Allie's War Early Years

by JC Andrijeski

  As my trainers warned me, back in my early days with the Org, there was very little “truth” in looking at the future behind the Barrier.

  That made true prescients extremely valuable.

  True prescients could somehow see past that mess and tap into some area of the timeline that interpreted those variables into their most likely manifestations... or so I had it explained to me.

  True prescience was like telekinesis, and only marginally less rare.

  Meaning, one had to be born a prescient. One couldn’t be “made” one via training, no matter how extensive.

  I, personally, had never met one... a prescient, that is.

  Well, not unless Terian had been one, as rumors said... and as Terian himself half-implied to me in that one casual comment he’d made about having some “commonality” with the female prescient with whom Dehgoies had been so infatuated.

  I had never even heard of a living prescient before Manaus.

  I made my voice neutral again before I next spoke.

  “Recommendation from Central?” I said. “At the time,” I clarified. “Before the blackout. Did they have one?”

  Ondati looked me in the face. He shrugged those big shoulders again.

  “Live capture strongly recommended,” he said, as though that were obvious, which it more or less was. “They were going to check with the brass to find out if live capture went beyond recommendation and into an actual order, but then...”

  “...The blackout,” I muttered, finishing for him.

  “The blackout, yes, boss,” Ondati confirmed.

  “Any chance he’d come back here? To the camps?” I said.

  “To the camps?” Ondati’s eyes blanked. “Who? The prescient?”

  “Yes.”

  Ondati glanced at Cat, then at Paulo. The muscular male shrugged as he looked back at me, his infiltrator’s mask intact behind those odd, gold-and-red colored irises. He might have passed for human, if not for those shockingly bright eyes, eyes that even contacts struggled to conceal, at least without blinding him.

  I knew Ondati had some old-school training, too.

  He’d been in the Seven once, according to his file.

  Thinking about Ondati now, and the fact that he, Cat, Paulo, Ringu and Jaela might have more opinions about this blackout than they were willing to say, or even think aloud, given the lack of privacy within the network, I only shrugged, too.

  I kept my face blank, my thoughts protected.

  Inside the Org, everything was scrutinized. Everything.

  I didn’t resent that fact. I approved of it.

  We couldn’t afford to take any chances, after all.

  We were at war.

  7

  LOVE

  I FROWNED, ONCE more scanning the open enclosure.

  We were on the edge of the camp now, on its perimeter, and pretty far from the screaming crowds. The seers who had originally shouted and shoved at my transparent riot shield through the enclosure fence with their bare hands had mostly been rounded up and returned to the cement holding cells, too. Technically, I could have had my own people return to our own bunkers, as well, but I decided we would do one more sweep, pick up any stragglers.

  We’d already found footsteps for a few.

  They couldn’t be guards... the footprints I had seen in the snow were from shoeless feet, so nothing like the prints left by the standard issue boots that all of the guards wore.

  We’d gotten most of the camp seers inside just in time for the snow to start coming down again. I had heard blizzard warnings about an hour earlier on the local feeds, a storm coming through the area that would likely keep our plane from taking off, at least until the next day.

  That might have been part of my motivation for taking another turn around the fences, truthfully. We’d have plenty of time to crouch in those bunkers like rats... I figured we might as well try to gather some useful intel first, before we called it a night and huddled around organic heaters with the locals, sharing bottles of cheap vodka and eating whatever crap remained in their frozen stores.

  The snow beginning to come down thick, though.

  Those dense, white sheets of large flakes had likely motivated the penned seers to end their disturbance a lot faster than the prods and batons of the guards. My own people barely got into the fray at all before the job was done, leaving us to walk around like impotent storm troopers with all of our organic weaponry and dark, armored suits.

  It was crap detail, and we hadn’t even been needed for it.

  I saw only a few seers outside those cement-block enclosures now, including an old male collecting fresh snow in buckets and dragging them back to the cement walls.

  I watched him hand those buckets over and through the glass-less slats in the walls once they were full, and other, younger-looking sets of pale hands take those buckets from him eagerly once he presented them.

  I assumed the snow must be for drinking water inside the pens.

  In any case, seconds later, the pails got handed back to the old male again, empty, and he repeated the ritual, looking for fresh drifts to fill up both buckets again.

  Like most of those in the pens and cells around us, the aged seer wore a sight-restraint collar around his neck, one of the modern organics with a two-way block. Even so, I found myself thinking they probably kept him around a bit like an old mare with a racing horse, to keep the others calm, and provide services that the guards didn’t want to perform.

  Like this one, presumably.

  I scanned the nearby Barrier space again and frowned.

  That weird fucking signal again. Was someone really lurking out here? As a blizzard started? Or was I picking up someone who actually worked here? Who was supposed to be in the construct, screwing around at the edge of the enclosure fences?

  Whoever he was, his aleimic markers weren’t registered with the locals.

  “Anything?” I sent around the link.

  Cat answered me at once, from a half-click ahead, near the trees.

  “No,” she said. “You?”

  “I’m getting something,” I said, frowning. “Near you. Can you get eyes on it?”

  I highlighted the relevant area of the construct for her, which physically seemed to live directly across the fence from the slanted, cement block shed with the open, glass-less and screen-less windows. Probably another shelter crammed to the walls with dirt-bloods, I thought, all of them huddled together for warmth against the snow and cold ground.

  I couldn’t even imagine how fucking cold it must get out here at night.

  Grimacing slightly, I showed Cat, along with Deseri and Ondati, who were with her, the specific signature a second time.

  “Got it?” I said. “He’s protected, right?”

  “By these dirt bloods?” Solai sounded doubtful. “You really think someone’s got a cell operating out of here, boss?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “I’m feeling distortion. A Barrier field of some kind, and I can’t get a lock on the exact signature...”

  “The rebels?”

  I didn’t answer, but let them feel me shrug.

  “Can we trace it back later?” Cat said. “Just pick them up for now?”

  I frowned again. “Don’t do anything yet. Just find him. But I’d like a source for that shield before you close on him, so be careful. They’re going to rabbit the second he gets picked up. If they’re any good, they could also wipe any trace of the shield before we get a solid imprint...”

  Cat pinged me that she understood.

  I looked up at the cloud-filled sky, watching fat snow-flakes drift down as Cat, Ondati and Solai checked out the unknown’s light signature, as well as the distortion caused by the Barrier shield I sensed around whoever this joker was.

  As I waited, I grew aware of my body again.

  My shoulder ached a little from holding up the plexiglas riot shield, and my back still twinged from the hit I took back in Cairo, from a board wielded by an angry protester screaming
about seers’ rights. Popping pain killers and stimulants on the way to Moscow hadn’t quite dulled the pain or lifted my tiredness, either, and now I found myself wishing we’d just done the one pass and gone back to the compound.

  Whatever we found out here, Central would probably order us to leave it alone, anyway.

  I needed to give my people a rest after this. All of us were punchy after four back-to-back assignments involving seer protests. I knew that as much as we pretended otherwise, having our own brothers and sisters constantly throwing rocks and bottles at our heads got to all of us. Being called traitor and worm-fucker got to all of us, too.

  One could only block out so much... at least for so long.

  There were rules about how many drugs we could use to take the edge off that kind of thing, too. Although, truthfully, SCARB overlooked a lot of ‘personal habit’ type stuff, as long as a particular team performed, and our team had one of the highest tag and intercept counts in our operating section right now.

  Sweat seeped through my uniform shirt and under my arms in the heavy coat and armored vest, making me shift my feet in a sort of underlying discomfort, even apart from the weight of the gear. I knew I’d probably be freezing once we returned to the cement rabbit warren of the barracks, but for now, different parts of my body fluctuated between temperature extremes that made me wish I could remove a few layers and maybe get all of us moving faster.

  It was getting colder, though. And wetter.

  Wet, cloying snow stuck to my clothes and in my hair.

  My sensitive seer ears picked up the low-level buzzing from the nearby perimeter fence, too, and somehow that was making it hard for me to focus behind the Barrier, and to watch what Cat and the others were doing.

  I found myself thinking about Manaus again, without meaning to that time.

  However I bitched about the snow and cold, I knew I preferred it vastly to being back in that shithole in the jungle. In Brazil, the insects alone were like an alien life form, much less the heat and the snakes and the jaguars and whatever else we might have encountered out there. I remembered feeling my feet slosh in the sweat of my boots, remembered thinking about them rotting in there, which brought back ugly flashbacks of Vietnam, probably my least favorite war in a string of bad wars started by the humans that stretched over the last half of the Twentieth Century.

  Like most seers, I definitely preferred the cold.

  “Yeah,” Cat said, her voice rising in the link after a few seconds more. “I got it, boss. Definitely a live one. I’m not getting a weapons reading, but could be they’re using dead metal. You want me to go in? See if I can flush him out?”

  “Alone?” I said. “No. We’ll come to you. Just don’t let him run.”

  “All of us?” Whalen said.

  “Yes.”

  “Who’s protecting him, do you think?” Paulo said, already beginning to walk around from the other side of the pen. “Rebels?”

  “Who knows?” I muttered, thinking softer, ... we’re not supposed to fucking ask that, remember?

  I felt Paulo react, maybe catching a whiff of that packed missive, or maybe just feeling the emotion behind it. He seemed to get the message, in any case, because he didn’t ask again.

  I shrugged then, smiling faintly. “We’re probably snowed in tonight, anyway, brothers and sisters. Might as well pretend we’re infiltrators while we’re here, right? I doubt there are many unwilling bars this far from Candara.”

  Ondati gave a low laugh, audible through the sub-vocal channel.

  Despite my flippant tone, my light was on high alert again. I realized that a part of me felt the truth of those words. I did want to know if they had rebel plants working out of this camp, even if Central would rather if I left that problem with the locals.

  I wondered again what changed their mind on that, anyway.

  Something must have changed.

  Some kind of politically-sensitive security issue, maybe?

  All I knew was, I was increasingly getting the sense that Central wanted me and my team out of here. I could almost feel them at the edges of my light, as if they wished they’d pulled me and my people before the snow started coming down.

  I wondered why they didn’t just order us back in.

  Pushing the thought around my mind somewhat haphazardly, trying to decide if there was any truth to those feelings, I scanned a few of the nearby prisoners. I came up blank on any of the terrorism flags we looked for, although I knew that wouldn’t be enough to discern even a semi-competent deep-cover agent. It was enough to give me an overall flavor of the group huddled in those cement bunkers, though.

  It crossed my mind that we could still do this the slow way, since we were already on the ground. We’d been given clearance to talk to the camp rats, after all. I could bring them in for interrogations, one by one... all night if I so chose.

  Looking around, though, I frowned, trying to decide if I wanted to deal with the political flak of pressing my luck in that way. No one had told me not to do it, but I’d be overstepping, and I knew it. I’d also be indirectly thumbing my nose at the blackout from Central... as well as using it to my own advantage, since the blackout also meant that me and my people were flying under the radar with Central more than usual, too.

  “Find me that jumper,” I said, hesitating only a breath before adding, “...We’ll get him and bring him in. Then we’re done here.” Once I said it aloud, I exhaled in a kind of relief, if only from making the decision.

  I wasn’t going to fight this battle. Not this time.

  Even as I thought it, I felt some higher vibration in my light start to loosen, too.

  So someone was watching me down here.

  Someone who didn’t want me interfering with whatever was going on down here, either. I couldn’t help wondering who it was... then I remembered that didn’t matter, either.

  I exhaled again, doing another quick scan.

  I watched Cat approach the edge of the trees along the highest part of the fence.

  “I’m still not getting a threat-warning, but don’t be stupid,” I warned her. “This guy comes after you, or anyone protecting him, and you drop the fuckers. Use batons, if you have to. I’ll re-designate if things look bad enough and we’ll get the guards to come out here, too, help us haul them all in... but I don’t want to do that until they give us a damned good reason.”

  “Should I close on the other side, boss?” Ondati said.

  “No. I want you where you are,” I said, sharp. “See if you can pinpoint the block... they’ll probably feel it when we get close enough, and I want whoever’s protecting this clown.”

  Cat and Ondati both sent me affirmative pings.

  Glancing around at the work camp grounds again, I realized I could see a group of camp rats standing by the fence, not far from where Cat was headed. I couldn’t tell what they were looking at, but they all seemed to be staring into the trees.

  Touching a setting on my headset, I used the virtual to zoom in on the five seers standing there. The one in the middle, who stood there like he led the rest of them, was a muscular seer, and tall... bigger than the usual camp rat I’d seen. I could see tattoos on the back of his neck and his arms, too, where they were bare to the elbow.

  Looked like pantheon stuff. Religious.

  That meant kneeler. Seven... or maybe rebels. From the intel I had seen, the rebels were even bigger religious nuts than the Seven.

  Exhaling, I began to walk, heading in the direction of Cat.

  With the work camp rats standing there, I didn’t see any point in trying to sneak up on whoever was in those trees. The prisoners would have clued off whoever it was that they had guards closing in on them already.

  “Belay the last order,” I growled into my headset. “Why the fuck didn’t you tell me you had inmates over there?”

  “Just saw them boss... sorry.”

  “You just saw them?” I said, disbelieving. “You’re right on top of them, Cat.”

&n
bsp; “Yeah, but something’s interfering with their signals, too...”

  I scanned, still walking fast, the rifle clutched in my right hand. I could feel what she meant now, though. Something was interfering with the Barrier signatures of those inmates. Something close to them... maybe even the same target we were tracing.

  “How close are you?” I said.

  “Maybe one hundred yards,” she said. “If I wasn’t in cover, we’d be in visual range,” she added. “I can feel the target and the work camp prisoners now, sir, using your coordinates. No one seems to be rabbiting, but we still can’t source the shield.”

  “Ditto here, boss,” Ondati added.

  “Same,” Paulo sent with a ping.

  I exhaled, annoyed. “All right. Stay there. I’m coming.”

  I squinted at that line of prisoners by the fence, feeling sweat trickle down my back as I increased my pace, the sweat running down from my hairline stinging my eyes. My mind remained mostly in the Barrier, where I watched the construct along with Ondati as Ringu and Strave paced him from behind, also holding their guns. The prisoners seemed to be watching me now, though, seeing me approach, especially the big guy in the middle, the one with the tattoos and the Chinese-looking features. The guy was even more pumped up that I had realized initially, so he couldn’t have been here long.

  He was built like a fucking tank, actually.

  I found myself wondering what his sight rank was, too... maybe he’d make an interesting recruitment opportunity, even if he was, or had been, one of those rebel fucks. Something about his light struck me as interesting, and despite the shield, I got the sense it might be highly structured, too.

  “Can you see the big guy?” I sent into the headset. “The one in the middle?”

  I got four pings in return.

  “Map his light,” I said. “As much as you can. Do you have an ID?”

  “No, sir,” Cat replied. “Just sent the markers back to the locals, to see what they have on file. Are you thinking he’s the plant?”