“What if there were a substantial number of Usaians on the seacity?” a small, very young voice asked, from the side of the console. I looked, startled to find that Mailys had spoken. “Would you then lend aid?”
Lucius tried to look at her and couldn’t, not in the position she was in. He frowned slightly. “There can’t be any large population of Usaians on Liberte,” he said, sounding more as if he hoped it was true than that he believed it. “We had a couple of stranded tourists from Olympus, and we made pickup—”
“But what if there is a large group of Usaians on Liberte?” Jonathan LaForce spoke, his voice sounding hoarse and tight, the voice of someone possessed by some overpowering emotion. “Secret Usaians, as your religion was secret in Olympus before the revolution.”
“There can’t be,” Lucius said. He sounded mildly horrified. “Liberte has the Sans Culottes. They’re not a religion, but they believe in the principles of the French Republic, and they think—”
“No. Not a religion. But Usaians are a religion. A secret religion passed down from father to son, from father to children. From Father—”
“Monsieur Keeva, you might want to check in the records of your religion, a gentleman by the name of Doctor Dufort. A line of them, in fact. Faithful.”
Lucius’s eyes went wide. It was obvious the name was familiar. “It can’t be,” he said.
“But I assure you it is,” Alexis said. “I, Alexander Hamilton Brisbois, tell you so, and Jonathan Dayton LaForce will corroborate me, as will—”
There was a sound from the other side. Keeva turned around. “Martha. Martha.”
Someone answered. I could hear him asking a confused question from which “Dufort” emerged. And then “How many?” followed by “No. Oh, hell no.”
“Monsieur Keeva,” Brisbois said, very loudly. “Will you lend aid? There are over a thousand of us, and we’re in places, and in positions, from which we cannot be safely retrieved. It is more economical to lend aid to the seacity. I wouldn’t betray their secret, nor would I call you into our civil war. But this is certain death bearing down on us. Will you help us, Monsieur Keeva?”
Lucius Keeva ran his hand backward through his hair, and succeeded in nothing except make it stand on end and pile up in odd ways. “Damn you,” he said. “Damn you. The army of Olympus is not the army of the Usaians.”
“No, but the army of Olympus is a Usaian army, because the regime is a Usaian regime.”
“Damn you.”
“Yes, Monsieur Keeva, but will you help?”
“I’ll call—I’ll endeavor to do what I can,” he said. “I…damn you…I’ll call up everyone I can.”
The sound of a deafening explosion and the call was broken, as floor and ceiling both shook.
ÇA IRÁ
Dare
I was fighting in a corridor, with cold saltwater lapping at my knees. It was laced with blood, and the spume collecting around the walls of the hallway was tinged pink.
Madame’s forces had come in not through any of the guarded entrances, but by making their own entrance via high-impact explosives. The first line of defenders who had run to the site had died almost immediately, but that had given time for the alarm to be sounded. By the time I made it out of the communications room and towards the sounds of fighting, the battle was well and truly engaged.
Fortunately, it hadn’t occurred to Madame to put the invaders in the uniform of Simon’s guard, or even not to put them in bright red uniforms with Liberty caps tightly on their heads. Which was good, because otherwise we’d have had a lot of friendly fire incidents.
As it was, something had gone wrong with the power, so that the lights overhead flickered and waned, making it hard to aim and to see whom you were burning. Or I presume it made it hard for most people. I could still see. I also had the advantage of not being in a white suit, which would be more visible in this gloom than my indifferent, gray, armored suit.
Mailys, beside me, wore something much like what I did, but was very visible by the pallor of her face. She didn’t talk, just walked beside me, each of us looking towards the side the other couldn’t see and burning anything that moved and wore red. Burn, burn. A distant scream. We came to an intersection, and down my way there was a melee. Three guards in white were fighting two intruders in red. I aimed carefully and took down one of the invaders. The three other men—or women, at this distance, it was hard to tell—jumped the remaining one.
A burner ray passed near my ear, but I heard Mailys fire, even as she said under her breath. “I’m sorry. Missed one. Was crouching.”
Down the hallway and three more encounters. A man running at us, blazing his burner erratically, got burned by both of us at the same time, but not before he’d burnt a hole along the side of my pants. It wasn’t important. We were now up to our hips in water, and Mailys said, “I wonder if there’s anyone alive past this,” just before we were attacked.
There were five men and two women. I didn’t see them. They had the foresight to wear something dark. And they knit themselves with the wall. If the first burner had been aimed at me, I’d have died.
But instead it blazed at Mailys. She saw it, and jumped out of the way, firing back as she did.
I’d had time to fire, twice, in the general direction the shot came from, then I jumped, forward and to the side, as a ray swept where I’d been. I shot again. Mailys was burning against both walls, in a long continuous line, barely missing me.
There were sounds of bodies hitting the water. I didn’t know if they were my kills or hers, and I didn’t intend to investigate.
It seemed like an instant, and simultaneously like forever. There were corpses floating in the water. One of them was a young, blond man, looking surprised. There was no resemblance whatsoever to Len, yet he reminded me of Len.
I turned to Mailys. “Are you wounded?”
She shook her head. “No. You?”
“No.”
A ribbon of red blood threaded delicately through the water, like a festival decoration. My throat caught.
“Zen?” It was a whisper, but I recognized the voice. I turned around and saw Alexis coming from the direction our enemies had come from, walking towards us, the water just above his knees. He shoved a corpse away. He almost casually reached out and pulled back a strand of my hair that clung to my face with sweat I didn’t remember sweating. His fingers felt rough but it was a comfort. I can’t explain it. It was right when he touched me. “Are you hit?” he asked in a sort of raspy whisper. Behind him Mailys made a sound I couldn’t identify. I scanned the corridor and saw no threats. I shook my head. “Not that I know.”
He nodded. “I need help.”
“All right. What kind of help?”
He shook his head. “Come.”
“I’ll—I’ll come too,” Mailys said.
“Hold back a bit, Mailys. I don’t want you in this.”
I wasn’t sure what this was, nor why he wanted me in what whatever it was.
“I should continue that way,” Mailys said. “Towards the breach.”
“No,” Alexis said. “Nobody alive there. Not theirs. Not ours.” He twirled his com ring violently and rasped into it. “The corridor is cleared. You can send workmen to clean up and stop water coming in. I slapped a membrane on it, but it’s not fitted.”
Which explained why the water hadn’t submerged us all, with a breach under the sea level. I presumed he’d swum to the entrance, slapped the membrane on and then fought his way back. I couldn’t know, but it was the only way I could see it happening.
We walked back, in the water, till we met a crew coming the other way. Clearly workmen, even if in uniforms. They carried tools, not weapons. Two carried a large section of dimatough between them. They grew silent as they crossed our path, and I got the impression they shied away from us.
At the end of the corridor, there were people. Many people. Some staring into the tunnel, others patrolling the large central space with burner in hand.
Basil was one of them and looked at Brisbois enquiringly.
“There are no more this way. Basil, where is he?”
“He?”
“The Good Man. Simon.”
Basil opened his mouth. “I…He was—”
“Yes, I bet he was,” Alexis Brisbois said, in an exasperated tone. “You let him go, didn’t you? You let him go from your sight?”
“He’s not my prisoner,” Basil said.
“No indeed,” Brisbois agreed. And then said, “Five trusted people, Basil. Five of them, and bring them to the meeting room on the second floor. The one where I destroyed the camera. And don’t tell me there wasn’t a camera there.”
Basil shook his head, then looked around and called five names.
They beat us to the meeting room by the expedient of keeping ahead of us.
“The cameras in other levels, Basil,” Brisbois said. “I know you have them. And I know you have some apparatus that will allow us to see what they capture. I want you to bring the apparatus here and I want to see where they are.”
“They?” Basil asked.
“Jean Dechausse and his strike force. Oh, don’t look like a guppy, man. Couldn’t you tell the breakin was diversionary? They knew we’d deal with it. Madame sent her expendable cannon fodder this way. Now, where is the real attack? The one with Dechausse and her trusted henchmen?”
Basil nodded and went out. I noted that Brisbois was tense in his absence, but when he returned with a small square machine and set it on the table, Brisbois’s agitation seemed to increase.
The machine projected a hologram, and it took me no time to figure out we were zooming in on various hallways, moving away from this room, to a perimeter of the outer rooms of the compound, the outer corridors following the wall. It seemed to me that we were in fact zooming along from room to room, but I understood it was more a matter of switching pickup cameras along the way.
“I don’t see why you’re so convinced that Dechausse would be here,” Basil said. “She would never risk him—” His voice died in a hiss, because the camera had picked up something, a man who moved surprisingly well despite his balding head and his clearly middle-aged body. There was silence for a few minutes, and then he said, “That is not—is that Dechausse?”
“Yes,” Brisbois said. “That’s Jean Dechausse.”
And, in fact, watching him, I realized this was the little bald man who had stood atop the cliff and tried to kill Alexis with a grenade. I blinked as he glided along the hallways.
“Why does he glide like that?” Basil said. “He seems like a sneaky coward.”
“Oh, no, no, no. A sneaky fighter, rather. I don’t think he’s so much afraid of dying, though perhaps he is, as he can’t conceive of dying…” He shrugged.
Basil looked at him, and said, “Like that, huh?”
“Worse.” Brisbois shrugged. “But he’s not an idiot and he will not be here alone.”
Brisbois leaned over and tapped his fingers on the controls to the machine, sending our pickups careening again, down the hallway. It was empty, as far as he could follow. “Basil, where would they have come in for him to be there and not to have been seen? Or if he was seen to have been by no more than one or two people he could kill before they gave the alarm?”
“Ah,” Basil said. He bit his lower lip, as though in deep thought, then nodded. “The ventilation shaft. To come down that way, they’d have to have cut part of it away. They’d also have to have had a map of this place.”
“Well, we know we had traitors among us.”
“Well said. And I’ve already sent word to the other centers, sir, for lockdown, because I imagine even if they didn’t know you and the Patrician were here, they were bound to have come up with some way to neutralize the other centers. I’ll now let them know that poison in vent shafts might be a way they try it. I wonder why not here?”
“Because, I presume, even if they removed the filters, and managed to get poison in, it would take days or weeks to clean all the bodies, and it might never be sure that Simon was dead. And if Simon isn’t dead…”
“Yes, the people won’t fully transfer their loyalty to Madame?”
Alexis waved the argument away. “Not that, precisely,” he said. “Possibly, to some extent. Again, the revolutionaries are a small minority, and the people who are loyal to the regime are probably still loyal to Simon as well.
“He is, after all, the Good Man. No, I think it’s because she knows the Good Men are attacking. I think she thinks she can buy peace by proving to them that Simon, who defied and rebelled against them, is gone.”
“And you don’t think it would work?” Basil said.
Brisbois snorted, a snort that turned into a laugh. “No. They will never, ever forgive anyone not a Good Man that kills one of them. I saw enough of it in the archives of Simon’s father when I took over the secret service. But Rose was never in that privileged a position. She wouldn’t know. They simply cannot allow one of them to be killed by anyone but the rest of them. If they do so, then their regime won’t be secure, anywhere. The idea of invincibility must be maintained.” He paused. “Mind you, they might have told her that they’ll forgive all in return for Simon’s body. It’d be like them to get one of their enemies to kill the other, and eliminate the amount of work they have to do.”
“But they think Simon is dead!” Brisbois said.
“I doubt it. My guess is they knew very well what capabilities Simon’s father had in place in terms of cloning and doubles, and they won’t believe the revolutionaries killed Simon unless they have the body and can examine and test it. Which is the point. Rose can’t afford to have the corpse be in such a state they’d think it was a decoy, like the one she beheaded. My guess is the Good Men asked the body be turned over, and Rose examined it and realized the deception.”
“So now?”
“So now, she’ll have sent her best—not just Dechausse but her best—hunting for Simon.” He leaned over and tapped the machine.
“She wouldn’t send Dechausse alone?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Brisbois said. “She might be a cold woman, but she prizes Dechausse too much to—No, I lie. He’s the only person of whose loyalty she’s sure, and therefore he’s precious to her. They might be…They are treacherous and murderously ambitious people, but they are, in their way a stable couple. I think that in the last few years each was the only one the other could trust. And I don’t think they can trust anyone else right now. But they can’t be that far behind him. Where are they?”
The next camera captured a group of people.
There were ten. They wore black suits, with a sort of sheen that told me they were woven through with dimatough fibers. And the way they walked told me they were enhanced too.
I took a step back, involuntarily.
Brisbois sighed. “Yes,” he said. “They are of us. And we’re the ones who must take them out. Basil, Madame Sienna and I will take care of this. Try to keep pickups on us. Also, have someone find that fool boy—the Patrician—Simon St. Cyr, and have him kept out of this. We can’t afford to lose him, because if we do, we’ll already have lost our cause. Or at least it will make it exponentially harder to rally everyone in these centers to fight and to calm the citizenry afterwards. Not to mention figure out how to run this madhouse without his gifts. But if you don’t stop him, he’ll walk right into the middle of this. He was very badly educated and has a wholly romantic idea of adventure and gallantry. He’ll think it’s his duty to face this.”
“But Brisbois, if he should order—”
“Ignore him. Tranquilize him if you have to,” Brisbois said, as Basil looked not only doubtful but appalled. “However, before all that, get me and Madame Sienna a half a dozen burners with full charges. Issue model, if possible, because they’re sturdier. We’ll go and try to stop this, before they get so far in the compound they can take hostages to exchange for the Patrician, or worse, they run into the Patrician himself.”
Basil looked at the people in the pick-up camera. “It’s suicide,” he said. “You can tell they’re all enhanced.”
“Oh, yes,” Brisbois said. “I can tell, but they’re not enhanced like Madame Sienna. And Dechausse is at least as enhanced as I am. Maybe more. Keep an eye on us. If we die, tell Jonathan. He’s the next capable of gathering the most enhanced people to try to defend us. If nothing else, we should be able to delay them so you and your people can get Simon—the Patrician—out of the way.” He gave me a shaky smile, and I wondered if he believed what he was saying, or if he was willing to sacrifice both of us to give the others more time at defense.
And this was when I got upset. “Brisbois,” I said. “That might be the most stupid plan in the history of stupid plans.”
I didn’t realize I’d actually spoken aloud until I heard the words coming out of my mouth. He clearly couldn’t believe his ears.
“I don’t care how not enhanced they are,” I said and realized I was being brutally honest in a way I usually wasn’t. Ever since my foster parents had told me I was the best and the brightest and no one could equal me, I’d been careful not to hurt the feelings of normal people. But Brisbois wasn’t normal, and I wasn’t going to be careful while he went merrily into the jaws of death. “There are thirteen of them, and I understand that Jean Dechausse is at least as enhanced as you are. We are not going to march bravely up the hallway and let them shoot us. It only takes one burner blast to kill you. And one doesn’t care if it comes from an enhanced or nonenhanced person.”
I don’t know what I expect. Anger, I suppose, or mockery. If I’d made the same speech to Simon, he’d have laughed at me, and come up with some light counter banter.
Brisbois stared. He pursed his lips. “What do you suggest then? I know you are saying that numbers matter, but we can’t let these people risk themselves while we’re the ones who are enhanced and while—”
And suddenly I understood. I understood Brisbois’s need to keep others safe—his need, perhaps, to sacrifice himself. Everything he’d done, everything certainly that I’d put him through and which he’d endured more gracefully than he deserved, his quasi-paternal relationship with Simon. All of it was an attempt to…what? Atone for a crime he hadn’t committed?
Through Fire (Darkship Book 4) Page 30