Allie's War Season Four (121 page)

Moreover, neither he nor anyone on his team could feel anything approaching a construct down here, either. Granted, they’d gotten a lot more cautious around assumptions related to construct detection following what they’d encountered with Shadow in Manhattan, but even so, Loki trusted the Sword, and the Sword hadn’t felt anything, either.

Changing channels on his headset, he pinged Yumi’s team back at the aircraft carrier to get a second opinion, anyway. He didn’t bother with a greeting when she picked up.

“Still nothing?” he said.

“Nothing, brother,” she confirmed.

Nodding, as much to himself as to the seer on the line, who wouldn’t see him anyway without his avatar function turned on, he motioned for the others to leave the elevator car in pairs. They walked out in front of him, two by two, with him and Anale taking up the rear and still scanning for any secondary security measures that the Sword’s plans might have missed. The Sword cautioned Loki more than once that those plans were a few years old, and came mostly from the Bridge’s and his memories of being held captive down here.

Given what happened in the wake of the Bridge being broken out of this underground prison, the Sword cautioned Loki strongly to keep his eyes open, as it was likely that security measures had been strengthened significantly, or simply changed into new configurations.

For now, however, Loki felt nothing. With the power down, the floors felt dead.

Even as he thought it, Illeg’s voice rose on the comm.

“Clear,” she said.

“Clear,” Ontari seconded from further down the hall.

“Clear,” Holo confirmed, from an open doorway about ten meters from the elevator doors.

A few more clears sounded in his headset, even as Loki felt the seers in front of him begin to fan out and scan the corridors and attached rooms. He monitored the careful touches of their light, even as he sent the construct a snapshot of the offices at the end of the hall, with particulars of the room the Sword had shown him.

Glancing at Anale, Loki motioned for her to follow him, right before he entered the pitch blackness of the hallway after the rest of the team.

Loki wondered if he’d ever walked in darkness so complete.

Physical darkness did not bother seers the same way it did many humans. They could use their Barrier sight to compensate for the most part, providing enough imprints lived in the physical space to allow them to make out the outlines of objects. Unlike an Elaerian, like the Sword and the Bridge, ordinary seers could get no insight into those objects apart from their outlines...but they could at least avoid walking into them.

Even so, pitch darkness like this still affected them, psychologically as much as anything, he supposed.

Like now, Loki couldn’t actually see the walls of the corridor.

He could feel imprints, some of them in the shape of fingerprints, handprints, touches of life and light left behind, which left a blurred outline approximating walls for him to follow. He could see the much brighter lights of his team members in the corridor up ahead, and in some of the doorways to either side, checking corners and scanning rooms. He could see organics in some of the walls, too, like faintly shimmering threads that stood probably an inch or two deeper than the physical limits of the walls themselves.

The organics appeared so dense down here, they ran like blood-engorged veins through all four surfaces of the corridor, giving him an incomplete view of the dimensions of the physical structure, but a view nonetheless.

“Corridor, second right,” he said through the sub-vocals. “Fourth door down on the left. Should be a dead-metal, key button security panel under a flip switch on the outside...followed by a secondary with organics, retinal scanner, possibly facial recognition ID.” Pausing as he felt Ontari and Illeg approaching the appropriate door, he added, “If you can’t hack the squids, we may have to use charges.”

Loki continued to make his way down the corridor as he spoke, feeling Anale walking behind him, and Kalgi and Holo just ahead, following Rex.

“Report?” he queried the others. He could already feel and see Illeg and Ontari jacking open the panel he’d told them about from the Sword’s specs.

“Still clear,” Holo said.

“Clear,” Rex confirmed, peering into a doorway to what felt to Loki like a much larger conference room. It contained an enormous, real-wood table that shimmered with the remnants of the tree’s light, as well as at least twenty, leather, high-backed chairs, and numerous imprints from human and seer light.

Loki felt Rex’s light pan slowly through the room, sharing a snapshot with the others. Along with the rest of his team, Loki felt the denser, more complex imprints contained in the light still flickering in the four corners of the room.

They’d had important meetings in here, when humans still roamed these halls.

Loki almost wondered if he should call that in, too, ask the bosses back at the carrier if they wanted him to try and collect more on what had occurred down here.

Yumi must have been monitoring him closer than he realized, however, for her voice rose in his headset only a few seconds after he had the thought.

“Adhipan Balidor says no,” she said, her voice sounding suddenly very far away. “Complete mission goal and get out. Boss says to hurry it up, too. He doesn’t like some of the signatures in the area...he thinks someone might have been tipped off that you’re down there.”

“Understood,” Loki said.

He knew by “boss,” his Sark sister meant Balidor that time, not the Sword. He couldn’t feel the Sword at all anymore, and suspected he was not participating in the op at this stage.

“Correct,” Yumi said. “Do you need him? He’s under...” She hesitated, as if stopping herself from saying something she shouldn’t. “...He’s indisposed,” she finished. “But I could try to pull him, if you need him.”

Loki shook his head, once, feeling Illeg’s pulse of satisfaction as she broke through the key in the door’s lock.

“No,” he said, watching with his light as they opened the door. “Negative. We’ll be in and out, as requested. Tell Adhipan Balidor I’ll report again once we know what we have here.”

He continued to follow Illeg and Ontari’s light as he spoke, watching as they entered the room beyond the security panel. Holo and Jax now held point over the door as the other two went inside, covering Illeg and Ontari with their rifles.

Loki had caught up with them in the physical now. He could see all four bright lights only a few meters away. He’d already passed Rex, Kalgi and Mika on the way towards the door, and he could feel Anale close behind him, as well.

“Report?” he sent to Illeg.

“You’d better come in here, sir,” she replied.

Loki was already at the door. Keeping his rifle raised, he walked inside, scanning the room in rote, right before he lowered the rifle’s barrel.

He could see what Illeg had brought him here to see.

In front of him, the faint outline of a picture or wall hanging of some kind stood out on the far wall, covered with different sets of hand and fingerprints, especially on one side, where it appeared it had been touched or grabbed more frequently.

Behind those duller, more static outlines of imprints, Loki could see tendrils snaking in complicated trails through the wall behind, far denser and with more vein-like, gold and green branches than what Loki had seen in the organic and semi-organic wall fixtures and sensors in the hallway outside. Seeing Illeg grinning at him through the Barrier, only a few feet away, Loki himself let out a quiet whistle.

The safe was exactly where the Sword had told him it would be.

The same safe that the Bridge had supposedly only dreamed existed in the first place.

Loki clicked his fingers, sending a pulse towards the painting, and to the wall safe behind it.

“Open it,” he said to Illeg, using the link despite how close they stood to one another now, and the fact that they hadn’t felt a single soul in the building since they’d arrived on these floors.

“Hurry,” he added. “They’re saying we may have company when we surface.”

He felt that ripple of humor on Illeg and Ontari’s light cut out at his words, stilling their aleimi back into focused stillness. Loki stood there, waiting, periodically glancing at Holo and Jax at the door and then back and Illeg and Ontari as the latter first used a physical scanner to determine if any dead-combustion (meaning non-organic) charges lived in the hinges, then proceeded to slide open the hinged image hanging on the wall to reveal the safe.

“Kind of old school, isn’t it?” Illeg asked, her voice holding a faint smile once more. “A safe in a wall? Hidden behind a painting?”

Loki smiled, but his light didn’t move as he watched the other two.

“Humans can be nostalgic,” Ontari said, smiling through the dark.

“Can you break the lock?” Loki said, quiet.

None of them bothered with the links at this point.

“Working on it, sir,” Ontari said.

Loki could feel a pulse of adrenaline hit his bloodstream, seemingly out of nowhere. Up until now, the danger Yumi warned him about had felt abstract, like something theoretical. Now, he felt the difference in his light. They were in trouble.

He touched his headset, opening yet another channel.

“Preela?” he queried.

She answered at once, even as his light skated out, taking a quick snapshot of what he could now feel converging on the grounds of the White House building.

“In the air, sir,” she confirmed. “We’re looking at structural damage on the roof...”

“And?” he said.

“No good, sir. Sensors say it won’t hold us...not safely anyway. Looking for an alternate until you’re ready for pick up.” She paused, and Loki heard the whine of the Chinook’s rotors in the background. “...Any idea when that’ll be, sir?”

“Not yet––” he began, but Illeg cut him off.

“Gotcha,” she said, smiling grimly at the safe door in front of her.

“––But soon,” Loki added into the comm, his light once more refocusing on the safe and the now three seers standing in front of it, since Rex had joined them, and appeared to be the one who had cracked part of the locking mechanism.

Loki remembered that the big-shouldered seer had a background in explosives and safes. He’d been a professional thief at one point, back in Russia. Like many seers had been in those years, he’d been recruited by Galaith directly out of the Russian gulag, where he’d been awaiting sentencing for one of those crimes.

Loki heard somewhere that the Sword had been recruited similarly by the Rooks, once upon a time.

“Where are you with it?” Loki said.

His physical voice sounded more noticeably tense outside of the link.

He watched with his light as Illeg and Ontari peered inside, using small penlights to illuminate the greenish-blue walls of the organic safe. Now that he could see the whole thing with his physical eyes, Loki found himself more impressed with Illeg and Rex’s work. The safe’s walls stood at least four inches thick, cut at a diagonal angle to fit perfectly over the hole in the organic wall itself. Even with the physical light overpowering his Barrier sight to a degree, Loki could still see those vein-like strands of aleimic light, pulsing under the strength of the living components of the nearly full-blooded organic.

“Tick-tock,” Holo muttered from beside him.

Loki glanced at him, but could not disagree.

Turning back to the safe, he watched as Ontari, Rex and Illeg began pulling out data keys, stacks of paper and larger organic devices, all but the paper appearing to consist of what had been the cutting edge side of high tech. Loki saw the three of them starting to examine these contents one by one and snapped his fingers impatiently.

“We don’t have time for that,” he said. “Bring all of it. We’re leaving.”