Chapter 14 Dave #2
When the eight minds had started to merge, the memories had started to merge as well.
Eight childhoods, and eight variations on the same fundamental experience.
A large sprawling compound with sections that children were not allowed in.
Mostly, they remembered the other children they had played with.
The mothers who had watched over them collectively, the ones who assumed the roles of teachers.
The older ones who cooked and were kinder.
It hadn't been a bad life for the children, at least not until the soldiers had come for the boys, and then they'd discovered what real hell was.
All eight bodies shivered at the memories. A lot of bad things had happened to the young boys at the training camp. Bad things that they preferred to forget.
Compared to that, the Dormant enclosure had seemed like a dream of heaven.
So what if their mothers hadn't hugged them or kissed them or told them that they loved them?
Perhaps it had been better that way. Otherwise, the shock of the brutality of the training camp would have been even worse.
But memories were not objective recordings.
They were interpretations, filtered through the consciousness of children who lacked the framework to understand what they were observing.
A boy of five or eight or twelve, raised in a compound where love was not often expressed, would not recognize it even if it was subtly present.
He would not understand why his mother's face was blank when she handed him his food, why she often stared at nothing, and why she turned away when the soldiers came.
Mattie had offered a different interpretation. That the blankness was not indifference but armor. That the turning away was not rejection but the only defense available to women who knew their sons would be taken and who could not bear to love what they were certain to lose.
It was her interpretation, a hypothesis of someone who had grown up with love and couldn't understand its absence. But it was plausible. After all, she was a woman. She understood other women better than they ever could.
"We can take our mothers to Annani's clan," Number One said, voicing what the collective consciousness had thought a moment ago. "They won't be abandoned."
This was the piece that Mattie and Dimitri were missing. The piece that changed the calculation from impossible to merely improbable.
Dave had been harvesting Losham's unguarded thoughts when he was too preoccupied to notice the slight mental intrusion.
Losham was smart and disciplined, but his mind was busy managing a power struggle with his brothers, the secret research program, and the excavation of a booby-trapped chamber in his father's basement.
His mental defenses had gaps, which Dave had slipped through like water slipping through hairline cracks.
The clan operated from somewhere in the greater Los Angeles area.
They had a compeller strong enough to bind Losham through a phone line, surveillance capabilities that extended to the island, and the organizational capacity to plan an extraction operation.
Losham believed that they probably had Navuh because there was no other way for them to know about the booby traps, which was by itself an extraordinary achievement that spoke to capabilities far beyond what Brotherhood propaganda attributed to them.
They wanted what was buried in the basement. Supposedly, five immortals in stasis had been placed in coffin-like chests that Navuh had been guarding like his most precious treasure, and the clan considered them valuable enough to go to extreme lengths to retrieve them.
Whoever those five immortals were, they mattered to the clan the way the enhancement drugs mattered to Dave.
They were existential.
If we escape with the eight women, we need someone on the other end to receive them. We cannot provide that, but the clan can, assuming the clan would be willing to take them.
Another thought surfaced. We can take care of our mothers.
With their thralling and compulsion ability, resources wouldn't be a problem. Not to provide for eight additional women.
"We will need the clan if we liberate more than eight." Number One voiced the next thought. "But we know nothing about them. What if they are not any better than the Brotherhood? What if we liberate the women from one enslavement only to subject them to another?"
Brotherhood propaganda described Annani and her clan as decadent and depraved, which was most likely false, but Dave knew almost nothing about them.
"We know what their civilization produced." Number Seven spoke for all of them. "The Western world owes its success to Annani, and there is no denying that it is more successful than all the others."
They had watched films curated for their consumption.
The goals had been to get the warriors proficient in English and to absorb customs and behaviors so they could blend in when sent on missions.
Dave had watched dozens of them over the years, chosen by some junior commander for their linguistic utility, mostly action films for vocabulary range, and familiarity with various locations.
Dave had absorbed more than the language, though, more than the urban sprawl.
He had absorbed the world the films depicted.
The cities, the landscapes, the social structures, the relationships.
The messy, chaotic, frequently unjust but also vibrant and free civilization that unfolded across the screen.
If Annani's clan had helped shape that civilization, and the Brotherhood reluctantly acknowledged that the goddess had influenced the development of Western culture across millennia, then the results spoke for themselves.
It was imperfect. It was also infinitely preferable to what was happening on this island.
"Losham answers the clan's calls in private," Number One ruminated for all of them. "We cannot join the conversation without revealing that we know about the calls, which in turn reveals that we have been reading his mind."
"We tell Dimitri what we know," Number One said. "Perhaps he will think of something we haven't."
It was unlikely. Even though Dimitri was smart, the collective was smarter. If they couldn't figure out a way to contact the clan without revealing their hand, Dimitri would not know how to do that either.
The harbor stretched below them, busy with the afternoon's activity.
The supply ship was nearly unloaded, its hull riding higher as the cargo transferred to shore.
Somewhere among the crates were probably the materials Losham had ordered for the lab.
The chemicals, equipment, and supplies that kept Dave's drug regimen on schedule.
The chain of dependency ran in one direction. The drugs required the scientists, the scientists required protection, the protection required Losham's continued authority. It was the chain that kept Dave tethered to the island.
But chains could be redirected.
If the clan was what Dave needed. It was a destination, support for the women, and most critically, access to the scientific infrastructure that would allow Dimitri and Petrov to continue producing the enhancement drugs, rendering the dependency on Losham null.
The chain would not be broken, just replaced, but it was the best solution Dave could think of.
The risk was the compeller.
Dave had never tested his compulsion ability against an unknown opponent.
On the island, there was no one who could challenge him.
Not currently. Lord Navuh had been a powerhouse, and compared to him, even Dave's ability was paltry.
Then again, the lord couldn't do what Dave was doing, which was compelling through a thrall instead of speech.
Dave was a novelty in more ways than one, and it gave him a serious advantage.
Still, the clan's compeller was a threat.
Whoever had bound Losham through a phone call was operating at a level that demanded respect.
Phone compulsion meant the power could transmit through electronic audio, which was a capability Dave had never tested in himself.
It also meant the compeller was strong enough to override the mental calluses Losham had built up over centuries of exposure to his father's far more potent ability.
Was that compeller stronger than the Eight?
It was an interesting question. If the clan's compeller was stronger, Dave's plans, his knowledge, his capabilities would be exposed to an entity whose intentions were unknown.
The clan might see Dave as an asset or a threat.
They might welcome cooperation or attempt to neutralize what they couldn't control.
"We have to avoid direct contact with the compeller," Number One stated for the collective.
"At least initially. If we use Dimitri as a bridge, we maintain a buffer.
Dimitri communicates with the clan, we communicate with Dimitri, and the compeller never needs to know about us until we are ready to reveal ourselves.
Dimitri's mind is difficult to penetrate now, but the compeller might be able to break through.
Losham tried to thrall him and failed, but then Losham's ability to thrall immortals is practically nonexistent. He can only thrall humans."
Petrov and Mattie are not immune; the compeller will know about us from them.
The collective processed everything in silence. Eight bodies were standing at the end of a pier and looking at the ocean, while their combined consciousness evaluated the probabilities of success against the certainty of failure if nothing changed.
Staying on the island was even more risky than escaping it.
The enhancement program that kept Dave alive was vulnerable to the power struggles among Losham's brothers.
Kolhood wanted the Eight eliminated. Others might agree once Losham's grip on authority weakened further.
And Losham's grip was weakening, day by day, as his brothers probed and doubted more and more the story about Navuh's self-imposed exile to the harem.
Dave did what he could to reinforce the story and make them believe it, but the three senior commanders were not easily thralled and compelled, and they shook off the effects faster than he could reinforce them.
The window was closing. Perhaps not today, and not this week, but the trajectory was clear, and Dave had spent enough time analyzing trajectories to know that the ones that pointed toward destruction rarely reversed themselves without intervention.
Mattie's request was not just compassionate, it was strategically sound, though she probably didn't realize it.
The dormant women were a bargaining chip.
If Dave could offer the clan not just intelligence about the island but the liberation of the Brotherhood's captive breeding population, the offer became too difficult to refuse.
It transformed a request for asylum into a rescue operation and turned into a partnership to do a charitable act of monumental proportions.
The clan would not be able to refuse, not just because it was the righteous thing to do but because it would deliver a massive blow to the Brotherhood, effectively halting their ability to produce more warriors.