Chloe arched her eyebrows and declared, “Haley has done well.”
“Outstanding,” Crane enthused sardonically, a dry note entering his voice. “However, while I find this sudden advance welcome. It does seem,” he spread his hands wide, “overly fortuitous. I’m at a loss to explain how James Haley could find so quickly what we could not.”
“For many years, James Haley was our best Shadowstone operative.”
Crane frowned. “It seems insufficient.”
“Perhaps this is simply a fortunate turn of events?”
Crane stared at Chloe and declared, “I haven’t survived nine centuries by being lucky.” He steepled his fingers and looked over them at her. “However, we will take this discovery on face value and monitor what happens. It seems that the Mirovar force team has taken a casualty. Do you concur?”
Chloe nodded. “The only operative likely to go off on their own would be Arthur Slayne. As a strategy, it would lower the risk of him being found, but increase the risk of being killed if he was found. His options in this instance are difficult to assess.”
Crane looked into the distance for a moment and offered, “He will stay with the team. Proceed on the basis that they have taken a casualty.”
Chloe wanted to say, ‘One for team vampires,’ because it would irritate Crane enormously if she did so, but she held her tongue and noted, “Four helpers have left for the east. Shall we pursue them?”
“No.”
“What if they have the P-Case?”
Crane paused for a moment. “Slayne will keep the P-Case with him. He will not trust the care of the Panopticon to another.”
“You are certain of this?”
Crane stared at her for a moment, as if considering his answer. “Yes.”
I’m not allowed to ask how he knows this, Chloe thought. “Do we take them on the road?”
“We have to preserve the safety of the Panopticon. That rules out aerial bombardment by our shadowstars. We will have to fight hand to hand, and this team has defeated nearly thirty fully armed praetorians today. We have too few praetorians left to ensure an overwhelming force and none to waste. No, your first proposal is a good one. We will raise a militia army and destroy them at their exfil location. They are heading to an airport northeast of Las Vegas, we only need to identify it and marshal our forces there before they arrive.”
Crane waved his hand over the display screen and a detailed map appeared. He stabbed a location to the southwest and suggested, “Somewhere here, there is an airport.”
Chloe’s fingers flashed over a keyboard and the map expanded to much finer detail. She looked at the screen for a second and stated, “There is a privately-owned airport just northeast of the intersection of US route 93 and Interstate 15 in Nevada.”
“Yes,” Crane nodded decisively, tapping the airport on the display screen with a long pale finger. “That’s where we will find Slayne and the Panopticon. We can get our militia to converge in sunlight protected aircraft and land at the airport.” He glanced at a clock on the screen. “Sunset is at 19:43, a little over two hours from now. How many covens have we woken up?”
Chloe stated, “Fourteen. We have forty-seven registered vampires ready to go within a thousand miles of Las Vegas.”
“We have a target. Get them moving, and make sure they bring every wannabe vampire they can find. I want three hundred plus vampires on the ground by sunset.” Crane smiled grimly. “It’ll be a meat grinder, but we can use the militia to exhaust their Ramp capabilities, then attack them with our fresh praetorians when they are at their weakest.” He nodded quietly. “Yes, first we exhaust them, then we overwhelm them.”
Chloe nodded, and hid her concerns. Her proposal for raising a vampire militia might actually work. She silently prayed Arthur Slayne had sent the P-Case away with the Order helpers. If he still had it with him, Crane could retrieve it and re-establish the Panopticon before the next dawn and her opportunity to seize back the initiative would be lost.
She looked past Crane for a moment. There was another opportunity rising amongst the chaos. In the hurly-burly of a battlefield, her pet chameleons could move like ghosts. Chloe needed to separate the Panopticon from both Slayne and Crane, perhaps the creatures could play a pivotal role in the drama that would soon unfold. It remained to be seen if Slayne still possessed the Panopticon. He was a wily opponent. If she were in his shoes, she would have passed the Panopticon off to another and then led her pursuers away from it. She pursed her lips. Of course, she would then lead her opponents to a suitable field of combat and chop them into small pieces with the Red Dragon. But Arthur Slayne wasn’t her, what would he do?
She focused back on Crane and asked, “Are you certain this is a trap?”
“Undoubtedly, it’s a trap.”
Chloe smiled. “And your plan is?”
“Well, not to spring it.” He waved his hand across the desolation of the Panopticon fortress. “Look at this. Slayne has smashed the fortress, he clearly had a way in and an Order helper on the inside.” Crane shook his head. “How did that happen? Then he guts half the remaining praetorians in North America, and steals the Panopticon. I’m sure I know where every damn quantum processor on the planet is, and he doesn’t have any. So, he can’t be intending to set up the Panopticon as his own system. No, it’s bait - pure and simple. His targets are you and me. He wants to cut off the head of the snake.”
Chloe shrugged. “Well, you could be right.”
Crane grinned derisively and steepled his fingers. He stared into her eyes. “I’m going to stake your life on it.”
Chloe arched an eyebrow and offered in a low mocking tone, “Indeed.”
“You really are a piece of work,” Crane declared, a dark intensity lighting his eyes.
Chloe looked at him in silence. Crane needed her and he admired her skills. There was nothing else between them.
Crane’s face darkened. “No, this mysterious trap of Slayne’s will become his grave. We’ll play along while we put our temporary army in place, then let him draw us in before we turn the tables against him and destroy him utterly.” He collapsed his steepled fingers and tapped his thumbs against his lips. “The next few hours will decide more than all the conflict of the last century. By the dawn, the Panopticon will be restored, the Order all but destroyed, and the Slayne’s extinguished from the planet.”
Chloe nodded; he could well be right. She suggested, “We could re-locate to the Order safe house and land. We could save fuel while the militia mobilize and converge on Slayne’s airport.”
Crane nodded. “It’s as good a place as any, make it so.”
“Yes, Sir,” Chloe replied, a slight smile gracing her lips.
Now it was time for James and the chameleons to show their worth.
* * *
The hanger doors slammed shut, plunging the interior into dimly lit gloom.
A long heavily-shielded limousine pulled to a halt before a private jet with blackened windows. The doors of the long black car opened and four people emerged from the cabin. They were uniformly pale of skin, youthful, beautiful, richly dressed and adorned with top-end sunglasses.
Tamsah al Ramil, aka ‘the Sand Crocodile,’ had been tracking this vampire coven since arriving in Portland before dawn. The Red Empire had identified a number of covens in North America over the last five decades. The Portland coven was a listed target awaiting the opportunity to send a fist team. The heavy presence of the Vampire Dominion in the United States had limited the feasibility of inserting a team to destroy the coven. A fact Tamsah welcomed as he’d lost contact with the truth speaker after the daylight battle in Minneapolis the day before.
The previous day, he’d killed four of the strangely enhanced Shadowstone troopers, and a squad of praetorians in the sewers beneath the Order conclave hall to enable the truth speaker to escape. He’d then exploited old contacts to use Red Empire assets active on the West Coast of the United States to locate the Portland coven. He still
had status on the Red Empire networks as an undercover operative. His conversion to a vampire remained a well-kept secret from his former comrades. The Red Empire would seek to bring him back into the fold now the secret alliance with Armitage was over. However, if they found out he’d become a vampire they would seek to deceive, trap, and kill him. He wondered what had happened to the other Red Empire operatives assigned to Armitage. If they had been forbidden to contact the Red Empire, they would remain ignorant of the truth and continue to obey her orders.
Tamsah had stayed hidden at Portland International Airport as the day dawned, and the sun crept over the sky. The latest news reports on his smartphone told of the eruption of a new volcano in Utah, south of Salt Lake City. An eruption that was assumed by serious-faced reporters to be due to natural geological forces. No, the news reports were propaganda promulgated by the Vampire Dominion and their agents in the PSYOPS directorate of Shadowstone. Instead of a natural event, the remnants of the Order had staged an attack on a Vampire Dominion facility.
He’d radically overshot his mark, ending up in Portland, Oregon instead of a valley southwest of the regional city of Lehi in Utah. Still, all was not lost. As a member of the elite leadership cadre of the Red Empire, Tamsah had participated in multiple war games to evaluate conflict scenarios with the Vampire Dominion and the Order of Thoth. Crane had lost praetorians in Minneapolis, and no doubt had lost more in Utah. One option that had been vigorously debated was Crane’s willingness or lack thereof to raise a vampire militia to replenish his losses in the event of losing large numbers of praetorians.
Now, it seemed that events were producing that exact scenario. Tamsah had originally considered stealing the Portland coven’s private jet, but now it looked a lot more feasible to simply hitch a ride. The Vampire Dominion militia would take him to the Mirovar force team, and back into the presence of the truth speaker.
He reflected upon the truth speaker; a young Order operative named Li Wu. Armitage had established an elaborate gossamer trap for her within the dungeon beneath her manor house in Northern England. Armitage and her henchman Marcus Drake had converted his fist team and himself into abominations. They had been dressed as praetorians and ordered to conduct a bizarre theater of murder in front of the rest of the Mirovar force team. At the final moment, Li Wu had looked into his eyes with proud defiance and filled him with the most dreadful shame. Her words were seared on his soul, ‘Who are you? You’re not a praetorian.’ She was right in the deepest way possible. She had spoken the most profound truth while staring with courage into the face of death.
The shame had been overwhelming. He’d used the strike of hidden death to fake her execution and she had survived, borne away from the dungeons by her team mates. From that night on, he’d devoted his life to her protection. His destiny bound to the truth speaker’s in an unshakable bond of honor. He lived for her honor for he had none himself - for all honor was denied to vampires.
Tamsah returned his attention to the Portland coven. His strategy for re-establishing contact with the truth speaker was to infiltrate the vampire community and follow trouble to its source.
A dapper young man, dressed in upmarket casual wear and the finest Italian shoes read a message on his smartphone. He turned to the other three and declared, “We have new orders from the Dominion. We have to go to a private airport northeast of Las Vegas.”
“And what of our familiars and their poor ignorant friends?” a tall, slim brunette asked with mock concern, shrugging her shoulders and opening her hands wide.
“They’ll be arriving shortly,” replied the dapper man. “We’ll convert them here before we fly,”
“Oh, darling,” the brunette remarked flamboyantly, “tonight will be such a delightful soiree!”
“Exactly,” the dapper vampire agreed with a grin. “There will be hundreds of us versus a handful of them. The lucky few who arrive first will feast on their blood tonight.”
The third vampire smirked, his full lips parting around perfect teeth. “There was a great victory yesterday morning. The Order have been smashed forever.”
“There are only a few stragglers left to mop up,” the fourth vampire remarked, casually leaning against the limousine and lighting a cigarette.
The vampires grinned at each other.
Tamsah emerged from the shadows and strode confidently toward them. He was clad in close-fitting dark clothes and a matte-black leather jacket. His pair of blackened twelve-inch tri-bladed knives securely hidden next to his ribs.
The nearest pair whirled around, all their smiles vanishing. The dapper vampire snapped. “Who the hell are you?”
With their supernaturally keen senses the recognition of Tamsah’s vampire status was a foregone conclusion. He was betting on it. He needed quick acceptance, and to fit in with the coven. The last thing they would expect would be that he was a former operative of the Red Empire.
“I hear there’s a fight coming up,” Tamsah stated.
The vampires stared at him for a moment. The dapper vampire inquired, “You’ve seen the broadcast from Crane’s citadel?”
“Yes,” Tamsah lied. “But I lack transport.”
The brunette sniffed imperiously. “You seem oddly ill-equipped for a vampire.”
Tamsah raised a quizzical eyebrow. “I like to travel light.”
The fourth vampire pushed himself off the limousine and suggested, “If there wasn’t a war on, we’d send you on your way. Oregon is our territory.”
Tamsah raised his open hands to shoulder height and offered calmly. “Of course, I’m not a poacher.”
The dapper vampire stated, “None of that matters now. You can come with us. The more the merrier.” The dapper man’s smartphone pinged and he glanced at it. “The familiars and wannabes are arriving by minibus now.”
“Fabulous,” the brunette remarked breathily. “I’m really quite parched.”
Tamsah prepared to participate in the feast. He wanted to be at his best in the coming battle. The truth speaker deserved nothing less than everything he had to offer her.
A side door opened, a bright splash of sunlight cutting through the gloom. A line of well-dressed, clean-cut, young men and women walked through the doorway and into the hanger. There were twenty-six of them, they doffed their sunglasses, blinking and murmuring excitedly at the vampires waiting in the shadows.
The vampire dominion would harvest thirteen new vampires in the next ten minutes. The rest would be food. The Portland coven would bring seventeen vampire militia to the coming fight, and one former Red Empire operative of the second rank.
Tamsah bared his fangs.
* * *
The blood thief’s aircraft descended on jets of blue flame.
Gullette stood in the shadows next to the Osprey II drone. Kavanne and Shemina rested inside the vehicle. Meat-that-talks, the prey animal that worked for the blood thief had given him a task. It was simple enough, deposit a tiny dot of technology smaller than the tip of his smallest finger upon the landing strut at the front of the nearest drone.
Gullette’s skin tingled constantly, maintaining the trick of light that rendered him invisible to all but the blood thief. He crossed the forty yards to the drone, reached down and pressed the dot against the metal surface of the front strut supporting the craft. The dot gripped the metal with minuscule clamps, tiny screws automatically penetrating the surface of the strut. A moment later, the surface of the dot changed color to match the surface of the strut and the dot vanished from view.
Gullette stepped away. The blood thief was tracking the movements of the craft. She must expect its pilot would go somewhere interesting, somewhere secret. The vampire general answered to one entity alone - the king of the vampires. Her treacherous nature was revealed. As expected, none of the vermin could be trusted, but advantage lay in anticipation of deceit. She would lie to them, she would attempt to deceive them, but in the end the tables would be turned and it would be the blood thief who would find herself
defeated.
He retreated up the ramp and into the cool shadows of the cargo bay of the Osprey II drone. His nostrils flared at the faint whiff of Shemina’s female glands. She was entering her reproductive cycle. He stared at Kavanne, who stared back, his nostrils flaring with barely restrained threat. The spines on Kavanne’s long arms and down his back began to bristle. His long talons emerging from his fingers for the death strike.
Gullette leaned forward, humming low in his throat. A rich, complex melody filled the cabin for ten seconds, and Kavanne quieted, his talons and spines retreating to a relaxed posture.
Gullette blinked in the gloom, his head bobbing forward and back. The song had worked this time, but as the mating instincts waxed over the next few weeks, the song would lose its potency as it was overwhelmed by a greater power. It had been two thousand years since the last mating cycle of the people. While he welcomed the opportunity to spawn an egg, the timing was terrible. He needed Kavanne to help defeat the blood thief. It would lower the risk if there were two of the People. She’d already killed one of their number, one whose name could no longer be mentioned, and he was loathe to risk Shemina in combat with the vampire general.
He needed events to move quickly or the opportunity to bring the People back to primacy on this world would be lost.
And if Gullette didn’t win, what did the future hold?
Nothing but extinction.
Chapter Twelve
“All conception of horror is defeated by the possible realities hidden within reach of the Metaframe. It is imperative that no one ever accesses the Metaframe again. Further change could unleash worlds of darkness, chaos and evil beyond anyone’s imagination.”
- An entry dated [REDACTED], 1945. Cornelius Crane’s personal notebook kept in his secret library
* * *
Utah, Enoch, September 11th, 18:01
The Crane War Page 30
