Page 121 of Seer Prophet

Tank-1

Revik took the stairs two and three at a time, sliding down the rails between mesh landings where he could. He focused only on moving fast.

He focused very little of his mind on where he was going.

He knew they were looking for him.

He didn’t yet have the carrier’s full layout comfortably lodged in his mind, not in terms of the finer details. Those same details might have cut his walking time from one end of the ship to the other, but he couldn’t do anything about that now.

He hadn’t been on many American ships.

Even during Vietnam, he spent most of his time on land, or in the air.

This ship might be different from what Americans used in those earlier wars, but it still had an American feel. Because of that, he struggled more to get his head around the logic of the layout compared to what he remembered of the big Russian ships from his time there, or even earlier, on those battleships he rode for Germany.

Four decks above hangar hard deck was odd to him.

The ships he’d ridden in before had only one deck above the main hangars, with the lower levels taken up with nuclear warheads, reactors, machinery rooms, laundry, dry storage, chill rooms, even data processing in later years. The hangars sat at water level on this ship, partly because the fusion reactor took up a lot less room and needed the cold of the water less, due to the organic field and buffer units being more efficient than the previous magnet-based variety.

So yeah, while he understood the tactical reasons for the placement of the hangar, the unfamiliarity disoriented him.

Balidor’s team had done a lot to modify the standard specs, which didn’t help.

Seers continued to modify the damned thing like crazy, adding organics and even stone, mostly to facilitate the creation of stronger constructs (stone, especially granite, was incredibly helpful in grounding constructs). They’d also converted a good portion of the largest of the three holds so they could grow food and keep domestic animals, as well as run the desalination equipment and store extra water along with algae-growing casks.

So yeah, Revik was still getting a feel for everything Balidor had done.

He’d given the Adhipancarte blancheover this project while he’d been working out of San Francisco. He found himself somewhat in awe of what they managed to accomplish in so short a time, given the small number of resources he’d funneled towards the project at the time. The carrier would never serve as a permanent base, but for now, while they hunted down Listers and avoided a stationary location, Revik couldn’t have asked for anything better.

Still, he wanted to know the ship.

Given what hunted them, he wanted to know every inch of this fucking ship.

He’d done what he could from the tank, memorizing specs and changes Balidor outlined in his log, but nothing replaced time spent on the ground, where he could note details and alterations with his own eyes, and where he could use the spatial areas of his light to take real-time snapshots of particulars.

He spent the better part of the morning doing that very thing, walking the ship’s corridors, memorizing staircases, service walks, deck layout, outer hull exits, security passages, not to mention all of the lesser-known ways to move around the ship.

He used the task to reassure himself, in part.

He’d also done it to distract himself from the thought of his wife handcuffed to their bed.

The memory brought an unwelcome flush of pain, one he shoved angrily out of his mind.

He couldn’t believe she hadn’t told him.

Hadn’t they vowed, in front of the gods and everyone fucking else, totelleach other shit? Why hadn’t she called him thesecondTerian walked into that cell?

Hell, Balidor talked about mutiny. Why the fuck hadn’tBalidorcontacted him while it was happening? Was he no longer Balidor’s commanding officer, either?

He strongly suspected he knew the answer to that, too.

He could feel the ship turning.

He felt it not long after he left the control tower and Balidor.

He heard whispers of their new orders, of the new destination inside the construct.

He knew Balidor was keeping that destination more or less under wraps for now, on a strictly need-to-know basis, but a lot of seers had picked up on the change. He knew Balidor was following orders, too, that the idea to change course hadn’t originated from him, or from the Adhipan leadership team more generally, or from Tarsi.

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