Skocz, who processed out of the Brianov army at the rank of captain and immediately contracted into military operations at the Kinder Group, had a word for the pack who intercepted them and murdered his Galanian teammate. The term was dogger, and it was born in polite streams as a reference to terrorists. The term came heavily into use once the policy-makers and their enforcers-- law types, the military, and the suits over in counterterrorism --finally got it through their heads that terror as a tool of trade was employed by persons in all walks of life, across the globe. Even the ultra-conservative reformists of Skocz's country had grasped that dogger behavior transcended culture, gender, and geographical barriers. A Brianov political scientist or behavior analyst could explain the ins and outs of the terrorist's psyche and be good at it too. As far as Skocz was concerned, a terrorist was a dogger, a grudge-grinder, a hater.
Haters didn't let their bones go: they ground them, nurtured them, and sought ways to make the rest of the merry old world suffer for them.
Two doggers were coming along now, escorted by a bland-faced doc or some sort of medical person and two orderlies.
The latter three had a take it or leave it arrogance that, to a less discerning pair of eyes, might have passed for intelligence. However, the lackeys were in the company of world-class butchers, which didn't speak well for job security and long-term health benefits. Unless the pay was phenomenal, the lads pushing the gurney and the lady in the lab coat were, as a matter of opinion, dumber than dirt.
As for the armed escort, doggers for sure. Out in the real world you had to be inside the circle to know a dogger from a businessman, a school teacher, a secretary, a mechanic. But in their dens, doggers were amazingly honest, sometimes brutally so.
As Skocz looked on, the orderlies hefted their insensate victim and transfered him to the cell floor. The cell had no beds, no chairs, no sink. Just an indentation that served as a crude sort of commode.
The orderlies collected the stretcher and departed. No look back. They were on board for the pay. The lady in the lab coat went with them.
The doggers lingered, looking through the now sealed transparent cell wall at the prisoners. Apparently, their trigger fingers were itching. Rough day for them-- no one to kill. They nudged each other as though trying to remind one another of a little thing called self-control. Finally, they stalked off.
The doctor, Interlandi, let out her breath. The doggers had frightened her. Not so Phanuff and Wastagh, who were probably thinking a hail of bullets was the least likely way these losers were going to kill them.
Skocz knelt by the body of the one called Wolf, put his hand on his chest. Warmth, movement. Some good news, at least. The doctor was taking a pulse, lifting eyelids, counting respirations. Skocz got up. He glared at the vacant and transparent wall, assuming the closest camera had been stuck there. These were clever doggers, and they had funding. An entire complex under the ground. He'd seen the dam, so he knew how the doggers were masking the power signature of a facility that was probably as hot, from a power useage standpoint, as a small city.
What do you do, he thought, when you come into possession of a bomb that could kill the world and realized you wanted to use it?
* * *
She was looking at him funny. After a while, he didn't mind her eyes on him, her worry and sadness and fear. He let his gaze slide past her to the dull metal of the wall in the back of the cell, and he lay there, lay on his side, breathing slowly in and out.
He lost the time, the moments and hours that went by in silence. Did anyone move? Phanuff? Wastagh, who sat in the corner massaging his brow, silent? Did Skocz? The doctor, Marea-Siris Interlandi, sat beside him but no longer looking at him. She was like the others now, initimdated by the waiting, understanding what she was up against.
And then he began to hear her thoughts. A shock, that. It meant he wasn't drugged. It meant he was getting stronger.
-- This is what Hephaestion meant.
"What?" Val asked in a rasp.
The doctor flicked a glance his way, then bowed her head, chagrined to have been careless with her thoughts.
Val didn't think she had been careless. He didn't need permission to know her thoughts, feel her feelings. He wondered why she thought he did.
A fragment drifted to him.
"What is StoMi?"
"A discipline that protects our private thoughts from your gifts, and you from the chaos of our musings."
He stared and finally smiled a little and said, "Oh." Hephaestion had let these have their illusion. Why? Val felt Siris's mind touch his. He glanced away. She was close, the others not so much. Still, he was going to have to put up his shield soon. In the meantime, "This is what Hephaestion meant. What did Hephaestion mean?"
"He worried you'd awaken troubled," she said without hesitation. "Despondent. The first time you didn't. This time you did."
He was sitting up, and then standing, his breath coming fast for a bit before settling down. There was a pause. "I don't think we're supposed to remember the way it feels, Marea."
Unfazed by the unbidden use of her intimate name, Siris nodded. She was imagining Hephaestion, the smoky look behind unfocused eyes, as though the journey to wakefulness had somehow taken a part of him.
Silence ensued.
After a while, he said, "They haven't come to drug me. There's a reason."
* * *
Skocz focused his mind. Do the aliens know where we are?
Val intercepted Skocz's thought without trouble and nodded.
-- Are they coming?
Val shook his head once to each side.
Skocz mouthed, "Why not?"
Val turned to stare down a passage that linked their cell to others. The other cells were empty.
He said, "You know why."
He hadn't learned anything about the bomb. No information meant extended stay. The Talos accounts were a side track.
Something larger was in the air.
Men were coming. When they stood in front of the cell, "Nice place you have here," Phanuff said.
The soldiers ignored her. They pointed to Val, and one said, "No mind-messing now, or we shoot you. And after we shoot you, the fun starts for them." A broad gesture to the Kinder team.
"How original," Val said, matter-of-factly. He approached the front of the cell to be let out. There were no cuffs, just the muzzle of a gun in his side.
The cell sealed behind him, trapping the Kinder people.
Val glanced back, impassive.
Siris had pushed forward, her palms against the transparent seal. He felt her mind and knew that she was afraid for him.
"I'll be all right," he said. It was getting easier to tell a lie.
* * *
In less than thirty days, far less than thirty days-- a handful of days, really --he'd died twice. Literally. He'd experienced the loss of everything he knew, and that wasn't worth watering down; he'd lost another identity, his home. His work, the children. The children. The dream that he and Maria Zakarij had created a love that would heal and nourish them for decades. He'd learned, instead, the truth about himself. It wasn't a bad truth but no, it wasn't what he'd signed on for either. Death was not death, but a state of existence, for him, called dormancy. Like removing the power cell from a particularly complex machine. Send the machine to the repair shop, see that the ticker underwent an overhaul. Need a new spring? How about a new circuit board? No problem. Reinsert the power cell. Allow for the re-charge, and there it was.
I'm not altogether like everyone else.
Ah, but he'd known that. Wasn't quite a secret, now, was it?
Arnulf and Gabriel, who led him along the underground passage, they knew it too.
"Where are you taking me?" Val asked. He didn't expect a reply and wasn't disappointed.
Better than words, Arnulf's thoughts told Val about the room they were going to, which was only a break in the journey, not the destination. Arnulf was thinking about reunions.
Gabriel thought about killing Val. A one-track mind, curiously focused.
Val learned more about what was going on at the underground station after five seconds in Gabriel's thoughts than two minutes inside Arnulf's.
"Here, here," bullied Arnulf, shoving Val at an intersecting passage. "This way."
The end of the passage let on a room with a punch-lock. Val decided the code to the lock was a good thing to have. He was pleased to find the six-digit number available in Arnulf's mind.
The room was a small sub-station, two banks of work stations in the middle of mainframes and racked servers. Swivel chairs against the console. Two men waiting. The taller man was Adam.
Val strode ahead, tentative but mildly and unexpectedly excited. "Hello, Marcus." They were of the same mother, full brothers. There had been some intimacy in childhood, awkward but palatable. Val had enjoyed his company on occasion and was sad, in the end, when the family business divided them.
Marcus stared, unabashedly awed to be in the presence of a mythical creature. There were, Val sensed, competing wonders, at least from Marc's perspective. For one thing, Val had escaped to live another life. The resurrection thing was the other, confirmation Val was what the Goranegi called a demian. Like Val, Marc had grown to favor his mother somewhat more than his father. Like Katherin, he'd taken to the administration side of things. His skills had little to do with enforcement; he wasn't a casual killer in the mold of Gabriel or Arnulf, although he'd shot men on command. One mustn't let go of certain truths. Long before Val fled Petronille, Marcus had learned to take lives.
Val tore his gaze from Marcus to seek Adam. Here they were, all together. Only Kath was missing. "You want me to write your release program?" he asked.
Adam pursed his lips, threw one hand to his hip. "It would be nice."
Marcus jolted to life. "This station is off the network, Val. You write the code, I say if it's safe. It needs to be safe, okay?"
Val took the chair in front of the terminal. "How have you been?"
Ludicrous as that sounded, the query seemed plausible to Marcus, who answered, "I'm married. I've got two boys now."
Val said, "I am glad to hear good news," without taking his gaze from the liquid crystal display. "Is your wife here?"
"The family's in Marquay."
Val began to type. "That's far." A mistake, he realized, but no matter. Adam thought he was talking just to talk. "They on the way?"
"No, they're staying put. Work's work," Marcus murmured, focusing over Val's shoulder. "They're good where they are."
Val's fingers stopped typing. Good where they are? He looked up at Marcus, and at the others.
No discernible reaction to his uneasiness. Adam poked his shoulder. "What time do you think it is? Get working already."
Val pressed the heel of his hand into his brow, rubbing the frown out. He asked for data. Marcus had whatever he needed. A half hour later, he nodded toward the screen. Marcus drew up a chair, leaned in.
"Well," urged Adam.
Marcus tapped the tabletop. "Its an executable program instructing the firewall to let it in. Once inside, it activates the account, initiates a transfer, and routes the credits. Looks like there's a comm code here."
Val said, "When I wrote code for off-shore accounts, I routed it to bounce off a comm-cor on its way in."
"To hide the sender? We're encrypted."
"Kath's the one who taught me to do this," he lied. "I never sent anything off-shore without bouncing it."
Adam interrupted. "What's the problem?"
Marcus licked his lips. "He's using a communications coordinator as one of the ghosts."
Adam spread his arms, like So?
"A comm-cor is sort of like a toll booth. Anyone can pass but it takes your picture and sends your image to the next booth down the way."
"Sounds like a stupid thing to do," Arnulf theorized.
"A comm-cor is airborne," Marcus elaborated. "After it shoots its message, because it's in transition, it's hard to isolate. A tracking program knows it's a comm-cor but at the same time it can only see the snapshot of where it was at the time it made the hand-off, not where it is when the tracker wants it. Trackers use an algorithm to locate comm-cors real time but comm-cors are commercial routers. They don't respond quickly to formal queries, even from ITAN. It's faster to hack them. That's the advantage of using them as ghosts."
Val spoke up. "It's a chase. You said you needed two days clearance on the credit transfer. This will give your tracker something to track but it's a decoy. They won't begin attacking the encryption until they've wasted hours looking for the data on the comm-cor."
Adam pointed at Marcus with his chin. "Is it so?"
"Yes, I suppose, though I don't think we need bother. Unless they know we're coming."
"Better not to take chances."
"All right, I'll plug us in and execute."
"You, get up from there," Adam said to Val. Val obliged. Marcus sat down, moved onto the network, and lauched Val's file, including the code that said to the big alien ship over Talos, Here is the credit transfer, see me, follow me. "It's done?" Adam asked when Marcus got up.
"Yes. Realtively simple, really. May I go with you?"
Adam shook his head hard. "And piss off Sir with your whinging?"
Marcus's expression settled into something close to stone. "Shit on you. I'm a big boy."
Arnulf grunted, turning on his heel for the door. "I say let him come. It's his head."
Gabriel looked between them, a small smile twisting his mouth. "Either way, we've got to go."
"Come on then," Adam said. He clamped a hand on Val's arm. "Let's move it."
They went down on a lift, far down, all of them crowded in together, the family Manegold. When the doors rolled back, they faced a broad corridor with soft lighting. The sense that many layers of concrete and stone weighed above them was muted by walls faced with carved wood paneling and carpet. This was someone's living quarters done up rather extravagantly. There was a Petronille soldier in the corridor. He spoke quietly to Adam, then passed the lot of them into a forechamber with a polished wood floor. Adam headed for the double doors, a somewhat frivolous indulgence, given the purpose of the facility, but then rank had its privileges. Val suspected a long hall stretched on the other side of the doorway and he was right. Burgolt and his throne rooms. It was set up like an executive office, the enormous kalonice desk at the far end. Hand-carved columns along the way, a functioning fireplace using only the Lady knew what technology. Val recognized sculpture from Petronille, his mother's fancy, not his father's. Maybe the new woman liked the pieces.
Sir Burgolt, at the end. Thicker than Val recalled, he'd sunk inside himself, like a toad. His neck was gone. He'd added two chins. His sausage fingers twitched. His thick lips hung slack, moist with spittle.
Val was alarmed not by the fact of his father's declining health but by the ferocity with which his father rejected the fact. Burgolt regarded him greedily rather than desperately, his tumbling thoughts on acquisition. In the tumult Val spied something red, like erupting magma, chaotic and scalding. The cauldron of Burgolt's brain, and it was not pretty.
"You're not so sorry you came to be here anymore, are you?" the familiar gruff voice supposed. "Or haven't you had enough time inside my skull?"
"I've had enough," Val said, evenly but with some effort.
"Can you do it?"
Val was thinking that maybe he was reading the wrong books when he formed his opinion of hell. Maybe he was getting a better education from Sir. "Yes, yes, I can."
A puff of foul air. But the old man hadn't been in doubt. "The bitch wouldn't, you see."
And I don't blame her, Val thought. "What makes you think I will?"
"You will." Burgolt's twitchy hands plopped onto his armrests. "I couldn't touch her, feel her, hurt her, but you're no bloody goddess. I could take you to the edge and bring you back, instruct every torment known to us and that's saying a lot. Oh, you look high and mighty now, but your flesh has some lessons it's yet to learn. Even if you don't break, it's a bad way to spend the next ten years." He dipped his patchy skull and scratched. "On the other hand, I'm inclined to do our procedures on your companions first. What a girl you are, squeamish for your outsiders. Look at it this way. Years of amnesty await, me for them, and all you have to do is give me what you gave those children at the hospital for nothing. Hmmm?"
Val was watching the faces of his siblings, and they were all watching him. Interesting. He realized his father had ceased rambling and was waiting for an answer. He swung his head around, going, "You can't be serious."
Burgolt frowned, of course. "What do you mean, I can't be serious."
"That I'd give you an answer on a moment's notice."
"What's so bloody hard about the deal you can't understand? Heal me, you prick, and I won't kill you."
"You'd keep me around for what, a walking magic trick?"
"Something like that."
Historically, sorcerers and other adepts were bound in one fashion or another to powerful figures and organizations. The Kinder Group, wanting the same, was hardly a new concept.
"I'm going to need to think about it."
Adam stirred, and struck Val in the face. Predictable.
Val brought the back of his hand to the place that throbbed. "I'm still going to need to think about it."
This time, Gabriel moved.
Burgolt threw up his hand, a king on his throne. "Let him think about it, boys. He hates his own kind so much, maybe we should send him back to the outsiders, remind him why the smart move here is to play the game."
-- Next Chapter
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