That part wasn’t his job, either.
Buckling the last few catches in the front of his vest, Jon checked all of his pockets again once he felt his light settle into the routes and connections he knew. He pulled out the Glock from his right-hand holster, checking the chamber of the gun in rote before he shoved it back into place, keeping his fingers near to the handle for when the hatch door opened.
He reminded himself it was a double-tap, organic safety, one he’d already disengaged, so he’d be able to fire it coming out of the gate.
It was more of a reassurance thing, though, remembering that. Jon honestly didn’t know yet if he’d be using it or not. He’d been told his guns existed mainly for emergencies, that he’d be covered in that regard by the other infiltrators.
If all went according to plan, he wouldn’t have to fire it at all.
Really, they had no hope of winning a 1:1 shooting match with these people. That had never been any true part of the plan, and why would it be?
They had Syrimne.
“Fifteen seconds,” Revik said, his voice sharp.
They all stood in a line that aimed at the back entrance.
Revik stood more or less at the head of that line, with six infiltrators in front of him for cover. Allie, Balidor and Yumi stood at the back of it, with only the pilots, Jorag and Illeg, behind them. Jon had seers on all sides of him now, since some still crouched in the areas of their seats, waiting for the back hatch to open and let them all out.
Despite the cramped and close quarters, Jon grew conscious of the silence.
He reached for Balidor, knowing the senior infiltrator would be responsible for keeping enough light on the four of them for Revik to work. Jon didn’t ask where that light came from, but he had his suspicions. After all, it likely wouldn’t be coming from the other infiltrators. Telekinesis or not, Revik needed them all operating at full capacity.
“Five seconds,” Revik said.
A bump told Jon that the Chinook had touched down on the dirt ground.
Gripping the seats on either side as he swayed on his feet, Jon felt his pulse pounding sideways in his throat and chest, making his entire body vibrate.
He gripped the threads holding him to the other three, glancing one more time at Allie even as he heard the gears fire up for the back door. He couldn’t see her face anymore, but he felt her, stronger than the other two, a sharp, white light wrapped in his.
“Two seconds,” Revik said.
The hatch door at the back of the Chinook was already halfway to the ground. Sunlight poured through the opening.
Then gunfire erupted from the two seers who mysteriously stationed themselves on either side of the lowering door in front of Revik. The other six fanned out, covering every inch of where Revik and Jon stood. Jon knew they were laying covering fire, so barely tracked them as he clung more tightly to Allie’s light, tightening the shield around Revik through her with every ounce of his concentration.
Then a bolt of electricity exploded out of the seer standing in front of him.
It nearly knocked Jon down.
He gasped in shock, gripping the seats on either side of where he stood.
He hadn’t been hit. The bolt didn’t drain him, didn’t touch his own light at all––unlike the way the telekinesis had done in the past. This time, the power source came from elsewhere, from whatever pool of light Balidor channeled to Revik to keep him operating at full capacity. Even so, the sheer power behind that very first bolt nearly brought Jon to his knees.
He felt an exhilarated charge off Revik, along with a focus that put Jon in open awe.
He had an irrational urge to yell, “Fuck, yeah!” but he didn’t do that either.
Even so, adrenaline shot through his limbs, bringing an odd grin to his face.
This was it.
This was finally it.
For the first time in over one hundred years, Syrimne was fighting a war.
12
FIRST STRIKE
A FAN OF infiltrators shielded them, in front and behind.
All but a few of them stood with rifles raised, firing with a kind of synchronized precision that Jon found strangely reassuring, if only for the depth of concentration on their faces. Even so, Jon knew their jobs were mainly defensive, as odd as that seemed.
Revik crouched behind them, and behind a mobile organic shield, in addition to the segment of wall they’d taken from the ground offensive for cover.
He was the offensive team.
Revik had already personally disabled a good chunk of the SCARB and federal military’s first wave of defense. Jon didn’t even know if they were facing Shadow’s people, per se.
Revik didn’t seem to care.
Either that, or he figured that hitting them hard, and head-on, would make an effective message, no matter who bore the brunt of it. It didn’t occur to Jon until later to think about the lives involved. He was too jacked up on adrenaline and too wrapped up in Revik’s light to think about much of anything but the targets in front of them as they walked down that ramp and onto the packed-dirt landing pad.
Anyway, this was war. He’d known it would be different.
Even now, gunfire exploded out of infiltrators’ rifles on all sides, deafening him.
Jon saw uniformed soldiers firing back from foxholes in the field, as well as from the few remaining vehicles. An explosion from a rocket launcher made Jon duck in reflex. Revik hit the missile off-course with another blast of his aleimic light, working so fast it happened before Jon could even make out the thing’s exact route. Jon watched in awe as the missile slammed at breakneck speed into a row of planes, knocking them back and plowing a hole through the middle of them with a deafening screech of metal.
A bare second’s pause...
Then the first of those planes exploded, shooting up green-tinted flames. It belched white and black smoke seconds later, even as those flames shot higher, igniting the nearby trees. Jon barely had time to stare before another explosion sent his eyes forward again.
He saw the man holding the rocket launcher on fire, along with the man next to him.
Jon looked behind them, but the Chinook had already taken off.
Jon didn’t know where it had gone.
Jon was too focused on holding the shield around the telekinetic seer to think about much of anything else.
He flinched again violently, jerked back to the present when another of the armored jeeps exploded abruptly in front of him, shooting hot metal in a near-perfect ring from around the vehicle’s shell...or at least from the rear end of it, where Jon imagined the fuel tanks lived. Soldiers fell and were thrown back from both sides. Jon saw more running, presumably those who’d been using the full-sized Humvee as cover.
He winced again when two of the larger weapons cracked with loud, unnatural-sounding reports as the metal fissured. Another missile headed for them and that one plowed into the row of smoking planes as well, exploding into two more of them. Another set of gat-like guns on turrets exploded within a few heartbeats of that larger blast.
When not in danger of running out of light, Revik seemed to be able to work pretty much non-stop, without so much as a breather between hits. Gaps took fractions of a second, from what Jon could tell...less than that, in the last dozen or so targets.
If anything, those gaps shortened the longer he worked.
He didn’t seem to be tiring, either, or showing any signs of strain.
Jon glanced over at the Elaerian’s face periodically, even with his own focus obsessively on the shield he held around Revik’s light. That focus required that his attention be almost perfectly split between the resonances he shared in Allie’s light and the structures it housed and the integrity of the shield itself where it wrapped around Revik’s aleimic form.
Jon also had to be aware of any attempted incursions from the Barrier, as well as the line he held to Maygar, who crouched down behind the same wall as Revik, providing support to the other seer with hi
s telekinetic structures, even as he set off a few fires of his own.
From behind the wall, Jon knew Revik mostly used the headset for targeting, but he used his eyes, too, from where he could see through the transparent shield. He also used his light.
Maygar seemed to need to rely more on his eyes, whether via the VR in the headset or in the physical, but maybe that was psychological, too. He’d been put in charge of watching their flank, and as far as Jon could tell, he hadn’t missed much.
Maygar’s normally-dark eyes now glowed with an unearthly golden-green light, slightly different and darker than the shade of either Revik’s or Allie’s while they operated those Elaerian frequencies. Jon watched as Maygar used the VR feeds of the structure behind them to make a gun explode in the hands of a soldier who’d been heading towards them.
Jon realized only then that a segment of the SCARB team had split off from the rest, trying to get behind them, using the nearby rec center as shelter.
The explosion from Maygar’s telekinesis was smaller, cruder somehow than Revik’s were, but Jon saw Maygar flinch as it happened anyway, almost as if his own success surprised him, or bewildered him, maybe. Then Maygar sent a short impulse to Revik, letting him know about the SCARB forces that continued to regroup behind the center.
Even as Jon felt the communication pass between them, he felt another attempted hit at Revik’s light. Pulling his mind off of Maygar, Jon focused solely back on the shields.
He’d spotted a number of attempts to penetrate his and Allie’s shield already, both from the construct itself and from what felt like individual seers, working for whichever groups fought back inside the Barrier.
Jon thought he felt Cass in one of those.
He thought he felt Feigran in one, too.
Both made him flinch, particularly the probe from Cass.
Jon jerked at the contact, then pinged Balidor the same instant, just as he’d been trained to do. His alarm mostly felt wasted, though. Cass’ presence withdrew fast, pretty much the instant she touched the shield.
The sensation reminded Jon of a child touching a hot stove.
Not long after that, Jon felt glimmers of Wreg and Balidor, and knew they were likely tracking that thread back to its source, probably so they could pinpoint her location when Revik finished his...
...Well, this.
When he finished with whatever this was.
Jon flinched again at another concussive blast.
That one came from behind them, and was followed by an even louder groan of metal.
Jon peered around the larger of the two walls behind where they crouched, still gripping the shield with every conscious element in his light. Looking up, he saw that one of the back wings of the recreation center itself belched black smoke, presumably from another diverted missile. Flames rose above the roof as Jon watched, right before a second area exploded outward, raining down bricks, glass and cement, trembling the ground under Jon’s feet.
So much for the SCARB commandos trying to get behind them.
Jon felt glimmers of Revik’s light as it snaked through walls, floors and furniture remaining inside those portions of the still-standing structure. The intent there bewildered him, if only for the stripped feeling of his light, the single-mindedness of it, coupled with a technical knowledge that frankly blew his mind. The Elaerian scanned not only the organics, but the physical structure of the building itself, meaning those components most seers referred to as ‘dead.’
That included everything––rock, earth, run-of-the-mill brick, concrete, glass, stone, wood, metal, gasoline, water...even substances that couldn’t be seen by the naked eye, like natural gas, oxygen in the air, hydrogen, propane.
Revik mentioned that a few times, during the training.
He’d sounded so blasé about it at the time.
It had seemed like a detail.
Jon knew that Revik’s ability to see the physical world from the Barrier constituted one of the racial differences between Sarhaciennes and Elaerian. Sarhaciennes couldn’t see physical objects with their seer sight, no matter how highly ranked they were in actual. They could see impressions of it, sure, mostly based on imprints left there by other living beings––but they couldn’t see the physicality itself.
Elaerian could.
That ability to see the physical from inside the Barrier provided a distinct advantage when it came to telekinesis, Revik had remarked dryly, while he’d been explaining how he intended to combine and connect their aleimic structures.
Obviously, it would make it easier to pinpoint the telekinesis...Jon got that, even then, but he didn’t really get it, not until he watched Revik in action. Revik told him once that he could see the physical down to the microscopic level with his light, and even beyond that, since the limits in the Barrier were less ‘hard’ than those of the physical world.
It allowed him to split atoms, if he so desired.
Well. Theoretically, anyway... Revik added in that offhanded way of his.
Jon found the idea terrifying now––well, then too, really, but the fear had been more abstract before. Anyway, as far as he knew, Revik hadn’t actually done that, at least not that ended up in the history books, not even back when he’d been Syrimne.
The idea that he could, though, and that Allie could, in theory or otherwise, struck Jon as wrong on more than one level, even with Revik ‘on their side,’ as he ostensibly was now.
Looking around the smoking and burning field, Jon found himself thinking that Revik likely hadn’t done that so far––meaning created fission or fusion reactions with the power of his mind alone––because he hadn’t needed to. For now, Revik’s more conventional approach to weaponry seemed to be highly effective all on its own.
It was a wonder, really, Jon thought, looking around at the devastation that Revik had wrought in less than an hour’s time, that they’d ever brought him down during World War I in the first place.
Revik had the other side on the run now.
He didn’t seem to waste a lot of thought on that, either.
Jon gave him another glance, feeling the Elaerian’s attention start to move once he no longer perceived a direct threat coming from the soldiers who’d been hunkered down in front of them for the past hour. Jon felt the split in Revik’s consciousness, however, his awareness of those men and women running across the grass and into the trees, a tracking and counting of the weapons they still carried, an ongoing assessment of whether and where they were likely to regroup for a second assault, and what they might try to hit them with, if they did.
Jon could practically feel him calculating risks, odds, likely scenarios.
As he did so, Revik’s attention returned to the air strip itself.
A few of those planes already burned from diverted missiles. Even so, Jon jumped half a foot when the first small plane exploded outward.
Jon saw its wheels lift off the ground when its fuel tank ignited. The fuselage broke in half in midair, right before the pieces fell abruptly to the scorched and burning grasses just outside of the dirt oval of the main field.
The sound echoed loudly across the meadow.
It shocked Jon into a near-paralysis, even after the last hour of smaller booms and blasts, the constant rat-a-tat of automatic gunfire and the last big explosion caused by the gas lines Revik had ignited inside the recreation center itself.
Before Jon finished staring at the first plane, and the smoke and flames belching out of the hole in the Fiberglas fuselage and the shattered cockpit glass, the larger Cessna next to it went up, exploding out at twice the volume of the first.
Then a military helicopter ignited. And another.
Despite the volume of the explosions, what struck Jon more than anything was the utter lack of fanfare in the elimination of the aircraft. In some respects, it reminded him more of watching a planned demolition of a building––or perhaps, more aptly, the routine crushing of cars to make way for more space in a junkyard.
Revik continued to work systematically through each of the remaining aircraft, breaking each plane one by one before he moved to the rest of the military helicopters, and then what remained of the ground transport.
Then he moved to the ammunition storage under the ground.
The last of those created earthquakes and near-craters when they went off, but Jon also felt that underlying ‘ho-hum’ attitude of Revik’s as he did it, like ticking off another item on a checklist. Only when he finished with the weapons stores and ammunition did that sharp, green light fade slightly from the rings of his irises.
In that bare instant of relative quiet, Jon heard Revik’s mind inside their mobile construct, for the first time since they’d left San Francisco.
His message was brief, chilling in its lack of inflection.
Have the others empty the last storage locker for supplies, he sent. We’re moving on.
Understood, Jon heard from Balidor, who stood somewhere on the other side of that wall.
Revik looked at Jon then, his clear irises equally blank, sparking with the vaguest hint of that sharper, green light.
The docks next, he sent.
That time, his voice bordered on polite.
Making a strangely understated gesture with one hand, he indicated towards the nearest Humvee, which Jon realized only then that Revik spared for their use. Three or four more stood in the opening of the gate nearest to where they stood, and Jon saw seers jogging for two of those already. Revik followed after Jon once he’d started walking in that direction, and Jon found himself looking around at the burning holes in the ground, then up at the clouds formed by the columns of black smoke that doubtless could be seen all over the city.
The airstrip was pretty much gone.
He ducked his head to climb into the Humvee when Neela held open a door for him, her rifle still up and aimed at the wider field.
Allie's War Season Four Page 25