The Rogue Retrieval (6 page)

“We're all going,” Kiara said. Her tone said there would be no argument.

“How do I keep from getting gutted like a pig, as you so delightfully put it?” Quinn asked.

“Stay right by me, and don't stare at anyone,” Logan said. “Make yourself invisible. You're supposed to be good at that.”

“Great,” Quinn said. Helpful as ever.

The village was nothing more than a dozen ramshackle buildings that squatted on either side of the slushy road. All of them were wood, but no two looked alike. They were practically on top of one another in hodgepodge fashion, like a city inspector's nightmare. The thatch roofs were at least a foot thick, maybe more, and sagging under the weight of the snow.

The whole village looked like it could collapse any minute.

The area outside the Wayfarer boasted a variety of animals lashed to wooden posts. Most were mules and half-­starved packhorses, but a few stood out. They were armored in some kind of animal hide, and bristled with swords, spears, even longbows.

“Merc horses,” Logan said.

“That's a lot of weapons,” Quinn said.

“They'll have even more inside. Good weapons are sort of like a mercenary résumé.”

“Why do you think they're here?” Quinn asked. Armed men weren't exactly his first choice, if he had to meet the natives. Just seeing their horses made him nervous.

“Hard to say. Anyone with a level head is probably looking for work farther south where it's harder to freeze to death.”

Which, sad to say, sounded perfectly reasonable.

They secured the horses to a set of hitching posts, as far away from the other animals as possible. Kiara pulled open the inn's stout wooden door. The inside was poorly lit. The warm air reeked of soot, sweat, and ale.

“Make sure your weapons are visible,” Logan muttered across the comm link.

Quinn loosened his cloak enough that the hilt of his short sword poked through. Chaudri and Kiara did similar with their blades. It was a casual but concerted gesture; more than a few of those in the common room took notice that the newcomers were well-­armed. Not to be trifled with.

One such cognizant fellow was the proprietor, a slender, middle-­aged man wearing a white apron. He greeted them with the nervous smile of a guy who doesn't want any trouble.

Logan held up four fingers, and then led them into the smoky back half of the common room.

Quinn did his best to keep his eyes to himself, but he couldn't help but glance around.
Alissians.
They looked human, albeit grubbier and with a good bit of facial hair to go around. The men had untrimmed beards and long hair that blended together into shaggy dark manes about their faces. The women had their hair pinned up, which explained why Kiara and Chaudri had done the same to theirs before coming through. Now Quinn understood why they hadn't let him shave since he'd come to the island. A man with a clean-­shaven face would stand out here.

All of the tables were full, so they stood up against the bar. Quinn did his best to appear casual. The innkeeper came over and plunked down four heavy mugs. Logan paid him with odd-­shaped metallic coins from a leather purse at his belt. Then he took another fistful of coins and casually dumped them into the innkeeper's apron pocket. The man moved away without seeming to notice.

“What's that about?” Quinn whispered.

“Don't let his manner fool you,” Logan said. “Old Sy keeps a squad of bruisers with steel-­wrapped cudgels on the other side of that door. If there's trouble, we just bought their allegiance.”

“For how long?”

“Daybreak . . . or as long as no one outbids us.”

God, hired thugs with clubs waiting in a back room. They weren't kidding about this being a rough place. Quinn couldn't get out of here fast enough.

Kiara left her ale on the bar untouched. “Logan and I will make the rounds. You two stay out of trouble.”

Quinn picked up his mug and hefted it. The ale was honey-­colored and frothy, the glass cold to his touch. “Is it safe to drink?”

“One way to find out,” Chaudri said. She leaned back and took a sip.

“You look like you're on vacation,” Quinn said.

“I am, in a way. It's one thing to study the data. Quite another to be over here collecting it firsthand.” She frowned, her eyes distant. “Dr. Holt did most of the fieldwork.”

Quinn looked around the smoky common room, taking care not to stare at anyone for too long. The smoke helped with that—­the air was thick with it. Men and women crowded the tables, drinking and laughing and shouting at one another. Like a scene from King Arthur's court.
Guess that makes me Merlin.
He could see the appeal of a little fieldwork.

He thought more about what Chaudri had just said, about Holt doing most of it. “Did you work closely with him?”

“For most of my career,” Chaudri said. “He recruited me, trained me. Took me here for the first time.” She smiled in a kind of shy way.

Not for the first time since he met her, Quinn thought,
Maybe there's a little more to this relationship than she's letting on
.

“Does he have a family?”

“I don't think so. His work was his top priority.”

“His name was on most of the briefing documents,” Quinn said. “Must be a pretty sharp guy.”

“Probably one of the smartest men I know,” Chaudri said. She took a long pull of the ale. “He lived and breathed this place. Spent weeks here at a time. Not to discount the efforts of the whole research team,” she added quickly. “But Holt was sort of our visionary.”

“You know, through all of the briefings and strategy meetings, no one's ever mentioned to me
why
he left.”

Chaudri raised a hand purposefully and leaned her head on it, tapping off her communicator. Quinn did likewise.

“Just between you and me, I think he got wind of something that the company was planning, and he didn't like it.”

“What are they planning?” Quinn asked.

Chaudri paused. “You saw the armory, didn't you?”

“Of course. I spent two weeks there proving my martial incompetence to Logan. You must have every medieval weapon ever used in there.”

“We have even more in storage, and hundreds of mercenaries who know how to fight with them. Not to mention the siege engines on the roof of the armory.”

“Like catapults?”

“Catapults, mangonels, siege towers. Even a pair of trebuchets. All built by your friends in the prototyping lab to be lightweight and portable.”

“Does that make you nervous, at all?”

She offered a dismissive wave. “I think they're just being careful.”

“Maybe it's more than that.”

“Like what?”

“I don't know, an invasion?”

“That would be a fascinating thing to see.”

“Fascinating?” Quinn was aghast. “How do you figure?”

Chaudri shrugged. “A small but technologically superior force against a larger native population. It's not like it hasn't happened before, in our world.”

Quinn shook his head. “Wow.”

“That's the difference between Dr. Holt and myself. He always got too close,” she said. “To the work, I mean.”

Oh my God, I think she's blushing.

Then Logan leaned into view from halfway across the common room, caught Quinn's eye, and tapped his ear.

“I think Logan wants us linked back in,” Quinn said.

They both leaned against their hands and turned their communicators back on.

“So, Bradley,” Chaudri said, with a forced cheerfulness. “How did the company ever get you to go along with this?”

Quinn smiled and shook his head. “A check and a threat.”

“Were you in Atlantic City?”

“Vegas. Have you ever been?”

“Oh, heavens no. What sort of tricks were you doing?”

“You name it. Disappearing acts, sleight of hand, optical illusions. A lot of flash and razzle-­dazzle. That's what they want in Vegas.”

“You don't sound as high on yourself as you did when you came here.”

Quinn sighed. “I have to admit I'm a little nervous. I mean, you guys have me posing as this magician and we know so little about them. How am I supposed to act? What things do they usually do?”

“We're not sure, to be honest. All we've been able to dig up is that they seem to take a lot of naps.”

“I'll be sure to run that one by Kiara.”

They sat in silence for a minute, and Quinn let the hum of conversation wash over him. Two heavyset men at the next table were arguing over whose turn it was to pay the bill.

“Son of a bitch,” Quinn said. He leaned toward Chaudri. “They speak English!”

“No, they don't,” Chaudri said.

“I'm talking about these two,” Quinn said. He tilted his head slightly in the direction of the fat guys. “I can understand them.”

“I expect so. That's the effect of the polyglossia.”

“The poly-­what?”

“Polyglossia. Universal comprehension of spoken language,” Chaudri said. “It's one of the phenomena here that we don't understand. And it works in both directions, too. They can understand us just as easily.”

“How is that even possible?”

Chaudri shrugged. “Like I said: we don't entirely understand.”

Quinn frowned. The list of things they didn't entirely understand just kept on growing. But he felt a wave of exhilaration just the same. He could
talk
to these ­people. “What about writing?”

“Well, there's the rub. The polyglossia is limited to spoken language. We've had to learn Alissian writing the hard way. Took our best linguists more than a year.”

“Ooh.” Quinn made a face. “You know, I'm not sure I can spend that much time here.”

She took him too seriously. “No need to worry. The prototyping lab set us up.” Chaudri took out a metal case that looked a lot like the one Logan had had in Vegas. She flipped it open to reveal a pair of thick-­framed reading glasses.

“The nosepiece has a tiny optical scanner. Whatever you're looking at, it captures the text and runs it through our translation programs in real time. The top halves of the lenses display it in English.”

“Get out,” Quinn said.

“Here, take them. I have another pair.”

Quinn did, and chuckled. Looks like he'd snagged what was in Logan's case after all.

Just then the big man reappeared, with Kiara right behind him. Their faces looked grim.

“We're leaving,” Kiara said.

“What's wrong?” Quinn asked.

“Someone outbid us with Sy's bruisers.”

“Already?”
That doesn't seem like a good sign.

“Yes. Quickly now.”

They started for the door. Quinn set his mug down and started to follow. Of course, that's when the men stood up, and the steel came out. Four of them. Four mercenaries, each holding a long dagger. Logan and Kiara retreated, moving back toward the bar. Two mercs pressed them. A third was on Chaudri. The fourth came for Quinn.

He thought about the sword, but knew he'd be less than useless in a fight. Especially at close quarters. Better to get out in front of this.

“I'm not with them,” he said.

The man had a narrow face and close-­cropped beard. A pale white scar ran from one cheekbone nearly to his chin. “You came in with them.”

“We entered at the same time. That's all.” Quinn leaned toward the man and lowered his voice. “I'm actually working right now.”

The man took a step forward. He held his knife low enough that it wasn't in plain sight, though Quinn could see it. “Doing what?”

Quinn took half a step back. He felt the wood of the bar against his back. No way around it. This was going to end just like one of Logan's cautionary tales.

“I'm the entertainment.” He threw his legs over and climbed up on the bar. Every eye in the room turned to look at him.

Quinn gave his best walk-­on smile. “Who wants to see a magic trick?” he said.

 

“The best illusions aren't a matter of technology, but of performance. First, you open the minds of the audience. Then you fill them with exactly what you want them to know.”

—­
A
RT OF
I
LLUSION,
M
ARCH 5

CHAPTER 5

THE POWER TO SAVE THE WORLD

F
rom his vantage point atop the bar in the Wayfarer common room, Quinn got his first good look at the crowd. Most of them hadn't noticed that three of the mercenaries had Kiara, Logan, and Chaudri pinned against the bar. That, or they chose not to care.

He tried to forget everything about his current situation—­the mission, the danger, the Alissian world—­and pretend it was just another stage.

“I have in one of my hands the power to destroy the world,” he proclaimed. That turned some heads. “And in the other, the power to save it. Who among you is brave enough to guess which is which?”

No one stirred among the crowd.

“You, sir!” Quinn called. He pointed to the white-­aproned innkeeper, who'd appeared behind the bar, looking nervous. He knew.

“Choose a hand to save the world,” Quinn said. He held both hands out, fists clenched, palms down, right in front of the man.

Old Sy looked dubious, but at last he pointed at Quinn's left hand. Quinn turned and held both fists up to the crowd. “He says left. What do you say?”

Mutters in the crowd. Some were nodding, others were shaking their heads. That was part of why this trick worked so well. Everyone favored a hand.

“I say right!” someone called from the back of the room.

“Right!” another man echoed.

“Two say right,” Quinn said. He raised the right fist slightly higher.

“No, left!”

“Right!”

The crowd was getting into it, shouting out their preference. A scuffle broke out on one side of the room where two groups of bearded men seemed to disagree.

“It sounds about even,” Quinn said. He lowered both fists down, right to the face of the man who was waiting for him. “I'll let you decide, my good man. Choose a hand to save the world.”

The mercenary's lips curled into a sour expression, but the crowd was hollering at him, everyone trying to shout down his neighbor. He raised a mail-­gloved hand, started to choose Quinn's left fist, but changed his mind and tapped the right.

“He chooses right,” Quinn said. He dropped his left fist by his side, raised the right one up to his face.

“Shut your eyes,” he whispered over the comm link. He rotated his hand, and made as if to peer in between his clenched fingers. The room fell silent now. He laughed out loud, held the fist up to face outward. “He chose wrong!”

He opened his hand and squeezed his eyes shut. A dazzling white light poured from his palm. Ten thousand candlepower. Everyone in the room was blinded, stumbling backward away from him. Men were shouting, falling on top of each other. Logan, Kiara, and Chaudri rushed past the mercenaries. Quinn ran along the top of the bar, jumped for it, and landed hard behind them. They ran out.

They slammed the door closed behind them. Logan dragged over a heavy crate and shoved it beneath the handle.

Quinn saw the door shaking as he scrambled into the saddle and followed Logan down the road out of the village. They fled at a full gallop for about half a mile.

At last Kiara called for a halt. She gave Logan a signal, and he rode back to scout behind them.

“What the hell was that, Bradley?” Kiara demanded.

“A simple trick. What we in the trade would call a looky-­loo.” Quinn showed her the small glass-­and-­metal contraption. It was one of the company's super-­LEDs, the kind used on emergency vehicles and radio towers. About the size of a matchbox car. Only worked if someone was looking right at it, so he'd had to make sure they were. Usually, the “Power to Save the World” was just a coin that he'd work for a few minutes with sleight-­of-­hand. More entertaining, but far less distracting.

“You shouldn't have drawn attention to yourself,” Kiara said.

“Hey,” Quinn said. He wasn't about to take flak for this. “I'm pretty sure I saved your asses in there. Those guys weren't screwing around.”

Logan reappeared. “No one following us. Looks like there's a full-­on brawl happening at the Wayfarer, though.”

“Wonderful,” Kiara said. “Bradley's already causing riots.”

“You hired me to play magician,” Quinn said. “That's what we do. We improvise.”

“In any case, I want a warning the next time you plan to go off script.”

I didn't know we had one. “
Know what, Lieutenant? You take the fun out of everything.”

T
he one redeeming point about the Wayfarer debacle is that it yielded the first intel on their quarry.

“Old Sy said Holt stopped in about a day after he went through the gateway,” Logan said. “Bought a horse and asked about the situation on the Kestani border.”

“Crossing the mountains is tricky this time of year,” Chaudri said.

“Think he'll head for one of the bigger passes?” Logan asked.

“I would. Probably Nevil's Gap.”

Kiara consulted her map and made a quick measurement with a stainless-­steel ruler. “Should be about a week's ride. That's long enough to know for certain which way he's headed.”

“Guess we'd better get moving, then,” Logan said. He tossed Quinn the reins of the mountain pony and took point. Kiara was after him, then Quinn, then Chaudri and the other packhorse.

They rode for five or six hours at a stretch, dismounting occasionally to walk the horses. Otherwise, they stopped only at midday for a brief rest and then to make camp at night. This wasn't R & R time, of course. Once the pup tents were up and a perimeter set, it was training time for Quinn.

Usually that meant Logan drilling him in the finer points of swordplay or knife-­fighting—­often literally. Sometimes Chaudri would take a break from her reading to join in. For a self-­proclaimed academic, the woman certainly knew how to swing a broadsword. She and Logan would spar with Quinn in a three-­sided melee, an exercise that usually meant welts and bruises on two sides instead of one.

“You're getting a little better,” Logan told him, after their fourth night of sword practice. “Might take an Alissian teenager to skewer you now.”

“As a general rule, I try to avoid teenagers.”

“It's the girls you've got to watch out for.”

Quinn chuckled. “You say that like you know. You have daughters?”

Logan sighed. “Four of them. No boys.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, wow. The oldest just turned fourteen.”

“Ooh.” Quinn made a pained expression. “How do you survive?”

“Mostly by staying in the basement. And invading other worlds.”

The thought of this battle-­hardened soldier hiding out in the basement from his wife and daughters made Quinn smile. “I didn't realize you were such a family man.”

“That's the first thing they teach you in basic. If you have a girlfriend, marry her. If you have a wife, start a family.”

So he
is
ex-­military.
“How'd you end up doing this?”

“That's classified.”

Of course it was
.

K
iara kept trying to raise someone on her long-­range transponder. It might reach the gateway cave, if the lockdown protocol was lifted and a receiver unit came through. None of her transmissions brought a reply, though. No one talked about it, but Quinn could tell that the lack of communication had her concerned. As did the clouds in the distance.

The storm hit about four days later. The barometric pressure—­updated hourly on the communicator Kiara had strapped to her wrist—­had been falling for almost a day. It was early afternoon when the first storm clouds began to gather. Logan began making little forays ahead of the group to search for shelter.

“Got a clump of evergreens close to the road, about a half mile ahead,” he said.

Kiara glanced at the wall of dark sky that loomed toward them out of the west. “Can we make it before the storm hits?”

“If we ride hard.”

The horses were tired, but Quinn had no trouble spurring his mare to a gallop. She seemed to sense the urgency of the situation. The mountain pony tossed his head a ­couple of times but eventually followed suit. They plunged along the hard-­packed dirt road behind Logan and Kiara in a growing shroud of twilight.

Logan raised an arm to signal and they broke east toward a dark patch of forest. Then the hardwoods gave way to blue and green conifers. Their branches were already draped in snow. The ground was clear except for a thick layer of fallen needles.

Quinn tried to ask where they planned to put up the tents but took a branch to the face instead. Shaking his head, he opened his eyes to find them reining in at a small natural clearing. By then the wind had become a steady roar.

“Secure the horses!” Logan shouted.

Quinn half fell to the ground, but he managed to keep hold of all the reins. He looked around for a good trunk or branch to tie off to, but the snow-­covered conifers had nothing to offer. Chaudri rummaged in one of the saddlebags, came up with a handful of metal spikes and a claw hammer. She drove enough spikes into the ground to get the reins secured. The mounts were snorting, showing the whites in their eyes. A primal fear of what was coming had them in its grip. Quinn and Chaudri struggled with hobbles for the horses' feet so they wouldn't bolt in the storm.

Meanwhile, Logan and Kiara had assembled a series of telescoping metallic rods about seven feet long. They drove these into the earth at regular intervals around the small clearing. Out came a long roll of ultrafine wire mesh from one of the saddlebags. They wrapped it around the perimeter of their clearing, then draped more of it overhead, supporting the mesh with more telescoping rods like the poles of a circus tent. Logan unwrapped a plastic-­covered bundle about the size of a small shoebox, revealing an electric console disguised as a jewelry box. He and Kiara fitted wires from this to the fine-­mesh layer.

“Everyone stand clear!” Logan shouted.

Kiara flipped a series of switches on the console, and the fine mesh began to hum. Quinn was half-­blind from the blowing snow, but he could have sworn a faint blue glow emanated from the mesh. And within their little clearing, the wind died.

“Don't touch the mesh,” Kiara said.

“Wasn't planning on it,” he said.
I'm not a moron.

The sounds of the storm had grown muted, as if shutting an open window on a downpour. Only this was a tempest unlike any Quinn had ever seen. He'd grown up in the desert; he'd seen summer squalls and even a sandstorm, but nothing with the raw fury of this storm. It was like a living thing that clawed at the very ground and shook it furiously.

“Is this a typical storm?” Quinn asked. His voice sounded strange in the clearing's numb silence.

“For northern Felara, yes,” Chaudri said. “The straight winds aren't so much a danger as the electrostatic charges. Incredibly disruptive to just about every electronic device that we carry. Not to mention the interference with neural function.”

“Neural as in neuron? As in my
brain
?”

“Yes—­for what it's worth.” She smiled, but Quinn was feeling his head, as if he might feel the storm attacking his mind. She took a wrist and gently pulled his arm down. “It's perfectly all right, Quinn. Alissians seem to have a natural resistance to the interference, but we don't. So we have this,” she said, gesturing at the wire mesh all around them.

“It looks . . . expensive.”

“CASE Global made it a priority investment. The charged plasma keeps debris off of us, too.”

Like a deflector shield, straight out of
Star Wars
. As if sensing his doubt, a wrist-­thick branch from a nearby tree was ripped loose by the wind. It skittered once across the top of the protective barrier, only to tumble away.

“Case in point,” Chaudri said.

“So nothing can get to us?”

“Oh, I doubt it would withstand a crossbow bolt. But it's good for just about anything else.”

“Hopefully the storm won't start shooting at us.”

“I'd say we're reasonably safe.”

Quinn leaned back and stretched. It felt like the first time in ages he didn't have that tension in his shoulders. “Why aren't we using this all the time?” He might even get a decent night's sleep for once.

“It's an energy hog. Emergency-­use only, that's right in the protocol. The solar chargers will need a few days to replenish the power we're burning right now.”

“Too bad.”

She leaned close to Quinn and lowered her voice. “There are security reasons, too. The plasma generates an electromagnetic field. Building a sensor to detect it would not be difficult . . . for someone who knew what he was doing.”

“Like Richard Holt,” Quinn said.

“Exactly.”

A
jagged line of steep, snowcapped mountains separated Felara from New Kestani to the south. The research team had been unable to determine what happened to
old
Kestani, or if it had even existed. The fact that mountains formed a physical barrier between Felarans and Kestani seemed a good thing, as the two city-­states had remained in a state of open conflict since well before the gateway was first discovered.

The main strategy for both sides was to control the mountain passes, of which there were about a dozen. Possession of these changed hands every few months by military action or treachery; sometimes even by strategic intent. According to Logan, Kestani currently controlled the largest pass, called Nevil's Gap.

“Border crossings are touch and go,” he said. “The key to getting across without too much trouble is to minimize your threat and have a good story.”