Sword

by JC Andrijeski

  He should have taken her to one of the present-day work camps run by SCARB, let her watch a few weeks’ worth of systematic rape, torture, families being torn apart, mates being sold out from under one another, unused “inventory” being farmed out for slave labor or cut up for spare organs and bio-matter to build machines.

  She’d been upset that he’d worked for the Germans in World War II, even though he’d left before the Final Solution had even been dreamed of––even though he’d done it as an infiltrator, working undercover for the Seven.

  Let her see how SCARB and their minions impregnated seer females, cutting babies out of them to raise them before they could energetically bond with their parents. Let her see the mass graves, and the “schools” where they hooked seers up to inducement machines, getting them addicted so they depended on SCARB for the rest of their lives.

  See how much she minded watching him kill those bastards then.

  She’d never really seen the dark side of the peaceful religious philosophy of the Seven, how SCARB continued to use it against them again and again.

  Even now, when seers should have learned better, they were still being brutalized by that peaceful noninterventionist crap.

  A few tours of the reality of most seers’ lives might have changed things between them that night in Delhi. Hell, she’d be giving speeches for their side, channeling all of that righteous anger where it belonged.

  He knew he was acting desperate, in a way.

  Hell, maybe he deserved that, too.

  Maybe she’d been right before. She’d told him once, during their consummation time in the mountains, that she’d always felt like it was her pushing him. She’d said she felt like she was always waiting for him, putting up with his indecision about them, his standoffishness, his fear of being married again, his fear about being dependent on her––his infidelity.

  She’d felt like it was her who kept their marriage intact.

  She even worried she loved him more than he did her.

  The memory made him wince, even more now than it had at the time. Still, he couldn’t blame her for feeling that way, given the things he’d done.

  Maybe it was time to change all that.

  Maybe it was time to show her otherwise.

  Revik clicked over to the recording function, adjusting the headset around his ears and the back of his neck.

  He let his eyes phase out as he fell into the Barrier proper.

  DARK CLOUDS BILLOW out around him…

  It happens fast. He falls hard and deep.

  As he does, the world ripples abruptly into view, tilting sickeningly before his light. Earth rotates below, snagged and snarled in billions of crossing strands. Everything is sharp, pulled into a denser focus from his infiltrators’ construct.

  He feels his light altering his trajectory already, fed by his mind’s urgency.

  He blinks somewhere in his mind.

  …and the jagged horizon of the Himalayas slides majestically into view, their outlines harsh against a sharp blue sky ribboned with aleimic light. The peaks grow larger, swimming into crystal clarity with breathtaking speed. He clicks further back, resonating with the particular frequency of Seertown and its surrounding hill country. The imprints supplied by Wreg make this even more precise, but he can’t help threading in a whisper of Alyson’s presence as well.

  It hurts again, once he does, but he holds on to her anyway, keeping it subtle enough that she won’t feel him there.

  The landscape blurs, shifting faster than he can track.

  When it reconfigures, he finds himself in a place he recognizes.

  He is walking down the main market street of Seertown.

  He stares around at where he is, only marginally aware of his light feet carrying him, taking him down the muddy track. He looks out over the bombed out buildings, the walls and roofs blackened from fire. His aleimic body shifts, growing brighter, more distinct against the gray and black landscape. Already, the land is fighting back, dotted here and there with green as weeds and grasses begin to grow up through cracked walls and asphalt. Trees stand, here and there, between the various structures, blackened by fire but still alive, still producing leaves.

  Mostly, however, he sees the ruined remains of human and seer lives: broken glass, blackened pieces of wood, smashed pottery, rags, broken walls, piles of garbage and clothes, broken feed monitors left over from looting.

  He leaves the market road, walking up the hill.

  He still doesn’t see a single other soul. Reaching the end of the street, he focuses on the Old House itself.

  The scenery blurs again.

  He stands on a green stretch of lawn now, dotted with white-skinned trees.

  Statues and benches made of white marble litter the paving stone path winding around the base of the hill. Some of the white-skinned trees are black now, their limbs wasted and pointed upwards. He walks closer, gazing up at the castle-like structure. Noting the silent emptiness of its walls and windows, he tightens the shields around his light.

  He doesn’t see anyone––not even members from his own team.

  He suspects they are staying away, out of deference to him.

  He did tell Wreg he would do the first pass.

  Hesitating another breath, he begins to walk around more slowly, his light extended within the shield he wears, looking for any trace of familiarity in the surrounding landscape. He focuses most of his attention on the light-infused Barrier ground, knowing it is the most likely thing to have retained fingerprints of any passersby. It looks much the same as the physical place would have looked to his eyes, but the differences are what hold his attention.

  Detail stands out in tiny blades of light-infused grass.

  Small and large presences criss-cross through plant life and earth, each leaving their own particular flavor. Worms and flies have passed here, squirrels and voles, beetles and snakes, mice, the occasional monkey, mongoose and dog.

  People, too––although most of those imprints are old now. Most are so old he passes over their trace scents without examining them.

  He feels birds, crows mostly.

  He walks in slow circles, letting his light pull him.

  Then, at the edges of the garden, he stops.

  He stares at the ground, doubting his senses at first.

  He looks around, as if hoping for another clue––some verification that what he is seeing is real, beyond the footprints he finds carved in mud leading to the base of the building. He glances up ahead, towards the giant stone staircase.

  The footprints likely lead there.

  He follows them, biting back excitement as he becomes more and more sure. At first it seems like he’d been correct about where they were leading him––that the tracks will take him up those stone steps to the main floors of the ancient building. He pauses, however, when the footsteps take a sudden turn to his right, to a garden trail leading between the trees.

  He stares at the tracks, then at the stairs.

  Hesitating another heartbeat, he follows the footsteps’ pull, unable to take his light away from them now.

  He is able to make out five separate sets of prints. Their aleimic vibration has dissipated in the time since they were made, but at least one set has his attention fully riveted.

  He feels his light reacting in sparks at her particular scent, faint but unmistakeable, only days old. Weeks at most.

  He will look for the vehicles later.

  Walking, head down, he nearly runs into the door at the end of the low retaining wall. He pauses long enough to take a snapshot with the part of his light that stores memory, along with the surrounding paths so he can easily find it again. Once he has, he passes through the water-logged wood that hangs on rusted iron hinges.

  He finds himself on a staircase, one that leads down to the House’s basement archives.

  He’s never been inside these before, not in the physical.

  The footprints are gone, of course, once he passes ins
ide, but he still feels her faintly on the stairs. Fighting back another reaction in his light, he descends rapidly, taking more snapshots, mapping out the layout of the basement rooms.

  He must be inside their construct now.

  Constructs didn’t keep seers out, of course––not entirely––but they altered the Barrier space, disguising the landscape and what it contained. They could be damned tricky to navigate, especially if one didn’t know whether they were inside one or not.

  Even when you knew you were inside a construct, it was easy to get lost.

  One could lose track of the boundary between the illusion and the real in seconds, in fact. Dimensions could be distorted, details obscured. Doors, vents, stairs and other critical details could change location, or be erased entirely.

  If a seer wanted to see past the illusion, they generally had to find some way in––which could be tricky as hell without being seen.

  Wreg and the others lucked out, finding the construct at all. It hadn’t even been sloppiness on the part of the Adhipan––it was an honest to gods lucky break.

  Revik doesn’t intend to squander the gods’ favor.

  He can make a few educated guesses as to what kind of construct it might be.

  They would want it relatively open, to keep Allie safe and facilitate easy and fast communication between the infiltrators operating inside. Access might be broken out at more than one level, but the priority would be to secure it from outside encroachment. They would have built layers into that, imprints behind imprints. They also would have set signals into the construct, here and there, to warn them in the event of a breach.

  It is a testimony to the Rebel’s shielding tech, and Salinse himself, that Revik hasn’t tripped any of those warning signals already.

  Even so, caution is warranted; it would be easy to stumble into a trap.

  Moreover, he could be standing among them, right at this moment, and because he is locked out of the construct, he wouldn’t be able to see them. On the other hand, as long as he doesn’t do anything stupid, they shouldn’t be able to see him, either.

  Looking around, he tries to think.

  Really, he has only one way in.

  He might be able to find her. If he at least finds the right room, he might be able to feel her, somewhere around where he stands.

  Wandering cautiously through the corridors, he tries to imagine the uses for each of the rooms––meaning, what he would do with them, if he were staying here. Not knowing Balidor well enough to speculate where he might deviate, he is forced to look around, use his own impressions of the security of the space.

  They would have projected a facsimile of the original layout, most likely, as part of the construct. They would want it to be as accurate as possible, so it wouldn’t tip off anyone who had been here before. Therefore, logically-speaking, what he is looking at now is probably the archives in their original form, meaning how they’d found them upon arrival.

  He enters a corridor, where a number of smaller storage rooms live. Unless they are planning to camp out here awhile, they likely wouldn’t bother emptying all of these. But this one, he thinks, looking in on one, only filled halfway with stored books and documents––they might empty rooms like this, if they wanted bedrooms for a few of them.

  He walks deeper into the catacombs.

  Main staging area, he thinks, looking at one of the larger rooms.

  This could be repurposed as a mulei and/or workout room, he thinks, looking in on another that has mats and rugs stacked against the wall, and a dirt floor.

  Seeing a massive marble table housed in another good-sized cave, he thinks it would work as a map or conference room, if they have live operations in play. He passes another room, half-filled with scrolls. They could store equipment in here, he thinks. They wouldn’t want to move the scrolls, for fear of damaging them.

  He finds a room off on its own, with a pony wall to another segment.

  Looking between the two areas, it strikes him that it would make an ideal interrogation area. Organic panel there, he thinks, touching the pony wall. Seats and organics in the smaller of the two rooms. The other could dual as cell and interrogation space.

  He lays his aleimic hands on the metal table in the middle of the room.

  Two wooden chairs stand to either side, but he ignores those for now, sinking deeper into the vibration of the table itself.

  Concentrating on his image of the room, he looks for Allie.

  For a long moment, he sees nothing.

  The room stays as he found it, static. He sees the gray walls, glowing faintly in the Barrier’s after-image. He sees the table, empty––

  But not empty.

  A man sits there, on one side. Handcuffed. His outline in the Barrier space shows him to be a seer. Collared.

  Revik stares at him, making out a bare outline of his form in the dim aleimic glow, obscured by the collar’s stranglehold on his light. He fights to make out features.

  There is… something. Some glimmer of familiarity.

  He can’t be sure.

  He turns his light head, gazing at the other chair. A different light form sits across from him, at the same table. Also collared, but the light of this one is brighter––a sharp white in the dim, rosy glow of the Barrier space. Her aleimic body is so close to his that it pulls at him, winding into structures around his arms and hands.

  Revik feels his light spark out.

  He feels himself reacting, unable to stop the ripples running through his aleimi as he recognizes the distinct flavor of hers.

  They’d collared her. They’d fucking collared her…

  His connection to the room breaks.

  Her light dissipates like smoke, along with the man with whom she shares the table.

  For a long moment, he doesn’t do anything.

  Then he takes his light hands reluctantly off the Barrier signature of the metal. He finds himself staring around the dim space, the empty-seeming room. Pain runs through liquid veins of his light, and for a moment his mind feels entirely blank.

  Grief hits him, mixed with a fear that makes it hard to see clearly.

  She is here.

  She is here, and someone put a collar on her so he couldn’t find her.

  He fights with what to do. He’d be pressing his luck, trying to reach her like that again. His own light pulls at him though, asking him to do just that, asking him to sit in the chair where he knows she sits, and open to her.

  His rational mind intervenes, reminding him that Balidor likely sits less than fifty feet away. Adhipan Balidor would be monitoring the space minutely for any trace of Revik’s light. The same Adhipan Balidor is likely the person who put the collar on his wife’s neck.

  The thought brings a flush of fury.

  He steps back from the table, walking with his light feet back to the door of the room. Looking out, then down either hall, he remembers he hasn’t yet walked to the other side of the warehouse-like area that makes up the center of the catacombs. Dotted with rows of shelves filled with artifacts, bits of pottery and scrolls, that center aisle stretches the length of a city block, stone pillars holding up the walls on either side of the main archive.

  On a different day, Revik would give a fair bit to be able to explore the actual, physical shelves in this space, but right now, his focus remains strategic.

  He wanders down the corridor on the other side, cataloguing the few rooms he sees jutting off to his right. Kitchen. Another bedroom possibly. Another that could be fixed up as a cell, if the interrogation room isn’t doing double duty.

  Stopping briefly at the last of these, he concentrates again.

  Using a faint taste of Allie’s light to get back inside the construct, he stills his own, willing the view behind the illusion to reveal itself.

  After the faintest pause, he finds himself seeing the outline of yet another being he knows.

  Complicated structures spiral off the old man’s light, even in sleep. Colors reside in
his form that Revik has seen in no other, in all the years he’s spent looking at other beings from behind the Barrier’s walls.

  This seer, unlike the other two, wears no collar.

  Revik gazes down at him, his mind nearly blank.

  He has loved this person, too.

  While he knows the harm Vash has done his people from years of non-intervention, of appeasement with the humans, Revik sees the good he has done, too.

  He could kill him. He could kill the old man so easily. The ancient seer likely wouldn’t even wake up. It would be a quiet death, a painless one. One befitting of the old man’s station, and all he had contributed to the history of his people, both good and ill.

  They might not even trace it back to him.

  They could never know for certain that he’d done it, even if they did.

  For a long moment, Revik stares at the sleeping body of Vash, trying to decide what to do.

  14

  REGRET

  WREG SLUMPED INTO the seat next to him.

  They’d been en route for over six hours, but so far, Revik hadn’t interacted with any of the other infiltrators. Looking up now, he saw several others he recognized, but he only tracked a few faces before he went back to programming the virtual recorder for a second jump.

  Glancing up at Wreg, he found the older seer watching him warily.

  “You don’t look so good, brother,” Wreg observed.

  “I’m fine,” he said, dismissive.

  “Maybe you should take your mate up on her offer,” Wreg said. “Teach her a lesson.” He nodded towards a female seer leaning over to speak to one of her friends from the aisle. She laughed at something the other seer said as he watched, her hand on the back of the airplane seat.

  “Any of them would have you, brother,” Wreg said, his voice low. “Hell. You’re the fucking Sword. They would jump at the chance. At least get one of them to put their mouth on you. We’d give you privacy.”

  Revik gave him a cold look. “No, thanks, brother Wreg.”