Dragon: Allie's War Book Nine (55 page)

“You think?” he said, quirking an eyebrow at me again.

Ignoring him, I clicked through a few more commands on the console. “Can you find the message Deks is supposed to have left or not?” I said. “Mara said you were good at that kind of thing. It’s why I brought you for this part.”

Dalejem exhaled in a sigh. Moving me out of the way, he clicked through commands faster than I had been. I felt his light slide into the organic console itself.

“Careful…” I muttered.

He didn’t give me so much as a glance.

Even so, I felt the disparaging look his light exuded.

I didn’t take my eyes off his hands or his light, watching him manipulate the aleimi of the organic machine with a skill and subtly that startled me. Within a few seconds I was completely immersed in what he was doing. I was also more than impressed; truthfully, I was a bit awed. If I was seeing what I thought I was seeing, Dalejem was better than “good” with organics. I’d never seen
any
seer do what I watched him do in that handful of seconds.

Well, not since Garensche.

I had no idea Dalejem was that good with the machines.

I’d definitely have to remember that.

Seeing a flashing part of the queue, I felt a vague whisper of Deklan’s presence and reached for it…only to have my hand slapped down by Dalejem.

“Do you mind?” he growled, giving me a hard look.

His eyes returned to the console, his light once more submerged in the organics’ light and concentrated on what he’d been doing. Hitting through a few more sequences, he touched the queue marker Deklan left only then.

“Secondary security protocol,” he muttered, hitting through the code the team had agreed upon in advance. “Probably wouldn’t set off the alarm, but we can’t risk it.”

“The password is ‘lizard-face-lady’?” I said, amused in spite of myself. “Really?”

Dalejem grunted. “I wanted ‘the Bridge is a pain in my ass’ but I got voted down.”

He hit a last key, then used his fingers in a sweeping motion to pull the data onto the monitor, releasing the packet with a smooth flick of his fingers.

The screen reconfigured at once.

Both Dalejem and I bent down, squinting at the three-dimensional map that appeared there, rotating slowly just out from the main screen. Flashing letters and numbers showed us different rooms. Colors coded the overall sections of the compound. Individual persons showed up as white lights. Each had been tagged, presumably by their aleimi or by trackers where our team couldn’t get an actual imprint. Right now, that meant Brooks, five of the remaining cabinet members, all four of our operatives inside and…

I pointed. “There.”

“Got it.”

I felt him take a snapshot with his light. I’d already done the same.

Then both of us were out the door.

Chan and the others must have found some way to clear most of the corridors between the small security station and the main compound. We met no one between that outpost and the edges of the second-level construct. When we penetrated that part of the construct, I had both Dalejem and I wrapped in a much denser shield.

I could feel light signatures up ahead though…a lot of them.

“Where the fuck did you learn how to do that?” Dalejem grumbled at me.

“What?” I looked at him, frowning.

“That shield,” he said. “I’ve never felt anything like it…not even from brother Balidor. How the hell did you learn to do that at your age?”

I rolled my eyes.

Even so, my frown deepened at the implied insult.

“I’m the fucking Bridge, man,” I told him, my voice holding a faint bite despite the humor. “And enough with the ‘kid’ cracks, okay? Revik didn’t have to put up with that shit. I shouldn’t have to, either…especially since I outrank him. Which everyone seems to keep forgetting today for some reason.”

Dalejem shook his head, clicking.

I felt him about to argue with something I’d said, but I held up a hand, silencing him.

“Guns down,” I whispered. “We’re coming up on someone. I don’t think they’ve ID’d us. We should just try to pass through.”

Closing his mouth, Dalejem immediately shifted his light.

Slinging my rifle over my shoulder, I glanced over as I felt him adopt a casual stride, slinging his own gun behind him and swinging his arms, his light exuding boredom.

Well done, I thought.

When I glanced up, I caught him staring at my face.

“You’re enjoying this,” he said, his eyes incredulous. “Un-fucking-believable.”

I shrugged, not changing expression.

“Beats backgammon,” I said.

He looked like he wanted to say more, but just then, voices echoed down the hall in front of us. Laughter, from what sounded like at least four or five humans, since they were all speaking rapidly in English with American accents. We turned the corner, still walking casually, our faces set in nonchalance as we aimed our feet for the mess hall.

As soon as we got close enough, I glanced inside the opening to the wider room, which had no door. Florescent lights flickered from a low ceiling. Most of the white metal tables were empty, although a cluster of backs faced us on the far end where a group huddled under a monitor, passing around what might have been a joint, or maybe just a cigarette, since those were increasingly rare these days, too. Nearer to us, two muscular males in tank-top undershirts that looked military issue, fatigues and dog tags hung over a table where four more humans sat, two male and two female. They were playing cards.

Those closer humans glanced up as we passed, but barely spared us a glance.

I got more of a once-over than Dalejem did, which maybe wasn’t surprising since it was mostly male humans looking. The biggest of the group gave me an appreciative smile after letting his eyes linger on my legs, ass and chest.

“You new here, lovely?” he called as we kept walking.

“Not that new, cowboy,” I snorted, rolling my eyes.

Three of them laughed, and now I had two other males watching me too, their eyes faintly predatory as they looked me over.

“You look nice in those pants, captain…” the first one drawled, adjusting his belt meaningfully as he stared at me.

I flipped him off, earning another laugh from the group.

I glanced at Dalejem, rolling my eyes, human style. I used my California accent more obviously when I added, “Fucking Seals, man. All ego, no dick.”

That earned me a hoot from the men, presumably in part because I recognized their branch even without their uniforms. Dalejem and I didn’t stop walking though, so the calls grew further in the distance after we turned another corner in the underground maze. Once we were well out of sight and earshot, I felt a pulse of irritation off Dalejem, right before he touched my arm.

“That was…not conspicuous,” he muttered.

I rolled my eyes for real that time, giving him a scathing look.

“Because trying to sneak by a group of half-clad men catcalling me…or maybe squeaking at them like a meek little mouse…
that
wouldn’t have looked suspicious at all. Especially with both of us in military gear and me wearing captain’s bars,” I muttered. Giving him a darker look, I added, “Or were you supposing any female human who managed to do the full-time military gig wouldn’t be able to give as good as she got?”

Dalejem seemed to think about that. Then, conceding my words with a grunt and a flip of his hand, he relaxed his posture, taking his hand off my arm.

It wasn’t exactly an apology, but I felt his light back down.

We passed a few more clusters of uniformed soldiers. We were walking through fairly crowded corridors not long after that, where more soldiers and even a few civilian-types walked in uneven streams, more or less constantly as we made our way across the residential common spaces between halls filled with sleeping quarters.

Most of the humans we saw on this side of the compound were military, however, and most were on duty, despite being so close to the residence area. So while I got a few nods and even one salute, no one really gave us more than cursory looks. They all looked preoccupied in one way or another. In fact, the overall tone of the place had more of a buzz than I’d expected, coming in here.

They felt like they verged on some kind of alert status.

It made it more likely they’d find our handiwork at the back entrance a lot sooner.

Luckily this place was big enough and still had enough new people coming and going that no one cared that they didn’t recognize us. Brooks informed us over twenty bases still existed in different parts of the United States and that they still rotated people in and out, in part to transfer intelligence safely, including via in-person drops, since the network wasn’t reliable in large swaths of the country. So yeah, it was unlikely any humans would notice us unless we did something stupid.

In addition to the uniform I wore prosthetics, as well as contact lenses that made my irises dark brown instead of green. The former felt weird when I made any kind of facial expression and the latter made me blink too much, but I knew I looked nothing like my image on the feeds. I’d also lightened my complexion with this spray-on paste Dalejem applied.

We didn’t bother disguising Dalejem’s physical appearance apart from contact lenses to make his eyes a muddier hazel color...mostly to disguise the violet ring.

He had no official record with the Dreng agents or SCARB or the United States government so far as we knew. He was entirely unregistered––off the grid––he’d informed me, something to do with being Adhipan for so many years and then a member of the Children of the Bridge.

Truthfully, until he told me that, I had no idea a seer could
be
unreg’d to that extent anymore, meaning in the pre-disease modern human world I grew up in. I knew seers like that still existed in snow caves in Asia, but from what I’d learned of the Children of the Bridge, that hadn’t been them. Meaning, they’d operated in the human world, pretty much full time. Uye, my biological father, confessed to me they’d lived in Santa Cruz, California for years, so only about seventy-five or eighty miles from where I grew up.

That blew my mind, frankly.

And yeah, it hurt, too.

Dalejem couldn’t have been hiding out in the Pamir that whole time either. How the hell had he flown anywhere? Stayed in hotels? Rented cars? Used a headset or logged on to a feed terminal? I knew he must have adopted aliases, accessed illegal portals, worn blood patches and whatever else, but
gaos,
what a pain in the fucking ass that must have been.

I hadn’t exactly gotten a chance to ask him about it in detail, though.

In addition to my shielding and our physical disguises, both Dalejem and I wore cloaks over our aleimi too, displaying structures other than what we normally would have shown in a Barrier scan. Some of that consisted of projections of the aleimi of real-life seers, some of whom had worked with the United States Government in various capacities. Some came from Barrier spaces that Balidor and Tarsi helped me reflect as a part of my shield.

But yeah, I knew it would be our light that got us in trouble…long before our physical appearances ever did. It was a lot harder to disguise a seer’s light, at least reliably, at least for any length of time. And yeah, we were in a high-grade security construct monitored by at least thirty trained infiltrators. Moreover, I’d used my telekinesis on the way in.