Allie's War Season Three (6 page)

He pointed me towards a high-walled cubicle.

I ducked into it without question, even as I heard more shots exchanged between him and the guards. I felt him changing magazines seconds later, pinging me to come out. Once I grew visible behind him, he turned and threw me a memory drive that I knew held the spook program he and Wreg had been working on in their spare time.

Glasses,
he told me.
Need it in five instead of ten...response time faster than planned...

The words came as a bare whisper in my mind.

Nodding, I darted down the next aisle in the maze of cubicles. The alarm continued to explode overhead as I searched for a good computer, looking for more cameras and surveillance devices with a split-off portion of my aleimi. Pausing just long enough to break the half-dozen devices I found, I didn't bother being gentle about it.

The series of explosions brought two more guards out of hiding.

I saw Revik slide behind a segment of wall right before he fired. From the Barrier, I felt one of those bullets hit a guard in the arm, sending his gun flying to the carpeted floor. In the seconds while the guard and his partner reacted, Revik knocked both of them out cold with his light. His aleimi coiled into a third guard's with lightning speed, cutting the cord to his consciousness before the man could raise the shotgun all the way to his shoulder. My light followed Revik's as he changed magazines again, his light now extended to cover most of the room.

"Allie?" he yelled above the alarms. "Where are you?"

"Ten seconds!" I said.

I was already crouched over a keyboard. After using the wear on the keys and the aleimic imprint to find the network password, I hooked the memory drive to an open port and opened the files. I was out of the chair and running back through the maze of desks the instant I hit 'execute' and saw the program open.

I could see Revik's head and part of his shoulders near the wall closest to the entrance of the suite, at least according to the map I held in my light. I saw him watching me, too, his eyes glowing a pale green in the dark. He continued to glance at me from where he stood, half-crouched by the glass doors. He peered out the frosted panes, his body motionless, shielded by a sectional wall. Meeting my gaze, he nodded to me, indicating towards a specific guard as he continued to cover us.

"One minute," he said to me. "...Hurry, Allie."

I knelt by the guard, double-checking his ID tag, even though I knew Revik wouldn't have made a mistake. Ignoring the security badge resting on the front of his dark blue shirt, I shoved my hands in each of his pockets until I found a smaller card, encased in an organic sheath to prevent my scanning for it. Pulling that smaller card out of its casing, I used my light to examine the gold bar at the back, and felt a shimmer of relief.

"Got it."

With my light, I sent a snapshot to Revik for him to confirm, jumping to my feet.

Without a word, he left the suite through the glass doors, a gun aimed in each direction. He fired as soon as he cleared the opening, and I felt a jolt from his aleimi as he sent another guard asleep. We'd both agreed that minimal casualties would be best...for both of us, really. But for him, especially. Even so, I winced when the man hit the carpeted hall. The second one smacked into the wall on his way down, sliding into a boneless heap before he'd finished cursing out Revik for the bullet hole in his shoulder.

When I felt the okay, I followed him out the suite's glass doors, walking directly to the elevators. I ran the card through the locking mechanism on the furthest set of doors, the one set aside for security and maintenance. They opened at once, but not before Revik rejoined my side. Without a word, he got into the compartment in front of me, looking around as he scanned with his light.

"No gas," he told me, above the sound of the alarms.

Nodding, I stepped in after him as he bent down to punch a button with his fingers, grabbing my wrist to pull me behind him with his free hand.

His other gun raised, he held me there as the doors closed soundlessly, muting the alarms.

THE ELEVATOR DIDN’T stop. Revik and I had talked about what we'd do if it
did
stop while we were on it, but apparently they didn't have a protocol to lock the security elevator along with the others when the guy holding the real pass-card went down.

Revik's guess had been right on that, too.

Which was a relief. I hadn't liked any of the contingency plans much. One involved us climbing up and out through the elevator shaft and shooting our way down the stairs. Others had us rappelling
down
the elevator shaft, or riding the elevators down the hard way, with Revik using the telekinesis to break our fall.

As it was, we rode down to the lobby level listening to Muzak while Revik checked all of our weapons and I scanned the security teams on the higher floors.

"Watch me, Allie," he'd said, while we were planning the op. "Watch everything I do. Do it to learn, but also to cover us...always be looking with an eye to find things I might be missing. We need to boost your training...a lot. With everything going on, and all the hits out on us..."

"Okay," I'd said, nodding.

"Allie." His voice grew warning. "If we're really going to do this, you have to assume you might need to take over at any point...or even go it alone. You need to operate as if I could be knocked out of commission at any second..."

I'd nodded again, swallowing that time. "Okay. Yeah. That makes sense."

His eyes had continued to stare into mine though, unconvinced.

"You can't afford to let your mind wander," he said, hammering the point with his light. "...Me leading it only means that one of us needs to make the calls...to avoid confusion as much as anything. I need you to be able to back me up in there, Allie. All the way. Just like Wreg would, or Chan, or anyone else..."

"I get it," I'd said.

"It'll be hard enough for me, knowing it's you with me..."

I met his gaze, letting him feel I understood.

"I get it, Revik," I said. We'd been sitting in front of the fireplace in my room, the blueprints spread out on the carpet between us. "I really do...I promise."

And I had. I really had.

But I'd be lying if I said the idea didn't scare the shit out of me. The thought of trying to match him in this stuff, given how many years he'd been doing it, still struck me as a bit delusional. Comparing me to Wreg or Chan hit the point home, though, which I'm sure had been his intention. I didn't know the precise age of either of them, but both had been alive more than twice as long as either me
or
Revik, and had been trained as infiltrators starting in their twenties. Back then, infiltration had been a profession designated by the Seer Council, and thus had recruits chosen at birth, based on their potential sight ranking. I knew Wreg had done time in the Adhipan training camps under Tarsi, and that Chan had been chosen to be in the Seven's guard before the time of First Contact. That probably meant a good three hundred plus years for Wreg, and another two hundred and change for Chandre.

"...We're going to up your training," Revik had repeated, averting his eyes to stare into the fire in the grate. "I don't just mean for this job. I'm going to formally ask the Adhipan to continue the training you started under the Lao Hu...assess any gaps and compensate. I'll have to do the telekinesis part, but I want you working with Wreg and 'Dori, too...and Vash. Your actual infiltration rank isn't as high as I'd like, given everything that's going on..."

I hadn't really had much to say to that, either.

Truthfully, once he mentioned it, I'd felt a little ridiculous that I hadn't thought to talk to Balidor about that already. We were well past the point where I needed Revik making those kinds of requests for me.

Still, I hadn't argued. It didn't much matter who filed the request, really. The pride element no longer factored in much for me, not for that kind of thing. Not only because I no longer took it as an insult, but because we didn't have the luxury to indulge in our little power games anymore. We were past that, given everything. We needed both of us contributing at full capacity, whatever our 'issues.'

If his behavior was any indication, Revik seemed to agree.

If anything he treated me a little
too
much like an equal these days.

But I knew he was right to pressure me on that end, too. Given all the people who wanted us dead following my being broken out of the Forbidden City, I couldn't afford to coast. They needed me operational, as Tarsi put it. The events of the past few years had stalled that long enough. Revik was the obvious choice to put the screws to me, since, as Chandre put it, I was more likely to let him boss me around than any of the others.

I listened to him, I guess.

Or maybe it was just easier for him to prick my pride.

Anyway, I couldn't afford to let them worry too much about me. Especially now, when we had reason to believe the Chinese were the least of our problems.

There had been contractors hailing from other sources in the past few weeks. Contractors hired by someone other than Voi Pai or one of her lieutenants.

Wreg dealt with one of them. Balidor got two others. A fourth one, Revik caught himself, ironically while he'd been 'sitting out' one of the strategy sessions because Balidor didn't want him working...or thinking...as an operative yet. Revik caught the guy on Feigran's floor, which made us wonder if the ex-Rook might be a target, too.

That last one, who didn't carry any light markers of having been trained by the Lao Hu, was the only one we managed to capture alive...not like it did us much good. Balidor hadn't been able to read much off the guy before whoever held his leash wiped his mind with a thoroughness that left the seer pretty much a vegetable, and apparently within minutes of his capture. Another first, from what 'Dori and Wreg told me.

In either case, someone was hunting us, and it wasn't the Lao Hu.

Well...it wasn't
only
the Lao Hu.

I'd asked if they thought the last guy had been sent by Salinse, but from Wreg and Revik's reactions, I had to assume it wasn't likely. So it might be Chandre's mystery group in South America, or someone looking to collect the bounty offered by Black Arrow after the Registry job...or it might be a new enemy, someone we weren't aware of yet.

In any case, things were speeding up, which made everyone nervous. Whoever orchestrated that end seemed to want Revik and I out of the picture...and Feigran too. So whoever they were, they appeared to be targeting the Four.

That was a whole other thing we hadn't had time to talk about really. The Four were the four intermediaries tasked with the Displacement, the name seers used to describe the end of a particular historical period...a seer apocalypse, if you will. This would be the Third Displacement, according to seer myth, and centered around human beings...preparing them as a race for evolution to some new, higher form.

That was the pretty version.

The less-pretty version was that humanity could simply be wiped out...or enslaved. Their life wave might not make it to the next level at all, or so few might make it that they wouldn't be able to sustain themselves as a species. They could end up dark, under the control of the Dreng. They could end up parasites, lost spirits...or devolve back into an animalistic state.

The Four were
supposed
to help them make it to the other side. We were supposed to find some way to shift the Displacement in the right direction.

The problem was, I had no idea what that meant.

Neither did Revik, as far as I could tell.

So Revik and I were two of the Four. Feigran, who used to be called Terian, was the third, and to call him a loose cannon would be generous in the extreme.