Page 73 of Seer Prophet

He wanted it, regardless.

Pushing the thought from his mind, he aimed his eyes out the oval window to his right, fitting his headset over one ear as he replayed the message he’d received from Dehgoies.

He would figure out what to do about the woman later.

For now, the Sword had given him a job.

The thought sustained him through most of the next ninety minutes of flight.

Chapter16

Don’t Worry, Cousin

They dropped down in the middle of the city, on the largest of several lawns belonging to what used to be one of the most heavily-guarded buildings in the world.

Loki contacted the carrier en route, telling them of his intentions once he got a good look at the satellite feeds out of D.C. Once he realized the place was almost totally deserted, with no remaining military presence, he requested permission for a direct assault. He figured on using speed rather than stealth to minimize risk.

He knew from feeds, of course, that the United States government continued to function. Their command center was now located underground, in a military bunker in another area of the country. Loki had seen and heard rumors around several different locations for that new government home, and none were coastal.

That list of potential locations had grown in recent months. The remaining human elite seemed to be employing a lot of seers, and those seers built a bewildering number of constructs and Barrier shields to obscure where the human leaders actually were. They also seemed to be periodically changing locations to evade?

Well, whatever it was those humans felt they needed to evade.

Truthfully, Loki could no longer be certain what that was.

Like Balidor and Varlan, with whom he had spoken about these matters, Loki believed the human leaders globally were being manipulated into a state of near-constant fear by Shadow and his seers.

He frowned out the window as the Chinook’s blades powered down. His eyes scaled the walls of the famous building’s South Portico and its high, white, ionic columns. He squinted past the anti-glare glass to the roof, where secret service agents used to patrol with rifles above the two massive balconies belonging to the lower floors.

He saw no one up there now.

To Loki’s light, the place felt abandoned.

The previously elaborate, military-grade Barrier constructs had already mostly dissipated from lack of maintenance by construct seers. He could feel few people inside the building itself, and those he did feel had a haphazard energy to them. It was totally unlike previous imprints Loki got of this place, back when it housed a working government?and, even more importantly in many respects, that government’s leader.

Organic-reinforced windows appeared to be missing from the upper and lower floors. None at all remained in any part of what he could see of the East and West Wings.

As none of those windows had been glass, that fact was telling.

They must have been broken out manually, using some considerable amount of force. It could possibly have occurred through the use of missiles, or some other military-grade ordnance, but Loki doubted it, given the size and shape of the scorch marks on the outside of the building. Those looked to be from fires more than explosions.

The quiet bothered him.

Then again, he did not intend for them to be here long.

In the encrypted recordings, the boss gave very specific instructions.

He also asked Loki to keep the particulars of any intel they found to himself, until he or the Bridge specified otherwise.

Loki found the Sword’s request for secrecy interesting, but not particularly surprising.

The Sword’s default position tended to live in the restriction of information.

Regaining his feet as he continued to run over details of the plan, Loki hunched his way out of his seat. He straightened in the main aisle before reaching up to the luggage rack, where he’d hung his weapon on a set of hooks fitted for that purpose.

The other seers continued to peer out windows, most standing in the aisle with rifles slung around their backs. Several leaned down on seat backs to stare through the oval portals.

“We going in there, boss?” Mika asked him.

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