Allie's War Season Four (181 page)

We’d gone over about a million different ways to enter Dubai.

As with most of our operations lately, the tricky part would be me and Revik.

We’d been practicing different types of Barrier cloaks and shields for weeks. We also worked to get better at hiding specific trauma markers, as well as other imprints and structures particular to ourselves and our aleimi––especially Revik, whose light had been mapped more extensively by Shadow and his minions than anyone else on our team.

That didn’t even get into things like changing the way we walked, talked, sat and otherwise moved our bodies to keep from being picked up by electronic surveillance. We knew Shadow could very easily be focusing defensive scans on other seers in our team by now, too.

We knew they might be expecting us.

Not because of Macau, necessarily, but definitely because of Terian.

Clearly, someone wanted us paying attention to Terry, and to Dubai more generally. As Revik pointed out, however, the smoke signals from Terry
could
be meant to draw us to Dubai, or they might just as easily be meant to warn us away. Terian asking us to come was so heavy-handed that it might have been intended to have precisely the opposite effect.

On the other hand, unraveling our marital bond seemed like a pretty big flag to wave in front of our faces, especially under the circumstances.

Whatever the meaning of Terry’s erratic smoke signals, and even though the infiltration team managed to pinpoint Dubai as the source with a fair degree of certainty, the idea of Terian being stationed there...or anywhere, really...was also a fallacy on multiple levels.

We had absolutely no idea how many bodies Terian might be operating these days, or how they might be connected. Even if we found one of those bodies in Dubai, getting ahold of it might be mostly worthless. We had no way to “hide” him in any conventional sense, given what he was. Putting a secondary body in the tank and cutting it off from his primary body––meaning Feigran––would likely only kill it. There was zero guarantee it would provide us any useful information before that happened.

Conversely, given how Terian’s bodies worked together in the past, Revik warned that no amount of shielding would cut Terian off from the rest of the his bodies if we left him in some kind of military construct outside of the tank. That meant he’d be a walking GPS signal for Shadow unless we locked him up... which again, would probably just kill him.

That didn’t leave us a lot of options, really.

Well, unless we happened to get ahold of the primary body, meaning Feigran himself.

In the past, the Dreng and Terian himself had gone to pretty drastic lengths to make his original body inaccessible, though.

Under the Rooks, he stored his original body up in space.

The whole topic of Terian and Feigran spawned an interminable number of endless discussions and arguments, including how long we could afford to stay there, inside a Shadow city, to look for someone who would probably be under armed guard and in close proximity to Shadow himself. Many of the infiltrators questioned whether we should even be
trying
to bring in Feigran, given the risks and uncertain benefits.

More than one person thought we should find him primarily to kill him.

Another group thought we should grab the List seers and get the hell out of there.

A smaller set of us, including me and eventually Revik, thought we should at least
try
to bring Feigran in alive, mostly in the hopes he might be able to help Lily.

Of course, those discussions also brought on a set of extrapolations around what might happen if we managed to get ahold of the original Feigran body, and, more to the point...if we could find some way to throw a kill-switch on the rest, in effect, killing “Terian” once more, and integrating all of his requisite pieces back into a unified Feigran.

Again, most of those theories involved utilizing the tank to cut Feigran off from his satellite versions, which in theory couldn’t survive without the original body. We had no idea what that might do to the “fragments” of Terian left floating out there, though, if they would be reunited with the Feigran body when he emerged from the tank, or...

Well, or not.

Revik thought if the gap wasn’t too long, they
might
reunite.

It was all just one giant jumble of maybes and what ifs though, and we all knew it. No one knew for certain whether Feigran would even survive the process, if he lost whole pieces of himself to the ether while locked up inside the tank. Revik also reminded me repeatedly that capturing Feigran couldn’t be a full-fledged mission priority until we’d breached the city walls and could do a realistic assessment of the likelihood of that mission’s success.

We did have a few people on the inside by then, of course.

Communication had been spotty, but we knew they’d made it inside.

They were able to tell us a few approaches
not
to try, at least, as well as a bit more about security measures to expect once we breached the city’s construct. Since our inside contact was Surli, meaning my sort-of ex-boyfriend from China, I knew Revik felt even less confident about using that intel than I did. He’d made absolutely no bones about not trusting Surli, but Tarsi recommended him, and in the end, it had been me who had to make the call.

Anyway, Surli made sense. He had few visible ties to us and none that we knew of to Shadow, or to either of Shadow’s rebellions. The seer who volunteered to go with Surli made a lot
less
sense, from a purely strategic standpoint, but I’d okay’d him, too, for reasons I was less clear about. That seer had been Stanley.

I probably wouldn’t have even considered using Stanley for this, given that he was one of the rare, nine intermediaries and already had been taken captive by Menlim once, but after Stanley offered, Kali spoke up on his behalf, declaring him a good choice. When Tarsi agreed with Kali, along with several seers in the Council, I decided not to argue.

So, despite grumbles from Revik, the two of them were briefed, prepped, and left to catch a ride with a smuggling ship off the coast of India.

Now I bobbed in the weirdly warm but very salty water of the Persian Gulf––or maybe, technically, the Arabian Gulf or the Gulf of Oman, I wasn’t sure––and watched Revik where he bobbed next to me in his form-fitting wet suit. We both wore oxygen tanks on our backs and I followed his hands as he fitted organic goggles over his eyes before he picked up the regulator on his tank and blew on it.

“You ready?” he said.

“No,” I said.

He laughed, then leaned closer, kissing me with wet, salty lips.

Liar,
he sent fondly, blowing heat in my general direction.
You’re worse than me.

Feeling the adrenaline coursing through my limbs, I realized that most of that wasn’t fear. It was anticipation. Hell, it was almost impatience.

Damn him.

I heard Revik chuckle again, right before he fit the regulator into his mouth, arranging the goggles a last time once he had it in place. Inclining his head for me to follow him, I felt another pulse of heat off him, that one holding more than just affection.

Hurry up,
he sent.
You’re turning me on, exuding all that warrior light.

Rolling my eyes, I did as he said, pulling on my own goggles and flicking the organics on by my temple. I winced at the spark of current, although I’d been assured repeatedly that they were totally safe and wouldn’t electrocute my head.

“Boys and their toys,” I muttered softly.

“What?” Revik said, still treading water in front of me.

Not answering, I glanced up, and saw Jon looking down at me, his face set in a worried-looking grimace.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” he blurted. “Please. Or is that a futile request?”

Realizing how little time I’d had with Jon since he and Wreg came out of hibernation, I felt a sudden stab of missing him, and a burst of guilt about hurting him with the telekinisis in the mess hall that day. I resolved to fix the first one, at least, once we got back from this mess. Maybe we could all go on a mini-vacation or something.

Him, Wreg, me, Revik, Lily.

At Jon’s snort, I blew warmth at him, infused with a not-subtle amount of love.

“Avoid stupid,” I said. “Check.”

He rolled his eyes. “Don’t humor me.”

“Just don’t let your husband shoot at us and we’ll be fine,” I told him, grinning.

I saw him flinch from the second pulse of emotion I sent, right before his eyes softened. That worried look didn’t leave his expression, however.

“No promises,” he said, gruff. “And hey, I mean it, Al. No reckless bullshit, okay? You’re a mother now. You can’t get away with that crap anymore. So listen to Revik. For once.”

“I will,” I told him, right before I fit my own regulator into my mouth.

Next to me, Revik gave an openly disbelieving snort.

Wreg apparently agreed with him. “No you won’t,” the muscular seer muttered.

Looking at Wreg, I was surprised to see worry in his eyes, too, along with more emotion than I was used to from the ex-rebel. When I glanced back at Jon, his frown deepened. I could tell just by looking at him that he didn’t believe me any more than Revik or Wreg.

Giving them both a last, weird smile through the awkwardness of the breathing equipment in my mouth, I winked, waved, then let go of the boat.

Revik followed me.

Together, we let the weight on our belts and of our tanks pull us under.

WE’D MAPPED THE shipping routes weeks before, mainly via satellite taps.

We’d still been docked at Sri Lanka when we started most of that end of things.

After the entire leadership team agreed not to let the aircraft carrier get any closer to Dubai than the coast of India––especially since we had good reason to believe they might be tracking us by then––we’d mapped out alternative routes into Dubai City from the staging area. We still didn’t know for certain whether we were being actively tracked, via the Barrier or in the physical, but we had to assume that if they’d figured out a physical means of tracking us, they would have tied that to satellites to pinpoint a location track inside the Barrier as well.

Wreg and his team, along with Vikram’s team, had gone over every mechanical and organic component in the ship, looking for anything that might serve as an easy-to-follow trail in the physical world, apart from the carrier’s actual wake.

They’d also looked for any foreign signals tracking them, or being sent from the ship without authorization.

They’d found nothing.

Wreg now cautiously theorized it was a Barrier leak only.

We all knew they would be looking for ways to use that Barrier leak to pinpoint a physical tracking mechanism, however. Once they managed that, assuming they hadn’t already, we could pretty much guarantee that the next step would be direct assault...assuming they didn’t just bomb the carrier outright, meaning, from a distance.

On other fronts, we’d also decided to send Maygar with Lily, rather than putting him with the military team supporting Dubai. That had been Revik’s call, and I knew why he’d done it and didn’t argue.

Truthfully, I felt better having Maygar with Lily, too.

And yeah, we were all worried about his light still, in terms of Shadow, but Tarsi and Balidor both said that Maygar had a lot less of that black stuff in his aleimi than either Revik or Lily... and much, much less than Cass.