Allie's War Season Two

by JC Andrijeski

  Whatever they had loaded in the guns worked fast. It dropped seers and humans alike with barely an exhaled breath...again, making almost no sound.

  In the same instant, I felt a tremor in the Barrier from Ike and Jax as they subdued one of the humans...wrestling his hands behind his back and feeling him over for organics and other communication devices.

  I modulated the shield to compensate, thickening it around the human in case he had something on him to communicate with the outside. I felt nothing.

  Between them, they got the human under control, almost silently.

  I felt the group collectively let out another exhale.

  Nikka put her mouth to my ear. “Are there others, Esteemed Bridge?”

  Her voice was barely a whisper.

  I let my light filter just under the construct I felt above ours. Looking around the space, I took a snapshot, then returned.

  “Six more humans,” I told Wreg. “All dispersed...all working on machines, cleaning, or doing maintenance. None in this main room. I don’t think they’ll come near us, so we might want to leave them alone. Two are close to doorways, so wouldn’t want to drop them there...” I paused. “I don’t feel any more seers. A shitload watching the place from the construct, but I didn’t see any leaks...”

  Getting a translation of this from Loki, Nikka blinked at me, then grinned. Saluting me, she turned to the others, relaying the message in hand-gestures.

  Then we all began moving rapidly towards Wreg, who stood near the lower door leading to the room where they kept the data storage computer.

  Ike and Jax brought the human between them.

  I saw the glassy eyes, knew they were pushing him. He even looked like a lab tech. Curly brown hair, dark skin, black-rimmed glasses. His vague brown eyes appeared pleasantly happy, as though he were dozing in front of a fireplace after a heavy meal...or maybe just took a big toke off a hiri smoke.

  As I reached Wreg’s side, he clasped my arm again, his eyes warm, almost affectionate.

  “Bridge,” he subvocalized. “You are a goddess.” He motioned at the human. “Why did you want him?”

  I felt my jaw clench. Without answering Wreg, I walked to the human.

  “Ask him what’s in the vats,” I said to Wreg.

  Wreg hand-gestured to Ike, who held the human’s mind.

  The tech’s face lit up, presumably the instant he heard the question.

  “High-grade bio-mixture...top of the line, really...”

  “For who?” I asked Wreg.

  “Military grade.” The human smiled. “Can do anything with it, really! Top of the line...really top of the line...”

  “Where is the source material?”

  “Shipped in.” That contented smile. “Shipped in...underground. The main camp. Outside Manous...”

  I felt my jaw harden until it hurt. I looked at Wreg.

  “Can’t do anything about it now,” Wreg said neutrally.

  “Did you know about this?” I asked him.

  He gestured negative, looking up at the vats. I felt sickness on him too. Enough that I realized he’d been shielding it from me until then.

  “No, princess,” he said. “Plans must have been wrong. Not unusual, these kinds of facilities. They keep them quiet...falsify the layouts. Wipe the humans after, you know? Keeps the seer’s rights groups off their backs...” He met my gaze, clasping my arm. “You all right?”

  I shook my head, feeling tears coming to my eyes.

  Angrily, I wiped them away. I gestured at the human.

  “Knock this piece of shit out,” I said. I bit my lip, fighting a part of me that wanted to do a lot more to him than that.

  At Wreg’s hand gesture, the seers did as I asked. I watched the human’s eyes go blank, right before they closed. He went limp in their arms, and Ike and Jax dragged him behind one of the machines, out of sight of the main floor.

  I watched them work, feeling Wreg’s eyes on me. I wanted to ask him about the labs, about what else they might have on site, but I shook it off, forcing myself to focus on why we were there.

  When I looked over, I saw compassion in Wreg’s eyes.

  “Call your mate,” he subvocalized. “One ping, use the structure you share with him...” He highlighted it briefly over my head. “...We need him to open the door, Esteemed Bridge.”

  I followed with my eyes to where his hand indicated, an old-fashioned-looking, iron locking mechanism with at least ten sets of locks that required keys. Next to that stood a straight keypad with raised buttons. I didn’t see anything on either that looked remotely organic...kind of ironic, given what simmered in the vats behind us.

  “He can get us in there?” I said, impressed in spite of myself.

  “Yes, princess.” He grinned then, clapping me on the shoulder. I felt an infusion of his light; I could feel him trying to cheer me up.

  “Call him,” he urged. “I just wish I could see the Boss’ face when you do...”

  Hesitating at this, I studied Wreg’s expression, once more focused on the work in front of us. We were off-schedule, maybe moreso because I’d wanted to question the human. It took too long, the sentient machine, the lab techs, the Sweeps. I did feel like I was about to have a heart attack, but otherwise, I thought things had gone relatively well, all things considered. It certainly could have been worse.

  I glanced around at the others, and saw smiles on their faces as well. Taking a breath, I focused on the structure that formed part of my bond with Revik.

  I pinged him the way they’d shown me in Santos...quietly.

  His presence rose at once. I felt his surprise, then a glimmer of alarm.

  What’s wrong?

  Nothing, I said, then amended, ...I’ll tell you later. We’re at the door. They said to call you...

  You’re there?

  Yeah, I sent, glancing at the others, who were still grinning at me. I forced a smile, using the white light to lift my own mood. You want to let us in? They have this crazy idea that you can break like sixteen locks just by looking at them...

  There was a pause. Then I felt a thick pulse of heat from him, enough to take my breath. I felt my cheeks warm.

  Honey, I sent. This is hardly the time...

  You have no idea what a hard-on I have right now, he sent back. Jesus, Alyson, you’re like forty minutes ahead of schedule. Did you know that?

  I looked around at the others, a little confused.

  They said it was okay...

  Did you do that?

  No, I sent. I mean...we all did.

  There was another silence. Are you all right? he sent.

  I’m okay. I’ll explain later, I promise. It doesn’t impact the op...

  His warmth pulsed at me again. Show me the door, love.

  Turning, I fought the blush off my face from his light, focusing on the outside of the metal door. I let my eyes and light run over each of the locks, moving to details as he directed me. I watched him work, moving from lock to lock, using my light along with his to break or slide open each one. He was meticulous, focused, and I felt his light doing things that I’d never seen aleimi do, that filled me with disbelief as I tried to figure out how he managed it. He’d never really let me see him do his thing before. Watching him in action now, I found myself biting my lip, fighting to hide my incredulity from him.

  No wonder the other seers worshipped him. By the end, I was so far in his light, I was turned on, and having trouble hiding it from him.

  Finally, he seemed satisfied.

  Okay, try it.

  I nodded at Jax, who stood closest to the door.

  Don’t open it yet...not all the way.

  Wreg gestured to Jax.

  The seer reached out, yanking down on the L-shaped handle. There was a loud-sounding click, then the door opened with a faint creak. He didn’t pull it open any further, though, not even to take it off the doorframe.

  Instead, Jax looked at me, waiting.

  You’re a superhero, I tol
d Revik. It’s open.

  Tell them I’m disengaging the cameras now, he sent. I’ll ping when you can enter. Wait for my signal.

  Got it, I acknowledged.

  I’m going to fuck your brains out when we get back, he sent, along with another pulse of heat. Gods, baby...you’re unbelievable...

  Before I could think of a response, he evaporated from my light.

  When I glanced at Wreg, he was grinning.

  “You’re blushing, princess,” he grinned. “I take it he was pleased?”

  Just then, I felt the ping in my light.

  “Cameras are down,” I told him, avoiding his eyes.

  He laughed a little, silently, as Jax opened the door, which gave out a longer creak.

  Cautiously, he peered his head around the opening. I watched as he grinned, then stepped over the raised threshold and into the room beyond. Past the opening, I could already hear the louder hum of machinery.

  “After you, princess,” Wreg said, still smiling at me.

  Shaking my head at him, half in embarrassment, I rolled my eyes, following after Nikka as the Chinese-looking infiltrator held out a hand indicating for me to go in ahead of him.

  I realized that they’d managed to distract me from the vats, even as it occurred to me to be grateful to Wreg for keeping me focused.

  It also crossed my mind that they were a lot more likely to have friends and family in there than I was, so if they could set their feelings aside while we did this thing, than I certainly could.

  As I stepped over the threshold of the steel door, something else occurred to me, too.

  I was now, officially, a real terrorist.

  24

  MAINFRAME

  ON THE OTHER side of the door stood the largest non-organic machine I’d ever seen in real life. It crouched inside a tall, square room that seemed to have been built around it, rather than the reverse. It filled all but a few walking and access corridors around a space that approximated the size of the small airplane hangar where we’d stayed in Santos.

  It also rose a full story above the cement floor.

  I just stared up at it for a moment, dumbfounded.

  “Why would any machine need to be that big?” I subvocalized to Wreg.

  He didn’t answer exactly, but raised an eyebrow in my direction.

  “You studied this, right?” I said. “You know something about it?”

  I realized then, that all of them had gone quiet, and stared up at the thing with grim expressions.

  “We had no way to do so, Esteemed Bridge,” Wreg said. “Only humans are allowed inside...and they memory wiped all of those we were able to ID. Boss made the call we’d go in anyway, if you were here...”

  “Me?” I looked at him blankly. “I don’t know anything about machines...much less a dinosaur like this.”

  Wreg just shrugged, looking up at the thing.

  It occurred to me, then, that we had to make sense of this monstrosity, at least enough to direct Revik to the right general vicinity so he could dismantle it. He likely couldn’t melt the whole thing from the ground up, not unless he had a massive influx of light from somewhere, and even then I imagined it would take hours.

  He couldn’t exactly follow us around for the next hour in here either, while we tried to make sense of the thing. Even crouched in a closet somewhere...even splitting his consciousness four ways from Sunday...he couldn’t be distracted for that long inside the Registry building without putting his own life in danger. Wherever he was, I knew he was monitoring more than just us.

  I looked at Garensche.

  He returned my gaze, frowning. When I motioned towards the machine, he smiled, signing something to me.

  Wreg translated. “He can’t talk to this beast. No organic parts.”

  But I knew that much. “What’s plan B?” I said.

  “C-4,” Wreg said, glancing at me. “Evenly dispersed around the machine...then detonated by your husband.”

  I looked at him, then up at the machine. “You brought that much?”

  He shrugged. “It would be better to be precise. No guarantee the Sword can find something else in here to ignite...they likely stripped it of anything combustible at that scale...”

  “How many does he expect the C-4 to kill?” I said, biting my lip.

  He clicked, barely audible. “That’s not the problem, Esteemed sister...” Seeing my expression, his own grew exasperated. “...Not in here, the walls are thick. We can drag those out, if you want...”

  He gestured at the bodies I only now noticed, lying on the floor. The two by the opposite door had been holding machine guns before they’d been knocked out.

  It occurred to me that Revik had likely done that for us too, clearing the way. It also occurred to me to wonder why they didn’t have more seers in here, on the ground. It was kind of foolhardy to rely on a construct alone.

  Then I remembered the vats, and thought I knew.

  They couldn’t trust seers with this...any seers. Even the ones who worked for them. It was like paying Jews to guard Auschwitz.

  “...There’s no guarantee it will work,” Wreg went on, “If we don’t place the explosive correctly, there could be fragments left over, things they could rebuild. We need something more foolproof than a guess. We have to try and be precise, princess...at least until we are out of options and must leave.”

  I stared at the machine.

  Walking around to the back of it, I used the imprints in my light to recall specifics from the crash course we all got in non-organic computers while we were being debriefed in Santos. I probably had more direct experience with non-organic...or “dead” machines, as the seers thought of them...than the majority of the seers there, but that experience was limited to handhelds, personal computers, headsets. All were small, and operated on servers I’d never laid eyes on. All were hooked into the network.

  All were built in the last sixty years.

  I couldn’t even pretend to know about this.

  Honestly, just placing all of our explosives somewhere as close to the middle of the monster as possible and blowing it up wasn’t seeming like a terrible plan to me.

  “He wants inside,” Wreg said. “The boss. He wants confirmation...”

  When I glanced at him, the Chinese-looking seer shrugged.

  “You know him,” he said. “He doesn’t like chance. And only one shot at this, Esteemed Bridge. They move the data, we’re done. Could be years before we find it and infiltrate well enough to crack the new security protocols. They’ll upgrade...they’re probably due for one now. And someone good with these machines...” He gestured towards the beast. “They could rebuild a lot. More than you might think...”

  Seeing my eyebrow go up at this, he clicked softly.

  “If they move the data, we’d have to find the new location, the new security, get our people inside to map out, decrypt...”

  “No, I get that.”

  I did, too. He was talking a few years, minimum.

  But there was still something he wasn’t telling me.

  Looking around, I saw a row of smaller workstations against the wall across from the mainframe monster itself.

  I walked over and sat in one of the swivel chairs.

  Even the chairs looked about fifty years old.

  Picking up a thick, non-organic headset that had an actual cord, I put it on. Nothing happened. I looked for where it was plugged in, but only found a hole where the wire connected. I touched the screen...

  ...and it shocked me.

  Remembering the lessons we’d gotten in Santos, I realized I wasn’t looking at a LCD screen, but an old-fashioned cathode ray tube, or CRT monitor. I even vaguely remembered the odd flickerings of the screen, like the antique my mother had when Jon and I were kids.

  I frowned, dumbfounded, trying to remember if there was anything important about that, other than the fact that I wouldn’t be able to access anything by touching the screen.

  Looking around, I opened
drawers and felt over the tabletop. Finally, I found a sliding tray attached beneath the linoleum desktop.

  Pulling it out, I found a keyboard with raised black keys. I stared at it, then back at the screen, which had a word of white text and a blinking cursor.

  The text said only, “NAME.”

  Experimenting, I typed in my own name, using two fingers.

  A different screen popped up, asking for a password.

  I stared at it, then at the keyboard. Using my light, I tried to keep the flare minimal as I scanned the keys, looking for those that had been hit the most frequently. Gradually, eleven letters glowed faintly brighter than the others.

  Memorizing them with my light, I reconfigured them in my mind in a number of different combinations to try and spell out something that made sense to me. At first, I couldn’t come up with anything. Then I noticed three of the letters stood out even more prominently than the other nine my aleimi highlighted.

  “Jesus,” I muttered, forgetting the subvocalization.

  “What, Bridge?” Wreg said.

  I didn’t answer. Next to “PASSWORD?” I typed “ICEBLOODPRICKS.”

  The password screen disappeared.

  Seconds later, a new screen popped up, showing me a record made up mainly of yellow-colored text. A picture of me, naked and chained to a bench, stared back at me. I knew exactly when it had been taken. I’d been processed by customs in that cell, right before I’d been imprisoned in the White House. My skin looked pale, covered in bruises, and I looked thin, my eyes overly large and faintly glassy from the drugs Terian had been feeding me.

  The image appeared next to a form with all of my vital stats, a list of school records and known residences, what they knew of seer skill sets (which wasn’t much, thank god, even next to telekinesis they had “unverified”), relatives of my adoptive human family, work and school friends, where I’d been born, my sentience category (non-sentient, thank you very much), ownership status (still the official property of the United States Government...again, thank you very much), and medical records from when I lived in San Francisco.

  I was categorized as “found” updated to “owned” and then “fugitive.” The most current date at the bottom listed me as “status unknown.”