Dragon: Allie's War Book Nine (39 page)

Just Revik.

Swallowing when my vision gradually returned, I found my eyes had blurred.

When I glanced at Dalejem he looked uncomfortable. I saw something else there, too. It was fleeting, there and gone, but I winced away from it, anyway…before I’d identified it even. For a few seconds, he just watched as I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. He didn’t avert his gaze, but his voice held less of an edge that time.

“What are we doing here, sister?” he said, his hands on his hips.

I glanced at him, then back at the row of tent-like spikes making up the main terminal.

“We’re going inside,” I told him.

Without waiting for him to respond, I turned, walking back to the SUV.

Clicking off the binocs as I grabbed the edge of the door and pulled myself onto the ripped leather seat, I used the headset to start the car and waited, watching as Dalejem pushed Feigran into the car in front of him, using the back door on my right side. Dalejem then climbed in after him, walking up between the front seats to sit shotgun. In his case, that was pretty much literal, since he had a semi-organic and semi-automatic Benelli M4 stuck just inside the door.

Squinting through the light slanting down from the sun roof, I raised a hand to shield my eyes and realized I vaguely recognized the weapon.

“Is that Wreg’s?” I asked him, putting the car into gear.

Dalejem glanced down at the gun he balanced against the car door with his booted foot.

“So?” he said, looking at me. “It didn’t have his name on it.”

I let out a disbelieving snort, shaking my head.

“You pick strange people to piss off, brother,” I told him, smiling wryly. “Wreg’s guns are like his children. I think you’d better wear the bullet proof jacket the next time we’re with them, brother…and maybe bring a lot of liquor as a peace offering, too. Not many of my people will be sympathetic if he takes a machete to your hands.”

“You’re assuming we make it back at all,” he muttered, staring out the window.

I lifted an eyebrow. “I never assume that.” Snorting, I added, “I still wouldn’t be stupid enough to take one of brother Wreg’s favorite guns.”

He looked at me directly that time but I didn’t return his gaze.

I was taking the SUV down the low slope towards the plain between us and the airport.

From Dalejem’s light, it felt like he might be about to say something more.

He didn’t, though.

Staring out over the wind-swept flats as I cranked up the engine, he didn’t change expression even as I drove hard over the rutted and rock-strewn flats, bouncing both of us in the air periodically as I floored it. In the bench seat behind us, I heard Feigran let out delighted shrieks every time I hit a particularly big bump or rock. I glanced in the rearview mirror, clicking softly even as a smile ghosted my lips.

Fucking Feigran, man.

“Why do you trust that piece of shit?” Dalejem said, his voice louder over the engine and the bump of the shocks and tires on rocks and ruts.

I glanced over and saw Dalejem staring at me again, his green eyes hard as stone. I could see the scrutiny there. It made me nervous for some reason, although I had no issue with the particular question he’d just asked.

More and more, I got the feeling Dalejem was a lot better at hiding what he was thinking and feeling than he pretended. I also got the feeling he picked up on a lot more than he pretended, which made me slightly nervous, too.

Even so, it was all the more reason to keep him closer than not.

“What makes you think I do?” I said.

I gripped the steering wheel with my hands, jerking it periodically to avoid larger debris. I glanced away from Dalejem’s face back to the windshield in time to swerve us around a larger rock than I wanted to risk going over, even with the higher undercarriage. Getting stuck out here would not be my idea of an acceptable op deviation.

I’d only taken us out this way to avoid the worst of the barricades anyway.

I still couldn’t feel any protection grids of any kind. Nothing in the Barrier…nothing in the physical, either. No OBEs. No electrical activity at all, at least not strong enough for me to feel with my light. Being Elaerian, I should have been able to pick up on it if anything like that existed out here.

The lack of security might be evidence against Feigran’s visions…or it might not.

From the satellite feeds, the planes were mostly gone before a month passed after the outbreak of C2-77. The fuel had to be long gone by now, too. Whatever was left initially would have been stripped bare months ago.

Food would be gone, too, even from the vending machines by now.

From what I knew, Denver had been hit hard. The few enclaves that made it past those first six months had gunned down without mercy any attempts to breach their walls.

So yeah, who besides us would even be out here, investigating something that technically didn’t exist? And why call attention to something by covering it with high-grade security if your main strategy for protection had been invisibility from the start?

So yeah, I still believed it might be here.

Did that mean I trusted Feigran? Hell no.

The SUV met up with the main road and I gunned it, getting us down and then up the slight ditch and onto the asphalt going about sixty miles per hour. I’d calculated it so we rejoined the road just after the long disjointed line of broken storage crates and abandoned truck cabs. Most of those, especially the crates, looked like they’d burned at one point.

From the looks of the wreckage I wondered if there’s been some kind of shootout out here, probably over the remaining stores of jet fuel.

If there had been, it was long over now.

Even so, I didn’t want to risk that someone might still be using those crates and smoked out cabs as barricades to jump unwary travelers. I kind of doubted it, all the way out here…for the same reason I doubted there was anything left to steal inside the terminal that loomed in front of us. I just didn’t see any reason to risk it.

I cranked the wheel, turning us onto Peña Boulevard, now going closer to seventy.

The back wheels skidded that time, but the thing cornered pretty well. I barely slowed as we fish-tailed briefly then aimed straight for the arrival gate, since that brought us to the lower level of the main terminals.

I already knew what we wanted lived underground. I also knew from Feigran’s drawings that he’d ID’d the entrance on the west side, below a small security station.

I heard Dalejem muttering again as we slid under the overpass and I accelerated in the shadow of the overhang.

That time, I didn’t bother to look at him.

Instead I drove us right up to the entrance of the airport, as far west as I could go along the loop where cars used to come to pick up loved ones from business trips and trips to grandma and Las Vegas and wherever else. I shoved that out of my mind as I pulled us right up over the curb, parking directly in front of the blasted out glass doors.

I didn’t see any reason to get out of the car without cover.

And yeah, if the SUV wasn’t here when we came back out, so be it. That was more or less the least of our worries, frankly. If we found what I came here to find, I’d be perfectly okay with calling the others in for backup if we managed to bring it out with us.

I had a feeling it wouldn’t be that easy, though.

Really, when was it?

They live underground.

In the dirt, sister, where he won’t go…

The words echoed softly in my mind.

I felt those words in a deeper part of my light than when Feigran first spoke them to me in Bangkok. They wove in and out of the other thing I now felt, what grew increasingly loud in my light, the deeper we descended into the dark.

I hadn’t heard the other voice, though.

Not down here. Not since I woke up that morning.

Sub-basement twenty-four now.

Twenty-four. Christ.

As an Elaerian, I had the ability to feel physical objects with my light. That meant I could feel the actual cement and metal and stone and earth of the tunnels around us, not just the aleimic imprints left on those things or any organics or semi-organic composites, which is all a regular seer would feel.

So I could see the staircase turning at precise right angles above and below us. I could also feel at least thirty more floors below the one where we stood now…which just about blew my mind, frankly.

Even with my Elaerian abilities, I couldn’t wrap my head around how big this space was. I also couldn’t stop wondering why I hadn’t felt any of it before we got past those blast doors under the security station in the basement of the Denver Airport terminal.

I wondered how no one had ever discovered it. I also wondered how the hell it had been built in the first place, without anyone noticing.

It was pitch black in here.

No electronics hummed behind those walls. I hadn’t felt a single living thing, including any semi-organic metal or stone, full organic machine or full-sentient, since we started descending the stairs.

And yeah, you’d never get Revik down here.

Hell,
I
was having a claustrophobic reaction…and I’m not even particularly claustrophobic. Of course, I was never claustrophobic at all before I married Revik.

They live underground. In the dirt, sister, where he won’t go…

I should have paid better attention to the pronouns.

“You can feel them too, sister?” Dalejem murmured next to me.

His voice was slightly out of breath as we continued to descend the cement stairs.

I sent a pulse of acknowledgment, feeling that pain in my chest worsen.

I could feel them. I wasn’t entirely convinced I would have felt them on my own, without Feigran there. I felt the other Elaerian’s light more entwined with mine than usual, especially at those higher levels of my aleimic structure. I wondered if he’d found some way to communicate that information to Dalejem too, or if I was doing that.

Either way, I didn’t see a need to share that information with Dalejem himself. He already didn’t trust Feigran. If he thought the Rook had led us down here and was manipulating us to feel the lights of other seers, he might mutiny on me for real.

And frankly, by that point, I was glad to have him.

I could feel the beings that Dalejem referred to, however the information came to me. I could also feel that there was something really fucking wrong with them.

They felt like seers. They had to be seers…but they didn’t feel like normal seers, or anything like Elaerian. I found myself reminded of Revik telling me how the Rooks used to run genetics labs back in the days of the Pyramid. Labs where they cut up and spliced together and experimented on both races.

Like so many awesome things, that started during World War II.

I wasn’t sure if I was ready for what we might find at the end of this little scavenger hunt, given that. I preferred not to get my imagination involved, in any case.

Even so, I couldn’t help thinking that whoever was down here, there were definitely more than three of them. So we’d be outnumbered, for sure…which might be bad if they ended up being hostile. Hell, we’d be outnumbered if there
were
only three of them, given that Feigran wasn’t exactly a fully-functioning member of the team.