Trickster Page 2
For this reason, if my true purpose was known, I would be considered a terrorist.
A renegade seer.
If I were ever caught, and labeled as such, I would be put immediately into a work camp, or a government lab––or, depending on which human ID’d me, I’d simply be in a mass grave somewhere, a bullet in my brain.
Does the thought of this possible end for me bother me in any way?
Truthfully… no. It does not.
This is espionage, my brothers and sisters.
This is how things unfold in the real world, for all us in the Org.
There are over three billion more humans than seers on this world. They still own the vast majority of resources. They still own the vast majority of weapons, some of them devastatingly effective. If we seers organized our race back at the time of First Contact, if we had struck out against them at the very beginning, those advantages may not have mattered.
But we didn’t do that… and they know about us now.
They know what we can do.
They have means of protecting themselves from our powers now, seemingly more all the time. They also have the money and other resources to pay off traitor seers to help them, and to design tech to destroy and enslave us more thoroughly than ever before.
This is the long game, my friends.
This is not your child’s board game. This is three-dimensional chess.
This is eroding and redirecting the human pestilence from within.
My human Registry code classification: Alpha-19. That means I can travel openly as a seer (technically a non-human, or “NH”) without restriction, and without a human escort or even ownership papers. I don’t even need a work classification permit.
I can also carry a gun.
Reg codes like mine are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars on the black market.
I’ve heard of seers being killed for reg codes like mine, so I still travel incognito when I can, and particularly if I am traveling alone. I also use my human ident to cross borders, unless there is a compelling reason not to. There are still plenty of un-reg’d assholes playing at the fringes, looking for seer identities to steal.
Not all of them are working for organized crime syndicates, either.
Some of them work willingly and legitimately for SCARB, the F.B.I., the World Court… any number of human agencies licensed to employ seers.
Some of them are traitorous fucks, in other words.
Current assignment: Second-tier support, Extraction Team Six-Two-Ought-Four. Level Three, Code Violation 2900-129. Reg tags violation. Suspected terrorist.
Code name (Central always got cute with those): White Rabbit.
It wasn’t quite a throwaway job, but it wasn’t one I thought I’d lose a lot of sleep over.
In the beginning, we all figured it’d be in and out.
Forty-eight hours, tops.
Of course, that was before Varlan, my pod commander, briefed us on all the b.s. surrounding this job.
When we first got the specs, we figured routine extraction, hunt and re-acquire. Maybe a chase-type scenario if things got heated, but nothing we couldn’t handle, particularly given our elite status as a field team, and the fact that our quarry just escaped a work camp.
On foot. Likely malnourished. Probably injured.
At best, a merc unit backing them, and then only if the family had money.
We saw shit like this a few times a year, at least. A lot of these “incidents” were too small to even warrant a footnote.
The initial briefing was to the point.
Summary more or less went as follows: suspected work camp incursion in the “refugee zone” located outside the city of Manaus in Brazil. Two high-value assets believed to have been acquired. Outside actors involved. One-day head start. Expect military engagement.
Once I got ahold of the prelim intel, however, I began to revise some of my initial assumptions.
Right off, it looked like the perps had some skills.
They’d already managed to get their extraction targets out, alive, past the camp’s external perimeter measures––no mean feat, in such a large and heavily-guarded camp.
If they’d managed that, without losing a single seer, without facial rec picking them up, without either of their extraction targets being fried in the perimeter grid, or shot down by one of the guards… they had likely done this before.
So yeah, not total amateurs.
Usually with one of these jobs, we were dealing with amateurs: family members, mates, girlfriends, boyfriends… seers just not thinking clearly, due to their light connection to whatever loved one of theirs got picked up.
Central tried to be gentle in those cases.
They still had to send a strong message, but there was nothing personal in that.
Seers could be emotionally volatile at the best of times. When strong light connections got involved, when the seer in question felt their loved one might be in real, physical danger, they pretty much lost their damned minds.
Org seers on the ground understood that. They even sympathized.
But yeah, they still couldn’t tolerate the behavior.
A pro hit on a camp was a whole different story, though.
The fact that whoever it was already rabbited past the secondary Barrier constructs, again with no fatalities, told us this might even be interesting.
Bets began to be placed on capture-to-kill ratios, as well as time in the field for the triangulation and re-acquire. One of those guesses had us on a minimum six-day campaign, so I knew at least a few people in my pod were just as impressed with the Barrier signatures spotted in those preliminary reports as I was.
I hoped like hell that guy didn’t end up winning the pot, though.
Six days in this humid, bug- and snake-infested bog would suck balls––even if it did provide some interesting targets with better-than-average sight skills.
I placed my money on three days, max, and hoped it wasn’t wishful thinking.
The fact that these jerk-offs risked a life sentence in a work camp of their very own, and for such a small number of seers, told me the run still likely ran on personal motives, versus a pure military extraction.
It was even less likely to be a terrorist hit by one of the pro- or anti-human groups.
Those jokers tended to blow shit up when they planned a break.
They definitely would have freed more than just the two targets.
Also, at least one of the targets extracted would need to be someone, as in someone politically sensitive or important to the group. According to the intel we received from Central, no high-sensitivity political targets had been housed in this particular camp, not currently at least. The female seer missing from their roster was a nobody.
Apolitical, according to her file.
She wasn’t even a ranked infiltrator.
The missing male was believed to be her mate, or some other close family member.
He didn’t have much on the books, either.
There were some blacked-out portions of his file, specifically around the turn of the century, which made his status more ambiguous. Those types of redactions tended to suggest some kind of past, so technically he could be someone of interest––but if he’d been in the game as either a spook or a soldier, he’d been out of play for years, likely decades.
I was still banking on a personal motive.
Someone who gave a shit about the two of them must have hired one of those ex-military, private sec teams off the Rynak, or one of the other black market feeds.
Whoever that outside contact was, they’d known enough to pay via barter or black market currency, since the Org hadn’t been able to successfully nail down the money trail yet. Half the time, these breakout schemes left such a big footprint, they got a heads-up months before the actual attempt was scheduled to take place.
All of this is to say, when I rode the helicopter flight out of Manaus to the camp, we still didn’t know much.
At some point in all my staring, Varlan, my commanding officer, pinged me.
I looked over when he did, meeting those violet-tinged eyes.
Varlan and I got on okay.
Truthfully, though, the older seer made me nervous.
And while it’s true one is supposed to feel some element of awe towards their commanding officer, Varlan had a sight rank truly worthy of that awe, unlike most of the pod commanders I’d worked under.
Varlan is a rank-11. Actual.
Let me just say that again.
Fucking rank-11. Actual.
For those of you humans out there who don’t know what that means, suffice it to say, if my boss wanted you to dance… you’d motherfucking dance. If he wanted you to put a gun to your head and pull the trigger, you’d do that, too.
So would a lot of seers.
The gods only know the truth of Varlan’s potential sight rank, but I’d heard that only an intermediary being, one of the old souls, could rival it.
The rumor was, Varlan was recruited from the Adhipan itself––meaning the real-deal Adhipan, the original, old-school military seers from back before First Contact.
The scar across Varlan’s face showed the only true sign of vulnerability or weakness I’d ever seen on the old guy, and even that added more to his mystique than detracted from it. Varlan wore one of the infamous Nazi scars, which meant he’d been in a concentration camp for a time, during the last world war.
It also meant he’d survived that camp.
Those facial scars were how German humans marked seers so they could recognize us on sight. A fair few seers had them, but not a lot of seers Varlan’s age lived to tell the tale.
The Germans were generally kinder to younger seers, if only because they saw us as potential assets, either for sale on the black market, or for their burgeoning covert operations wing within the German Wehrmacht.
Older seers like Varlan were generally seen as “unredeemable,” and shot on capture.
I’d never heard the story of how the Nazis got ahold of a seer as powerful and experienced as Varlan in the first place, but I had no doubt it was a good one.
So yes, working under a seer like Varlan was intimidating.
Varlan was one of those seers you’d never get on top of, no matter how much you fooled yourself into thinking you could. You couldn’t hide things from him, or lie to him. You couldn’t out-fox him in the Barrier. You wouldn’t see much of anything he’d missed.
If you knew that, all’s good.
If you lied to yourself on that score, you were fucked.
I mean, seriously fucked.
Maybe that’s why me and Varlan got on okay.
I never once let myself forget what Varlan was, not even for a second.
SCARB transport helicopter
Roughtly 80 clicks outside of Manaus, Brazil
November 27, 1978
After giving me that longish stare, Varlan’s eyes returned to the distant, vaguely unfocused look that told me he’d gone back to working in the Barrier.
I decided I’d better do the same.
Therefore, while my gaze returned to the jungle, focusing on that blur of verdant green, my mind returned to my sight work, and the intel on our quarry.
Mostly, I looked for identity markers––anything distinctive enough, I might use it as an anchor on the group as a whole. Every individual seer had quirks in their light, things that were visible behind the Barrier, the nonphysical space where seers conducted their sight work.
Those quirks could include: trauma markers, odd structures, broken places in their aleimi, connections to nonphysical beings that were unusual, unusual resonances, ties to particular organizations or people, and any number of other individual anomalies that might make their light stand out behind the Barrier.
I looked for anything that one of our private-sec seers might have difficulty hiding, even with a Barrier shield.
I saw a few little things, here and there, but yeah, these jokers were surprisingly good for such a small unit.
Ten in total. Six males, four females.
The numbers and sexes made their origins ambiguous, as well. Most of the private sec teams out of Asia tended to be predominantly male, due to the shortage of females resulting from the slave trade in the West. In the West, those ratios tended to be flipped.
This group was more or less half and half.
I definitely got some intimation of a formal military background. They might’ve all served together during one of the human wars. It wasn’t uncommon for military-trained seers to stick together for decades after they’d fought side by side on the front lines.
So, statistically-speaking, these jokers were probably on the young end of the spectrum for seers, meaning less than two-hundred-years-old. They’d probably come up in human infantry and espionage sometime in the forties or fifties.
World War II. Korea. Vietnam.
The Middle East. Russia.
They could even be out of the recent wars in Turkey and Syria, or the even more recent conflict on coastal Africa, but I had my doubts.
Whoever these jokers were, it felt like they’d been working together for a while.
The sheer impenetrability of their primary construct suggested they knew one another’s light intimately, which generally meant at least a decade of solid field work as a unit.
A lot of private sec did freelance for human governments, so they might even be connected to one of the human militaries currently. The Ukraine, maybe. Possibly Slovenia or Belarus. Those countries still incorporated seers almost openly in their rank and file, even if they lied about their race-cat to the World Court and international watch groups.
Because their human masters didn’t pay shit, those seers often worked as mercs on the side, usually with their owners’ blessing.
“Focus on motive, brother,” Varlan advised through the comm link. “…and on target. There is a particular interest among our betters in the extraction targets themselves. Which is why I asked you to go over the files of those held in the work camp with special attention.”
I nodded, flickering my light at him in acknowledgment.
I knew his words as a rebuke though, so I felt my face warm.
It really is damned hard sometimes, to not feel like a crippled child next to a seer like Varlan.
Even after he nudged me in that direction, I couldn’t really get where he was going with the target thing at first. I’d looked over all of the specs by then. All of them.
Nothing leapt out at me at all.
“Look at the female, brother,” Varlan said, his voice soft in the comm.
Flushing more, I did as he said, recalling the file via my headset.
Female. Early stages of middle age, so around three hundred, maybe three-fifty years old. Unranked. Picked up as an unreg’d living in a human-only territory in the United States with her Sark mate. No files existed for her at all in the Registry prior to her arrest.
Okay, yes, that was unusual––but not unheard of.
No political or military background.
Varlan nudged me toward a different part of her records.
Once he had me focused in the relevant area, I swore out loud.
Di’lanlente a’ guete. How the fuck had I missed that?
“Pregnant?” I looked right at Varlan, speaking aloud over the helicopter’s engines. “Is that right? She’s actually pregnant? The target?” Re-scanning the health records––records I’d barely glanced at until now––I added, “It says she’s almost full term. Could they really be on the run with a female seer on the verge of giving birth?”
Varlan smiled, like I’d finally caught up.
“Interesting, do you not think, my brother?” he said, copying me by also speaking out loud. “The Sweeps believe that, given her mapped ale
imic structures, they likely would never have captured her in the first place, if she had not suffered from the blindness of pregnancy when they happened upon her in California. Her husband was caught when he attempted to protect her. The two of them had been living off the grid for years, it is believed.”
His words brought another flicker of puzzlement to my light, although I did my best to keep it off my face.
Her mapped aleimic structures?
What was so unusual about those?
I didn’t voice it aloud that time, but scanned back through those records, as well. It occurred to me only then that I’d been sloppy with those as well, since she had no working infiltration rank. Potential scores, and civilian skill sets, generally didn’t interest me.
“Picking up pregnant females is illegal,” I pointed out, as I continued to scan through her files. “Putting them in camps is even more illegal… even under World Court law.”
Varlan only smiled at that, too.
When he didn’t answer in words, I tried again.
“I thought she was unranked?” I said.
“She is,” Varlan replied at once. “It does not mean she is blind, brother Quay. Not everyone with significant structure chooses to be registered with a working rank.”
I frowned. Why the hell wouldn’t they?
Why waste what the Ancestors gave you?
Still, my mind couldn’t help but turn over the implications.
An unranked female with significant potential.
Possibly even a working rank she’d chosen not to register for some reason.
That still happened with some of the older seers, especially those who lived by Code, especially those who lived far out, away from any significant human settlement. But she’d been living in California, for fuck’s sake… not the middle of Eastern China. Moreover, she’d been completely unknown to the Registry.
That meant she’d been in hiding for over a hundred years, somehow escaping the notice of the Human Protection Act authorities all that time.
Of course, those facts, in themselves, said something about her sight abilities.
The pregnancy thing still puzzled me, though.
Female seers lost access to their sight once they’d been pregnant for more than a few months. The blindness lasted up until when they gave birth, some sixteen months following conception, so it made sense the Sweeps would catch her then; it was an incredibly vulnerable time for female seers.