sight. A fair few seers had them, sure, but not a lot of seers Varlan’s age lived to tell the tale. The Germans were a lot kinder to younger seers, if only because they saw them as potentially salable... at least, when they didn’t recruit them directly into their own burgeoning covert operations and military ranks during the war itself, usually with family members or mates kept as collateral.

  The Germans had at least been smart enough to fear seers.

  I’ve never heard the full story of how the Nazis got ahold of a seer as powerful as Varlan in the first place... but I have no doubt it’s a good one.

  “You would do best not to dismiss this assignment as routine, brother,” Varlan had told me, somewhere while I’d been thinking all of this.

  Once more, I found myself aware of his voice and his light, even over the hum of the rotor blades and the smell of humid,
plant-filled air. When I turned, Varlan gave me a look that bordered on warning. At first, I’d flushed at that, wondering if the older male had continued to listen to my mind, and if any of my thoughts managed to offend him.

  “...This job may not be as easy as you think,” Varlan added after that pause, his voice holding less of a rebuke. “Nor as quick to be finished as you might have hoped. There is some chance an old friend is involved. One with sufficient skill to entertain even you, brother Quay.”

  At the end of that speech, I heard humor in his voice again.

  I heard something else there, too, however... something harder to define.

  I watched Varlan’s violet eyes for a few beats longer. When he didn’t go on, I raised my voice over the helicopter’s blades.

  “What old friend would that be?” I said. “Someone from the Seven?”

  “Dehgoies,” Varlan said simply.

  I stiffened at once.

  I mean, true, the surname is not completely unusual in the seer world; it constitutes one of the oldest of the original seer clan names. It’s also one of the most respected of those families, and the name still commands significant cache in the old world. In other words, there is more than one “Dehgoies” knocking around Asia and the New World.

  Still, I’d known exactly which Dehgoies Varlan meant.

  I said it aloud anyway, over the high-pitched whine of the rotors.

  “Dehgoies Revik?”

  Varlan made an affirmative gesture with one hand, a softer yes in the older version of seer sign language.

  By then, I’d noticed a few others in my team listening to us talk.

  I’m sure some of them turned when Varlan spoke Dehgoies’ name, as well.

  “What the hell is Dehgoies doing in South America?” I said, still speaking loudly, even though I knew I didn’t need to, given that I wore my headset. “I thought he was locked up in some kneeler ice cave somewhere, repenting for his crimes against the Ancestors? Hasn’t he been completely out of commission since ’74?”

  I couldn’t quite keep the disgust out of my voice or my light when I said it.