Paul was very strange to her in many ways. In her time, she would have considered him a follower of Loki. A capable fighter, and from everything she had heard, not without courage. He always seemed to have a jest available and didn't appear to see combat as anything more than a job. Something that he had to do, not something that was filled with honor and glory. He trained his militia to approach war in the same fashion. War, to him, was simply business. It was more of a profession like smithing or farming than the calling she remembered it being for her.
Paul cleared his throat. "Can you be a little more specific? And could he have been talking to the computer, not himself?" Gyada paused in thought. Could he have been? It wasn't like she understood the language he spoke at the time. She thought back to that time very carefully.
Going over her memories, which were surprisingly clear.
The memory jumped on her and left her frozen. The strange looking creature. How it acted, constantly muttering and tinkering with devices in that cave that seemed to disappear. She had tried to find it when she first became trapped, but the cave walls were all solid. The thing that stood out most was the constant muttering. Then the hidden … she shuddered and shied away from that memory.
She shook herself lightly, then answered, "Going back into those memories isn't fun you know. Sometimes the strange being might have been talking to her. Sometimes it was definitely a mutter to himself. And I don't know what he was saying, I didn't know the language at that time."
"Fair enough. Okay, that means he had some narcissistic tendencies in human terms. Probably a bit of a jerk to anyone around him, especially women of his own race." Paul muttered to himself, focused on what he was hearing. Janna been listening into the conversation and her eyes went wide as Paul started trying to psychoanalyze the alien. First, because, well how did one psychoanalyze a totally different race and species? Secondly, because he always played the fool. The buffoon, the idiot, the jokester.
Even when training townspeople in their militia duties he did it with jokes and funny situations gotten in and out of.
Always to emphasize the skills he was teaching.
This was a completely different Paul, one who was deadly serious. One who wasn't playing the idiot. Janna assumed he'd been there outside of combat, but this was the first time she'd noticed him do this in front of her.
"What do you mean by all that? Besides, where did you get any training to be able to assess someone's psychological state?" Janna asked sharply. Paul had taken training the townspeople into a militia onto his own shoulders. It left him little time for much else, and he was always acted the clown in the meetings of the heads of departments. He was always around, but not where she was.
Paul blushed and looked away. Alecta rolled her eyes and answered. "He has two different masters degrees in psychology. One in aberrant psychology, the other in Combat and Post-Combat psychology. It's why I get so frustrated when he acts the fool. He's at least as smart as me, and he insists on playing his version of Prince Myshkin."
Paul went back to looking at Gyada. "Is there anything else about the alien that seemed strange? Compare how he acted to how the personality acts."
Gyada said, "No, I've said enough. I don't need to keep going about how he was." Her face was pale and her voice shook as she whispered, "It's too painful."
"And being effectively enslaved to a person, possibly the person who tried to kill you, wouldn't be?" Paul asked quietly, caring. "She can't even tell us if that's what happened. I'm not sure, but it is possible. I just need a few more details. I can't tell you what I'm looking for - it could taint what you remember. Please... It could be key to answering the Riddle. A riddle's answer is as much an artifact of the person who created it as anything." There was pleading in his voice.
He looked up at the others "Keep going. I'm only working on something that will help us narrow down the answers you guys come up with."
Shen meanwhile was going another route. He still had a way to communicate with ADAM from his laptop. He quickly typed a message 'See what you can do about getting an analysis of this Kurtherian group's leaders actions - I think his name is Chaos is in Limited Options. See if you can get any information relevant to his state of mind to someone for a quick psychological analysis.'
The response came back 'Timeframe longer than BA will be happy with. Two to three weeks minimum.'
Shen muttered "Fuck, I hate reality. Working with computers is so much easier." There went his second idea. He had no real idea on what to do next. He looked around the room. Gyada wasn't going to be that much help with the notes. She simply hadn't known English that long. Hell, Shen was surprised with the fact they hadn't asked for a Russian translation. He went to rise, but Boris waved him back down. With nothing immediate to do, he relaxed enough that an idle thought occurred to him... one he didn't like much. He liked his life alone, working the black market and various scams.
He didn't like representing his father's business that much, but that was what allowed him to travel, gave him the other opportunities.
He was slowly becoming a valuable member of Boris’ inner circle. Worse, he found himself appreciating the feelings of trust, safety, and respect that created in him. Damn, he thought, does that make me a sucker for my saviors or a sucker for a cause? At least one that has most of the facts that I know worked into it?
He was left with that thought, a slightly forlorn look on his face.
Boris now had the pad and was going over everything carefully. He had a soft smile on his face. He was hopeless at riddles but enjoyed them anyway. Of course, the fact that he was working in English, which he had only learned in the last century or so, complicated the matter for him. He was always thinking in Russian, then translating back and forth. He only added a word or two to each of the four sections. He passed the pad on to Alecta and turned his focus on Paul.
It wasn't often Paul acted seriously. He was always thoughtful in combat, but Boris had seen him avoid a mugging by laughing in the face of the guy who pulled a knife. He was a little unnerving in the way he could get out of any situation he got into.
The closest Paul had come to dying had been in situations where Boris had asked for his help. When counter-sniping in Afghanistan he'd used a really odd trick. He had put a small mirror on a wire that gave away a false position to the enemy. It seemed stupid to most people, but Boris agreed that if it's stupid and works, it ain't stupid.
"Okay, so he tried to act cold and dispassionate, but you felt that he was enjoying the pain that he caused?" Paul asked Gyada,
"Yes. If I felt he might be as sadistic as the first man to approach my Father for permission to court me. If he hadn't been I might have risked not taking the actions I did. But there was a sense of excitement about the pain he caused. The cruelty was as much an end in itself as a means to an end."
"Hum. I think I have enough to help narrow down the list."
He turned to Boris and the others. "Have you finished that list and narrowed down by removing answers that fit only one?" They gathered round the table, eliminating answers that only covered one or two pieces of the puzzle. Finally, they were left with a half dozen: Fire, Despair, Fear, Nothing, Hope, and Grace.
“Well, Fire is definitely out,” Gyada commented. “Most hearths have a fire after all.”
“I’d drop Grace and Nothing. Grace doesn’t fit being easily found in battle, and that pair doesn’t make sense with Nothing as the answer to them at all.”
There was silence. They had narrowed it down to three. “Fear doesn’t fit as well with the first pair of clues either,” Alecta suggested. “Hope and Despair both seem to answer it, though. Maybe Hope is a better fit, but Despair still works.” Janna narrowed her eyes, then nodded slowly in agreement.
All eyes turned to Paul. “It’s so nice to be appreciated for my mind,” He said with a lopsided grin.
Alecta whacked him on the back of the head. “It’d happen far more often if you’d stop acting like a clown,” she
grumbled.
Paul shrugged while rubbing the back of his head. That was true enough after all. “Now, which one would a narcissistic sadist use? It comes down to blocking off her ability to tell anyone the answer. However, he managed that. If he’d left her able to tell anyone the answer would be Despair. Plus, he’d have made it harder for her to communicate at all. Because he made her unable to give the answer, but only put otherwise light restrictions on her ability to communicate, I’d bet on Hope. Hard to be certain if he’d lost touch with reality completely but Hope is the more likely answer all things considered. It would have been another way for him to torture the personality.”
Suddenly, all hell broke loose on the systems. Alarms blared in the conference room.
“I swear, it wasn’t me.” Paul smiled.
Boris typed in a code to the computer in the room and said, “No, it wasn’t.” He turned the screen to face the others.
One of the twenty-four assets or someone from their families had triggered their panic button.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Moscow, Russia
Ivan and Anton had been tasked to keep an eye on the Chinese after Ivan submitted his report to Janna. They were to set up a signal intelligence intercept on the Chinese intelligence outpost in Moscow. They knew the frequencies that the Russian bugs would be using. This enabled them to catch anything for those devices. They also set up listening posts on several of the windows. These would burst transmit any recordings back to their daytime operations site.
All in all, it was a tidy, if undermanned, operation. If they weren't getting support from New Romanovka on the analysis side, there wouldn't be much point to it. But they were, and most of their duties involved making sure the systems were still running.
After two weeks, orders came down to track down and capture the agent called Bohai from the outpost. He seemed to be taking too much interest in New Romanovka for Boris to be happy with. Taking him out was a risk, as it might make the Chinese more curious. But if he were taken by Russians, it might also look like an official government operation, which could dissuade the Chinese from continuing to investigate the town. They had enough problems without aggravating the Russian government.
Denying that someone got pissed off enough at you to flatten a mountain tended to leave you with a lot of internal problems. Denying to the outside world that it happened, when there were plenty of satellites that could see the evidence was really quite silly.
Ivan and Anton also knew there were half-dozen personages that they might be requested to extract. Therefore, it was only a mild surprise when they got a request to call in over the specialized equipment.
"Sleepy to Mama Bear. Requested contact initiated."
"Enemy activity around Laborer. Beacon sent. Request you remove Laborer's family to outskirts of Hive. Pack will be in support. Pickup will meet you in no more than four hours."
Despite the supposed security of the special communications network, Janna insisted on using code names and operational terms. Evgenni had triggered his get me out beacon. Someone would be sent in a pod to pick him up. Ivan and Anton were to get his family out of harm’s way in case they became secondary targets. They should have up to four additional assets en route and should move towards the outskirts on foot until their supports arrived.
Ivan was pissed off now. It was probably those Chinese fuckers that were involved. Why his own government hadn't cleared them out, he'd never know.
The philosophy that it was better to know who the enemy spies were and where they were only made sense up to a point. The fact that this outpost was the only one that the Russians closely watched made it certain that there were other sites the Chinese had, that the government had never found out about.
---
"We know you talked to Boris, Evgenni. Helped him cut a deal with the government so they wouldn't harass him further. That would be enough for us to take you and torture you. That you might have additional information that could be useful to us?” He looked over at the man, “is just the icing on the cake."
Bohai said this as he took a needle to a medical vial of fluid. "I can never remember what this stuff is called. I don't really need to know. All I need to know is it will increase the amount of pain you feel by a factor of ten at a minimum. That is for people who are particularly insensitive to its effects."
Evgenni's heartbeat had increased significantly when the needle came out. He didn't like needles, and the thought of what might be in the needle disturbed him further. However, he'd also been responsible for checking the structural integrity of many buildings in NVG sites. Nothing in this room matched the carnage potential he'd seen fulfilled at those sites. Arms ripped off, some fast, some slow. Bodies completely eviscerated, with blood trails indicating that despite a significant percentage of their organs being on the ground, the person involved had still been alive for some time.
He knew what Boris and his people were capable of. He doubted the Chinese had the same... Potential. He was clinging to the hope that he had managed to get off the signal to Boris for his people. He had been briefed on Boris’ history, and he knew that if it was Boris who turned up, the five Chinese spies in the room and outside its door would be slabs of meat before the night was over.
Whether he was alive at that time or not.
---
"Somehow Gyada got wind of this mission Boris. She is insisting she is ready to go. She's promised not to change and has already collected several axes and knives," Danislav was telling his father figure with some trepidation.
After weeks of training with the woman from the past, he just outright feared her. "She's even promised to follow my lead. Not that I'm sure she will, but she might. She’s realized that there are a lot of different dangers in the world today, from what they were in her time.”
Boris glared at his second in command, "How the hell did she find out about the mission?" He growled.
"She claims she could smell the excitement from the caves. Besides, we have been talking about doing training missions for several weeks now. Ever since Bethany Anne dropped a handful of mark two pods on us, for our use. You said she'd be cleared for those training runs. She seems to assume that means she’s authorized for this, too."
Boris grunted.
They'd been keeping her clear of the major cities, although some of the Weres had taken her with them to a couple of the larger towns in the oblast. "This is something you have to answer honestly then, Danislav. Do you see her as a potential asset or detriment to the mission profile?"
He quickly opened his mouth answer, then paused. He thought about her skill with ax, knife and in hand-to-hand. If they wanted to keep this mission below the radar, which they did, she would definitely be an asset.
She might behave oddly on the streets, but most Russians would take that to mean she was drugged or drunk. It wasn't particularly uncommon to see intoxicated people in the area where the beacon was now transmitting.
And if all hell broke loose and the op was blown she'd shift, which would give them an edge in getting away. It was against orders but…
In team training, she’d shown a vicious maternal instinct to those on her side. To the point where Paul had to caution her and suspend her from training for a week. But that could be an advantage in this situation. Danislav knew she'd be focused on protecting the mission's primary, to an extent no one else he'd met could.
"Given the mission, I have to say that she would be a significant asset and a slight liability. At least we know she doesn't freeze with gunfire if it comes to that. And to be honest, I've only encountered maybe two dozen who are better naturally at close combat fighting that she. Finally, it prevents me from asking if Janna or Paul are available. We don't know if this is the Chinese government or the Sacred Clan after all. Both groups would have a hard on to take out anything we consider an asset after what Bethany Anne did."
Boris grunted in agreement at that. Then he sighed and answered, "Fine, she goes. But warn her tha
t if she operates outside the limits that we defined that it will be the last time I let her go on an operation. Nothing further than close patrols for three months minimum if she screws this one up."
---
The rescue squad's final composition was three Spartans, four Weres, Danislav, and Gyada. It might have seemed overkill, but the Chinese had co-opted one of the local gangs. For all Janna knew, they were walking into a crossfire ambush.
The Weres spread out, covering potential exit points between them and surveying the bystanders. It was nighttime in a warehouse district. There was only a small group of gang members two buildings across.
The Spartans brought their carbines up from under their coats to their shoulders. Danislav set to preparing a breaching charge for the door. Gyada gave him a quizzical look, then moved back 10 paces back and shoulder charged the door. It flew inwards with a 'crack-thump' and a shriek of tortured metal. While it was noisy, it was still quieter than the breaching charge would have been.
Revelations (The Boris Chronicles Book 3) Page 11