Terian: A Bridge and Sword Novel by Andrijeski JC

Author:Andrijeski, JC
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: White Sun Press
Published: 2023-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

The Inevitability Of Weakness

28 clicks east of Rio Negro

343 clicks west-northwest of Manaus

The Amazonian Basin, Brazil

December 1, 1978

We continued moving more or less silently towards those shielded lights.

We walked through pitch-darkness now, in the physical, at least.

I and the others made some noise, of course. It was inevitable, even with the sound-deadening boots we wore, and our ability to move more quietly than humans through dense terrain, especially without visual-spectrum light.

We paused as a group only when we needed to hack through some impassable segment of jungle. Or if we lost our quarry long enough that we needed to check in from several points, where my link to central wouldn’t be enough.

Usually it was Gregor, Dayven, and Jorel who worked the machetes, while the rest of us focused our attention behind the Barrier.

The light that felt like Dehgoies was close now.

The Defector and his rear-defense guard had drawn nearer to the rest of the target group as the Org team drew closer to them. I found that interesting.

Did Dehgoies do it in anticipation of a fight, to leverage more seers on the ground? Or had the primary team merely fallen further behind?

Had it forced their rear-guard to close the gap?

Why had they sent Dehgoies back with the rear-guard? They must know he would interest us more than anyone else with them, including their extraction targets.

Was he another kind of decoy? A distraction from the female?

As it looked now, we would likely catch up with them sometime in the next three or four hours. What then? Would Dehgoies and his Adhipan friends try to fight us off? Try to kill us one by one? Try to kill Terian? Try to negotiate?

Or would they merely attempt to slow us down so the female might escape with her mate and child? Was Dehgoies really so infatuated that he would throw his life away for another male’s mate and offspring?

Would Terian really kill a female seer with a newborn at her breast?

The idea fell beyond the pale.

The very concept of killing a newborn, or any seer pup, was beyond taboo. That had been true long before the population shortages since First Contact.

These days, it constituted an unpardonable crime.

Killing any seer, no matter what their age, verged on criminal nowadays.

Within the Org, I mean… but among the kneelers, too.

Really, for any seer, such a thing must be avoided in the extreme.

I could only think of a handful of exceptions to this rule: self-defense, or the defense of a greater number of our race. Violation of a personal nature that exceeded what the average seer could be expected to tolerate, such as one who convincingly threatened one’s mate or family, committed rape of a child, or the rape of a bonded mate. Certain types of torture or enslavement. Medical experimentation like what the Nazis had done to pre-fertile seers.

Extreme circumstances, in other words.

Things that made the finality of death comprehensible.

Generally speaking, seers fought their battles through humans, not the lives of other seers. Even work

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