Its never really silent in a combat aircraft, even when its quiet. The mechanical hums, the chimes and sounds of various consoles, the breathing, farts, belches, and assorted creaks of equipment from the troops in the back.
Now, though, with Alliance Two, it seemed different. Oh sure, Henri snored in the co-pilot’s seat, curled up in a ball around her ever present laptop, exhausted from the combat and the researching, the healing, and the emotional scarring of those she couldn’t bring back. Whitley slept in the back seat, Shawna in the seat next too her, both too exhausted to snipe at each other like sisters arguing over, well, some guy….the older tweaking the younger constantly.
Bryce and Bryan, in the middle row, Bryan asleep, but lightly, because he no longer knew another way. Bryce, murmuring slightly in his dreams, the ancient “Egyptian” a continuous concern, but not something I understood, nor was it even that uncommon anymore.
Only William was “awake,” but he was in whatever standby mode he used to recharge. Sometimes, I thought he didn’t need to, just used it as an excuse to hide from the rest of the broken humanity on this team.
We flew through the night, high over the Indian Ocean, stunned by our failures, the ease with which we apparently fell into Anubis’s trap, and whether we had trusted all the wrong people, including the witches.
My thoughts cycled through ever changing scenarios, long habit subconsciously monitoring the flight controls. Were we compromised by Bryce’s ties to the ancient creature, or his fellow “generals?” Someone stalked us, someone attacked us in Edinburgh, but why only wound Shawna? It would have been much easier and more efficient to kill her, if we were a true threat anyway. Were we completely compromised or was someone inside our group fighting against control? At this point it could be anybody, given Whitley’s intense terror when we ran into Dunn at her grandmother’s, maybe she had been mentally infiltrated? It didn’t seem likely but my paranoia checked all the angles. Bryan – with his training? Was he truly free? Bryce, obviously a potential leak now; maybe Titan infected by the evil APEX virus. Henri – with her weird skills and abilities since her coma. For that matter, maybe Shawna did it to herself, through some ancient programming from when those clowns sucked her spirit from her original body, throwing her into a more adult, sexier version. Adding to the guilt, maybe me with my broken memories and unknown pieces of the past, maybe the nanite virus had done something else to my mind? From all my past, from all my missions, what I knew was that you never saw it coming. And you would eventually drive yourself insane like Bresnick did with suspicions.
There’d been little argument when I’d turned the aircraft towards Australia. Oh, I’m sure eventually there’d be bitching and whining and passive aggressive insults about Mommy issues, but I didn’t need to explain myself. No one really did when it comes to family. If I were going to, I’d say that with the news, Bryce and Bryan needed to go home. They needed it, in so many ways. They may not want it, they may not think they did, but I think they needed to see our mother. I’d made Bryce leave, after the experiments. He’d been only eighteen, and by then I’d thought Bryan lost. We couldn’t visit Dad, since the news report Henri found last year said the stubborn bleeding wanker had gone and died.
I was going home….to say goodbye. The goodbye I should have said sixteen years ago. The one that had been overdue before the accident almost six years ago. The end of the world was coming. Sad, pathetic even, really to know that’s what drove my actions. I knew I was broken and that it was far too late to somehow put those jagged parts back together. That’s what no one ever considered. That I somehow didn’t realize the depths of the caverns of my past. I was going to say goodbye. Then I was going to Perth, and make sure that Olivia and her sister were safe, or as safe as I could make them. No matter what Amelia had said before she died. If anybody didn’t like it, they could bloody well sod off.
Last Dreams 