Allie's War Season Four (119 page)

Grabbing hold of Loki’s armored vest, he began dragging him down the aisle to the forward hatch. Holo reached it just in front of them, and Loki watched as he yanked down on the locking bar to swivel the hatch open on its greased metal hinge. Holo swung it all the way open, until it caught and locked. Then, looking down, he used his foot to engage the lowering of the metal stairs.

Loki did not let himself look at Gina again.

Even so, he found himself aware of her, aware in every part of his body and light, during those few minutes it took to get himself off the Chinook.

9

WHITE HOUSE

LOKI’S BOOTS HIT the grass. His aleimi continued to pull on the woman’s in the background, but once he’d landed on the muddy, water-soaked ground, his head felt marginally clearer again, perhaps just from being outside the aircraft.

He could breathe freely again.

He glanced back at the Chinook a last time before Jax gripped his vest, dragging him deeper into the area of the old lawn and away from what his light still wanted.

“I am sorry, brother,” Loki murmured, glancing at the shorter, East Indian-looking seer. “Truly.”

Jax only smiled at him, clapping him on the back. His eyes remained serious, though. “No apologies. You might need a chaperone until we get you two lovebirds back to the carrier...but no apologies required, brother Loki.
I guess it was just your day.”

Loki nodded at the seer expression, not answering.

He still found himself fighting his own light.

Slowly pulling his equilibrium back to center, he shifted his eyes around where they stood, focusing on the grounds themselves, on the physical details of their location about twenty meters from the door to the reception hall below the South Portico.

The transformation of the building struck him more directly that time, now that he could see it all without the intervening organic-glass window.

It differed markedly from the out-of-date virtual schematic the Sword provided.

Dirt and scorch marks rode in twisting patterns up several of the white columns, he could see now. The dirt looked mostly to be weathering from storms. The scorch marks still looked more like localized fires than bombs or missiles.

Loki saw broken furniture, cloth and other refuse covering much of the lawn directly below the portico itself, as if most of the items there had originally been thrown to the lawn from the upstairs floors of the White House itself. The grass itself was mostly gone. That, or else it had grown wild, depending on which segment of ground Loki studied with his eyes. He saw an equal number of bald, muddy patches filled with tire ruts and garbage, sometimes directly adjacent to denser patches of taller, field-looking grasses mixed with dandelions, thistles and wildflowers. He saw broader-leafed plants, too, which must have seeded from other areas.

He measured with his eyes that most of these, dead and alive, had entertained at least a few months’ worth of growth. The monsoon-like rains must be keeping the area greener than usual, even without the fountains and sprinkler systems of the past, but clearly, no one had mowed any of these patches of wild growth for six months or more. If not longer.

Loki tried to remember again, when all of this started.

Had it been a year already? It had been more than that, he realized. The disease had come to San Francisco in October of the previous year, so they were already a month past the time of the initial infection.

As Loki puzzled over this fact in his mind, and how different this area had been just those thirteen months previous––when the Sword and Bridge and the rest of them still lived inside a fully-functioning hotel in New York City––he realized, once again, that until he had a concrete reminder such as this, of the actual,
physical
changes that had taken place, in areas he knew before the disaster struck, it sometimes felt like things had always been this way.

Well...except when they weren’t.

Memory interceded, reminding him, but it all felt strangely distant, even now.

The stone fountain had a few inches of yellowish-brown, brackish water stagnating in its basin, choked with mosquito larvae and trash broken by circles of mossy foam on either side of the previously white walls. The place stank of rotten vegetation and urine, and Loki felt his mouth curl involuntarily until he looked away, back towards the scorched walls of the White House’s main building itself.

He motioned with one hand to Illeg, then to Jax, pointing towards the lower entrance to the diplomatic reception room. The Sword had given him blueprints along with operational parameters, but there was no way to know which entrances would still be open and which blocked. Balidor had also provided the most recent aleimic scans they had of the building and surrounding city, but those were at least two months out of date, as well.

Even as he thought it, Illeg motioned towards him, asking a pointed question with her hands.

My discretion,
he answered, gesturing back the answer, also using seer sign language.
For now, no Barrier,
he added.
Once we’re inside, if there’s still no construct present, we might use it in targeted bursts...but only at my signal. The construct is abandoned, according to the Adhipan, but the boss thinks they might still be watching this and other hot spots, so we’ll only dip in and out as needed. Understood?

Illeg nodded, her eyes holding a faint relief.

Loki did not add that Shadow and his people might be watching them, too, meaning the individual team members, especially given who they were. Particularly, he might be tracking those who had accompanied the Sword into Gossett Tower that night, and who had aided him in stealing back the Bridge and Sword’s daughter, as well as the being, War.

He didn’t voice any of that, though.

Instead he looked around at the rest of the team, ensuring they also understood.

Mika nodded, confirming her understanding with another set of hand signals. Jax, who had been watching them converse back and forth, nodded, as well. Loki caught Ontari’s eye when he glanced that way, and waited for his nod. Once he had it, he checked with Anale, Holo, Kalgi and Rex, as well. Loki noticed only then that all of the seers seemed to have relaxed, in both their facial expressions and their light, since they had gotten Loki off the aircraft.

Pushing his mind off the reasons for that, as well as the woman he was leaving behind, Loki nodded again, to himself that time. Glancing around once more at rest of them, including Rex, he motioned to Illeg again, waiting for her and Jax to walk out ahead before he signaled for Holo and Rex to follow. He pinged Ontari and Mika after they fanned out behind their leads, then motioned Kalgi closer, speaking to her in a low voice.

“Stay behind us a little,” he said. “This should be a simple extraction, but it feels very quiet here to me.”

“Awfully fucking quiet, sir,” Kalgi confirmed, her eyes and voice agreeing with his implied meaning. “I’ll see if I can get Adhipan backup in terms of our own lights, sir.”

Loki nodded, sending a pulse of approval. “Good. Very good,” he said.

“I should have mentioned it earlier, sir,” she said almost apologetically. “I only thought of it now, to be truthful.”

He clicked at her mildly, but only smiled.

“I will mention it to the Sword,” he offered.

“Like hell, you will,” she retorted.

Smiling faintly at what he heard in her voice, he touched his headset again, switching it on and sending a subvocal check around to the rest of them, even as the props of the Chinook behind them continued to grind to a half power-down, moving slower and slower over the grass as the whine of the rotors lowered in volume and tone.

Realizing it would take some minutes to power the helicopter back up again, even from its current waiting stance, Loki hesitated, tempted to tell Preela to move the bird now, as a precaution. Even so, he appreciated Kalgi’s words...and understood their meaning.

He could feel they were all essentially pulling for him, too, since Loki himself had only recently been assigned to lead teams on the ground. The thought touched his mind briefly, how strange this might have been to all of them, even a few years earlier, with Kalgi, an ex-Adhipan lifer, taking orders from him, Loki, who fought as a rebel in two wars.

Loki found the symmetry there pleasing, however.

Something in it felt more like a circle than otherwise.

Giving Kalgi and then Anale a last glance and a smile, Loki raised his rifle, following the others towards the ground entrance into the oval hallway.

THE SWORD ONLY gave Loki the bare bones of where to look.

Truthfully, from the encrypted recording Oli sent, Loki could not be sure that the Sword knew for certain if there was anything to find, much less where it might be. Still, he understood the logic of looking, since they were all unlikely to be in this part of the world again, at least any time soon. They had found as many from the Lists as could be found here.

Loki wasn’t even entirely clear what the Sword hoped to find, even apart from what he thought might be likely or possible, however. Presumably, the Bridge might know, as this intel reportedly came from her, but if she did, either she had not confided that detail to her husband, or he had not passed on that information to Oli.

When Loki had attempted to probe Oli for additional information, in fact, purely for operational purposes, she said that the intermediary had been even more reticent than usual. The Sword admitted to her, after a few more minutes of roundabout discussion, that he’d received the information from his wife, and that she wasn’t available for him to ask her further questions.

Loki found that odd, to say the least.

Oli did, too, and proceeded to tell Loki so. Loki knew better than to rise to such bait, or to speculate as to the private life of his intermediaries...but yes, he found it odd.

He had heard whispers of the Bridge’s prescience, of course.

All of them knew she supposedly dreamt dreams that contained elements of prophecy. It was rumored that those prescient dreams of hers reached her even inside the walls of the tank where she slept with her husband...even though the tank cut them both out of the Barrier proper. According to rumor among Loki’s ex-rebel friends, including Commander Wreg himself, the Bridge had even dreamed the Displacement Lists...for months prior to the break-in at the New York bank where they were found.

From what Loki could gather regarding his current set of orders, this D.C. op might have similar origins.

Loki did not mind. He knew that some of the seers with him might have somewhat less accepting views, however, which is why he chose to keep that information to himself.

The Sword’s encrypted message had been precise in two critical areas.