Jay shouted again, “Li!”
The miniguns whirled to a halt, gray smoke rising from their barrels, their ammunition packs spent.
Li stared at the swarming vampires. Slayne’s words came back to her, ‘There always comes a time in life where you can either give up or step up.’
The vampire’s screeches and yells rose in triumph.
Li ramped hard. She blurred to her feet, snapping her squad automatic weapon to her shoulder. She ghosted forward to stand between Peter and Chiara and opened fire with her SAW.
The nearest vampires were ten feet away, leading at least another thirty against the team.
A hot fire burned in Li’s soul, eclipsing the flames that spat from the barrel of her weapon. Her silver and lead hollow-points whipped through the advancing vampires. She shifted aim carefully, directing three round bursts for head shot after head shot. With a half and half mix of silver and lead, every vampire was being hit in the head with at least one silver hollow point round.
They went down and stayed down.
Li took a step forward. Flicking her gun from vampire to vampire, efficiently picking the next closest target with each movement. Time slowed, individual rounds slapping into flesh. Tongues of yellow flame licking from the throat of her SAW’s barrel. Bone shattered and blood sprayed in wet ribbons of gore. Smoke rose from her weapon; each round a whip crack in the air. The walls and ceiling were painted with splats of blood and gobbets of flesh. The concrete ran with rivulets of blood as the corpses piled one upon another. The ammo counter on top of her SAW dropped toward zero. She kept her finger hard against the trigger and fired, and fired, and fired.
The last vampire pulled to a halt six feet short of Li. She was a young woman, slim, long dark hair, pale, with sharp fangs descending over her bottom lip. Her face was frozen with a sudden expression of being lost and alone.
Li didn’t hesitate and shot her beneath the nose, guaranteeing her bullets would carve through the vampire’s brain stem. The young woman collapsed backward in a spray of blood and gray matter, her corpse joining the other vampires heaped upon the concrete floor.
Near silence flooded the maze. There was only the rustle of clothing, soft sounds of breathing, and shuffling of boots over smooth concrete behind her. The vampire swarm was finished.
She turned around; everyone was looking at her. Jay had his mouth open with surprise, his eyes lit with amazement. “Awesome.”
Peter looked at her, his blue eyes alive with admiration. “That’s some mighty fine shooting.”
Chiara stared at her, a hard smile on her full lips. “Worthy of a - …”
Jay’s face hardened, and he asked, “Worthy of what?”
“A combat specialist.”
The team fell silent. Something dragged at her from within. Li looked back over the carnage in the corridor and the sudden euphoria evaporated away. Many of the corpses were young; late teens, early twenties, dressed in fashionable street wear and high-end sneakers. Earlier that day, they’d all been human with potential for full human lives. Now they were all dead, betrayed with false promises of immortality.
She glanced back around the team and stated firmly, “We need to find Anton, Arthur, and anyone else who survived.”
Jay nodded. “Yes, but how?”
Li looked at the ladder reaching up to the hanger and declared, “We have to get back to the surface.”
Jay nodded and, looked at Li with warm eyes and offered with a broad grin, “Then lead us up there.”
Li nodded and began scaling the ladder.
Chapter Sixteen
“If you wish to abrogate all responsibility for your moral and intellectual independence, then by all means - conform with the herd and obey blindly.” - Arthur Slayne
* * *
Nevada, Arthur Slayne’s Private Airport, The Maze, September 11th, 20:52
“I don’t know what to do Anton,” Arthur stated.
His grandfather had been especially tight-lipped since the destruction of the last warehouse. Obviously, the P-Case was a bomb, implying a switch had occurred somewhere between the Panopticon fortress and the airport. What disturbed Anton the most was that his grandfather had been about to detonate the bomb while holding it. Had this been his plan all along? It must have been. His grandfather had put together a twenty-year plan that included his own suicide at the end of it. It left him feeling sick to the stomach like nothing else he’d ever encountered.
“Do what?” Anton asked carefully.
Arthur pulled to a stop and studied the tunnel wall. “Here it is.” His fingers blurred over the steel plate on the wall in a complicated pattern. The metal flashed briefly like a television screen turning on. A touchscreen appeared on the surface, presenting an alphanumeric keypad. Arthur’s fingers flashed over the symbols. There was a click and the whole panel recessed six inches and then moved aside.
He paused and looked hard at Anton, a tension working its way through him and declared, “I don’t know if I want to hug you or give you a hiding.”
Anton asked, “What were you thinking conducting a suicide mission?”
“… I didn’t know.”
“How could you not know?”
“We don’t have time Anton. Now follow me,” he commanded, waving his left hand forward as he stepped into the unlit alcove. A light came on automatically. The alcove was a ten by ten feet room with a set of stairs leading up beyond the opposite wall. Arthur turned to the rack on his left and reached out with both hands. “There’s no guarantee they’re dead.”
Anton stepped into the room. The rack held four shoulder launched surface to air missiles.
Arthur pulled two of the launchers from the rack and handed them to Anton, and instructed, “These weapons are idiot-proof. Very simple to use. I’ve preconfigured them for shadowstar drones, so they will automatically detect and target them. Once you hear the missile lock alert press the firing stud. Then throw it aside and grab the next launcher. You might need two shots. But anything within a thousand yards is point blank range. It can also be used as a line-of-sight weapon with the trigger underneath the casing. It will hit anything you point it at.”
Anton nodded.
He grabbed two more and indicated the stairs with a glance. “Up the stairs Anton, we have to assume Justin failed. There will be shadowstar drones to take down so we can exfil from the airport. Plus,” and he grinned without a trace of mirth. “We might just catch Crane and Armitage in a vulnerable moment.” He turned away and blurred up the stairs.
Anton ramped and followed him.
Arthur pulled to a halt at the top of the stairs beneath a wide pair of rectangular doors. Arthur set one of the launchers down for a moment and tapped a sixteen-digit alphanumeric code into a keypad at the top of the stairs. Electromagnetic locks clicked open and the two long rectangular doors popped up an inch. He glanced at Anton with an obvious expectation in his mind. Anton placed his missiles carefully on the stairs and pushed on the forward door until it opened fully and slammed flat against the tarmac.
He poked his head up and looked around. The airport was half in ruins. To his left a shadowstar drone was parked about a thousand yards distant. A squad of praetorians were boarding it. He glanced right. A second drone was descending into the middle of the ruined third warehouse. Crane, or Armitage, or both, still survived.
Anton’s eyes widened with avid intent. They still had a chance to destroy them.
* * *
The night air was cool on his face.
Arthur clambered out of the stairwell and onto the tarmac. He put one stinger down on the ground and grabbed Anton’s shoulder. He pointed at a drone to the south being boarded by praetorians, and commanded, “Take that one out.”
Anton turned and strode a couple of yards away, lifting the launcher over his shoulder and sighting on the shadowstar drone.
Arthur’s target was the other drone. The one that had come to a hover over the ruined interior of the third warehouse. The
canopy had already lifted, giving access to a side by side two-seater cabin. Crane and Armitage were nowhere to be seen, but must be just about to board it.
He snapped the missile launcher into position on his shoulder. He looked through the sights, the drone was magnified and firmly in the cross-hairs. The missile lock alert sang its welcomed note in his right ear. Two forms blurred across the drone’s hull and into the cabin. The nearest one was Armitage, she glanced in his direction, her mouth forming an ‘O’ of surprise beneath her helmet’s visor.
Arthur’s finger descended toward the firing stud.
A powerful hand, hard with callus clamped over his face, covering his nose and mouth. A second one lifted the stinger from his grip. A third wrapped around his waist and lifted him away from the ground like he weighed nothing.
The secret door, stairs, and cache blurred past him, and he was carried back into the tunnels. He thought, Ahhh… the chameleons show their hand at last.
The one carrying him squeezed. Arthur struggled for a moment before the world crashed into darkness around him.
* * *
The missile lock alert resounded in Anton’s ear.
He pressed the firing stud. The stinger speared away, covering the thousand yards to the shadowstar drone in a flash. The hypersonic missile hit the hull of the drone, slicing through it with a molten copper whip burning at fifteen hundred degrees. Its secondary charge penetrated into the bowels of the craft before detonating in a thermobaric glare. The craft’s hydrogen fuel supply added to the conflagration. The drone vanished within a massive explosion, streamers of burning metal arching high into the sky.
Anton whirled around. The other drone was rising above the roofline of the ruined warehouse. Where was his grandfather? He’d disappeared! His missile launchers lay on the tarmac, unfired.
“What the fuck!” Anton swore, feeling like he’d just been punched in the gut.
The distant shadowstar drone began to accelerate. Anton ramped hard, blurring forward, scooping up a missile launcher and snapping it into position over his shoulder.
Something moved on the tarmac about sixty yards distant. It’s Justin, jarred through his mind like an ice pick through his skull.
Crane and Armitage were within point-blank range. They were sitting ducks waiting to be killed.
Anton raised the tip of the missile launcher higher, tracking the rising shadowstar drone. It was already four hundred yards off the ground and accelerating on jets of cobalt fire.
A screeching wail erupted from beyond Justin. Anton pulled his right eye away from the launcher’s sights. Vampires were boiling forth from another secret entrance in the tarmac a hundred yards away.
Justin lifted one good arm and dragged himself forward across the tarmac. Gaining a couple of feet on the rushing vampires. He pushed against the ground, grimacing in agony, struggling to get to his knees.
Anton’s heart burst. He panted. He glanced back at the shadowstar drone, now a thousand yards above the ground and without doubt about to go hypersonic. He raised the missile launcher to take the shot.
Something snapped within his soul. He whirled around, pulling his finger from the targeting stud. The shrill missile-lock whistle evaporated, and he pulled the line-of-sight trigger. The rocket streaked into the midst of the attacking vampires - and exploded in a white flash. Anton rushed forward. The vampires had disappeared, vaporized by the stinger’s thermobaric warhead. There were no more screams emanating from either secret entrance.
Anton reached Justin and knelt next to him. The bigger man threw his good left arm over Anton’s shoulders, his right arm hanging uselessly at his side, dripping blood onto the tarmac.
Justin cried out, his face twisted in anguish, “They’re gone. Everyone’s gone.”
Anton looked up, scanning the horizon, looking for threats. He glanced up into the sky. There was a blue dot high up against the night sky - well out of range of any shoulder launched missile.
He looked back toward the southernmost hanger, now more rubble than anything else. Li, Peter, Jay and Chiara rose up over the pile of smoking masonry. He paused for a moment, waiting for Francis to appear. Sadness stabbed through his heart like a cold knife. “Not everyone, Justin,” Anton advised quietly. “Not everyone.”
It was clear that the big man was beyond standing up. The right-side of his body was a mess. It was a miracle he still lived with such injuries. Anton, squatted beside him and got his arms beneath him. He rose in a smooth motion, Justin groaning within the cradle of his arms.
The rest of the team were a mile away. Anton felt recovered from his overheating earlier that night. Justin needed Chiara as quickly as he could get him to her. He dug deep, ramping hard and blurring away.
The airport lit up as he ran. Hammerheads lancing down from the distant drone, striking each of the hangers in turn, destroying all evidence of the vampires on the surface.
As for the tunnels, Anton figured that Crane would be back to erase them too.
He blurred away, carrying Justin Blake like he was a precious child. He silently berated himself, What the fuck! Why didn’t I take the shot? He didn’t have an immediate answer, but deep within himself he knew he couldn’t have done otherwise.
* * *
The darkness lifted.
Arthur’s vision clarified. He was inside the hold of a small to mid-sized transport aircraft. He was still restrained by a chameleon. He was sure nothing else could hold him with such an unbreakable grip.
A man stepped into view, ruggedly built, six feet, four and about two-hundred and thirty pounds. He moved with the practiced ease of someone with intimate knowledge of combat.
The hand released Arthur’s face and appeared at the same time. A second chameleon glided past. The creature held out the Black Dragon in its scabbard and his auto-pistol. It offered, “Bright sharp steel.” It wrinkled its snout, revealing many shark-like teeth. The man stiffened slightly. The chameleon continued with, “Another weapon. You good luck.”
The man nodded, raised a long-barreled Glock and stated without malice to Arthur, “Time for a sleep.”
The gun fired with a soft ‘piffeet’ sound.
Arthur had been expecting a bullet. He glanced down at his chest, a nearly transparent one-inch dart was just visible on the edge of his shirt.
His head sank back on his neck. The interior of the craft, the man, and the chameleons all whirled away into the darkness.
One last thought swam in the vanishing whirlpool of his mind.
Damn, I’m going to forget -
* * *
The command drone hovered five miles above the ground and ten miles from Slayne’s airport trap.
Cornelius watched the hammerhead missiles slam home on the remaining hangers, wiping out the evidence of the vampire aircraft and the corpses within them. As for what was in the tunnels, he would order the site quarantined by Shadowstone. Their ranks had been depleted by the Day Guard program and it was all he could ask them to do. The actual clean up would have to be done at night by vampires. The evidence below ground would be too telling for human eyes to see.
He’d strongly considered using one of the nuclear weapons he carried on his command drone. He carried two variable yield warheads on hammerhead cruise missiles. He could dial the yield down to five kilotons and erase the site in full, and destroy any Order of Thoth survivors.
But it would be very difficult to explain. The use of a nuke would require his own intervention to manage the political and media narratives - and with Mekra waiting in her donjon - it was a task he didn’t have time for. No, a nuke would remain unused - only in extremis would one be deployed.
Power that is secret will endure. The secret of vampire existence, no matter how tenuous it now was, would be ruthlessly maintained.
Cornelius looked across at Armitage and declared, “Our weapons are spent. Our praetorians are dead. The vampire militia have been destroyed or scattered. Now nothing more than a lingering memory of madness.”
He looked back at the cabin displays without seeing them. “This battle is done. It is time to withdraw, count our losses, and rebuild for the next conflict.”
Armitage nodded and remained silent. Cornelius turned back toward her and studied her face. Normally she’d have more to say. Perhaps she felt this defeat as keenly as he did.
A message from the skeleton staff at the citadel scrolled across the cabin display. Cornelius frowned. He was being attacked on all sides. “It seems that my chief financier Boris Hartman has been missing for over two weeks, and I only find out about it now. We’ll have to recruit a new one from the ranks of the banking elite.” He tilted his head slightly and remarked, “It shouldn’t be hard to find someone with the appropriate predatory nature to fit in with the Vampire Dominion.”
“No doubt, you are correct,” Armitage conceded.
Cornelius frowned at her. Was she mocking him? She appeared sincere. He couldn’t tell for sure. It was a good thing she was tied to his life by the implant next to her brain stem. He ordered, “Back to Fort Dix. It’s time to refuel and rearm this craft. There are many things we must do in New York.”
Armitage nodded. She set the destination and the shadowstar drone accelerated away.
* * *
Crane had closed his eyes to ‘meditate’ upon his strategy.
Chloe tracked the Osprey II drone on the cabin displays, it was heading toward the Arizona safe house. She checked her smartphone. There was a silent text message from James, it read, ‘The package is being delivered as ordered.’
The message vanished five seconds after she read it.
She counted tonight’s action a victory snatched from the jaws of defeat. Without the Panopticon, Crane would be forced to personally address the ‘rogue vampire,’ situation in China. This would allow Chloe to travel to Japan with James and the chameleons, find the Tanaka sisters, and deal with Crane’s implant once and for all.
The Crane War Page 43
