Allie's War Season Two

by JC Andrijeski

  I had to believe he wouldn’t lie to me about that.

  Even as I thought it, I felt him from wherever he was. I knew he and his team were already on the ground, but remained hooked into our construct through a number of connecting structures. He tugged gently at my light.

  What is it? he sent. Everything okay?

  Realizing he’d just now checked in on me, that he hadn’t heard the rest of the back and forth with the others, I shook my head, even though I knew he wouldn’t see it where he was.

  Nothing, I sent. Just nerves. How much longer?

  Two minutes, Allie.

  He hesitated. I felt a whisper of doubt on him.

  You sure you want to do this? he sent. You can still sit this one out...ride with the others back to Santos. It will complicate things, but it’s not too late... He hesitated again, and I felt that worry in his light sharpen. I didn’t push you into this, did I?

  No. Thinking about this, I realized it was true. Not at all. I want to be here.

  I felt a pulse of warmth off him.

  So we’re all go, then? he sent.

  I folded my arms, exhaling. Why? Are you afraid my ‘decent at mulei’ won’t be enough? Or that because I still suck at seer sign language, I’m going to manage to blow the whole operation?

  I felt his amusement. They showed you?

  Erratic? I said. Really, honey?

  I felt a whisper of pain off him. Don’t distract me, love.

  I realized he was right and swallowed.

  All right. I shooed him with a Barrier hand. Off to work with you then, husband.

  I felt him chuckle, right before his light withdrew from mine.

  My eyes clicked back into focus to find Garensche grinning at me.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Stop distracting him, Bridge!” He tossed a flare at me, and it bounced off my helmet with a ping, and hit Nikka in the shoulder.

  “Hey!” Nikka said, irritated, rubbing her arm.

  Garensche added, “We don’t want to find the two of you in a dark corner somewhere, necking in the middle of the op. Or rutting like dogs—”

  “That’s enough,” Wreg said mildly, holding up a hand. When the giant looked at him, the humor in his face faded. “You’re going too far, Gar. Don’t you remember why you got yanked off detail with her?” He clicked at him mildly, but I saw the warning in his eyes.

  “...Manners, Gar. Manners.”

  I gave a short laugh, but no one else did.

  Finally, glancing around at the others, I looked at Wreg.

  “It’s okay.” Giving Garensche a mock disapproving look, I sighed, clicking softly. “Gross. But okay...in a boorish, low-class, I-spend-too-much-time-with-machines kind of way. How about I just think poorly of him and feel sorry for his mate...?”

  Everyone chuckled...probably as much from hearing me use a seer expression with my badly accented Prexci as for what I’d said. Still, I felt a lingering tension as they all glanced at Wreg.

  Wreg smiled after a beat, lowering his hand. His eyes remained serious when he bowed his head to me.

  “As you wish, Esteemed Sister,” he said

  Garensche smiled at me, his broad face crinkling around the scar.

  It didn’t occur to me until later that the look on his face was relief.

  I CLIMBED DOWN the metal ladder behind Wreg, gripping the rungs with gloved hands and placing my feet on slippery rungs below me in the dim light. Jumping the final few feet and moving out of the way of the seers behind me...or above me, more accurately...I looked up and down both ends of the tunnel, my hands on my hips.

  Wreg looked at me, then tapped his helmet.

  I turned on the low-frequency transmitter.

  “Use this if you need to talk, Bridge,” he said, using sub-vocals. “Barrier grid is dense in here...denser than anything you’ve likely seen...even the White House. They’ve got about forty seers maintaining it nearly full time...” He tapped his throat. “We’ve only got two of these, you and me...the rest will use sign language. Keeps the noise down...”

  I gestured a yes so he’d know I understood, glancing over as I saw the others reach the bottom of the ladder behind us.

  “Why am I down here?” I said, also speaking without moving my lips. “Revik said you would tell me my role in this once we started? He seemed to think I couldn’t know in advance for some reason...?”

  Wreg inclined his head down the tunnel.

  “He thought you could help us shield,” Wreg said, his face unmoving. “He said you’re a master at it...”

  I hesitated, thinking he was pulling my leg at first. I saw the complete lack of humor in his eyes and shrugged.

  “Don’t you have some kind of mobile construct?”

  “Yes,” Wreg said. “But it might not be enough in here. It’s primarily to keep our presence hidden...but we’ll need to use sight skills, Esteemed Bridge. To open locks. To get past any guards we find. Any time we need more than a light scan, it could be seen. If you monitor the construct and keep those from getting to the sensors, we’d be grateful...” He hesitated. “You should know, they’ve gotten better at finding our constructs, too...”

  I found myself understanding why Revik kept my role in all this purposefully vague. I would have laughed in his face.

  As it was, it was a little late for me to start arguing the point.

  “Okay,” I subvocalized. Keeping my expression as still as possible, I gestured with a hand. “Okay...lead the way.”

  I followed him and the others down the tunnel, fighting not to panic.

  I was going to kill Revik.

  As we walked, I found myself pushing out the shield I’d been keeping around my light for the past however-many months, but only in small, incremental steps. I examined the mobile construct Wreg’s team used as I did. Wreg had said it would withstand a basic scan, so I did that first, trying to get a sense of the size of it, where it hooked into the Barrier, what it looked like from the outside.

  As I did, I flinched, feeling a whisper of silver strands.

  Backing off, I looked at the whole thing from another angle.

  I realized I could see it then, the box woven around the twelve of us, hooked to a structure in the Barrier. I felt beings behind that, but I didn’t get too close.

  The Dreng. Of course. Another dose of reality I didn’t really want.

  I examined where my own shield came from. Somehow, it had never occurred to me to do that before.

  I felt glimmers of Vash, then something a lot bigger, behind him.

  A pure, pristine white, it emanated light, as steady as a sun...as still as a held breath. It had a sharp quality to it like glass, a diamond knife.

  But it didn’t have the agitated feel of the silver light of the Dreng, or the bite I felt behind their metallic coils.

  It was easy to forget sometimes, that while I was staying here, with Revik and his people, I was lost in the equivalent of the Pyramid’s construct. Salinse’s Rebellion, if not the only link to the Dreng since Terian died, certainly constituted the most organized and widespread one.

  I hadn’t liked thinking about that very much, either.

  Still experimenting, I hooked the team’s construct to the white light I used for my shield, and to whatever I used to hold it steady from my side. It felt like some kind of anchor in my physical body, only it was more specific than that. I realized then, in a kind of wonder, that it came from almost the exact center of my chest...inside my body.

  There, I saw a similar node of that sharp, snow-white light.

  Gradually, I pulled the team’s construct away from the silver light of the Dreng. I fed the aleimic structures with more of the white light, watching as the whole thing changed frequency.

  Wreg clutched my arm.

  “What are you doing?” he subvocalized.

  I heard a thread of panic in his voice.

  I glanced at the others, even as a wash of fear fell over me, along with crippling self-doubt. I was messing arou
nd with their primary construct in the middle of an op. Who did that? And why did I think I would know what I was doing? My throat closed, my heart started pounding in my chest, thudding against my ribs as it occurred to me what would happen to all of us if we were caught.

  I could have just gotten all of these people killed, thrown into work camps, tortured, cut up, or worse...

  Wreg’s fingers relaxed on my arm then.

  He looked at me, his oddly opaque, nearly black irises holding a kind of wonder. I felt him scanning the space around all of us.

  His light suddenly seemed to relax. Looking up at him, I felt like I was seeing him for the first time, without the silver light dominating his aleimi. Sparks came off his light, still sharp from the Dreng, but behind that, a more subtle, red-orange glow I found difficult to look away from.

  I almost commented on how pretty it was, but couldn’t find words.

  He spoke first.

  “How did you do that, Bridge Alyson?”

  My worry returned, even as it occurred to me that the Dreng might not appreciate what I’d done very much, either. The fact that I’d been allowed to do it at all still baffled me.

  “I didn’t screw anything up, did I?” was all I said.

  “Screw anything up?” He smiled. “No, princess. No.”

  I glanced at the others, and saw something different in their faces too. Their lights sparked around me in a flicker of different-colored waves, all contained by that high, white light. Rather than covering over their own light, however, it sat on top as a sharp, dense cloak that seemed to bring out their individual flavors of presence. They bathed in that protective shield without being overpowered by it.

  I looked around at all of them in wonder. An odd flood of emotion hit me, as I did. These weren’t the bad guys. They were my family.

  Wreg slapped me affectionately on the back.

  “If I wouldn’t lose a finger for it, I’d kiss you...” he said, grinning.

  Before I could ask him anything else, he walked past me in the tunnel. His boots splashed through the half-foot of water in the bottom of the drainage pipe, so I could hear him even in the near-dark.

  Saying a silent thanks to whatever or whoever might be listening that I hadn’t killed all of us before we reached the first check point, I followed after him, trying to make as little noise as possible.

  As we walked, physical lights grew dimmer and fewer...until eventually, we passed the last one. Ahead of us I could hear the faint trickle of water, scurrying feet that probably belonged to rats, or, for all I knew, cockroaches the size of cocker spaniels. The lights didn’t come back on as we walked, but the water did get gradually deeper, until I was pushing my way through bilge that came almost to my knees. After a few random splashes from my boots reached my face, I kept my mouth firmly closed, and waded instead of taking steps.

  It felt like we pushed our way through the dark like this for over an hour before Wreg stopped, holding up a hand to the rest of us.

  It occurred to me that, even in the pitch dark of the tunnel, I could see him...but only just. If I’d been human, I wouldn’t have been able to see anything at all. As it was, a faint outline of light allowed me to make out each of their forms inside our mobile construct, but nothing much of the pipe walls or what lay under our feet. I found I was almost glad of that. The smell alone was enough that I was fighting to take breaths only when I had to. My legs had touched things here and there, too, enough to mash down my squeamishness button to the point of near-panic. The only solution was to refuse to think about it at all.

  It was that, or I was going to throw up. So far anyway, I’d managed not to embarrass myself.

  I saw the outline that matched what I knew of Wreg’s shape and light, standing at one side of the tunnel.

  “I don’t think anything’s getting through that shield, Bridge Alyson,” Wreg said, respect present even in the subvocalization in my ear. “...But if you please, I would not mind you keeping an eye out, while I open this lock...?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  I moved closer to where he stood.

  I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be looking for exactly, but I scanned the space around him, concentrating as if I did know. Then, out of nowhere, I saw his light flare, illuminating that part of the construct. Immediately, I used my own light to smother the resulting flicker, then, realizing I might be cutting off his access to it...to simply contain it.

  As I pulled back, controlling his light more subtly, I felt his relief, but also a flicker of his amusement.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked, using the transmitter.

  He shook his head, not answering.

  A moment later, the flare of light coming off him died down. I heard an audible beeping sound and jumped slightly. Following the initial tone came a series of soft clicks, and I realized the noises were physical.

  “Is everything okay?” I said.

  “Easy as can be,” Wreg subvocalized. “Thank you, Esteemed Bridge.”

  I felt a little flush of pride...or maybe it was just cold-sweat relief.

  “No problem,” I said.

  Even as I spoke, a door over us began to open. A rapidly widening crescent of light shone down on where Wreg stood, which I realized was the foot of a ladder. Next to him, a panel with a print-scanning surface hung on the wall, blinking slightly as the door finished opening.

  He glanced back at me, his black eyes visible once more in the white light. He grinned, then began climbing the ladder, hand over hand, using his feet and arms to propel himself up rapidly.

  I realized my own hands were shaking.

  I concentrated until they stopped.

  Then I grabbed the rung at eye-level and began to climb after him.

  23

  COURSE CORRECTIONS

  WHEN I REACHED the top of the circular ladder, I found myself with Wreg in a room with so much organic material the walls were a deep, forest green. Sensing movement as I climbed out of the hole in the floor, I looked up at an even denser piece of wall over the four doors leading out of the room.

  Something there caught my attention...and held it.

  At first, I couldn’t have said what it was, though.

  The surfaces up high shimmered liquidly as I watched, rippling almost as if they were alive. I watched, fascinated as the skin rippled again, making its way around to another corner of the room. The movement was snake-like, almost sensual in its smooth uniformity. I stepped out of the way of the ladder, but my attention remained riveted on that piece of wall. Wreg was too focused on bringing up the rest of the team to notice.

  My light found the boundaries of the presence I felt.

  I realized it was a machine of some kind...but it was alive. In fact, even for an organic, it struck me as more alive than usual. Once I could see it well enough to know that much, I followed the presence of the machine’s host organism as it reconfigured around where we stood. I saw it ripple around the rim of the room...faster, that time...and realized a separate but related organism formed a band at the part of the wall near the high ceiling.

  Riveted, I walked a little further from the opening in the floor, giving a bare glance to the equipment in the room, which seemed to be centered around some kind of power generator. It took up most of the high-ceilinged space, surrounded by walls covered in paneled readings of various kinds. But that part felt almost dead; it throbbed with a low-level hum that didn’t interest my light, at least not the way the walls did above us.

  I watched the wall ripple backwards again, and felt that glimmer of presence once more.

  It reminded me of Cass’ boyfriend, Baguen, for some reason. Something in the way the light moved, almost as if...

  My mind trailed.

  We were being scanned.

  For a bare second, I just studied the tendrils aimed at us.

  Then I felt my heart leap to my throat.

  The damned thing wasn’t just alive...it was sentient.

  I didn’t
have time to think about it clearly. I felt the scan deepen as it honed in on me. But the realization stuck with me. It was alive...more of a guard dog than a wall. The shield wouldn’t work on it, not with us this close.

  Panicking, I threw up a wall of images to hide our exact location.

  Like a mirror, I reflected the room back at the living wall. Realizing the wall might notice a blank spot in the room as well...too little light as opposed to too much...I infused the images with scatterings of aleimic imprints from the equipment and organic floors.

  I felt the creature back off slightly.

  It still felt alive, and now almost like I’d managed to confuse it. It made me think of a big child, or an animal sniffing something that abruptly disappeared...like a mouse disappearing into a crack in the wall. It continued to look where it thought I should be, exuding puzzlement.

  Then it began probing more persistently in my direction, trying to find the edges of the screen I projected at it.

  “Where’s Garensche?” I asked Wreg, feeling my chest tighten. I didn’t wait for his answer. “We need him...now. I can’t keep this thing out...”

  Wreg stared at me, bewildered.

  Then he looked up at the wall. Flinching when he felt the screen I was projecting there, he looked at me again, his face holding a kind of incredulity.

  Immediately, he leaned his head down the ladder.

  I continued to shield his light, at the same time I projected and widened that screen of images at the organic wall to cover the others. I watched Wreg’s face as he seemed to be communicating with someone else below, another part of my mind focused on the living machine.

  I tried to assess where it was in its examination of me.

  It was starting to suspect the images were originating from somewhere. It was looking for their source now. It kept picking up the different aleimic imprints I reflected and then losing them again before it could identify their source.

  Looking around as I tried to figure how much of the wall itself that the sentient portions covered, I subvocalized to Wreg again.