Retaliate

by Alex Albrinck

  She pushed that idea aside, troubled by something far more obvious to her now. Her captors assumed her parents would pay any price for her freedom, bidding ever-greater portions of their influence for her return. They might even suspect that the apparently estranged couple—they couldn’t be together if the intel about her mother having greater power over the ruling elite than her father was true—might join forces to “bid” a larger amount while still maintaining majority control in the future world.

  Or…

  Deirdre swallowed.

  Or would they shrug off the threats of her captors and leave her to fate, refusing to sacrifice their future power for the life of their daughter?

  The more she thought it through, the more she hoped her intuition of the veracity of their claims of her mother’s survival were false. Leaving the ghosts of the past in the past was a lesser pain than the implications of Delilah remaining among the living.

  If they were correct—and she feared they were—it meant that her father had known for some time of her mother's survival.

  And he’d never told her.

  And her mother had never revealed herself to her now-grown daughter.

  If they’d do that… it meant they might have faked Delilah’s death the full time, for reasons she couldn’t quite fathom but couldn’t rule out.

  She felt the tears trickle down her cheeks as her despair rose anew.

  If her parents would do that—fake the death of one and never tell her—she had little doubt that they'd leave her here in New Venice to die before they'd give up a shred of their power.

  Jeffrey had made clear what would happen if no one paid an adequate price for her release.

  Deirdre could only hope that her real death was less painful than the staged demise her parents had the world to believe her mother had suffered.

  —4—

  RODDY LIGHT

  RODDY FELT HIS MIND spinning, trying to process what the woman had just called him.

  Son.

  It was a word with many possible meanings, depending on context. Context and tone could add a positive or negative slant to the word. For instance, it might be used by an older person referring to a younger man, though that possibility made no sense here as there was no age difference between himself and the pair of people staring at him like he was their reason for living. While they might be slightly older than him, whatever age difference they might assume certainly gave them no reason to use that word.

  That lack of an age difference made the biological variant of the word irrelevant as well.

  Or did it?

  His mind flashed to what he’d learned of James Delaney. A man who appeared no older than he did, who’d served with Roddy in Special Forces, who’d been an apparent friend and confidant until he’d revealed himself to be an ally of Oswald Silver, one who’d reported Roddy’s budding intuitive talents as something worth retaining from a world set for devastation.

  But Delaney wasn’t a peer of his. Instead, Roddy learned, Delaney was many centuries old, and even then was hundreds of years younger than Oswald Silver.

  He stared at the youthful couple before him, staring into their eyes, noting a deepness there that suggested a wisdom attained through living a life far longer than nature deemed normal for the human species.

  Could it even be possible?

  Were they, like Silver and Delaney, decades or even centuries older than they appeared?

  And… no, impossible. Even if they were older, it couldn’t mean that he was… that they were…

  Roddy swallowed, unable to blink as he stared at them, his unlocked mental powers gathering information, processing what normal senses couldn’t perceive, trying to fathom what his mind told him to be true, unable to accept that truth.

  A strange chime emanated from the woman, snapping his mind out of its reverie. He blinked himself back to a deeper direct awareness of his surroundings, taking in the plain walls, the wooden table with scratches and gouges marring the surface, the more comfortable chairs away from the table they’d used for these… conversations.

  He watched as the woman extracted a device that resembled the personal portable communicators so ubiquitous in the modern world, devices he’d recently learned directed all manner of information back to hundreds of computer servers and technicians living aboard the space station, data used to determine those who’d be part of the post-Ravaged world, and those whose remains lay transformed into the oozing mass of miniature robots responsible for the devastation of the land he’d once known.

  The woman’s eyes flicked to the communicator’s screen and then back to her husband, a look of determination on her face. No words were exchanged, but the man moved swiftly, springing toward the door they’d used to enter the room. He opened the door gently, quietly, and glanced back and forth the length of the hallway outside. Satisfied with what he had—or perhaps hadn’t—seen, he shut the door once more. The man slid his hands above the door frame, and a faint green glow flowed from the plain walls as the man spoke a single word.

  “Secure.”

  The walls and door of the room shimmered, and Roddy watched with a mixture of amazement and panic as the plain walls transformed, taking on a decidedly metallic look. He looked back at the door and noted a similar change in appearance. The change in coloring wasn’t the only change; the faint hum of sound generated by the voices and movement outside the door, noticeable before, vanished as if the rest of the people inside New Venice had suddenly vanished, silent like the millions of dead in the lands of the West.

  The man nodded at the woman. She placed the communicator on the table and performed a sequence of gestures upon the device’s surface. She backed away, and Roddy watched, fascinated, as a hologram sprang up above the table, morphing into the shape of a tall, lanky man. The man possessed a military bearing, steady brown eyes, and skin the color of deep mahogany. The hologram’s stern gaze seemed to penetrate them, even though he wasn’t here.

  The hologram spoke. “You look well, Mona.”

  The woman smiled and gestured at Roddy. “He’s home.”

  The virtual visitor turned until his eyes met Roddy’s… and Roddy, trained as he’d been in all manner of weapons usage and self-defense, felt intimidated for the first time in his memory. “Welcome home, Roddy. I’m hopeful that your time away wasn’t too painful. How are—?”

  “We haven’t restored him yet, Micah.” The man glanced at Roddy as he cut off the query from the man called Micah. “He won’t understand that question. Not yet.”

  The man took the interruption and information in stride, nodding as he processed the new data without a change in facial expression. He repositioned himself to directly address the man and woman, leaving Roddy off to the side. “I’ll get right to the point, then. The insertion effort in relation to the control server was successful; all localized Ravagers are now under my control.”

  The woman beamed, and the man pumped his fist. “Yes!”

  Roddy glanced at them. “Who controlled them before?”

  “Your former employer,” Micah replied. His head tilted slightly to the side as he returned his gaze to Roddy. “I assume if you’re back that your services are no longer required by one Oswald Silver?”

  Roddy snorted; he might not understand everything right now, but it was clear Oswald Silver would never trust him to fly an aircraft again. Then he frowned. “You said the localized Ravagers are now under your control, presumably at the expense of Silver. What does that mean? Localized?” He felt, rather than saw, the change in the mood of the others in the room, as if they’d only now realized they’d missed that critical word in the exuberance of the moment.

  The man called Micah sighed. “I can’t track any Ravagers on the Eastern mainland.”

  “Signal strength issue?” the woman asked.

  “Negative. I loaded a missile with Ravagers and launched it at a Phoenix island enclave in the old Indian Ocean just after local activation. I can track those without issu
e.”

  “Perhaps a double cross from up above?” she mused, drumming her fingers upon the table’s surface.

  “Possible. Not really in line with their plans and prior behavioral patterns, nor within the construct of their internal rules. A betrayal of this magnitude would be far too easy to detect. There’d be a firm retaliation against the architects of the change, perhaps at the most extreme levels. No, if I can’t see them… it’s by their design.”

  The man tapped his fingers. “You’re thinking the batch in the East takes orders from a different control server?”

  Micah nodded. “That seems the most likely scenario. It provides built-in redundancy in the event of a failure in the primary server, and it keeps the major factions operating on high with an ability to remedy any subterfuge. We can’t stop them from activating in the East, but we have a rather powerful weapon now at our disposal, one which may be able to counteract the second swarm.” His face seemed to darken as his eyes narrowed. “If we can get them into position.”

  The woman’s face morphed into a frown as well. “There’s too much water for them to cross though, no?”

  “I’ve calculated that with the quantity of Ravagers available now in the West that a Bering Strait cross is possible. And water’s only an issue due to Ravager-specific code sets. We can eliminate that… er, technical allergy.”

  The woman sighed. “I think you’re right, then. Is your ally still aboard the station and able to search out the second server? If we can gain control of that one...”

  Micah nodded. “Yes, she’s still there. But communication channels are effectively blocked or monitored, which means I cannot safely get sufficient information through to her to enable her to take that type of action. Tracing the first server took a rather Herculean effort; I can’t fathom scanning that entire city looking for another. And…” He paused. “She should be there still. She was meant to return through a portal but hasn’t done so yet despite quite a long passage of time since control switched over.” He scowled. “Sad as it may be, we have to believe she’s no longer among the living. But I’m still trying to confirm that she’s alive.”

  Roddy winced. He didn’t know this woman—or so he assumed—but if she’d wrested control of the Ravagers away from Oswald Silver, he hoped she’d made it through the experience alive, waiting for a chance to return to the surface.

  Micah cleared his throat, as if wanting to announce he was changing the topic of conversation. “One question I’ve pondered… by chance are our wayward trio showing dramatically different appearances? Such that I wouldn’t recognize them if I saw them?”

  Roddy felt the eyes in the room turn on him and a deep emotional change swept through him, not from him, but from the man and the woman here with him. He sensed that this question ought to mean something to him, perhaps cause him pain… and it certainly escalated the level of distress of those asked the question. Mona—that was the woman’s name, per Micah’s original words to her—took a deep breath before answering a question she clearly didn’t want to hear. “Yes. Why?”

  “In the aftermath of my escape from the bunker following the Ravager activation, I encountered a woman with two children, similar in age and appearance and of an age that would match… well, the children we’re all interested in. They were with a man who was quite protective of them. Their actions were somewhat panicked given the onrushing Ravager swarm, but they knew they should be heading toward the lake. The ages and circumstances matched enough to give me pause, and so I gave them an alternate ground car that didn’t have the special enhancements of my primary vehicle. When I considered everything later, I realized that my appearance now is different than what they once knew. Thus, we could meet up as we did without any of us recognizing the other.”

  The man had sat down a moment earlier, but stood as Micah related the tale of encountering people he apparently knew—that they all knew—who’d changed their appearance to make themselves undetectable. Mona leaned over the table once more and tapped her communicator. The device projected a second hologram. “Here’s the last image we have.”

  Micah studied the new image: an attractive woman smiling for the camera, with two beaming children huddled under each arm. He nodded. “That’s them. I can feed that image into my camera network and try to track their current location.” He paused. “Any news for me?”

  “No.” The man paused. “No, that’s not true. I’ve not heard from my sister, which isn’t necessarily a concern.”

  “True.”

  “And we’ve… captured a major bargaining chip.” He arched his eyebrow, and Roddy couldn’t miss the man glancing in his direction.

  Micah nodded and glanced at Roddy, clearly comprehending the coded reference to something or someone that eluded Roddy’s understanding. “Well done, Jeffrey. Let me know of anything else you find. I’ll do likewise. Jamison out.”

  The images vanished.

  Jeffrey walked back to the door and repeated the same process he’d used to secure the room, and the walls and door returned to their standard appearance. He glanced at Roddy. “How much of that made sense to you?”

  Roddy shrugged. “Not much.”

  Jeffrey grimaced. “That’s… good, actually. But we need to change that.” He glanced at Mona. “Do you want to start?”

  She glanced at him. “Have you ever wondered why you remember nothing of your life before you showed up to register for Special Forces?”

  Roddy blinked. How could they know? He’d told nobody about that severe case of amnesia, though a few had noted he seemed unusually detached from his past.

  Mona noted the hesitation in his response. “I’ll take that as a yes.” She glanced at Jeffrey. “We know why that is. And we’re going to tell you.”

  Roddy felt his pulse quicken. He’d always wondered about the source of his amnesia. Would he finally get answers?

  “Years ago, we recognized in Phoenix the fingerprints of an ancient group, one led for quite some time by a man you know as Oswald Silver. There were strange communications we intercepted—”

  “How?” Roddy asked.

  “—that suggested the carrying out of a massive conspiracy, and with Silver involved, we knew it couldn’t be anything good.” He sighed. “The challenge we faced is that our communication intercepts couldn’t get everything, just coded messages sent over typical channels. We knew something was happening, but we didn’t know what. We needed to get inside, to gain the trust of Silver and his closest associates, and do so in a way that raised no suspicions.”

  Roddy nodded. “You needed a mole.”

  Mona returned the nod. “Exactly. We needed our mole to be someone who had the character to follow through with the assignment to the very end. We also needed our mole to avoid revealing the secrets of our existence and interest in learning enough to retaliate against whatever scheme hatched by Silver and the Phoenix group.”

  Roddy glanced at them, understanding dawning. “You’re saying that the mole… was me?” It felt odd to say that. “But I didn’t learn anything or share anything with you.” He threw up his hands. “How can I be a mole, a spy, if I don’t even know I’m one?”

  Mona offered him a comforting smile. “You didn’t send us information directly, of course; to do so, to know what to send and how, would compromise your mission. You needed to be a communications beacon with the ability to transmit what you heard and saw, to do so in a way that didn’t attract attention, and to do so in a manner that was both untraceable and unblockable by any technology Phoenix had seen. You didn’t tell us anything, Roddy… but you gave us everything. We pieced it together. Micah, whom you met, had risen through the military ranks, which gave him plausible reason to visit many of the facilities, and he allowed himself to be coerced into becoming an apparent member of Phoenix. Thanks to your information, he knew where to go, who to watch, and what to look for. It gave us a fighting chance.”

  “That’s great, and I’m glad I helped against Phoenix in some manne
r—though I’m not sure it did any good given that the entire West is leveled. I still don’t understand why I remember nothing and didn’t know what I was doing.”

  “You had the strength and character to fulfill the mission. No one doubted that. That wasn’t enough. You had to be someone that would catch Silver’s attention without meaning to do so. Your abilities… nothing could hide those entirely, and it would be something Silver would want to observe, control, and learn from. We couldn’t turn your power off entirely, but we could make sure that Silver could never learn from you the secret of unleashing that power. Silver’s own power is impressive; despite your strength and character, he could make you crack and tell all, given enough time.”

  “I’d never tell him that,” Roddy snapped, nettled. “No amount of torture—”

  “No one is questioning your loyalty and toughness,” Mona said, squeezing his shoulder. “But Silver wouldn’t torture you.”

  “What are you—?”

  “We had to make you forget the secret of your abilities, sure. Silver would understand you’d die rather than give up the secret, and thus you couldn’t know. Silver would need something else, something that would make you talk… and you had that type of vulnerability.”

  Roddy felt faint, sensed the seemingly random discussions with Micah were now tying together. “What vulnerability?”

  “The knowledge of the people you’d do anything to protect, anything to keep them from suffering. Silver would find them and inflict pain upon them until you talked… or until he was convinced you knew nothing.”

  Roddy sat down, barely feeling the solid wood of the chair near the table.

  “Two of the people he’d go after… were your parents.” Mona smiled. “That would be us.”

  He tried not to let the news hit him hard… but failed to keep the look of shock off his face. The clues pointed to it all too clearly now, and yet… “But that’s not poss—”