Prophet: Bridge & Sword

by JC Andrijeski

  Loki felt Balidor’s team now, too, fighting in the Barrier against seers working alongside the SEALs. He felt the Adhipan overpowering those seers even as he ran. Then Balidor’s people were helping them actively, shielding them from attacks, pushing the aim of human soldiers off track enough to give them a window.

  Even so, Loki felt the humans scrambling around the fallen SEAL with the RPG, fighting to untangle it from where he lay.

  Loki felt fliers coming, too, mechanical security bots.

  He knew most would be equipped with armor piercing bullets and even grenades, depending on their size and capability.

  But the window might just be big enough.

  They were barely twenty yards from the Chinook, and Loki thought with some amazement that his team might actually get out of this alive.

  Then, something hit him really hard in the head.

  Everything around Loki went dark.

  19

  RESTLESS NIGHTS, RESTLESS MORNINGS

  I FOUGHT MY way back to consciousness, beating back fleeing flickers of dream.

  Reluctance lived there––although if I was reluctant to leave those glimpses of light and dark, the heat of memory and loss around things that hadn’t even happened yet, or if I was reluctant to feel any of those things in the first place, I honestly couldn’t tell.

  In the end, full consciousness came with a full-body jerk.

  I don’t know if I felt something in those last few seconds prior to waking, or if it was just nervous energy.

  I do know when I jerked, I hurt my arm.

  Squinting up at the ceiling in a rectangular room, lit only around the baseboards by a dim, blue-green glow, I fought to focus my eyes. It occurred to me as I did, our new “quarters” on the carrier stretched barely larger than the bathroom that came with our shared suite in New York.

  That kind of thing didn’t bother me, but I wondered if it bothered Revik.

  Given how he’d grown up, he’d always been significantly more poverty-conscious than me, in ways that sometimes baffled me until I untangled their sources. He also suffered from pretty severe claustrophobia.

  Sighing, I started to pull in my hand, intending to comb the hair out of my face.

  My arm jerked, stopped.

  I looked up.

  Someone had cuffed my wrist to the wall.

  I stared at it. More cautiously, I tested the restraint, tugging on the organic cuff, one end of which closed around an eyebolt someone programmed directly into the wall. When the loop of green metal didn’t alter on its own, I tried a few passwords.

  When that didn’t work, I tried hacking the organism itself, using my light.

  Something shocked me.

  It actually… shocked my light.

  It didn’t hurt really, but it forced me out of that part of my light.

  I stared up at the cuff, frowning, sure I must be mistaken, although the truth behind that was already pooling somewhere in the back of my mind. The bare facts of my situation raised conclusions I both doubted and began to winnow down in terms of what this was––what it had to be, given the extremely small number of people who could have done this to me.

  I stared at the eyebolt again, looking at it harder with my sight, meaning my aleimic sight, my seer sight, not just my eyes.

  Again, I got shocked.

  Muttering to myself, I finally said, fuck this, and tried to use the telekinesis.

  The shock was stronger that time.

  I lay there, panting, staring up at the damned thing. It still hadn’t really hurt, but I hadn’t been able to work the telekinesis through that shock, either.

  Two more things occurred to me.

  One, I was completely naked.

  Two, I was alone in our smallish compartment of the tank.

  Remembering the night before brought a liquid coil of pain, enough to close my eyes, to cut my breath. Images flickered through my mind––his fingers in my hair, gripping me against him as I gave him head. He’d still been wearing most of that damned suit, even as he used the telekinesis on me from behind. He’d talked a lot––making demands mostly, cajoling, teasing. He kept me from coming for what felt like hours, finally ending with his arms around me from behind, his hands wrapped around me as he leaned his whole weight into me, forcing me into the mattress, forcing my legs as wide as he could.

  Something about when he did that, when he put all his weight on me, all his light in me, going as deep as he could with his body, his face pressed to mine from behind––

  Pain blinded me a second time as I remembered what he’d done with his light. My eyes closed; my light snaked around the room, looking for his.

  He definitely wasn’t there.

  It wasn’t the first time I’d woken up in here in pain, with him gone. It was, without a doubt, the first time I’d woken up in here chained to the wall.

  Still biting back pain, I looked around until my eyes settled on the metal table to my left. On it lay a headset earpiece––not mine––and what looked like a handwritten note. Even from where I lay, I recognized the precise, all-caps print.

  Twisting my body around, I stretched over to that side of the bed, my wrist still bolted to the wall, and scooped up the note with my free hand, snatching it up from where he had it propped up against the lamp.

  It read, Getting breakfast. Wall monitor is up, if you’re bored.

  Staring at the handwriting I now recognized even more clearly, even down to his quirky p’s and b’s, which bordered on cursive, maybe even calligraphy, I felt my disbelief turn into a more complex array of reactions, most of which lived and warred somewhere between puzzlement, involuntary amusement and outrage.

  Looking back over my shoulder, I yanked on the cuff a few more times, scanning it.

  When I got too close to the mechanism again with my light, it shocked me.

  I stretched back over to the small night table.

  Scooping up the headset carefully with my fingers, I fitted it around the outside of my ear, flicking it on with a voice command and sending an impulse without waiting for it to queue up.

  After what felt like a long pause, he picked up.

  Even before he had, my pain worsened again, making me grit my teeth.

  “Dehgoies,” he said.

  I couldn’t feel his light. I very clearly heard the humor in his voice, however.

  “What the fuck is this?” I said. “…Husband?”

  I heard his smile widen. “I’m getting us food.”

  Pausing at my silence, he cleared his throat.

  “We’re meeting to talk about Dubai at two. I set it up with Balidor. I hope you don’t mind.”

  I didn’t. He was nominally in charge of military functions anyway, and this definitely fell into extraction territory.

  “What time is it now?” I said.

  “Ten.”

  “Is Jon going to be there?”

  “Yes. They’ve got him patched up. He might be a little out of it, but Wreg assured me they’d both be there.”

  I felt myself relax, but only marginally.

  We’d only just gotten Jon back a few weeks ago. That op at Macau was the first he’d been on since he and Wreg came out of hibernation––which seemed to take forever, by the way. Even Balidor grumbled about it a few times, wanting Wreg’s ear for this or that, and I’d heard Revik grumble about not having Jon’s input at more than one strategy meeting.

  We carried on without them just fine, of course, but I wasn’t thrilled at the prospect of losing Jon again so soon, no matter what the reason.

  “How’s Lily?” I said.

  I knew without asking he would have gone to see her, too.

  “She’s fine.” His voice held more warmth. “Asked about you, of course, but I told her mommy’s lying in bed like a lazy slug.”

  I burst out in a laugh. “You did not.”

  “Okay. Maybe not.”

  “Anyway, if I’m a lazy slug today, it’s entirely your fault.”

&
nbsp; “Gods, I hope so.” He paused, as if contemplating saying more, or maybe what to say. His voice grew overtly polite. “I hope you slept well. Better than me, anyway. I tried to leave you alone once you were out.”

  Despite his polite tone, I heard the added heat in his voice. Since I couldn’t feel him, it only frustrated me.

  Biting my lip, I shook my head, changing the subject.

  “You have everyone calling her Lily now, you know,” I said, faintly accusing. “I hope you know, you’ve de facto changed the name of our daughter. After you were the one to name her.”

  He only smiled through the link, clicking at me softly.

  Truthfully, though, it was my fault, as much as his.

  I had everyone calling her “Lilai,” short for “baby girl” in Prexci, after we first rescued her from the Tower. When Revik and I decided to name her “Elyashi,” after his sister who died, somehow “Lilai” and “Elyashi” morphed into “Lily.”

  Only Balidor called her anything else, and that might have been pure, old-fashioned stubbornness. He called her by her full name, Elyashi.

  Thinking of that only reminded me about the other thing that was bothering me, though. Frowning, I stared at the wall that separated our compartment from Lily’s.

  “I want a date from him,” I said. “A real one.”

  It didn’t occur to me until after that I hadn’t included Revik in my thought process up until then––or that he couldn’t read me, given the closed construct of the tank.

  He followed my train of thought anyway.

  “We’ll get one.” His voice held even more warmth, along with a softer assurance. “We can talk to ‘Dori about that today, if you want, wife.”

  I nodded, but my frown only deepened.

  Lily hadn’t been out of the tank once since she’d come on board the aircraft carrier. I knew she was climbing the walls in there. Further, she needed to play with other kids, and run around, and see things that weren’t just on screens, or in VR. I hated her being locked up in there like a prisoner. She was hardly ever alone, but that wasn’t exactly the same thing.

  Hell, maybe she wanted to be alone sometimes.

  Maybe she didn’t want a bunch of seers watching her every move, 24/7, like she was some precious artifact.

  Maybe she just wanted to be a little girl.

  When Revik didn’t say anything for a few seconds more, I glanced at my wrist cuffed to the wall. I debated whether I wanted to get into it with him on the link, especially since there was a good chance we might be overheard by security. Pretty much everything went through security these days.

  “What were you dreaming about last night?” Revik said, pulling me out of my own head. “You were restless for hours.”

  I frowned, thinking, staring at the foot of the bed.

  “Dubai,” I said, half-surprised at my own answer. “I was dreaming about Dubai.”

  I heard him smile. “I know.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Was I talking in my sleep again?”

  The smile returned. “Yes.”

  “But you’re not going to tell me what I said?”

  Briefly, his voice grew serious. “Not right now.”

  There was another silence. That one felt more loaded.

  “Was there anything else, wife?” he said innocently.

  Shaking my head, I clicked softly. I let my voice get softer, too.

  “We’re going to have words, you know. When you get back.” I paused. “Unless you plan on leaving me here the rest of the day while you wander around the ship without me… baiting me long distance about dreams I may or may not have had.”

  He chuckled openly at that.

  Listening to him, I bit my lip, frustrated that I couldn’t feel his light.

  “Are you alone?” I said finally.

  “No.”

  “Do they know you chained your wife to a wall?”

  He clicked at me softly, but I could hear something in it that time, something I almost recognized, enough that it brought up another coil of pain.

  “I wanted to know where you were,” he said.

  “You wanted to know where I…” I trailed, again fighting competing impulses for laughter and outrage. “You could have brought me with you, you freakin’ weirdo!”

  “I didn’t want to disturb you,” he said, his voice still innocent. “You were tired. You haven’t been sleeping enough.”

  “What if the ship got attacked?”

  “I can unlock you from here.”

  That stumped me a little. “You can?”

  He clicked at me. That time, I could almost hear him rolling his eyes.

  And yeah, he was right. He was contingency guy. He also took paranoia to the level of an art form. He would never leave me like this if he couldn’t free me if something happened.

  “What if you got knocked out?” I said, still fighting annoyance.

  “I have a check-in switch timed. It would unlock you automatically if I didn’t respond.”

  “What if you died?” I retorted.

  “Then you’re dead anyway, wife,” he said, smiling.

  I bit my lip, fighting a curse. He seemed to pick up on that, too.

  “I told you I wouldn’t be reasonable about this, love.”

  “Reasonable?” I snorted. “Since when have you ever been reasonable about anything, husband? Do you plan to come back anytime soon, at least?”

  “Of course.” I heard him smile again.

  Feeling anger win out briefly over amusement, I let my voice grow sharper. “Are you seriously punishing me? For what? The Macau thing going south? Or just for being abducted and nearly killed last year?”

  There was a silence.

  “Nearly killed?” he queried innocently. “Did you just say nearly, wife?”

  I bit my lip. Then, snorting a little, I exhaled, clicking up at the ceiling. Before I could answer directly, he continued in a more serious voice.

  “…And no, wife. Not punishing.” He seemed to think about my words for a few seconds more. “Punishing… no.”

  “Then, what?” I said, exasperated. “Is this just getting you off?”

  He chuckled, not answering at first. I almost felt him glance around the room.

  “Did I mention I’m not alone?” he said.

  “You did mention that,” I grumbled.

  “Any requests for breakfast?” he said, after a pause. His voice had that maddeningly innocent tone again.

  “No.” I said, still grumbling. After a pause, I changed my mind. “Wait,” I amended. “Fruit. If there is any. Blueberries, preferably. Bananas.”

  “Coffee?”

  I rolled my eyes, letting my weight collapse back on the mattress. “Do you even need to ask?”

  “I fixed the wall monitor,” he said, after another pause. “I’ll be back soon.”

  Before I could protest, he switched off. I tried to raise him again, but hit dead air.

  He must have turned the damned thing off.

  Rearranging my shoulders as best I could, I shoved a pillow under my upper back before taking off the earpiece and tossing it back on the night stand. I looked to the featureless wall on my left, specifically the segment over Revik’s desk.

  A few paper books sat on the desk, along with a wristband comp he wore some days, particularly if he happened to be coordinating a lot with Vikram. His urele lay next to the books, probably from training sessions he’d been conducting with Maygar.

  The toolset he’d had out most of the week to fix the monitor was gone.

  Frowning at the blank wall, I remembered our aborted conversation of the night before––specifically, about that seer we’d run into at Macau, Dalejem.

  Revik hadn’t said much.

  I didn’t get the sense he was keeping things from me for some sinister reason; he more seemed uninterested in anything but sex by the time I got back here. Now that it was a new day, and neither of us were dealing with post-op sexual frustration, or subsequent adrenaline cr
ashes, I’d have to reassess my tactics.

  Realistically, though, I knew the sex thing would probably be a distraction for a while. We both still seemed to be having… adjustment issues… after everything that happened the year before. It was easy to blame that on Revik, but I knew it wasn’t all him.

  Sighing, I leaned into the pillow, using a voice command in Prexci to turn on the wall monitor. Immediately, the greenish, glass-like surface morphed.

  Flickering images rose, sharpened.

  We’d been getting crappy reception in here for weeks––some glitch with the security re-routing. He must have worked out with Vikram and Dante what the problem was.

  The black market feeds came up first.

  Instead of the hundreds of thousands––possibly even millions––of stations filling the airwaves prior to the C2-77 outbreak, only a dozen or so human stations remained. Each covered news in some fashion, even the black market feeds, which streamed headlines beneath auction and fixed-price merchandise lists. A few had pretty blatant agendas, though, and a lot of crazy rhetoric attached, both ideological and religious.

  One channel had a primarily Third Myth cast to it.

  Another belonged to an extremist Christian faction. That one advocated the open murder of seers by all “true believers.” According to Loki, one of the Middle Eastern stations had a radical Islamic bent and advocated most of the same things as the extremist Christians.

  Another station with an iffy political slant came out of China, but wasn’t endorsed by the Chinese government, or any of the mainstream Chinese news sources. They, too, broadcasted a lot of conspiracy-theory stuff––less aimed at seers than at other human civilizations.

  In addition to feeds, our ship had a decent stock of recorded material. Balidor told me even more existed in storage that hadn’t yet been added to the ship’s library.

  The regular comp-ops couldn’t afford to spend time doing that kind of work, of course. Their plates were pretty much full to overflowing these days, and likely to get worse.

  They’d even put my ex-boyfriend, Jaden, to work on the tech side, since he’d worked as a game programmer in Silicon Valley and was designated “tech” on the Lists. I didn’t ask what they had him working on, mostly because I didn’t care, but apparently, he reported to Dante, which I couldn’t help finding funny.