Dragon: Allie's War Book Nine (31 page)

Revik raised his hands…slowly. His eyes didn’t move from the end of the rifle the guard aimed at his head.

“Don’t fucking move!” the seer hissed in Mandarin.

Revik looked over the other male carefully.

The seer had black, matted hair tied back by a leather thong. Bare feet. Torn, filthy jeans. Shirt open to display a thin chest with visible ribs. Homemade, black-faded-to-blue human ink tattoos crawled up from his chest to his neck, covering his arms, hands and fingers. The marks and symbols themselves mirrored those Revik had seen on many ex-slave campers, as well as those who ended up in work camps. The poor seers, that is. The ones without the sight rank or the connections to be bought out.

The seer wore earrings too, human-style.

Although his dark skin looked sun worn and rough, Revik pegged his probable age at just over one hundred years…two at most. He’d definitely come into this world post-First Contact from the looks of his light and body. A recent refugee from one of the liberated work camps most likely. That, or one who’d been enslaved for years and only recently obtained a half-assed form of freedom, courtesy of the Dreng.

He could have worked fishing trawlers, from his skin. He wore the open uniform shirt of dock security, but Revik focused again on his bare feet.

They couldn’t have splurged on boots for this poor fuck?

Revik took in the other seer’s light in a single pass.

He didn’t lower his hands.

“Relax,” Revik said in the same language, sending a pulse of warmth. “I’m not armed, brother. I’m not here to cause trouble, either. I’ve come to––”

“Who are you?” the guard snapped, cutting him off. “How the fuck did you get out here? This area is restricted.”

Standing at the end of the dock, Revik kept his expression still, unmoving apart from a slight widening of his feet and legs. He hadn’t done that aggressively either, more to connote that he fully expected to be frisked. The posture was meant to imply he wouldn’t fight them on it when they did. Nothing to hide, so to speak.

“I took a boat,” Revik said, fighting not to add something sarcastic about the obviousness of that fact. “As far as who I am, I would happily tell you that, brother, if you would just allow me to––”

“Shut up!” the guard snapped. “I don’t want to hear your lies!”

Revik bit his lip.

He tried to decide if he should attempt again to calm him, then fell silent when another guard walked up and grabbed his arms from behind. The sudden, rough contact made Revik jump. He’d felt other lights in the background, of course, and knew the first guard wasn’t alone, but the second infiltrator had been a fuck of a lot closer than Revik realized.

Already he was struggling inside the denser construct. He was an outsider here. None of that functionality would be working for him, only against him.

He wondered if he’d need to use the telekinesis after all.

The idea didn’t thrill him.

Then again, neither did the idea of being shot then drowned in the ocean by underfed guard dogs bought off with scraps.

“You think you’re funny?” the first seer grunted, still aiming the rifle at him. “You a fucking comedian brother, is that it…?”

“No,” Revik said only.

“You like jokes?” the seer with the ponytail sneered, as if he hadn’t spoken. “You want to tell us some funny jokes, brother? Right before we splatter your brains and bone over these crates? Or should we save the bullets…just throw you back in the water, like you were thinking? Watch you sink like all the other fishes? Maybe then you don’t come on shore where you not supposed to…?”

That time, Revik opted to remain silent.

He kept his mind silent too, realizing he’d underestimated the construct already.

He didn’t fight the seer behind him as they cuffed his wrists behind his back. He felt the muscles of his arms and back tense, though.

He also started to wonder if this had been a mistake.

He should have stuck with his original plan and crossed into Singapore from Malaysia. He could have made a formal petition for entry there, on the land side. Hell, he wouldn’t have needed to…his image would have lit up their facial-rec software like a damned Christmas tree the second he got into visual range. That, or the Barrier construct would have ID’d his light the second he crossed through the gateway of their OBE.

He wouldn’t have had to explain anything.

They likely would have shoved him on a boat for Hong Kong themselves.

Ironically, he hadn’t done it that way because he’d been worried some trigger-happy guard might recognize him before they could run his stats up the flagpole, and he’d get shot. Now he might get killed by some dock-rat security guard for no reason whatsoever.

He decided to take a chance.

“Do you not recognize me, brothers?” he said.

He let the second one shove him forward, stumbling a little as he took a few steps. It hit him that they really were shoving him towards the end of the pier. They might really just throw him into the water, cuffed, likely shot…and let him drown.

Thinking again about whether he wanted to risk using his telekinesis, Revik swallowed.

He might have no choice.

Even so, he knew that using manipulation here, inside even the bare edges of a Dreng construct, would be risky as hell. There was a better than decent chance he’d be knocked unconscious, at minimum, the second he tried it.

Hell, it might kill him.

“…You might want to send my image to your commanders,” he said, speaking faster when the seer behind him shoved him again. He switched to formal Prexci. “I am the Sword, brothers. I believe your masters would wish to speak to me before you toss me off the pier…however good your reasons for doing so might be…”

The male seer holding him halted.

His hand still gripped Revik’s cuffed wrists.

“You liar,” he said, his voice gruff.

Great. This one barely spoke Prexci. Revik switched back to Mandarin.

“I’m not. Brothers…I implore you. Check my ID before you do anything rash…”

The seer behind Revik shoved him again, still gripping the metal cuffs.

Revik found himself half hung over the water. He felt his body tense as he overlooked the murky water of the pier, his booted feet barely holding the edge of the wooden planks. He stared into the oil slick surface and swallowed, right before he turned his head, craning his neck to speak to the first seer again, the one with the messy ponytail and the human tats.

“Brother! I am the Sword! I am not lying to you!”

“You are liar!” the first seer said. He spoke English that time, if thickly accented. “You not Sword! You nobody! You lie!”

“Run the facial-rec,” Revik said, switching to the same language. He glanced at the water again, conscious of the male behind him tensing, as if readying to shove him the rest of the way over the edge. “…Hook my appearance into the security construct at least! Please consider this, my brothers. If you kill me and you are wrong, you will answer for it…is that worth not even checking with your masters, first?”

“Why the fuck would the Sword come here?” the second seer sneered. He also spoke English with a heavy accent, but a lot more competently than his partner. “And why the fuck would you think his name would
protect
you here, brother? The Sword is our enemy now. He defected…he is worm-lover, with his cunt whore of a wife!”

Revik felt his jaw harden.

He forced himself to answer in an even voice.

“I can only tell you what is true,” Revik repeated. “I am the Sword…I have come requesting parlay with your masters. I would ask that you permit me to make peace with your people, if I could just––”

“If you Sword, why you not just kill us?” the first seer cut in. He raised the gun, again aiming it at Revik’s head. “Why not use light? Break guns and bones?”

Revik hesitated.

He didn’t know if he should tell them that he might have to do just that. After a bare pause, he shrugged with one cuffed hand.

“I would rather not kill my own kind,” he said diplomatically. “Why not simply send my image and light to the network? It is a small inconvenience, surely…particularly for a mistake that might cost both of you your lives.”

There was a silence.

The first seer, the only one Revik could see, frowned at him.

Revik couldn’t see the seer behind him, but felt a flicker of nerves vibrate the strands of his light. Revik felt a tenser pull of those fingers on his cuffed wrists, as well…along with glimmers of some kind of private exchange occurring between the two of them.

It felt like they were arguing.

A few seconds later, the seer behind him pulled Revik off the end of the pier.

Revik kept the relief off his light, exhaling as his feet rested firmly on the water-soaked wood.

“One moment,” the seer behind him said. He still gripped the cuffs, but lightly now. “One moment, brother. We will do as you say…you will not move.”

He sounded openly nervous that time.

Nervous enough that Revik wondered if maybe he’d looked at Revik’s light, too.

After a few more seconds, that quiver of nerves turned into something closer to shock. Revik glanced over at the first seer right as he lowered his rifle. His dark skin had gone an unnatural pale color, with a greenish tint. He continued to grip the gun, but fear trembled his aleimi, even as the seer behind Revik began to unlock the cuffs on his wrists.

“Illustrious brother,” the seer behind him said. His voice shook, holding an overt submissive note. “Brother, I humbly apologize…”

Revik grunted, noncommittal, even as he pulled his wrists back in front of his body, rubbing them briefly with his fingers.

“Come with us please, brother,” the same seer said, stepping out from behind him and motioning towards the land-ward side of the pier. “Please, Illustrious brother…please…”

Revik glanced at him, taking in his appearance and light as the other bowed, making the respectful sign of the Sword with one hand as he kept his head lowered. He looked a lot like his friend, only slightly less underfed and at least three inches taller.

He had the same ID scars on his arms though, and the same pantheon of tattoos covering his skin with the same cheap human ink and imperfect lines.

When the seer indicated a second time for Revik to walk up the pier towards the guard station and the outside wall, Revik followed the direction of his ink-stained fingers.

He didn’t give the other seer, the one who’d pointed a gun at him, so much as a glance.

He felt the first seer’s shock as he passed, however.

More than that, Revik felt a kind of lost confusion on his light, like he’d just found out Revik was Santa Claus.

Revik ignored that, too. He focused on the landward horizon instead, placing his feet in rote as he made his way up the warped planks.

The real construct lived behind that gated wall, he knew.

He also knew there was a good chance that once he passed through that wall, he’d never come out again. Or worse, really.

He could come out, but no longer be himself.

Because at this point, as Allie would have said, things could definitely get worse.