NewU Pt. 38

No more than twelve hours after I had been taken from Horlivka, Jerry had received a text message from me telling him that the plan was on and to relay the information to Bob via the radio. He, in turn, sent one back an hour later, saying that Olena had been safely retrieved and that the whole group was making their way back to a secure location to wait for me.

Then there were the interrogations. They were simply a means to test how far along the path to being broken I was. But for reasons that I couldn't quite fathom, they had left the door to my cell open for each one of them. Maybe it was so backup could arrive quickly in case I became violent. Maybe it was so the man interrogating me could escape; it didn't matter. For the entire length of time that the interrogation was going on, the power-blocking properties of the cell were completely undone, and my powers had as much free reign as they always had done.

Including the ability to jimmy the frame of the door a fraction of an inch out of place, a tiny but permanent crack in the field of nothingness surrounding me. Small enough to let the door still close properly but imperceptible to anyone without a magnifying glass and a knowledge of exactly where to look, and more than big enough to let my powers slip through and render all of their efforts meaningless.

You know what they say about the best-laid plans surviving contact with the enemy.

Or, in this case, the enemy's best-laid plans surviving contact with me.

Within a few days of being left in the cell, I had harvested the minds of the dozens of humans coming and going from the compound and had an entire working map, not only of the complex I was being held in but of the local area around it. I was officially in Russian territory, in a wooded area just outside the tiny little village of Christopl'e, which in turn lay about halfway between the Russian-Ukrainian border and the city of Rostov-on-Don. The village was tiny, even by the standards of where I had grown up, and this complex was a few miles outside of it. It was the very definition of the middle of nowhere. It wasn't just rural; it was in the wilderness.

That posed a little bit of a problem, but nothing that couldn't be overcome.

The minds of the human members of this order divulged some pretty interesting information. Firstly, and most importantly, they understood absolutely that they were second-class citizens. There wasn't any clear supremacy between the Inquisitors and the Evo's within the ranks. Promotion did really seem to be given on merit, but even the very lowest of those was far higher in the structure of the Praetorians than the highest of humans. It struck me as something akin to how men in an occupying army may treat cooperative local civilians. They were helpful, useful, and maybe even essential, but they were always going to be locals, and they would never be members of the nation that had taken them over.

Secondly, this was an organization that took Uri's need-to-know sentiment to extreme levels. These men understood that they worked on a specific assignment or performed a specific role and nothing else. They were even restricted from entering areas of the compound not related to their job and rarely spoke to non-humans outside the performance of their duties. They were paid well for their work, but they knew that the people they worked for operated well outside of any known apparatus of law. If they broke their oath of secrecy, they would be the victim of a tragic accident, and their families would probably meet a similar fate. And yet none of them were working here against their will, nor - as far as I could tell - had they been influenced to do so by one of the treasonous Evos.

The sentiment shared by all of them, when they thought of their employers, was that a war was coming, and it was better to be on the right hand side of the devil than stand in his way.

Lastly, and perhaps unsurprisingly, considering their apparently lowly status within the Praetorians, none of them had access to any of the information that would tell me anything I wanted to know.

I left that last part up to Jeeves.

Being a modern organization, everything in the compound was linked to a computer; that computer was linked to the nearest power outlet, and that power outlet was linked to me. There were hundreds of computers in the facility, and Jeeves, over the course of entire days, trawled through everything - which would illustrate how much there was to scour through, given the mind-boggling processing speeds of my computer at home - and found absolutely fucking nothing.

I should clarify. For all we knew, he had found, copied, and transmitted every single shred of information we could ever hope to find, but all of it, every single byte's worth of data, was encrypted behind what he called a "512-bit, rotating encryption algorithm."

What that meant, in effect, was that the information now being held on my computer was complete gibberish. To translate it into anything recognizable as a human language would take a 512-bit decryption code... which, in terms of letters and numbers, was fucking enormous. The code had something stupid, like 500 trillion trillion trillion different combinations, and even with the insane processing power of my computer, there was no way it could decode that level of encryption without the decryption code. To make matters worse, that code was changed every twelve hours. To put that into context, the German's World War II Enigma machine that took Alan Turnin and his team two years to crack - and had been considered unbreakable before him - was the equivalent of two bits.

None of the human minds had the code; moreover, in a show of how little they were trusted with that level of clearance - possibly justifiably, considering I was currently stealing everything else they knew - they didn't even know that such a code or overly complicated encryption process existed, nor did they know what was on the computers.

I was forced to wait.

While I waited, I played my part. A copy of Sterling's theater had replaced one of the placeholder buildings near the center of my city. I hadn't seen it yet - I needed my wits about me, and taking a break to check out a single building within my mind seemed a little risky in my current circumstances - but it was doing its job well. I allowed the skin to be ripped from my body when I had been blasted by that hose. I allowed my lips to crack and my skin to start looking drawn and pale as the telltale signs of dehydration took hold, at least as far as my guards were concerned. Each time electricity smashed into me, I allowed it to course through my skin, but only my skin, with every pain-receptive nerve ending firmly switched off; I allowed my muscles to spasm, my body to convulse, and my hair to singe. I groaned when I was supposed to groan, I screamed when it was dramatically necessary to scream, and I... made a mess when my captors' minds told me I should be. My theater did it all. It told my body exactly what it was expected to do to pull off this performance, and my body played its part beautifully. To any outside observer, I was being slowly drained of my power faster than I was able to recharge it through the very limited amounts of sleep they thought I was getting..

What my captors didn't know was that I was getting no less sleep than I usually would have. Every time I was laying in a ball on the ground, twitching and sobbing in despair, my body playing the part my theater dictated, entirely on its own, my mind was curled up quite comfortably in my bunker's bed while Jeeves smashed through one firewall after another in the Praetorian computer network.

All the while, my mind was plotting.

Jerry had been kept up to date with everything, but aside from letting Bob and Charlotte know that I was okay, he had been sworn to secrecy. With my power still filling a sizable part of his well, it had been easy to link my mind with his, find that shadow of corruption, and banish it. I admit that I felt more than a little pissed off with how easy it was to shatter that manipulation now that I knew what to look for when I had missed it so completely in my own city when I hadn't. The secrecy was to make sure he didn't inadvertently pass on something important to someone corrupted by Marco. Charlotte was a gamble, but there was something about her utter contempt of the man that told me that she couldn't have been corrupted.

For his part, Jerry was kind enough to stifle his "told you so" moment when he had learned of Uri's innocence. Perhaps it was because of the soul-consuming grief he felt at his death and the unspeakable loathing he felt toward Marco on discovering that our mentor was the traitor. Uri's insistence, however, that he could be trusted was not only a source of great comfort to the younger man but proved to be entirely accurate. For those hundred days, he was the only friendly voice I had. My mind and my powers may have smashed through the Praetorian defenses, but he was my connection to the outside world.

"Charlotte is still pissed at you," he chuckled.

"Still?? It's been weeks. Hasn't she calmed down yet?"

"Nope, she said that she is expecting you to get out alive so she can kill you."

I rolled my eyes silently and chuckled to myself. Tales of the lengths that Charlotte had gone to show her support for me had been the warm blanket I had wrapped myself up in while she kept her vigil over Philippa. She had moved to the mansion with Evie to be with her friend while the trusted members of the Sect worked on reconstructing her fractured mind. Fiona, even less trusting of the Sect since the revelations of their members being involved with the Praetorians, had reluctantly gone with them. Apparently, only Agatha knew that they were there, hidden in some secluded room in the bowels of the mansion where nobody ever went. It was Agatha herself, a veteran of a few Evo-on-Evo wars and no stranger to the damage that an Evo attack could do, who had taken the lead on Philippa's treatment.

There was no news on any progress.

"This is gonna be one of those frying pan and fire situations, isn't it?"

"Yup, you're fucked!" he laughed. "She is still saying it's the bravest plan she has ever heard of and that she is proud of you, but she is going to kill you."

"Oh well, something to look forward to."

Jerry laughed, but soon, his voice turned serious again. "I don't like this, man." He confessed. "I wish there was a way for me, Bob, and the boys to come get you. Kick the doors in, all guns blazing, ya know?"

"Yeah, I know." I tried to sound reassuring. "But there are other Evos here. I can feel them. I don't know how many there are in total, but any one of them could turn our escorts against us in an instant. Then it will be just you and Bob against a small army of people expecting you to attack."

"I know, but I don't understand why you don't do that. Turn the humans there against the rest of them. That would give us an edge."

"Oh, I already have," I answered cryptically. "I am just waiting on a few last-minute preparations before I am ready. And I am kinda curious about what they want to say to me tomorrow."

"Will those preparations be ready by tomorrow?" he asked.

I didn't answer for a moment, letting my mind wander to the little surprise I was preparing for my captors before reconnecting to Jerry, "It will be close, but it should be, yes."

"And if it's not?"

"Uri said that Conclave law is enforced by Evos combining their powers to take on more powerful members, right?" I asked.

"That's right, yes, but..."

"That is what I am expecting tomorrow. A bunch of Evos there, ready to have a go at me if I refuse to work with them. If worse comes to worst, I will just have to fight my way through them to get out."

"Pete, to match your power, they would need quite a few Evos. But they don't want to match it; they want to exceed it, by a lot, just to be sure... that would be a hell of a fight."

"Yeah, I know. I won't lie; that is the part of the plan that worries me. So far, I have counted twenty Evos in the compound. But those are only the ones the humans have seen. There are lots of areas they aren't allowed to access. God knows how many others there are that I haven't found yet. They are all blocking, permanently."

"Fuck, I still can't believe there are that many of them," he sighed heavily. "One or two of them from the Conclave was bad enough, but this is so much worse. I just don't get it."

"Neither do I. That is why I want to hear what they have to say tomorrow. Or at least find a way to get hold of that decryption code."

There was silence for a few moments, Jerry not really knowing what else to say about the plan, so I changed the subject. "How is Henry?"

"He's doing good." came the quick reply. "The doctors are trying him on solid foods this week, I think. Still no progress on the speech, but the therapists are optimistic. He's still getting annoyed with having to communicate through me via a notepad, though."

"I'm sure he will manage," I chuckled back.

Jerry matched my laugh before his voice turned serious. "You are going to need a good night's sleep before tomorrow. Perhaps you should get some rest."

"Yeah, I'm laying on the bed now," I sighed, "I've gotta say, it looked a lot more comfortable than it feels."

"Bastards!" I could hear the smile in his voice.

"Alright, tomorrow," I sent to him, my real-world body looking like it was succumbing to the exhaustion of my ordeal. "I need you monitoring and recording everything. Get a transcript to Bob as soon as you can; he will transfer it to Isabelle."

"It still blows my mind that we are in the position of trusting a member of the Royal Inquisition above anyone in the Conclave." Jerry sighed despondently, "But you've got it. I will make sure it is done."

"I know it's hard, man. But we don't know how many people Marco..."

"I know, I get it... I really do."

"This will be over soon," I said, with more vehemence than I expected. "I'll touch base in the morning."

"Night, Pete."

"Goodnight, Jerry. You get some sleep, too. Tomorrow is gonna be a long day."

********

The now-dressed walk through the complex brought back some strange memories. Stark grey concrete walls and the dank, stale smell of the air. It was remarkably reminiscent of the very first nightmare I'd had since I'd come into my powers. There was no beast hunting me - I confirmed that with a semi-nervous glance back over my shoulder to find nothing there - and there were no other Evos being chased with me. The walls here, as opposed to the dream, were interspersed with other closed doors. Some of them were clearly other cells, especially during the first few minutes of the journey, but with their blocking fields intact, I couldn't tell if they were occupied or not. The corridors in the dream were also part of an underground complex. I couldn't tell how I had known that, and there was no visual way to confirm that this complex wasn't. It was simply the minds of the other humans I had mined for information that told me that it wasn't.

Still, the stretches of the corridor without floors, the muted sounds of my footsteps on the wall, the heavy, nervous breathing from my chest, and the smell of sweat and mold on the air had the eerie effect of transporting me back to the dream I'd had in Becky's bed all those months ago.

Despite the act of surrender that I was putting on, despite the plans in my mind, despite the surprise that was waiting for my captors, and despite my connection to the outside world, it put me on edge. There was nothing like a dream to really fuck up the start of a day. Still, for this moment, a dream meant nothing, and dwelling on it was a waste of energy.

The complex itself was fairly standard as far as quasi-military complexes went. This wasn't some futuristic or even overly advanced installation. Most of the rooms I passed - the ones I could see into - were briefing rooms that were oddly similar to my childhood classrooms, storerooms filled with crates and pallets of stores, barracks and bunkrooms, locker rooms, bathrooms, and the odd office.

The 'prison' section of the compound gave way to the more administrative section after a few minutes of walking. One armed Inquisitor marched ahead of me, two flanked me, one on each side, and two more followed up the rear. Whenever someone came the other way, walking toward us in the corridor, they would press against the wall and let us pass with their eyes invariably fixed on me. The further into the administrative section we ventured, the fewer humans we encountered - perhaps this was one of the areas they were usually not allowed - but even the Inquisitors stopped and watched me go. What was interesting, at least to me, was that there was none of the expected hostility - or even concern - in their eyes. Just a vague expression of curiosity.

There was a marked difference between them and the men who had attacked the party, the men who had tried to corner me in The Hague, Toussant's team, and the people here. Those men had meant me unspeakable harm, and they had killed without mercy or hesitation, and Toussant at least hadn't felt the slightest shred of remorse. It was more than a little confusing to suddenly see the contrast between that and the way I was being treated now.

I was being watched; they were being careful, but I wasn't being treated like the enemy. At least not one they should be trying to murder on sight.

Finally, I was led into a large conference-like room. Much larger and grander than the one that I had seen at the sect, the table was weighed down by three marble busts spaced evenly along its length. Five men were sitting at the far end of the table - two Inquisitors and three Evos - while a place was left empty at the opposite end, presumably for me. Lining the room were about twenty-five men, all spaced equally apart and all seemingly standing to attention; all of them were Evos, too. I stifled a frown at the fact that Marco didn't seem to be among the men here. My five guards closed the door behind me and took up positions behind the chair I was expected to take.

Well, that accounts for the security.

My eyes were drawn to the busts on the table. Somehow, from somewhere in the recesses of my memory, I recognized them. One was of Julius Caesar, another of Augustus, but the one in the middle was the most out of place. It was of a Roman General: Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo.

"Do you know who that is?" One of the men at the far end of the table asked.

"He looks familiar," I lied as I sat down.

"He was a General in the Roman army, General Corbulo. The mad emperor Nero became fearful that the General's influence would become a threat to him, so he ordered the General to commit suicide in front of his men. Corbulo, being a man of honor and loyalty and knowing he had done nothing wrong to deserve this order, obeyed his Emperor anyway. His last word, shouted to his men as he threw himself onto his own sword, was "Axios."... I. Am. Worthy. The General is venerated as a man who put his loyalty to the Emperor and his honor above all other things. Before greed, before ambition, and before personal gain."

I just nodded and held his eyes as he spoke.

"Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo is the epitome of the virtues we strive to achieve. The line of the Emperors may be gone, but the basis on which they stood is still embodied in our principles."