Allie's War Season Four (35 page)

Jon wondered if Revik never talked about his daughter because he assumed he’d never see her alive. Jon had done the math, and looked up gestation cycles for seers. At this point, the baby would scarcely be a few months old, if following a human gestation arc. She wouldn’t be born at all yet, if Allie adopted a more Sark gestation arc during her pregnancy, since those lasted a full fifteen months. The baby could only have been around six months old at most when Cass took her out of Allie, so unable to survive outside of the womb, in either case.

Jorag told Jon that experiments had been done by the rebels to accelerate the growth cycles of seer offspring. Jorag said the rationale had been to keep female seers from being rendered vulnerable for extended periods of time during pregnancy, and so that newborn seers would spend less time in the vulnerabilities of extreme youth. Since both conditions, pregnancy and youth, tended to force the afflicted seers into hiding for months or years at a time, Salinse ordered their technicians to find a way to shorten those periods.

Jorag said that rebel scientists had already found ways to accelerate development of fetuses in the womb, back when he’d been a rebel. He knew they’d been working on continuing that acceleration of development outside of the womb, too.

He also told Jon, told all of them, really––well, all of them except Revik, who presumably already knew this and didn’t want to think about it in relation to his own child––that those experiments had been extremely well-funded.

Jon had a pretty good idea of who had been funding them.

Revik hadn’t known about Shadow back then.

Even so, Jon couldn’t help wondering if Revik ever wondered exactly where the money came from, back when he worked for Salinse. Of course, knowing Revik’s penchant for detail, he probably thought he knew. Shadow probably long ago found ways to hide, confuse and distort that information long before it reached anyone who cared enough to ask.

Thinking about that now, Jon glanced at Wreg.

Those obsidian-black eyes shifted away as soon as their gazes met, but Jon saw a frown touch the infiltrator’s lips just before he turned back to face Revik. Jon continued to watch the two of them talk, right before Wreg nodded to something Revik said, making a respectful gesture in seer sign language. It struck Jon as oddly Wreg-like that one minute, he could punch his commanding officer in the face, the next, he could follow him without question.

Revik seemed to expect nothing different, though.

Exhaling, Jon stamped his booted feet on the tarmac, fighting to focus on why he was here. Instructions cycled aimlessly in his head. The words remained, like nails hammered in his brain...but Jon could scarcely make sense of their meaning, despite how long he’d spent thinking about and memorizing all of it in the previous weeks.

He had maps to Allie’s light, somewhere in that tangled mess.

He carried a separate set of instructions for every level of the operation in which he had direct involvement, including every type of contingency, along with a number of variables that Revik and Balidor trained him to look for in the event things really went sideways. He’d been given a dozen different contingencies for if the construct knocked out Maygar and/or Revik’s telekinesis, another half-dozen for if it impaired Revik or Maygar’s ability to connect with Allie, five more if the construct broke, knocked out or blocked their ability to use the Barrier.

He’d been given contingencies for if any one of the three of them––meaning Allie, Maygar or Revik––were killed. He’d been given contingencies for finding Shadow on his own and for what to do with Feigran and Cass, if he found himself facing either one of the intermediaries alone. He’d even been given instructions about retrieving his niece or nephew.

He just hadn’t gotten them from Revik.

Despite all of these different plans and counter-plans and contingencies floating around in Jon’s head, he knew he only held a fraction of the possibilities, for the same reasons he strongly suspected a fair bit of false information had been fed to him along with the good by the other infiltrators already.

Jon was fine with that, too.

He wanted his piece of the plan, and that was it.

He knew it was a relatively small piece. He knew that piece lived inside what must be a much larger puzzle, one that contained a few hundred other, differently-shaped pieces that spelled out a much wider and denser meaning. Despite knowing he was only a small cog in a larger machine, he took seriously the warnings not to minimize his role, or to assume the plan could succeed without him.

Thinking about that had a tendency to bring on a debilitating kind of panic, though, so Jon felt a lot better when he didn’t dwell on his own potential for screwing up.

When he focused on Cass, on seeing her again, he felt strangely calmer.

When he focused on the fact that Cass and Shadow had his niece, he felt calmer still. The idea of Shadow raising Revik’s child, after what had been done to Revik in his own youth, had a tendency to remind Jon why he wasn’t asking Revik a lot of questions about means versus ends. It also served as a chilling reminder of why Revik might not be eager to talk about what might have been done to his and Allie’s child already.

Six months had passed, since they found Allie in their mother’s house in San Francisco.

Six months, nine days and roughly twelve hours.

Jon glanced over at the others just as Revik finished speaking. He watched Wreg make that half-salute the rebels often used with Revik, the one that contained an abbreviated version of the gesture of respect specific to the Sword. Even as the Chinese-looking seer completed the motion, Jon heard beating rotors echo across the near-empty tarmac, like the thuds of a giant heart.

By the time he faced in the direction from which they came, the dark shape of a helicopter had risen over the furthest hangar, its nose tilted at a slightly downward angle.

The black bird looked massive to Jon. A modified Boeing CH-47 Chinook, it wasn’t an attack model helicopter, or even a rescue model, like those that Jon had ridden in with Revik in the past. The thing stretched over one hundred feet in length, and had specifically been designed for combat cargo drops. Not only would it carry all of the high-ranked infiltrators Revik brought with them out of San Francisco, but also all of their equipment.

Jon had known, even before they’d left San Francisco, that they’d be flying over the OBE walls this time, not going across land or water. But it hadn’t really sunk in what that would mean to all of them, not until that precise moment.

There would be no surprise landings, not in that thing.

Jon saw Revik and the others turn, watching the Chinook approach low over the flat expanse of empty concrete near the terminal buildings. Among all of the seers standing there, only Allie didn’t change the direction of her eyes.

She continued to look out over the wave-crested ocean instead, at those dark, massing clouds hovering on the horizon.

For a bare instant, Jon thought he glimpsed her there again, shining from the depths of her pale green eyes, hiding in that thousand-yard stare.

As soon as Jon saw it, however, that sharper glimmer was gone.

11

CHINOOK

JON’S HEART POUNDED in his throat, deafening him.

He watched the row of steel and glass buildings grow larger as he stared out the nearest window, sitting alone in a two-seat row at the back of the Chinook.

The Chinook must have been used for commercial purposes, once upon a time. Instead of combat-drop benches, it had seats like an airplane, if smaller and narrower than those that came with most commercial jets, and with old-fashioned looking headsets linked to the pilots in the event of announcements. Organic panes had also been fitted to the Chinook’s fuselage, panes that appeared transparent when aligned with the outside feeds, allowing Jon and the rest of the passengers a near-360 degree view as the helicopter rose into the air near the main terminal of LaGuardia.

Jon sat in the back third of seats.

Allie sat in the front, nearest to the pilots. Revik sat near her, with Yumi and Balidor in the two seats across the aisle from them. Wreg sat with Jax up front, too, across from Chinja and Neela. Behind them sat another row of heads, and another.

Jon didn’t bother to try and identify most of them.

The cabin remained silent, but for the beating rotors. Whatever the seating arrangement meant, it clearly didn’t involve a lot of socializing. No one spoke at all as the Chinook rose above the level of the buildings dotting the shores of Queens. The silence remained as the nose of the helicopter tilted forward and they began cruising rapidly south to reach Manhattan from the lower tip, so more or less across from Staten Island. Jon didn’t know the exact reasons for that approach, but he’d overheard Jorag, who was one of their acting pilots, talking about needing room for the climb up over the front of the OBE field that protected Manhattan itself.

The cabin remained silent as they flew over into Brooklyn, apart from the engines thrumming loudly in the background, penetrating Jon’s skin with their rhythmic pulses.

Jon watched birds fly beneath the helicopter’s fuselage, skimming over the surface of the water of Gravesend Bay, right before those waters met with the Upper Bay and then turned back into the Hudson River. Jon saw no boats anywhere...no ferries or freighters or even one-man canoes. Ships rusted here and there, but only by docks along the shores. Jon didn’t see any other planes in the sky, either, not even news helicopters or military jets.

Hell, he didn’t see so much as a kite, or a kid’s lost balloon.

The buildings they’d skimmed past over Brooklyn mostly looked like burned-out husks. A handful remained standing and more or less intact, but fires raged outside their doors, and Jon had seen walls built from broken cars and dumpsters to keep people out, razor wire and glass dotting the edges of those enclaves to reinforce the point.

He could only imagine what must be going on down there, now that enough time had passed for real food shortages to emerge, as well as shortages in a lot of other post-apocalyptic essentials, including power and water and ammunition, to name a few.

The sky still looked relatively clear, but Jon couldn’t help wondering how much of the island flooded when the storms rolled back in, given that the outer boroughs weren’t reinforced with dykes and expensive OBE fields, unlike Manhattan. Jon knew a good chunk of the island had likely been made permanently uninhabitable for that very reason already, even apart from the mess of having no law enforcement, no ambulances, no hospitals, no fire trucks, no help...in essence, nothing to keep people from devolving into animals and eating one another, either out of fear, sport or desperation.

Once they’d made a circle around Staten Island, the Chinook began to climb.

The helicopter climbed for what felt like a long time, gradually at first, then more and more dramatically as they got closer to the skyline of the main city.

Within minutes, they reached an area of sky high above the downtown buildings.

Reflected in the VR panels, steel and metal structures loomed up from the earth below Jon’s feet. Jon’s light sparked and reacted to the nearness of the city, touching the bare, coiling edges of the organic binary electric or ‘OBE’ field that surrounded the vast majority of the sky over Manhattan itself. Jon felt himself scanning for signs of life, for any movement at all in the streets and buildings as they passed overhead.

They were too high for him to see anything with much certainty, though.

He strained his eyes by staring down anyway, frustrated by his blindness, by his complete inability to see what might be waiting for them on the other side.

He felt something else down there, too, and realized that he could feel the bare edges of the construct over the city itself. Allie had talked about that, back when they reached New York the last time. No one else besides Revik had even been able to feel it, though, not even Balidor.