Allie's War Season Four (144 page)

Presumably, he’d done all of that while I was up on the deck, staring at the wake of the aircraft carrier. Or maybe after I’d gone to sleep that night.

No one could even tell me what he’d sent them to look for.

Not even Balidor, who had been involved peripherally.

Apparently Revik only talked to Oli and Yumi regarding the actual mission parameters and even they didn’t have details on the actual target. Revik sent all of that, encrypted, directly to Loki, along with schematics, an approach plan, and several contingencies. Later, Yumi and Balidor got called in by Loki himself as backup.

Both Oli and Yumi updated me with everything they knew as soon as I asked, but no one could tell me what had happened to Loki yet, since there’d been radio silence since the Chinook left the White House grounds.

Either way, I was pissed.

Granted, I could see the hypocrisy in that, given that I’d just delivered orders to send us to Dubai without talking to Revik beforehand...but I was kind of blown away that Revik had done all of that right after the mess in Macau, and from the tank, no less.

From what Balidor told me, there had been casualties, too.

I was supposed to get confirmation on that later, as well as who we might have lost, once the team ended their radio silence. I hoped like hell Revik had a good reason for getting some of our infiltrators killed. We weren’t exactly flush in high-ranked seers these days.

Moreover, a significant chunk of those we had were completely untried in the field. It was going to take a hell of a lot longer than we had right now, to train up those we’d found among the Lists and refugee camps who had high ranks in potential.

So yeah, none of this put me in the best frame of mind.

But I knew I couldn’t put it off any longer. I had to talk to Revik.

I had Balidor call ahead, so I wouldn’t take him completely off guard. I overheard Balidor tell him that they’d been forced to bring me into the D.C. operation, too.

It pissed me off more when I heard the apology in ‘Dori’s voice while he explained that, and it occurred to me once again that Revik had managed to split our command structure a lot more than I’d realized. He’d done it long before he put a gun in Cass’s face.

The bottom line was, he hadn’t wanted to talk to me about it, which meant he didn’t trust me. No one believed in the chain of command more than Revik did, not even Wreg. I’d never known him to buck it before, except when he had zero respect for his commanding officer.

Which yeah, hurt. It angered me, too.

Either way, I figured we had to settle this. One way or another, we had to.

Revik had been the one to teach me that someone has to be in charge. That person could delegate all they wanted, but without someone at the helm, things unraveled fast in military operations. And whatever Balidor said about the Bridge being a military commander but not, we were still, essentially, a military operation. Right now, anyway.

I’d delegated a lot to Revik already. Even the D.C. op could realistically be seen in that light, as an exercise of the authority I’d already granted him.

But executing Cass after I’d explicitly told everyone I wanted her alive was not.

All of this ran through my mind as I walked the ship’s corridors from the control deck back down to the main hold.

I walked the long way, maybe to buy myself time, climbing down stairs and ladders without seeing the green and gray metal around me. I passed seers who saluted me, refugee humans who noticed me and stared.

I barely looked at any of them, either.

When I finally reached the bottom of the last metal staircase into the floor housing the three cargo hangars, and saw the wall of organic metal shielding protecting the tanks from the rest of hangars 1-3, I found myself reluctant to go in there at all. Was I really up to being yelled at for the next few hours? Being told I was incompetent, by the one person I needed to trust me more than any of them? He obviously
didn’t
trust me, though. He’d made that much crystal clear, even if I hadn’t suspected as much ever since everything went down in Manhattan.

Truthfully, I didn’t see that there was much I could do about that, either.

Which really left me only one option with him.

Well, two really...but only one I was willing to entertain right now.

It wasn’t pride that made me want to hold onto command. Not anymore. I’d never given a damn about that, about being “The Bridge” as some kind of ego thing. The whole Bridge title and role was a fucking albatross, to be honest. If I could, I would have handed the whole damned thing over to him...and gladly. If he wanted power, he could have it. That wasn’t the issue for me. That had
never
been the issue for me.

But it felt wrong.

I don’t know how to convey it any better than that.

Maybe I was closer to that Bridge part of me these days, after dying and everything else that went down in Manhattan, but I had no choice but to trust that instinct now, whereas I might have worked harder to willfully ignore it before.

I needed to be in charge.

I didn’t want it, but I needed to do it anyway.

I felt it down to my bones that it had to be that way.

Maybe I was just channeling Vash, or one of the other Council seers...or maybe Balidor himself, who believed in the chain of command even more strongly than Revik, even though he didn’t always act like it.

Maybe I was simply too close to these people to be an effective leader.

Maybe they couldn’t take me seriously enough...or hell, maybe they just flat-out didn’t fear me enough. Maybe it would always be too difficult to treat my husband like my husband while I was also supposed to be his commanding officer.

I didn’t have answers for any of it, honestly.

I didn’t even try to find answers, not once I realized I would never be able to find them with my mind alone, not in time, anyway. I didn’t have enough military experience to come to that kind of conclusion, and frankly, when I tried to think about it with the more logical part of my mind, I could find examples pointing to just about any conclusion I wanted.

All I could do was resist and get angry, fluctuating between wanting to give it all to him––to Balidor, to Revik and all the rest of them––and be done with the whole mess, see if they could do better, only to circle right back to that same, unwavering, and deeply annoying truth.

It felt wrong.

It just flat-out felt
wrong
to give it to them.

So I wouldn’t.

I didn’t want to think about yet, whether my marriage would be able to handle that.

But today might be the day where I had to answer that question.

HE WAS THERE, at least.

I guess I should have been thankful for that.

When I went inside, I didn’t know what to expect exactly. I mean, I guess I must have been geared up for a fight. I would have been stupid not to be.

Mostly, though, I felt strangely clear again.

I felt like a different part of me had taken over for this part.

He was lying on the bed when I got there, stretched out, ankles crossed, headset on. I didn’t have to look at his face to know he was working, but he must have been pretty deep into it, because when he felt my light, he jerked noticeably, looking up at me in surprise.

In what felt like less than a second, he was on his feet.

He unfurled from his position like a cat, ripping the headset off and half jumping off the bed in the same motion. The latter he did subtly, but it still made me think of being in the ring with him. It also made me pause, standing not far from the door and watching him warily as I took in his light, the unreadable look on his face.

Only his eyes were expressive.

Borderline cold, they shone at me from above those high cheekbones, watching me as carefully as I watched him.

I realized I could still feel Neela then, and glanced over my shoulder. Meeting the female seer’s gaze, I noted the worried look there, and motioned easily with one hand, keeping my voice deliberately casual.

“It’s okay,” I told her. “You can close it. And please turn off the surveillance, if you would. I would like some privacy.”

I watched Neela’s face as she struggled with my instructions.

I could feel the part of her that wanted to say something, to remind me they’d be outside, or maybe remind me of some of the security precautions for the tank itself. I could see her wanting to impart some other meaning, too, to let me know that they wouldn’t stand for him harming me.

More than anything, I could tell she didn’t want to turn off the surveillance, whatever I told her, and whether she understood my reasons or not.

I could also tell she didn’t want to disobey me, especially not in front of Revik.

Eventually, that last part won out over the rest.

“Of course, Esteemed Bridge,” she said, her voice stilted.

Her cheeks looked redder than usual, but she immediately began to close the door. I stood there, watching until it had shut entirely, and the red, blinking light over the door had turned back to a solid blue-green.

I then waited until the light went out in the God’s eye camera over the door, and the other one, over Revik’s desk.

Only then, did I turn to face Revik.

His expression had changed somewhat in that pause.

I couldn’t have said how, precisely, but it looked as if some of the cold had seeped out of his eyes. He still looked angry, but something about that anger struck me as more open...or maybe just more willing to fight me outright.

I watched as he tossed his headset to the table covered in larger, more animal-like machines he’d been toying with, as well as a short stack of leather bound, paper books. When he looked up at me next, his narrow mouth curled into a frown.

“Well?” he said, apparently unable to continue our staring contest without speaking.

I began to feel his light like an electrical charge, coursing around me and through me, making my skin tighten, along with my fingers, my jaw, the muscles in my legs and arms and stomach. It grew more intense in those few seconds before he continued, like a fire coursing through my aleimi, briefly making it difficult to think. I couldn’t even define what I felt as anger, not at first. It felt more like power, like a charge of something he barely held in check, sliding through the higher regions of his light.

“...Are you going to start?” he said. “Or shall I?”

His voice had gone cold once more.

The contrast to the heat I felt in his light felt almost disorienting.

He took a step towards me in that pause, and I felt something in his self-control break, along with a rush of emotion that seemed to hit the higher regions of my light first, and didn’t come to me in words, or even discrete pieces of thought. I felt part of what I’d been feeling for weeks, though, that this wasn’t really about Terian breaking into the computer network to speak to me, or even about what Revik wanted to do to Cass.

It wasn’t even completely about his fears for my life.

I’m not sure if it ever formulated in my mind, what he intended to do.

I didn’t imagine him hurting me, or trying to hurt me, but I didn’t get far enough ahead to see him yelling at me, either. Jon told me that Revik had yelled at me once, back in San Francisco...loud enough that the whole house had heard it. Jon said it scared him, if only because he’d never felt or heard Revik like that before, and all of them worried he’d snapped, that he’d lost control over himself. The whole Adhipan had sat there in that living room, listening and watching to see what Revik would do, to make sure he didn’t hurt me.