Loki nodded, sending a pulse of approval. “Good. Very good.”
“I should have mentioned it earlier, sir,” she said apologetically. “I only thought of it now, to be truthful.”
He clicked at her mildly, but only smiled.
“I will mention it to the Sword,” he offered.
“Like hell, you will,” she retorted.
Smiling faintly at what he heard in her voice, he touched his headset, sending a subvocal check around to to each team member, even as the props of the Chinook behind them continued to grind to a half power-down, moving slower over the grass as the whine of the rotors lowered in volume and tone.
He appreciated Kalgi’s sentiment. He could feel they were all essentially pulling for him, since Loki himself had only recently been assigned to lead teams on the ground. The thought struck him, how strange this might have been to all of them, even a few years earlier, with Kalgi, an ex-Adhipan lifer, taking orders from him, Loki, who fought as a Rebel in two wars.
Loki found the symmetry there pleasing.
Something in it felt more like a circle than otherwise.
Giving Kalgi and Anale a last glance and smile, he raised his rifle, following the others towards the ground entrance into the oval hallway.
THE SWORD GAVE Loki only the bare bones of where to look.
Truthfully, from the encrypted recording Oli sent, Loki could not be certain whether the Sword knew if there was anything to find, much less where it might be. Still, Loki understood the logic of looking, since they were all unlikely to be in this part of the world again, at least any time soon. They had found as many from the Lists as could be found here.
Loki wasn’t entirely clear what the Sword hoped to find, even apart from whether or not it might be likely or possible. When Loki attempted to probe Oli for additional information, purely for operational purposes, she said the boss was even more reticent than usual. The Sword admitted to her, after some roundabout discussion, that he’d received the information from his wife, and that she wasn’t currently available for him to ask further questions of her.
Loki found that odd, for several reasons.
Oli did, too, and proceeded to tell Loki so.
He knew better than to rise to such bait, or to speculate aloud as to the private life of his intermediaries––but he could not stop himself from hearing it, or agreeing with Oli that it was odd, given that rarely were the two of them seen apart these days.
The Sword’s encrypted message had been precise in two critical areas.
One: he was able to tell Loki the rough area where this thing might be located, even if he’d been uncertain of the specifics. Two: he was able to tell Loki how to access that thing, assuming he and the others managed to find the specific place the thing was located.
So nebulous, yes––but with enough to go on, Loki felt confident they might succeed in retrieving this thing anyway, particularly if one of the Bridge’s visions was involved. He might be more superstitious than many of the seers on this mission, but he knew they would agree the Bridge had an impressive track record when it came to her prescience.
They entered the portico with no problems.
They found the elevator shortly after.
Riding it down to the sub-basement levels, Loki could not help the emotional impact he felt, related to where they were. He had railed against, fought wars against, and cursed the denizens of this building off and on over the years, but his primary feeling now was one of sorrow, even nostalgia.
Good and evil had seemed so much simpler even just fifty years ago.
He glanced at Anale, who crouched on the floor of the elevator by the open control panel. A thick, sticky bundle of glowing, jelly-like wires spilled out of the opening and into the hands of her and Ontari, who worked beside her, fingering through components, or “squids,” as the techs called organic wiring.
Between them sat a portable power source, which pulsed an eerie, red-orange light. That same power source got the elevator car moving; unfortunately, it also triggered a good number of the attendant security protocols. The car had already screeched to a halt in the shaft twice. Loki and Jax were forced to access a secondary organics panel through the back wall to override and fool the ID scans into thinking they belonged here.
Luckily, the gas contingency had been disabled, or they might have spent a lot longer in that elevator car––waking up with hangovers and with their comms going crazy from them having diverted from mission parameters by six to ten hours, assuming the gas didn’t kill them. The less dramatic scenario would have left them trapped between floors until they figured out a different means of traveling the shaft, likely by cutting through the elevator car floor.
Loki suspected any course they took would ignite security measures, though. The boss already warned him they might still have back-up power sources and surveillance below ground. If nothing else, they’d potentially trigger alarms for secret service agents no longer located on site, but who might be monitoring the location from bunkers housed elsewhere.
Something about having those remnants of organic security systems continuing on in their tasks, oblivious to the absence of their masters, struck Loki as eerie.
He sensed he wasn’t the only one to feel unnerved by the silence of the surrounding Barrier space. Jax had been making jokes for the last ten minutes as the elevators descended––a nervous tic that used to be more pronounced in the young seer, but had become unusual since he was injured during the Gossett Towers op in New York.
Loki had already wondered if the Sword and Balidor assigned Jax to this mission for that very reason. Jax had been noticeably changed by whatever happened to him in New York, and Loki suspected it wasn’t only because he’d been shot and nearly died of light loss and loss of blood.
All of them had noticed the difference in him.
More than a few attempted to talk to him, but Loki couldn’t be sure to what success. He knew Jax had been ordered by the Sword to see Yumi regularly, to assist him in dealing with the trauma he’d suffered. The Sword informed Loki of that fact, and that they were monitoring Jax’s light periodically via central infiltration, when he put Jax under Loki’s command.
Such disclosures were usual with commanding officers. The Adhipan apparently had a long history of seeing to its own in that way, probably because for many thousands of years, they had no choice.
Holo had done the most to try and pull Jax back into his former, jovial self, but between the death of Garensche and his lingering injury, Jax still seemed to be in a kind of ongoing shock, months after they’d left the Tower and Manhattan behind.
Even now, his dark, East Indian features held a harder expression than the smile on his lips suggested, and Loki saw the dense, haunted look behind those dark violet eyes. Hearing Jax attempt to joke around with the rest of them, when his eyes, voice and light clearly showed him to not be fully engaged in those jokes, was more unnerving than it was reassuring, truthfully.
Even Holo seemed to think so.
Instead of laughing, he only smiled at Jax’s comments, watching the other seer’s face.
Keep an eye on him, Loki sent. Let me know if you notice anything.
Holo looked up. He nodded after studying Loki’s eyes.
He’ll be fine, Holo sent.
It is not criticism, brother. Concern only, I assure you.
Something in Holo’s eyes relaxed, right before he gave another seer’s nod.
Loki kept his light attuned to his, to Jax’s––to all of theirs now––as they continued to descend.
When the elevator came to a stop a few minutes later, the security protocol switched back on, bathing them in a dense electrical field as their physiological idents got scanned by the machines. They should all come up positive now, thanks to the comp-hacks, but Loki didn’t move while the scans took place, and he glanced at Illeg where she continued to monitor the open back panel.
Checking the specs the Sword provided, Loki nodded when Anale ga
ve him a glance. Without a word aloud, the team split, four and five to either side of the doors, rifles up.
Anale triggered the correct tendrils in the squids to open the door.
Loki had a light tap on the construct now. He used that tap to pull his team up slightly, to give them a view of their immediate Barrier surroundings in the underground bunker.
Mostly, he looked for life forms.
As Sarks, Loki and the rest of his team had to depend on living things and the imprints of living things to understand their environment––although the dense organics he could feel in some of the walls down here would certainly help.
It was one large disadvantage of not having Syrimne, the Bridge, or Syrimne’s son, Maygar, with them, or in the infiltration team backing them up.
They’d all grown somewhat spoiled from having that additional layer of sight.
“You still with me, Yumi?” he subvocalized.
“We are here, brother. The Barrier space is clear where you are. Are you seeing anything different, from your location?”
“No, sister,” he said. “We are not.”
He could feel nothing down here.
On the upper floors he’d felt humans, squatters from the feel of their light. He’d counted around thirty living and sleeping above the ground floor, separate from the half-dozen or so they’d already scared off upon entering through the back portico with their rifles. None felt like anything but civilians. He got no ties to SCARB, to Shadow, to any of the militaries whose imprints he knew. All of their lights felt haphazard, disorganized.
He knew those characteristics could be faked, of course.
Still, no seers appeared to be living here, meaning in the White House or its surrounding environs. As a result, the humans had been easy enough to push, which Loki ordered his team to do mainly to avoid unnecessary deaths. He knew using their light in such a way posed a different set of risks, if anyone were watching from the Barrier, but Yumi agreed the risk was an acceptable one, perhaps even a small one.
Anyway, the Sword told Loki to use his own discretion.
Seeing his team surrounded by hungry and irrational-looking humans, and feeling nothing in the way of a living construct or the presence of other seers, the choice seemed a simple one. It was that, or mow down the more dangerous-seeming humans with automatic weapon fire, which carried its own risks, not the least of which being to his soul, and the souls of those on his team.
He could only hope the Sword would agree.
Down here, he felt no one––which wasn’t particularly surprising.
No stairs led to these floors from the levels above, and only one elevator led deeper into the earth’s crust, the one in which they currently crouched. A secondary exit existed below, according to revised plans provided by the Sword, and emergency stairs provided access between the lower sub-basement floors and that exit, but they were cut off from the upper structure totally without the elevator.
Additionally, the Sword warned Loki they’d likely be cut in half by force fields triggered by motion sensors, if they tried to rappel up or down the shafts without finding all of the secondary security measures. He warned many of those would come equipped with independent power sources that might be difficult to find without an Elaerian with them on the ground.
Suffice it to say, the sub-basements made an unlikely refuge for human squatters.
Changing channels on his headset, he pinged Yumi’s team back at the aircraft carrier.
“Still nothing?” he said.
“Nothing, brother,” she confirmed. “The construct is dead. I just ran the imprints by Balidor, and he found nothing remotely like what Shadow had in either New York or Argentina.”
Nodding, as much to himself as to the seer on the line, he motioned for the others to begin leaving the elevator car in pairs. They walked out, two by two, with him and Anale holding the elevator car and its organics for the others.
There was a very long-feeling silence.
Then Illeg’s voice rose on the comm.
“Clear.”
“Clear,” Ontari seconded from further down the hall.
“Clear,” Holo confirmed, from an open doorway closer to the elevator doors.
A few more all-clears sounded in his headset as Loki felt the seers in front of him begin to fan out and explore secondary corridors and attached rooms. He monitored the careful touches of their light, sending the construct a snapshot of the offices at the end of the hall, with particulars of the room the Sword had shown him.
He motioned for Anale to follow him, then entered the pitch blackness of the cement block corridor. Once the doors closed behind them, he doubted he’d ever walked in a darkness so complete.
Physical darkness did not handicap seers the way it did humans. Seers could use their Barrier sight to compensate, providing enough imprints lived on the surrounding surfaces to allow them to make out their outlines. Ordinary seers could get no insight into the objects themselves––but they could at least avoid walking into them.
Pitch darkness like this still affected them, however––psychologically, that is.
Like now, Loki couldn’t see the corridor walls.
He could feel imprints, some in the shape of fingerprints, handprints, but most just vague touches of life and light, including those left behind by the air breathed out by so many living bodies moving through this space. Compared to a city street, or even an area where animals and insects proliferated, the imprint layer was light, a faint glow, but the sheer accumulation over time left a blurred outline approximating the walls, floor and ceiling for him to follow.
He could see the much brighter lights of his team in the corridors up ahead, and in some of the rooms to either side as they checked each one methodically. He could see organics in some of the walls, too, like faintly shimmering threads that stood probably an inch or two deeper than the physical limits of the outer walls.
The organics appeared so dense in some areas, they ran like blood-engorged veins through all four surfaces of the corridor, giving him an incomplete view of the dimensions of the physical structure, but a view nonetheless.
“Corridor, second right,” he said through the sub-vocals. “Fourth door down on the left. Should be a dead-metal, key button security panel under a flip switch on the outside. The secondary will engage after you open that. Organic––retinal scanner, possibly face-rec or other ID.” Pausing as he felt Ontari and Illeg approach the appropriate door, he added, “If you can’t hack the squids, we may have to use charges.”
Loki continued to make his way down the corridor, feeling Anale behind him, and Kalgi and Holo just ahead, following Rex.
“Report?” he queried the others.
He could feel and see Illeg and Ontari jacking open the dead-metal panel.
“Still clear,” Holo said.
“Clear,” Rex confirmed, peering into a doorway to what felt to Loki like a large conference room. It contained an enormous, real-wood table that shimmered with the remnants of the tree’s light, as well as at least twenty, leather, high-backed chairs.
Loki felt Rex’s aleimi pan slowly through the room, sharing a snapshot with the others. Through him, Loki felt the denser, more complex imprints contained in the light still flickering in the four corners of the room.
They’d had important meetings in here, when humans still roamed these halls.
Loki almost wondered if he should call that in, ask the bosses back at the carrier if they wanted him to try and collect more on what had occurred down here.
Yumi’s voice rose in his headset at once.
“Adhipan Balidor says no,” she said, sounding suddenly very far away. “Complete primary goal and get out. Boss says to hurry it up, too. He doesn’t like some of the signatures in the area. He thinks someone might have been tipped off that you’re down there.”
“Understood,” Loki said.
He knew by “boss,” his Sark sister meant Balidor that time, not the Sword. He couldn’t feel t
he Sword at all anymore, and suspected he was not participating in the op at this stage.
“Correct,” Yumi said. “Do you need him? He’s under…” She hesitated, as if stopping herself from saying something she shouldn’t. “…He’s indisposed,” she finished. “But I could try to pull him, if you need him.”
Loki shook his head, feeling Illeg’s pulse of satisfaction as she broke through the key in the door’s lock.
“No,” he said, watching with his light as they opened the door. “Negative. We’ll be in and out, as requested. Tell Adhipan Balidor I’ll report again once we know what we have.”
He continued to follow Illeg and Ontari’s light, watching as they entered the room beyond the security panel. Holo and Jax now held point over the door as the other two went inside, covering them with their rifles.
Loki caught up with them in the physical seconds later. He could see all four bright lights scarce meters away. He’d already passed Rex, Kalgi and Mika on the way towards the door, and he could feel Anale close behind him.
“Report?” he sent through the sub-vocals.
“You’d better come in here, sir,” Illeg replied.
Loki was at the door. Keeping his rifle raised, he walked inside, scanning the room in rote before lowering the muzzle.
He could see what Illeg wanted him to see.
In front of him, the faint outline of a picture or other wall hanging stood out on the far wall, covered with different sets of hand and fingerprints, especially on one side, where it appeared it had been touched or grabbed more frequently.
Behind those duller, more static imprints, Loki could see tendrils snaking in complicated trails through the wall, with thicker, more vein-like, gold and green branches than what he’d seen in the hallway outside. Seeing Illeg grin at him through the Barrier, only a few feet away, Loki allowed himself a small smile.
He whistled quietly, making Ontari chuckle.
The safe was exactly where the Sword told him to look.
The Bridge’s vision was eerily accurate, even compared to track-scans by teams of infiltrators––for targets that were known and could be identified through the living subjects associated with them in realtime.
Prophet: Bridge & Sword Page 16