“Anything to suggest this has been tampered with?” he said then, switching back to English.
“Tampered with?” Dante let out an involuntary snort.
His eyes shifted, looking up at hers with a sharper scrutiny.
Dante shrugged. “Not tampered, Sherlock. But there’s stuff missing, yeah...” Leaning back over her keystroke flat, she scribbled in a few commands with her fingers, then used those to open up a second page with her thumbs and forefingers.
“...See that?” she said, pointing at a set of numbers. “There’s stuff missing there. File sequences are dated, see? They’ve updated everything on that block but this one. That means either the owner missed their required filing, or...” Dante shrugged.
“...Or someone pulled the record,” Balidor muttered, finishing her thought.
“Got it in one,” she said. Letting him look at it, she glanced over his back at Vikram, who gave her a tense smile. “I gotta use the ladies’,” she said. “Spare me for five?”
Vikram nodded, waving her off.
“Don’t get lost, my beautiful cousin,” he murmured, his violet eyes focusing back on the screen in front of him. “...We need you to talk to the OBE when you get back. The dog won’t bark for me...or for Anale.”
Dante only grunted, not answering as she backed away from the screen, heading for the door into the hallway. ‘Lost’ was the Vik-man’s code for telling her not to go get stoned in the bathroom. Like she’d really do that in the middle of a friggin’ military campaign...even if her stash hadn’t already been used up.
Bat’s balls, he could be an old man sometimes.
Still, he wouldn’t be happy with her if he saw her now, either.
Instead of hanging a left for the restrooms next to the company kitchens, Dante hung a right, towards the bank of elevators by the etched-glass enclosed floor lobby. She didn’t really think about how she knew where she was supposed to be going...or why she hadn’t told any of the others that she intended to go there. She tried not to think too hard about how weird it was that she’d just trust some disembodied voice in her head, either.
She did trust it, though.
Besides, the world was ending, right? If she ended up being wrong, or manipulated to dance the wig-wam for some ice-blood with a hard-on for worm meat, who really cared anyway? They might all be dead in the next few hours, anyway.
Even after the thought skirted through the background of her mind, Dante found herself glancing up and down the halls nervously after she pushed the button to call the elevators. Shoving her hands in her pockets, which just about pushed her oversized jeans down over her now significantly slimmer hips, she stood there, her foot tapping with nerves as she listened to the wind rattle the outside organic panes.
The storm they’d predicted looked to be another doozy. No surprise, really, given the weather of late, but it made her nervous. She should’ve reminded Vik to do the 1812 thing...although she supposed none of the others would really be in the mood for their weird humor, anyway. They were thinking their friends were going to get shot.
They were thinking about that Bridge chick, Allie, being dead.
As Dante stood there, muttering under her breath at the slowness of the elevators, she honestly couldn’t tell if she was more worried about being caught, or that someone might not notice her missing until it was too late.
Even as she thought it, she jumped, seeing another person walking towards her from the same corridor from which Dante herself had just come. The seer’s footsteps didn’t make a sound on the dark-gray carpet, and her narrow, light-brown, almost gold-colored eyes scarcely flickered when they saw Dante standing there.
The female walked right up to her instead, and then stopped, as if standing there, waiting for the elevator with Dante, was the most natural thing in the world.
Dante watched with some nervousness as the other woman, who happened to be Anale, pulled a gun out of her side holster and turned it sideways, examining it. Dante watched as the female seer popped the magazine from the bottom, checking the number of bullets before she popped it back in, cocked it, then handed it to Dante, handle out. Dante took it tentatively, but Anale barely seemed to notice, bending down to pull another gun from a holster by her ankle, and replacing that one in the nylon shoulder holster.
“Sixtieth?” Anale asked.
Her voice came out polite, conversational.
“Yeah,” Dante said, wary. Then, unsure what else to say, she cleared her throat. “You?”
“Sixtieth,” Anale confirmed, with a single nod, seer-fashion.
Exhaling a bit, Dante nodded back.
Still at a loss, Dante looked down at the gun she held awkwardly pointed towards the floor. She didn’t know enough about guns to know the brand or anything, but it was some kind of semi-automatic, and it had one of those organic triggers, which usually worked on intent as much as pressure. Firming her jaw slightly, she checked that same trigger (carefully!) to make sure the safety was activated, then shoved the whole thing in the back loop of her leather belt, feeling somewhat foolish but unsure what else to do with it.
She’d screwed around with guns before, sure, but not in a long time, and not very often. Mostly she’d hung around while Mavis shot off his dad’s guns in the swampy area back behind that squatter pisshole they called ‘the office,’ where they’d stashed their illegal boxes for hacks. Mavis got on macho streaks a few times, probably because his dad was some quasi-military weirdo who mostly got rich on defense contracts.
Mavis even taught her how to use a carbine once, when he ‘borrowed’ an organically modified version from his dad’s garage.
Shit, that thing had been loud.
Musing over this, and the fact that she might actually have a reason to thank Mavis, for a change, Dante jumped again when a ping came from the nearest set of elevator doors, right before the button’s light clicked off. The doors were opening then, and Dante realized she’d already committed, although she had no idea to what. Following the suddenly very military-looking seer into the empty elevator car, Dante shoved her hands deep into the pockets of her oversized jeans and decided it didn’t matter.
She was in, for good or for bad.
Remembering Vikram’s words to her before she left the room, she squelched the faint murmuring of guilt that turned her stomach queasy.
Hell, it was the apocalypse.
The Vik-man would just have to get over it.
18
TICKING CLOCK
REVIK STARED UP the front of the organic-fronted building, frowning.
He could feel the secondary construct from where he stood, although he and his team hadn’t yet left the protected confines of the park.
They stood a few feet from the wall’s edge, instead, on the opposite side of the street as the Gossett Tower building, and hidden from 79th Street itself, which bisected the park just south of where they stood. Revik and the other seers huddled behind a small row of elm trees whose leaves and branches swayed in the wind from a coming storm.
He could almost taste the charge in the cold air, along with the faint hint of electricity––well enough to know they would be in for a downpour soon.
He didn’t much care about that, either, though.
The construct captured the vast majority of his attention.
He could feel Wreg, Neela, Loki and Chinja scanning the construct, too. Gar focused on the OBE itself, which was exactly where Revik wanted him focused.
“Awful quiet, laoban,” Wreg subvocalized through the link, giving him a hard look. The muscular seer adjusted the harness of his automatic rifle, wrapping a tattooed hand around the organic-coated body of the gun.
“...I’m getting that we’re expected,” he added. “What about you?”
Revik grunted, not bothering to answer.
He glanced at Jon, who stood on the other side of Wreg. He felt a surge in the other man’s aleimi, accompanied by a pressurized feeling as the shield around his light densified once
more. He’d noticed that Jon tended to obsess on the shield when nervous, which was just fine with Revik. In terms of nervous tics, it was a damned practical one.
“Do we knock?” Neela subvocalized through the same channel.
Even through the link, Revik heard hints of a wry humor.
“He does seem to like us to,” Jon muttered, not bothering with the link. “...Dick.”
His words brought the first low chuckle to the group since they’d left the hotel.
Even Revik gave him a thin smile, although it didn’t feel overly attached to the rest of him. Still, he appreciated anything that kept his team out of a fatalistic state of mind. He certainly wasn’t capable of pulling them out of such a mental state on his own. He touched his headset on impulse, pinging Balidor through the construct in the same set of seconds.
He didn’t bother to create a private channel for the exchange.
He also didn’t bother with a greeting.
“We’re here,” he said, blunt, even through the subvocals. “Still in the park, but we’re on the doorstep.”
“Understood.”
“Any luck mapping the inside layout? Did you manage to dig up current blueprints?”
Balidor hesitated. Revik felt the pause more than heard it.
“What?” he said, sharp.
The other seer shook his head. Revik saw the gesture clearly through the VR, but he also picked up on the vague feeling of being shielded from the other man’s light. Before he could ask the question again, Balidor broke the silence, his voice businesslike, matter-of-fact.
“We’ve got preliminary specs for you, sir,” he said, his voice reluctant. “I’m afraid they aren’t overly promising. The blueprints were out of date. Dante didn’t suspect tampering, per se...but we think the new ones got pulled or destroyed. We’ve been able to make some educated guesses using the older blueprints and by mapping the Barrier imprints, as well as the design of the construct itself, particularly its defensive features. We’re seeing evidence that a secondary construct outside the primary protection grid contains multiple layers, however, which makes it difficult to map the physical in relation to it, since at least part of its functioning seems to be to obscure and distort those very physical features...”
Hesitating again, Balidor clicked softly through the link, his voice holding anger.
“We’re seeing a lot of these obfuscations, Illustrious Sword. The structure we’ve mapped is of similar make and complexity to what we saw in Argentina. There’s a primary construct that organizes the rest, like what we saw in Argentina, too. It may or may not be tied to the construct over Manhattan, which none of us can still see worth a damn, although the structural points you provided help in terms of mapping some of the stronger currents. The construct around the Tower is also grounded in the Barrier itself, though, and not to the specific physical features of the building or any of the surrounding land...or even solely to the construct over the city. I have to assume that they’re using that same main pillar for this...”
“The one that’s not Menlim?” Revik clarified.
“Yes, sir.”
Pausing more meaningfully that time, Balidor added, “...The densest of these structures are housed in the sub-basement, sir. We’re now estimating that this same sub-basement extends a good ten stories underground.”
Revik glanced at Wreg, knowing he was hearing this.
The Chinese-looking seer clicked in irritation, staring at the street, as if to try and see through it to the basement levels below.
“The basement,” Revik muttered. “Perfect.”
“Yes, laoban,” Balidor said, startling Revik slightly by using the more informal moniker for ‘boss’ that Wreg normally used. “...I am guessing that is not an accident.”
Revik’s frown turned into something closer to a scowl.
The others knew of his dislike of enclosed, underground spaces. Balidor definitely knew...so did Wreg. The only ones to ever tease him about it openly had been Wreg and Allie, and even they had been careful how they broached jokes on that subject.
Revik hadn’t even liked traveling the sewers with Allie before and after their bank heist, although he’d been the one to suggest that approach, knowing it made the most sense. He kept the entry point short for that reason. When they ended up wandering in those tunnels for hours afterwards, avoiding NYPD and SCARB and whoever else after he’d been forced to blow his way through the safe walls, Revik nearly blanked out on her a few times, even apart from his lack of light and overall disorientation from being wounded. Like a rabbit caught in headlights, his mind just...stopped working. Or stopped working well, anyway.
Revik knew at least part of that came from being underground too long.
He’d been with her that time, too, and immersed in her light. He never would have been able to do that on his own. He would have been forced to surface a lot sooner, even if it meant calling for backup from Wreg or Balidor or whoever else...or fighting his way back to the hotel.
He’d never told her that, but he wondered if she knew.
Guessed, anyway.
He’d deliberately given Wreg that part of the op in São Paulo, too, when they went after the Registry mainframe. Just like with the bank job, he’d known after looking at the blueprints that their main access point had to be underground. He didn’t talk about it, but anyone who’d worked with him for any amount of time knew this about him.
Menlim knew it better than anyone. He’d been the one to create that phobia, as well as the one to turn it into something nearly debilitating when it grew prolonged.
“Recommendation for approach?” Revik said, his voice toneless.
“You’re going to have to go down, Nenz.”
Revik felt his fingers tighten around the gun he held. “No shit. Sewers? Front door? Side entrance? Can you tell anything from the construct?”
“The OBE is stronger underground.” Balidor hesitated. “...My recommendation at this point, given the small amount we know, would be the front door. I am basing that on the overall construct layout and design, which seems to have been fortified to ensure much more limited access from below. But Nenz,” Balidor said, his voice holding more emotion. “You’re going to hit some mazes in there. It looks like the same hall of mirrors we saw in that house in Patagonia. Perhaps even worse, since there seems to be an additional layer of construct over the downstairs alone, one that’s potentially geared towards hiding any departures.”
“They’ve got their own access point down there you mean?” Revik said, to clarify.
“Yes.”
“Fuck. What? Water? Some kind of amphibious vehicle?”
“Unknown.”
Balidor paused again, obviously looking at something, either on a screen or in the Barrier. Revik found himself biting back impatience by the time the other man next spoke.
“...I’m not seeing any evidence of us getting cut off in there, Nenz,” Balidor added. “Not yet. But it’s a distinct possibility. You’d better take whatever imprints we have now...”
“Send it to everyone on the team,” Revik said at once.
Immediately, several multi-dimensional and non-dimensional maps of the Barrier structures around the Tower reached him in a rapid-fire, highly detailed series of snapshots.
As he looked them over with the higher structures in his aleimi, Revik couldn’t entirely squelch a denser pain that rose in his gut. He knew the reaction to be pure emotion, not related to logic in any way, but he couldn’t suppress it entirely, either. He knew both Balidor and Wreg felt it, the latter of whom gave him a worried glance.
Even Jon turned to stare at him. Revik could see Jon’s pale face aimed at his through the waving shadows of the tree branches, which filtered the lone streetlight that must be running on the same set of generators powering the Tower itself.
Revik forced himself to focus on the area of the map where he knew he’d likely find Cass and Terian...and his child, too, potentially. Something told him not to exp
ect Menlim in the same place as the other two, meaning Terian and Cass. Based on what Jon said and theorized about Cass’s motives, Cass would want to handle a lot of this herself.
Revik suspected Menlim would indulge her in that regard. Or, more likely, that he would let her think he was indulging her, as he worked his own machinations behind the scenes. Revik didn’t know if Terian would be with Cass or not, but he suspected yes.
They might possibly give the child to Menlim to guard, but Revik found himself doubting that, too. Cass would want the child with her.
Revik’s light found the densest configuration of construct points.
His first thought was, Jesus. Balidor really hadn’t been exaggerating about the basement.
Staring at the revolving, thread-laden and hyper-detailed diagrams, Revik grunted again.
“What about personnel?” he subvocalized. “I’m not seeing many.”
“We’re assuming most of them must be cloaked,” Balidor said.
Revik glanced at Wreg, who answered his frown with one of his own.
“We thought that in South America, too,” Wreg observed, clicking again softly. “Is it possible it will be an empty nest again, Adhipan?”
“Anything is possible,” Balidor said. “...But I am thinking not. This feels different, even from the small glimpses we’ve gotten. They must know you wouldn’t go in, not unless you had good reason to believe them to be in there.”
Revik exchanged another look with Wreg, who answered him with a scowl. Sighing a bit, Revik nodded, letting Balidor see it.
“So we won’t know for sure until we get inside,” he said.
Balidor’s voice held regret. “Likely not. I only hope you will know for sure then, given the complexity of some of these construct elements...”
There was another silence. Revik tried to think through it, but again got distracted by something he could feel in the less-obvious flares from Balidor’s light. Honing in on that ripple deliberately that time, he smacked the other seer sharply with his light. He felt Balidor’s reaction even through the relative distance of the link.
Allie's War Season Four Page 37