The Far Shores (The Central Series) (53 page)

In Chinese folklore, the
Yaojing were considered demons. Alistair found himself in agreement with this
interpretation.

“And yet they are in the
Ukraine, close to the heart of the matter. If they discover the World Tree before
it matures...”

“They will
not
.”
Alistair allowed a small amount of his genuine anger to seep into his imperious
tone. “I do not underestimate Alice Gallow or the Director – I am certain they
will divine the full extent of our intentions. But they will do so after it is
too late for them to stop what will already be an inevitability. Tomorrow will
see the end of the Auditors, and the beginning of a new rule in Central.”

“Perhaps.” The Yaojing lingered
over the word, as if in deliberation. “Though your success or failure is none
of our concern. I am here only to assure that our interests are safeguarded.
Something that I think I will do personally.”

Alistair recoiled
slightly, despite all of his practiced nonchalance.

“What do you mean by
that?”

“I intend to accompany
you during the operation.”

“Lady Samnang, I must
protest...”

“Noted. But if your
master expects further aid from us – and we both know that he does – then he
will acquiesce. I will see you tomorrow.”

The Yaojing walked away
with the slack body language of someone not quite awake. Alistair watched her
go, and nurtured his resentment and outrage with vivid and specific fantasies
of exactly what he would do, once their positions were reversed.

It made him feel better,
but only slightly.

***

Michael knocked on the door frame of
the female side of the temporary dormitory despite the open door, earning
curious stares from Haley, who was reading in her cot, and a communications
tech whose name he had forgotten, who was bent double on a yoga mat. Katya, on
the other hand, didn’t bother to look up from the tablet resting on her legs,
watching streaming video and eating pretzels in her cot.

“Katya. A word?”

Michael smiled and
gestured to the hallway with his thumb. Katya sighed, put her headphones and
tablet aside, and followed him out of the room in flannel pajamas and purple
woolen socks, bringing the bag of pretzels along. Michael walked down to the
end of the hall, next to the window which looked down on the desolate backyard
of the former commercial building they occupied, where they could be assured of
relative privacy.

“Let’s be frank, Katya.
What was that whole scene with Miss Aoki about?”

“You mean Mitsuru?”
Katya rolled her eyes. “God, you’d think she doesn’t have a first name.”

“Yes,” Michael agreed
amiably. “What is the issue?”

“That you chose to speak
with her first means you know as well as I do,” Katya pointed out, munching on
a pretzel while offering him the bag. Michael declined politely. “Look, I like
you just fine, Michael, but I’m not one of your students, and I’m not
interested in having a chat about my behavior.”

“I’ve been getting that
a lot, this evening,” Michael admitted.

“Then maybe you should
mind your own fucking business,” Katya suggested. “Just sayin’.”

“That’s the thing about
teaching – it becomes part of who you are, how you carry yourself and interact
with others. I can’t just walk away when I see a teachable moment. And I am
part of the same unit that you are a candidate for, I might add – which does
put you under my authority. I will not ignore an issue that, if left to fester,
could destroy what little team unity we’ve had time to establish.”

“Unity?” Katya raised an
eyebrow. “You’re joking, right? That Arab guy has said like, ten words, total,
since he showed up. He spends all his time cleaning his guns and watching
everybody from the corner like he’s waiting for a target. I don’t think Miss
Gallow could remember Min-jun or Haley’s names without a telepathic prompt.
Chike tries to convert anyone who talks with him for more than a few minutes.
Some team. I’ve seen tighter groups during field trips at murder school, no
lie.”

“I notice that you don’t
insist on a first-name basis with Miss Gallow.”

“That’s because she’s a
scary bitch.” Katya shrugged and scratched her arm with nails freshly painted
the color of gunmetal. “Sorry. I know you guys have your little romance going
on, but it’s true.”

“Katya, that is
hardly...”

“It’s an open secret,
Michael. Please.”

Michael paused to
collect himself before taking a new tack.

“Regardless, I would
prefer if you didn’t discuss personal matters so openly. Or use profanity quite
so liberally.”

Katya sighed, rolling
the top of her bag of pretzels closed.

“Yes, Dad. So, are we
done here?”

“No. Not until you
explain that confrontation you had with Miss Aoki.”

“Do you really need an
explanation? You know what the problem is. She’s a menace, Michael. I’m fully
aware of how powerful she is, but that doesn’t change the fact that she is an
emotional wreck and an operational liability. The last time she snapped, people
died. You and Miss Gallow make whatever decisions you want about your
personnel, but don’t expect me to keep my mouth shut when your mistakes put Alex’s
life at risk. I have a job to do here, you know.”

“Are you certain that
you sufficient understanding to judge the situation? You only joined Audits
recently, and are not yet a full Auditor.”

“Unlike you, I suppose?
You were a teacher a couple months ago. Sometimes I think you should have
stayed in the classroom. Look, Michael – I’ve been doing this stuff for years.
I know the difference between a useful psycho and a basket case, and Mitsuru is
definitely the latter. I’m sure Central wants to see a return on their
investment, and I know that she’s a capable Operator when she has her head
together, but the field is a terrible place to determine whether someone has
the emotional makeup for wetwork.”

“I think you are
underestimating Miss Aoki. It’s true that she has been through a great deal. Then
again, she has also accomplished more for Central than many experienced
Operators.”

“That’s great. You wanna
roll the dice with your operation, that’s fine. None of my business. But once
you start dragging me – or Alex – along for the ride, well, then it becomes my
problem.”

“Miss Aoki has saved
Alex’s life on multiple occasions,” Michael reminded her. “He wouldn’t be with
us today if it weren’t for her protection and initiative.”

“So give her a medal for
past performance,” Katya scoffed. “I’m not interested in history. I’m concerned
with getting him home in one piece, not how he got here.”

“I think perhaps you
have forgotten your place. You aren’t a Black Sun assassin any longer. You are
a candidate for Audits, and your responsibility is dictated by the needs of
Central.”

“Sure,” Katya said,
smirking. “You can pretend that’s true if you like. We both know who I really
work for. I’m on loan to you people, that’s all. You wanna use me to get shit done,
well, I don’t mind. But at the end of the day I don’t answer to you or Miss
Gallow.”

“That kind of talk makes
me think it isn’t Miss Aoki who is unsuitable for Audits,” Michael said,
raising his voice and curbing his temper with an effort. “It’s you, Katya. You
can’t serve two masters. Perhaps it is time that we reviewed your continued
involvement with field operations...”

“You do what you have to
do, Michael.” They both turned, surprised by the unexpected contribution to
their discussion. Alex stood a few meters away, not far from the door to the
male dormitory, leaning heavily against one of the walls with an outstretched
arm. He looked ragged, with dark circles underneath his drugged eyes and fresh
blood seeping out through the bandage on his forehead. “Just know – if Katya
goes, so do I.”

“Alex,” Michael said,
taking a step forward, “you shouldn’t even be up right now...”

“I mean it.” Alex’s legs
were wobbly and his voice strained, but his eyes were clear and determined. “If
Katya has to leave, then I’m done with Audits, too.”

“Alex, this is none of
your concern.”

“I’ll decide that for
myself,” Alex snapped. “I trust her, Michael. And I know she’s only here
because of the decision I made. As far as I’m concerned, we’re a package deal –
you don’t get one without the other.”

“Alex, you moron, you’re
gonna tear a stitch wandering around.” Katya chided him, but there was no
rancor in her voice as she hurried over to provide support, ducking beneath his
arm and then gently leading him back to the men’s dormitory. “If you don’t
rest, you can’t heal, and then you definitely won’t be going into the field.”

Katya helped him back
toward his cot, giving Michael a knowing and triumphant look before they
disappeared.

“Well, at least part of
the team is unified,” Michael observed to no one, looking out the window at
broken concrete and dead weeds. “That’s something, I suppose.”

Alice accepted coffee from Mrs.
Barrett with her usual disquieting smile.
The interrogation of the captured Witch had dragged on
for hours, and then she had been required to make a number of apports. Running
on very little sleep and reeling from several time changes, Alice was grumpy
and anxious to leave Central.

Gaul did not anticipate
a pleasant debrief.

“Tell you what. If I
were in charge of Central, first thing I’d do is get some decent coffee for my
office.” Alice set her cup aside, shaking her head. “This stuff is awful.”

“As soon as I have a day
where the quality of the coffee in my office is my most pressing concern, then
I assure you that I will make improving it a priority. Since this is not that
day, what do you say we discuss Kiev?”

Alice took her army
surplus jacket off, then set about tying her unruly hair back.

“Be honest with you,
boss. It’s gonna be ugly. Whatever equipment the Anathema are using to mask
their Etheric Signatures is distorting everything so the remote viewers can’t
figure out which way is up, but that city is so crowded with hostiles I’m
amazed we don’t trip over them on the way to the corner store.” Alice tugged
her hair through a tie, then glanced at a strand miserably. “You sure I don’t
have time to shower before we have this little chat? I smell like blood and
garbage from the fucking alley I spent all night in.”

Gaul ignored the
irrelevant portions of her statement. He had found that to be the most
effective method of communicating with Alice Gallow.

“What about the local
cartel? Kiev Oblast, I believe?”

“Still alive, amazingly
enough.” Alice said, sitting back with a sigh. “I expected to find a compound
full of corpses. They’ve been filing regular reports on all the weird shit in
town for the past couple years, but Alistair routed them straight to the
archives, so it never came to your attention. They don’t have the numbers or
the balls to do anything on their own, and apparently Anastasia isn’t too keen
on them, because the Black Sun hasn’t done much to help either.”

“As far as I can tell,
the Black Sun is very much involved with their own difficulties, of late.”

“Yeah, I hear that, too.”
Alice grimaced. “Courtesy of your friends in the Thule Cartel, right? That’s a
fine mess you dumped in my lap inviting them back, Gaul. Once this thing is
dealt with, me and you are going to have a long chat about that one.”

“Doubtless. In the
meantime, what did you learn from your prisoner?”

“Witches are built
tough, I’ll give ’em that. Took us all night working on the bitch before she
gave it up. Fortunately, I had some free time, and Mark is a determined
bastard. He cracked her like an egg.”

“And?”

Alice gave him an evil,
self-satisfied grin.

“The info that Witch
gave Mitzi checks out. Kiev is the core of whatever the Anathema are up to. The
Witch we captured was part of a security net they spread across the entire city
to take care of curious parties before they could get too close. She didn’t
know that much about what they were actually doing – they seem to be using them
more or less as cannon fodder – but Mark took some interesting images from her
head.”

“Expensive and
irreplaceable cannon fodder,” Gaul mused. “The Anathema have invested an
unthinkable amount of resources in whatever they are doing. What kind of images
did you find?”

“Tech. Machinery mated
with crystalline structures, like what we found in China, but on a much bigger
scale.”

“Apport shielding? Signature
scramblers?”

“Who knows?” Alice
shrugged, reached for her coffee, and then thought better of it. “The Witch
didn’t. Probably all that and more. If you want my guess…”

“I do.”

“…then it’s transport.
Has to be. All those kids the Anathema were harvesting, we have to assume they
moved the ones we didn’t catch to the Outer Dark. We know from your sources
that performing an apport to the Outer Dark is extremely challenging – well out
of range for the average technician. The Anathema aren’t capable of moving all
those kids to the Outer Dark, not to mention the personnel and machinery we’ve
seen at the installations we raided. It couldn’t all have been produced on
site, or terrestrially sourced, or we would have turned up more of their
sources by now. Whatever they are doing, it involves moving large amounts of
material and groups of people across the Ether.” Alice laughed. “Who knows,
boss. Maybe it’s like those nutcases at the Far Shores say, and I’ve just been
made obsolete.”

“We should be so lucky
to live in a world that kind. What else?”

“This facility was
centralized to avoid discovery. That’s a change in tactic for the Anathema. Previously,
they have distributed operations globally to limit potential losses, even to
the point of duplicating effort. In contrast, this whole operation is being run
out of a single fortified location, concealed about as well as anything we’ve
encountered before. I’ve had the remote viewers pouring over the city for
hours, and we don’t have anything better than a general idea.”

Gaul nodded to himself.

“Interesting. Anything
else?”

“Couple little points.
One,” Alice said, holding up her index finger, the nail coated with chipped
black polish, “it’s above ground.”

“How do you know?”

“The images,” Alice
said, her grin widening. “There are windows in the background.”

“And?”

“Two,” Alice said,
adding her middle finger, “whatever they have planned, it’s going to happen
soon. Very. As in the next few days.”

Gaul looked disturbed,
pushing his glasses back in consternation.

“That soon,” he muttered.
“Much quicker than I had imagined.”

“Time to level, boss,”
Alice said, leaning forward with glimmering eyes. “I need to know whatever
you’ve been playing close to the vest. I appreciate the need for operational
secrecy as much as the next girl, but you hold out any longer and I might not
make it in time to save the day.”

Gaul nodded reluctantly,
mentally reaching for his Etheric uplink to review the records of the
interrogation, confirming his suspicions.

“You are correct.”

“’Course. What you got?”

“As you suspect, I have
someone on the inside,” Gaul said, standing abruptly and striding across the
room to the window, which was curtained to spare Alice the disorientation of
full daylight when her system was insisting on night. “Not part of their inner
council, but close. The intelligence I have received dovetails perfectly with
what you have discovered.”

“Confirmation is nice,”
Alice said sourly. “Got anything I can use?”

“Just this – the
Anathema are running this project personally. Opposition this time won’t be
limited to renegade Operators and Weir – you should expect to encounter the
Anathema directly.” Gaul pointlessly shuffled the paperwork in front of him,
neatening piles and aligning edges. “Including your predecessor. Alistair.”

“That
is
interesting.”
Alice stood up and reached for her jacket. “I still get the feeling that you
aren’t being totally forthcoming, but I’ll let it slide for now. I wanna try to
get a couple hours of sleep and a shower before I settle that particularly
account.”

Gaul watched Alice head
for the door, torn between the potential futures that hung in the balance,
mutable possibilities waiting to crystallize depending on his decision to
speak, or to hold his peace.

“Alice.”

She stopped at the door
and glanced back at him, her smile wavering when she saw the strain on his
face.

“Yeah?”

“Realistically, the
worst may happen,” Gaul admitted, his expression pained. “You may wish to
prepare yourself accordingly. Should you be forced to make a judgment call in
the field, I would suggest that you take the shot.”

Alice cocked an eyebrow.

“You want to be a little
more specific, boss?”

“Yes,” Gaul admitted. “But
I can’t.” He held his breath for a moment, then when he spoke again, he lied to
his Chief Auditor for the first time. “You know as much as I do, I’m afraid.”
He swallowed hard, then returned to the truth. “Precognition is not an exact
science.”

“Neither is killing, but
you don’t hear me complain.” Alice frowned at him, then shrugged and opened the
door. “I’m off. You decide you wanna play ball, you know where to find me.”

Gaul watched her leave,
slamming the door behind her. Then he exhaled all of the air in his lungs in a
rush, removed his glasses, and buried his head in his hands.

The future he had chosen
was set in motion. All that remained was to live with it.

***

Eerie arrived at the fourth floor of
Processing late and out of breath, her laptop beneath her arm, a knit cap
sitting on top of wet hair, and a lollipop clenched between her teeth.

“Sorry I’m late, Adel,”
she sang out to the cubicles surrounding her own. “I just got the email.”

She came to a sudden
halt when she saw the two men waiting for her, one on either side of the
entrance to her cubicle, both wearing the distinctive white coats of the Far
Shores over their conservative suits. The tall one wore sunglasses, while his
friend had warm, open brown eyes.

“Not at all, Miss.” The
shorter of the two smiled and extended a hand in greeting. “We just arrived
ourselves.”

Eerie looked uncertainly
from one to the other, taking a small step back toward the elevator.

“What is this? Who are
you?”

“Didn’t Mr.
El-Nadi tell you about us?” The
shorter man’s smile didn’t waver as he let his hand drop back to his side. “He
did have to leave in something of a hurry, so perhaps he forgot to mention. We need
to escort you to the Far Shores. We are having difficulties with our connection
to the Etheric Network. Your supervisor, Adel El-Nadi, is already on site, but
he requested that we stay and collect you, so that you could provide assistance.”

She glanced across the
cubicles at Adel’s office, but the lights were out, and all of the desks in the
bullpen around her were empty. Given the hour, that was a significant deviation
from operating procedures, so the network disruption must have been severe, to
merit such a response. The situation sounded serious to Eerie, but also outside
of her area of expertise, as her talents lay in programming rather the
emergency technical support.

“I’m not – I didn’t, um,”
Eerie stammered, setting her laptop down on the table beside her. “What do you
need me for?”

“Nothing serious,” the
man assured her. “Some routine debugging. It shouldn’t take too much of your
time, as I understand it.”

“Oh.” Eerie was
flustered, removing the lollipop from her mouth and powering up her laptop. “Well,
let me just check Adel’s email and make sure I have everything I need before we
go…”

“Of course,” the man
agreed. “Take your time.”

The solid-state drive
booted in seconds, and then Eerie was looking at the icons on the desktop of
her custom-built operating system. She launched her mail client, her fingers
coming to rest on the keyboard automatically.

The larger man was very
quiet. He must have apported, because he was right behind her, standing between
her and the elevator. Eerie didn’t have a chance to turn around before he
pressed the stun gun to the base of her spine and activated it. There was a
loud snap and a moment of severe and transitory pain, and then she fell. The
last thing she saw before succumbing to unconsciousness was her own reflection,
distorted by the curvature of sunglass lenses worn by the man who dragged her
roughly across the carpet.

***

When Alex got out of the shower, a field
medic waited by his cot. The medic gave Alex a cursory examination, dabbed the
wound on his forehead with something that stung and gave off a strong chemical
odor, and then changed his bandages for fresh ones. Alex refused the offer of
drugs for pain, and made his way downstairs to the ad hoc mess hall. There was
very little conversation during their brief breakfast. Alex ate some scrambled
eggs out of habit rather than hunger, and forced himself to drink a cup of
instant coffee, to try and shake off the cobwebs of the previous night’s
painkillers. He felt a great deal better, though his neck and jaw ached.

When he finished eating,
Michael told them to assemble in the conference room for a briefing. Katya
approached Alex as they bussed their tables, dumping the remains of uneaten
breakfasts and dirty dishes into a grey plastic tub.

“You feeling okay?”

“Fine, more or less,”
Alex responded, feeling slightly embarrassed when he recalled their hazy
confrontation with Michael. Between the drugs and the previous day’s usage of
his Black Protocol, the night’s sleep had been heavy and dreamless. “You ready
for this?”