Innocence Lost

by O. J. Lowe

  Wilsin raised an eyebrow. “No?”

  “I wasn’t a big fan of Unisco. Still probably not. I think you have too much power, too much anonymity and too much scope in how you wield it. I used to think you sacrificed your morals for results.”

  Wilsin went to open his mouth to argue in disgust, desperate to point out the fallacies in that statement. Some of the criticism stung. Some of it, Reeves might have had a point with. The Vedo didn’t give him the chance.

  “But!” he said. “And it’s a very big but. I grew up. I found Master Baxter. He taught me a lot, not just about being the Kjarn but about developing as a human being. He told me all sorts of stories about the Vedo and about Unisco. How can I criticise Unisco for anonymity when the Vedo were just as bad, if not worse in the past?”

  “It’s a little different,” Wilsin said softly. “As I understand, the Vedo kept their secrets to themselves because they didn’t want to share what they knew. We keep our secrets because someone’s got to keep the kingdoms safe. Someone needs to stop people like Coppinger. And we need to keep ourselves protected while we do it.”

  “Exactly. I appreciate that you serve a useful function. Take everything out, I doubt you’re a worse option than any other group would be in the same circumstances. That’s why I volunteered to be part of the Vedo that came over. I wanted to see it all for myself. I wanted to help. I wanted to make a difference.”

  “You want a lot,” Wilsin said. “I didn’t know that was a Vedo trait.”

  “Everyone has desires, David. It’s a case of whether you’re in a position to reap the fruits of them or not. Whether you allow them to consume you. Being a Vedo isn’t about denying yourself, it’s about control and commitment. At least, it is now. I don’t know what the old order was like.”

  “They died, didn’t they?”

  Reeves nodded. “As far as I’m aware. There are just a few left out there. Arventino was one. My master. Oh, and Wim Carson.”

  “Bet you thought it was crazy when Ruud approached you, didn’t you?” Wilsin said.

  Reeves said nothing, tilted his head to the side in consideration and then nodded. “Just a little. This great champion shows up in your town, asks about for a few days and then winds up in front of you. He tells you stuff, hells he goes and shows you stuff.” He ran his fingers through his hair awkwardly. He didn’t look comfortable.

  “What did he show you?” He didn’t have to feign interest in this story, he’d been wondering a little about Baxter’s methods.

  “When you’re young,” Reeves said. “You hear stories, right? They’re always there, you think they can’t be true. People who are better than human. Superhuman. That was what the Vedo were to me. I saw Master Baxter summon fire to his hand, I saw him call upon lightning, he had the power of the storm at his fingertips. He jumped from the ground to the roof of my home in a single leap and back again. Sometimes you simply need to accept that you’re in the presence of the remarkable. He had all this power, he told me how he wanted to use it. He told me everything, what had happened to the Vedo of old and what he intended to do.”

  He paused, took a long drag out of his water canteen. It was already getting disgustingly hot, Wilsin had noticed. “When it’s put to you like that, how could you turn it down? The chance to make a difference doesn’t come to you every day.”

  No, Wilsin thought.

  It certainly doesn’t.

  He hadn’t realised how glad he was to get off that cramped aeroship, stretched out his arms and felt muscles complain with the exertion, even if it akin to stepping from a sweatbox into the fire. The heat clamped around him like a fiery glove, the humidity threatening to overwhelm. It took him a few moments to adjust, shield his eyes from the glare of the sun high above them. Wilsin rummaged in his pocket, found his shades and slipped them on. He looked at Brendan, then at Reeves. Brendan was mopping his face with an oversized handkerchief, he looked like he was already regretting his decision to come out here. Reeves, Wilsin found himself cursing, didn’t appear too bothered by the furious temperatures. If there was even a single bead of sweat on his skin, he would be surprised.

  “Welcome to Vazara,” Brendan said ruefully. He reached into his pack, pulled out a data pad in one swift motion. Some of the rumours about thieves in Vazara, Wilsin thought, it’d need swift hands to stop someone running off with it if Brendan wasn’t careful. He thought of the blaster securely hidden in his pack, wished that the time had come where he could wear it openly holstered on his hip, secrecy be damned.

  He’d never been the sort of guy who’d shoot first and ask questions later. That had always been more of Nick Roper’s forte than his. He didn’t believe in drawing his weapon unless he meant to use it. He only meant to use it if his life was in danger. Having things out in the open meant that the deterrent was there. Especially with the size of the weapon that Navarro had given him.

  He’d practiced with it before they’d left, just to get used to the weight. It had a kick like a stubborn mule, firing it repeatedly had left his arms throbbing and numb from the kick. He’d never especially considered himself a blaster nut. Didn’t revel in the specifications of each individual weapon. How effective it was usually meant the sum of his interest in it. The big blaster was a beast though, Navarro had regaled him with stories of how it’d punch through anything short of an aerofighter hull.

  Not that he expected to be facing any aerofighters on this trip. If he ended up doing that, things would really have gone badly wrong. All their weapons had been locked away behind anti-security measures, they were heading into enemy territory now, a place devoid of their authority.

  There were people all around them, many but not perhaps as many as there might have been. Small scattered groups waiting in subdued silence for a ship to take them away. Nobody looked happy to be here, they had their luggage and their eyes locked onto the ground as if scared to look up in case they didn’t like what they saw. Very few of them looked like tourists. Most of them looked like they wanted to get out as fast as possible and not come back. Wilsin had noted that he, Brendan and Reeves were the only people coming into the kingdom off their flight. That didn’t bode well with him.

  It all added up to the simple fact that people weren’t coming to Vazara. It had always had a reputation as a rough place for those who didn’t have the means to protect themselves. Since Nwakili had been killed and the kingdom seceded, that reputation had grown and grown and not in a good way. Stories had been coming out all too often of late and it didn’t sit right with Wilsin. People shouldn’t have to live in fear like this. Mazoud hadn’t taken long to declare it a police state, his operatives were everywhere. Wilsin was sure he could see two of them already, stood leaning against the back wall of the port wearing mirrored shades, trying to keep an eye on everything and everyone.

  He said as much to Brendan who shook his head. “That doesn’t worry me so much as the ones you don’t see. It’s an old Vazaran Sun trick that. Have two obvious guys who look like they don’t have a bastard clue and have twenty more roaming unseen.”

  “Can see why they’re avoiding eye contact with everyone else then,” Reeves said, glancing over at the departure queues. He took a deep breath, sniffed twice and then coughed. “This place stinks of fear. Fear and desperation.”

  Wilsin said nothing, moved for his own data pad as they moved towards the customs cubicles. Even as they approached, the lines were only handfuls deep, inbound

  arrivals numbered in the dozens rather than the hundreds. At least they wouldn’t have to wait too long. That was a small blessing. Once through those gates, they’d be in Vazara proper, they’d meet with Fazarn, Brendan’s contact and they’d be able to make a start on, well, what they needed to do here.

  Security looked a lot more stringent than it had before. Getting into any kingdom had never been an issue in his experience. Normally they were happy to have you. The more people flooding in, the greater the gain to said kingdom. When you stacked it up with
the argument that spirit calling was an exceptionally transitory sport, people came and went all the time. If a hundred thousand people go out of Serran in one week, then a hundred thousand people coming in from Premesoir would at the very least keep some sort of balance. People didn’t stay in the same place. Wilsin had only recently bought an apartment back in Blasington in Premesoir, his first home. He’d spent two nights there in a month due to work commitments, spirit calling might be in a slump but Unisco was busier than ever.

  Being embroiled in a civil war would do that to you. He smirked to himself, stepped into the shortest line. Brendan went to a different one. Always split up in circumstances like this. Be least memorable as possible. People knew who Brendan was. It was likely people might know who he was. Ergo, if they saw the two of them together, they were likely to remember them. That could compromise them going forward. That was a chance that was easy to avoid. Unisco protocol existed for a reason.

  Nobody knew who Reeves was, he followed Brendan into his own line. If Reeves was posing as his student, it made sense. They’d be part of the same party. They’d stick together, though it suited Wilsin to be alone. He got the feeling Reeves could handle himself, but he was still an unknown quantity. Too many of the Vedo were, the ones that Baxter had trained the longest anyway. He knew that Anne Sullivan and Alex Nkolou had joined up and were in the process of being trained and that assuaged some of his worries. They had the training. They could be trusted. Wilsin preferred those around him whose capabilities he could, if not rely on, then at least understand.

  He made it to the front of his queue before Brendan and Reeves got to theirs, Wilsin smiled at the stern-faced Vazaran behind the glass. He didn’t want to think about what might happen if they were refused entry.

  “Good morning,” he said, holding his data pad with the relevant documents to the window. The man’s expression barely changed. He had more hair on his eyebrows than he did on his head. His eyes listlessly twitched back and forth, examining the screen. He gave every impression he didn’t want to be here.

  Wilsin didn’t blame him. Idly he found himself wondered how long before immigration and border control fell under another wing of Vazaran Sun authority. He’d read all Unisco’s files on Mazoud, had drawn conclusions from them that he was the sort of man who if something worked, he wasn’t going to give up on it. More than that, Unisco psychological profiles had declared that he’d try and apply it to areas where perhaps it didn’t necessarily fit in an attempt to make it run more smoothly. Putting mercenaries in charge of bureaucratic affairs didn’t sound like a recipe for success. He was glad they were arriving now and not six months times. Although, depending on how this mission went, six months might be the time they returned. An unhappy thought. Getting out might be even harder than getting in.

  They’d have to deal with that when they came to it. Six months was a long time in politics. Things could have easily changed by then. You needed some faith in the world, no matter how bleak things might look like they could get.

  The immigration officer was still reading his documents, finally nodded, gestured for him to hold his pad under the scanner on the front of the booth. Wilsin did so, making sure that all the correct tags and codes lined up with the beam.

  “Name?”

  His accent was thick and gruff, but understandable. Why he needed to give his name when he’d just seen all his documents… Maybe letting the Suns take over wouldn’t be the stupidest idea after all.

  “David Peter Wilsin,” he said, keeping his voice even. Getting into arguments wouldn’t be smart. People remembered arguments. It would defeat the point of keeping their presence here low key.

  “Purpose of visit?”

  “Spirit calling and exploration.”

  That brought a sad shake of the head from the officer. Wilsin glanced at him through the glass, saw his nametag was faded, discoloured from years of wear. The name had been obscured by dirt on the plastic. That didn’t fill him with confidence. He wondered how many people had given that excuse in recent months to come into Vazara. Given the look on his face, he doubted it was many.

  “Length of stay?”

  A tricky question when it came to buy an immigration visa. Given the expansion of the Green across Vazara, it had more than quadrupled in size since it had first appeared six months ago. Desert had become jungle, none of the cities had been swallowed up yet but if it carried on the way it was… Exploring it could become tricky if you had to travel twice as long to get out as you had going in.

  Still, he had the answer Brendan had told him to give. Hopefully one that’d cover them regardless of the circumstances ahead.

  “Open-ended year plus,” he said, giving him another smile. Wasn’t the sort of visa that most arriving spirit callers went for. They were expensive, more than three times the price of normal visas. Yet what made them so handy was that they included the rest of the current year and all the next. That’d give them more than enough time, he hoped.

  The officer slid another data pad over to him, a thumb reader on its screen. Wilsin didn’t hesitate, pressed his thumb to it and watched the screen go green. It didn’t take long, just long enough for his print to go white under the pressure.

  “Okay, that’ll be three thousand credits,” the officer said. On the screen, Wilsin’s picture flashed up, his identity confirmed as well as all his relevant information. Strange seeing your life boiled down into a few lines. Three thousand credits, in his opinion, was absolute extortion, though it wasn’t him that was paying it. That softened the blow. The credits had come from a Unisco operation fund set up for incidents like this. Their use had been authorised, they’d been transferred into his account and he slid that credit card across to the reader.

  It was with a strange realisation of irony he noticed this was the swiftest part of the whole process, the taking of the credits in the first place. Barely three seconds passed between scanning and accepting. With that out the way, all that remained was the transfer of documents from immigration to his data pad wirelessly, he waited twenty seconds as it went underway, then put his pad away as it completed. He gave the guy another smile, this one not as enthusiastic.

  “Thanks,” he said. “Maybe I’ll see you on the way out.”

  “If you’re lucky,” the immigration officer said without a hint of jest in his voice. Deadpan, Wilsin thought, heavy emphasis on the word dead, “You’ll manage to get out at all.”

  Wow…

  Wilsin’s feelings about this entire mission took a downward spiral. He didn’t want to think about what he might have meant. Maybe things were worse than they’d all thought they were. He didn’t want to think about how much worse that could be.

  He’d had to wait a few more minutes from Brendan and Reeves to make their way through to him on the other side, the three of them heading through to arrivals. Even out here, they were probably the largest party. Most of the arrivals looked like they’d come back on their own, most of them of similar demographic. Young, tough-looking Vazarans in their twenties, all giving the impression they were up for a fight. He wondered if they’d come back to join the Suns.

  They still had to put their bags through a security scanner, Wilsin noted, the queues coming to a bottleneck ahead. He couldn’t help but feel that it was a strange way of doing things, having this last. Other kingdoms made you go through this before you spent credits on your visa. Not here. Other kingdoms didn’t search you as you came out, they left it to the kingdom you’d left to check you hadn’t taken any contraband on the aeroship. He wasn’t worried about the security scanner as he approached it. Navarro had given them special packs to fool the x-ray machines, they were lined with a photo-reflective lead which showed them what they’d expect to see in a pack that would pass muster. Clothes, spirit calling equipment, his data pad.

  He did have to admit the closer he got though, Navarro was no Alvin Noorland. He was competent, but he hadn’t earned instant faith status yet, he still had a lot to prove. If Noorl
and had come up with the stuff, he’d have been more confident. Noorland had been a genius, he was still heavily missed by those who’d known him.

  Ten people ahead of him. Nine. The machine pushed through their packs, didn’t show any sign of registering any contraband. Eight people, then seven, then six. Smuggling it in was stupid. If you wanted to bring a weapon in, they weren’t hard to get hold of in any major Vazaran city. Five people. They should have done that. Procured weapons on site. Four people ahead of him. The only downside to that being with that many illegal weapons floating around, you had no idea what they’d been used for previously. Three people. Too many weapons with crimes attached to them. If they were caught with a blaster that had killed forty people, they wouldn’t be getting out alive. Two ahead of them. He could smell the sweat of the security officers who were manning the machine. It was too bloody hot here, not a hint of air conditioning anywhere. Any other kingdom, they wouldn’t have allowed it. Too many regulations. He was going to be the next one through. If his bag set off the scanners, he counted at least six security officers who’d be ready to jump on him. He couldn’t fight off six, not when they all had blasters and probably wouldn’t hesitate to shoot a foreigner who’d already paid for his visa. Brendan wouldn’t help him. Reeves might want to, he’d follow Brendan’s lead though, Wilsin was sure of it, just as he was sure he’d be on his own if it went bad.

  He put his pack on the belt, took a deep breath and stepped forward through the body scanner. He didn’t have anything about his person that would set it off, he’d made sure of that. Wilsin wanted to walk through unencumbered, he wanted to grab his bag and walk off again. Even so, he found his fists balling up as he stepped forward, some part of him quietly ready for action. Just in case.