Bridge_Bridge & Sword_Apocalypse

by JC Andrijeski

  He stared up at Menlim, still trying to control his light.

  He shifted his gaze, looking at Terian, at the old woman with the lizard-like face, Cass, Eddard, the Middle Eastern seer in the expensive business suit, the older white man he’d shot in the stomach, Salinse…

  He looked around at all of them, and realized his time was up.

  For a few seconds, he considered killing himself.

  They’d been kidding themselves, thinking there’d be any other outcome but this. He’d been kidding himself, too angry and blinded by grief to consider any possibility that didn’t include him taking at least one of them with him.

  That didn’t matter anymore, though.

  Revenge felt hollow. Pointless.

  He lay there, thinking about Allie. Thinking about their daughter, what he’d be leaving her to, if he put the gun to his temple now––if he left her with these people.

  Would Allie ever forgive him, if he took the easy way out with this?

  He knelt there, paralyzed with indecision.

  He should kill himself. Or maybe, quite probably, that would be playing into their hands, too. He’d always done what they wanted, even when he thought he wasn’t.

  “Please don’t die, nephew,” Menlim said, his voice low. “Believe it or not, I will permit it, if you still wish it. But I would implore you to hear me out, first… to make an informed decision, with all of the relevant information at your disposal.”

  Revik felt nausea overcome him, pain.

  A thread of silver light penetrated his aleimi as his uncle probed him in silence. Fear slammed his light. It turned to despair as he realized the Dreng really believed they weren’t through with him yet, even after all this time.

  He stared at those faces, yet the only one he could see was the face of the child Cass held in her arms in that wall monitor of the suite he’d shared with his wife. He saw her clear eyes, rimmed with green. Allie’s eyes, at least in shape. Allie’s mouth, although she hadn’t grown into it yet. Allie’s face. Allie’s hands. Allie’s frown.

  It was a cruel image, a betrayal of biology––even of light.

  Don’t die, a voice whispered in his head. Don’t die, Revik. Please, baby. Please…

  Without his willing it, tears came to his eyes.

  He lay there, looking up at them, and felt lost. His heart hurt so badly he couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe; yet it felt like someone had ripped it out of his chest.

  After he found her in that house in San Francisco, he thought he’d finally managed to close it down. He thought he’d be able to do this, even alone. Then she opened her eyes and hurt him again, even more. Then he thought it was really gone––really and truly, gone forever––when she died in his arms in that hotel suite.

  He knew, finally and for good, that it was finally over.

  He’d come here out of duty, not out of love.

  He couldn’t handle the love part of this. He never could. He couldn’t handle seeing his daughter behind his eyes––the life he’d never have. He couldn’t do it.

  It was too much, what they wanted of him. It had always been too much.

  “Gods,” he managed, choking on the word. “Just kill me. It’s over, isn’t it? Just fucking kill me. End it.”

  Menlim’s mouth firmed to a small line.

  He exchanged looks with Terian, then with Cass.

  Terian frowned at him, an unreadable look on his handsome face. It turned almost puzzled inside those amber-colored eyes, but his mouth and expression didn’t move. Cass only smiled, her light brown irises glinting in triumph, as if she’d expected this, or perhaps only hoped it would happen this way.

  Menlim looked away from both of them.

  Gazing down at Revik, he made a concessionary gesture with one hand.

  “If you wish it,” Menlim purred softly, sadly. “We will, nephew. I vow it.”

  47

  NOT DARK YET

  BALIDOR COULD FEEL them now.

  He climbed the stairs steadily, using the quiet setting on the anti-grav boots. Using his thumb, he flipped on the rifle sensors to check for any movement ahead. He flicked it off when the sensors still showed nothing.

  So far, he hadn’t really learned anything about what he’d find ahead, not apart from what the breach already told him. The security fields below the roof all appeared to be intact, as well as those leading from the roof into the hotel. He could only verify that for certain for the floors he’d already climbed, but he had no reason to doubt it was true for the higher floors, as well.

  The unbroken fields didn’t make sense, not if Ditrini’s people had been the ones to take Tarsi and Dante. From all appearances, Ditrini’s people hadn’t even cracked the shield on the roof, which meant they were still trying to figure out how to access the lower levels of the hotel without getting fried in Wreg’s secondary security measures.

  Even so, Balidor’s nerves remained taut. He continued to move cautiously, if quickly, towards the roof. He didn’t have a lot of time.

  He could feel that, too.

  The Sword’s teams had gone completely dark, over an hour earlier.

  Tarsi was gone, either off on her own, or kidnapped.

  Allie was dead.

  Clenching his jaw, he began jogging up the stairs faster, trying to clear his mind even as he used his sleeve to wipe sweat off his face and neck.

  He couldn’t go there, not with Dehgoies, or Tarsi––definitely not with Allie. None of them could afford to think about the ramifications of losing the Bridge right now.

  They’d known those on the Lists could be killed before they completed their work down here. Shadow already managed to eliminate a good eight to ten percent of the human List. He’d also killed a handful of List seers, not to mention the larger number he’d recruited outright.

  Balidor had just passed the landing for the sixtieth floor.

  Only five flights from the roof.

  He’d been forced to stop on fifty-nine, to log in with his security clearance codes to get past the next set of secondary fields. While he was there, he took the time to reprogram the grid to go into lockdown and short out if anyone else tried to cross over into the lower levels of the hotel. If he found Hondo up there, he’d just have to bring her through with him.

  Assuming she hadn’t been turned.

  …and that they were both still alive.

  Most of the security protocols for the hotel had been designed primarily with either a sub-level or a roof breach in mind. No one really believed any serious number of intruders would come in through the front door, especially post-quarantine.

  Balidor now had the grid rigged to focus primarily on the roof, mainly to buy time for the evacuating seers and humans on the lower floors. The sub-basements didn’t seem to be a target; most of those levels were still flooded, so dangerous as hell to enter from outside, particularly when they were about to get hit by another storm.

  As for the higher levels of the hotel––there was no longer anything there to protect.

  Even Allie’s body was gone.

  Shoving the thought from his mind, he focused back on his feet, on moving as quickly and silently as he could up the narrow staircase.

  He could feel strange things happening to the hotel’s fields.

  He felt strange things happening in the Barrier, too.

  He tried to assemble what he felt into a coherent picture, and to determine the source, but it wasn’t easy. He couldn’t even tell for certain if it came from the hotel’s construct or the larger one over Manhattan. He felt shimmers of Tarsi, Vash, Allie, the Sword, Menlim, Feigran, Cass. He got fainter glimmers of Maygar, Ditrini, Jon, Wreg, Neela, Chandre, Varlan. He had no idea how much of it was illusion and how much real, or what any of it meant.

  He did note one thing: even with Allie dead and the Sword missing, he felt the Four more strongly than any of them.

  He still couldn’t comprehend that Allie was dead.

  He knew part of his disbelief m
ight be how it happened––how completely lacking in drama and fanfare her end truly was. Whatever he’d thought her passing might be like, he hadn’t expected that. He hadn’t expected it to be banal, or so utterly pointless. Even after that mess with the wires, after everything Dehgoies went through with her in San Francisco, Balidor thought her end would mean more than that.

  He expected something more… well, worthy of her, he supposed.

  Instead she’d been fried like an overtaxed console someone plugged into the wrong power source.

  Shoving the image out of his thoughts, he forced his attention to the immediate.

  His immediate was Ditrini.

  That psychopath was the only seer alive Balidor could easily imagine wanting Allie’s corpse. It was the one thing that made him think Ditrini might still be behind the disappearance of Tarsi, Dante, Anale and Surli.

  He hoped to the gods Anale wasn’t a part of this.

  He wanted to believe if anyone in their ranks worked for that piece of shit, or for Shadow, or for Cass, it had to be Surli.

  Realistically, though, either Anale or Surli, or both of them, could be affiliated with any one of the groups that circled around Shadow––Salinse’s Rebels, the Lao Hu, Cass, Feigran, Xarethe, someone in SCARB or FEMA or Black Arrow. The different camps comprising Shadow’s network had become so many in the past year, Balidor almost couldn’t pull them apart.

  He remembered Vash telling him this would happen.

  Vash told him that in times of relative peace, the different factions of the Dreng could seem to be in direct competition with one another, even in direct opposition––like fighting on opposite sides of the same war. They could conflict openly, like Shadow using the Lao Hu to wipe out the Rebels, or Terian murdering Galaith, or even Galaith helping end the first seer rebellion, only to build the network of the Rooks from its ashes.

  At other times, Vash said, those factions would come together as a unified force.

  When that happened, the old seer said, war would soon follow.

  Real war.

  Balidor knew he’d never seen that kind of war––an end-of-times, planet-killing, extinction-event-type war. He’d come closest during World War I.

  Vash’s words rang true to him, though.

  He’d seen the groups coalesce around the Dreng ever since the Bridge came out of hiding. Destroying the Rooks’ network was part of it, so was destroying Seertown, and the Rebellion. Those lines were still being redrawn, including for those groups that never fell neatly on one side or the other, like the Lao Hu.

  Perhaps now they would have to choose––all of them, choose––which side they would fight for in the end.

  The long game. For the Dreng, it always came back to that.

  Of course, Vash, being Vash, joked that the light ultimately played the long game, too.

  The goals of the light, however, provided significantly more room for variation, since the only rules they had related to truth, compassion and free will. Vash said the different threads on the side of light would unify at the end, too.

  Both sides would call their children home.

  The light would call theirs––those humans and seers who, in their inmost hearts, truly wanted the light to prevail.

  The Dreng would call the rest.

  Vash joked that some of those children might return kicking and screaming, fighting the whole way. Unless their inmost hearts had changed, however, they would eventually return to their true home, just as the children of the Dreng would return to theirs.

  At the time, Balidor assumed he was talking about Dehgoies––The Sword.

  Now he realized a lot of those he’d fought over the years might also fit that bill.

  Wreg was one who already seemed to be finding a new home for his light. Varlan might be another. Dorje hadn’t been who any of them thought. Neither had Terian in some ways, and not only because he was one of the Four. Maygar had been born into the dark and flirted with it, but now seemed to be on a different path as well.

  Part of the Displacement had always been this separating out, this pulling apart the gray into sharper shades of black and white. It was something he definitely didn’t have the vision to see clearly, but that felt true to him on a deeper, more intuitive level.

  He was so lost in his thoughts, he reached the end of his climb without realizing it at first. Hopping up the last stair in the narrow corridor, he found himself in a low-ceilinged, gunmetal gray room.

  He stopped dead, blinking.

  Nothing stood above him but a flat, featureless roof, painted the same shade of gray. In the center of that roof, he saw a square of lighter metal, with a ring set in the middle.

  It had to be the hatch.

  He’d reached the final landing below the hatch that opened up to the roof.

  After looking around briefly, he arranged his gun across his back and climbed up the handholds to the base of the hatch. Leaning up and out, balancing with one hand against the ceiling, he lay his ear against the metal and listened.

  He kept his aleimi tightly wound around his body, behind a dense shield.

  Nothing. He couldn’t hear anything.

  Glancing to his left, he saw the panel that led into the real ventilation system––the same system used to disguise the hatch on the roof. Keeping his light behind that thick shield, Balidor carefully touched his headset.

  “Declan.” Balidor used sub-vocals, keeping totally silent. “I’m here. Anything more for me on the roof, before I start?”

  There was a silence.

  Then he heard the click-over as the other seer turned on his vocals.

  Immediately, Balidor flinched, hearing a chaos of sounds on the other end, what sounded like screaming, fabric shifting as bodies thudded into and rubbed past one another in a space too small for all of them to pass. Balidor heard voices talking, too many voices.

  What sounded like gunshots––

  “What the hell?” He kept his speaking voice silent, using the headset to convey emphasis in the transmitter. “Declan!”

  “Here, boss.”

  Balidor said, “What in the gods is happening? Are they rioting?”

  “Damn near,” Tenzi said, breaking into Declan’s link. “The military just showed up, Adhipan Balidor. On the street, in front of the hotel. FEMA and SCARB mostly, but there’s a number here that look like regular army. They’ve got a fucking tank… pardon my language.”

  Balidor stiffened. “Same group as went after Nenzi?”

  “Possibly. We have word that military forces have sealed off the Tower, too, and remain in that area, so this can’t be all of them. I imagine some of this is from what the Sword did to the airfield today. They’ve known we were here for awhile, of course. They were just leaving us alone until now.”

  “Can you get them out? The refugees and Listers?” Balidor said, glancing up at the hatch.

  His nerves twanged from his nearness to the Lao Hu infiltrator. He could almost feel the bastard, although he knew that had to be entirely in his head. Gripping the M-4 more tightly in his hands, he fought to listen to Declan and Tenzi as they answered.

  “We think so, sir––”

  “We’ve had to re-work the contingency,” Tenzi cut in. “Since the roof’s out of the question and now the street, we’ve got transport ready to pick us up at a secondary rendezvous point––”

  “We’re having to take the refugees and the Listers downstairs,” Declan added. “No one wants to go below because of the flooding, but I don’t see as we’ve got much choice––”

  “Can you get them out that way?” Balidor cut in, feeling his muscles tense as he fought to follow the two seers as they spoke rapidly over the chaos around them.

  “We think so, yes,” Tenzi said.

  “It is still flooded?” Balidor clarified. “Will you make them go through the water?”

  “Yes,” Declan broke in. “…To both.” His voice held a wry humor. “We have boats, if you can believe it, sir. Smal
l ones, but we think it’ll be faster. We have to hurry, though. We’re still getting weather warnings from south of the coast. The tunnel could flood completely.”

  “If an earthquake hits––” Balidor began.

  Tenzi broke in before he could finish.

  “––Then we’re royally fucked, sir,” the Tibetan seer said. “…pardon my language. But it’s the lesser of the risks right now, boss. They’ve got another tank coming to join the first one upstairs. They’ve got missiles on them. Real ones.”

  Balidor nodded, feeling his jaw clench.

  Still thinking, he pulled a multipurpose tool off his belt. Turning it over, he twisted out the small, powered screwdriver appendage from the body of the device. He reached to his side, to the right of the hatch, making sure the gun hung behind his back as he began using the tool to carefully and quietly unscrew the slatted cover off the ventilation duct.

  He kept his headset on the subvocal setting.

  “Any news for me?” he said, not pausing in his work. “…About the roof?”

  “We have estimated numbers, sir,” Declan said. “Can’t guarantee anything, of course––”

  “Just give me what you have.”

  “Twenty-six,” Tenzi said.

  Balidor frowned. “Did you get in touch with Chandre?”

  “She and her team have been diverted, sir.”

  “Diverted?” Balidor’s focus snapped off the screwdriver and the grate. He paused to think, then continued as soundlessly as before. He concentrated briefly on restraining his light before he next spoke, feeling the muscles in his arms and hands clench.

  “What in the name of the Ancestors does that mean?” he said, a beat later.

  Declan answered, “She wouldn’t say, sir. Couldn’t, maybe.”

  “Is she in the city?”

  “Yes,” Tenzi said at once. “We did affirm that much, sir.”

  “Has she been in touch with Dehgoies?” Balidor said.

  Silence fell over the transmitter. Well, not silence, but neither Declan nor Tenzi spoke for a number of seconds. Balidor heard shouting and screaming in the background during that pause, echoing in a hollow-sounding space. His mind classified the acoustics as belonging to another stairwell, or possibly an underground tunnel.