The Far Shores (The Central Series)

by Rawlins, Zachary

  The sand in front of the facility had been cleared of rocks, packed down, and then marked with reflective paint to form a crude landing area for helicopters, so close to the rock wall that Alex marveled at the bravery or foolishness a pilot must have possessed to attempt a landing there. The aboveground portion of the facility was little more than a concrete box two stories high, reinforced with steel struts and doors, embedded into the base of the cliff. It reminded Alex vaguely of photos of the fortifications the Nazis had built into the coasts of France, an angular and rigid intrusion into the eroded folds of the stone.

  Katya stepped fearlessly into the circle of brilliant light cast by the halogen bulbs suspended on guide wires around the ad hoc landing zone, a fistful of sewing needles clutched between the fingers of her left hand, waving cheerfully at the handful of guards who were nervously watching the other direction, watching the fire and listening to the sounds of gunshots and violent, abrupt death.

  “Hello, boys!” Katya said cheerfully, extending the handful of needles as if she were offering them a gift. “Also, goodbye.”

  The guards never had a chance. A few turned in their direction, and one even brought his rifle halfway to his shoulder, before internal neurological trauma made even the smallest controlled movements impossible. Alex followed Katya past the convulsing bodies performing the jerking dance of their ugly deaths. He was getting to the point that he was almost used to it.

  “And here we are,” Katya said, grimacing and holding a hand to her rib cage as she gestured toward the magnetically bolted and thoroughly sealed security door. According to the briefing, there were only three entrances to the compound, each composed of six centimeters of high-grade steel reinforced with titanium – proof against drill, ram, or explosive entry. They were at the primary point of ingress, while Miss Aoki and Xia were currently making a mess of another. The third had been sealed via a high-explosive demolition charge that Chike had placed shortly after he apported them in. “Alex, you remember how to do it, right?”

  He shrugged out of the pack, leaving it in the sand, and crouched in front of the door, putting both hands on the polished steel slab.

  “I think so,” he said, biting his lip. “It worked in the sims.”

  “C’mon. A door can’t be that hard to kill, right?”

  Alex nodded uncertainly and closed his eyes, activating his protocol and shivering as the Black Door slid smoothly open. There was something troubling about how easy that had become. In his dreams, Alex was frequently confronted by a Black Door that would not close.

  Eyes closed and protocol centered, the world presented itself in an entirely different way. His protocol recognized energy first, and mass a distant second, transforming people into whirling sculptures of electromagnetic activity, cocooned by shrouds of radiant heat. The nervous system appeared intricate and brilliant, fine veins of pulsating energy forming a kind of second skeleton, intertwined with the warm fluid dynamics of the circulatory system. The mass of flesh surrounding these systems was little more than a mildly radiant halo, an illuminated smudge. Buildings were little different – the compound in front of him was represented first by the rigid, angular arrangement of electrical lines and the temperature differential caused by the flow of air in the vents and water in the piping.

  It wasn’t sight. It wasn’t really part of any of the five senses. But in reaching for an analogy – and Alex needed an analogy to even attempt to understand how it worked – the sensory data his protocol provided was almost visual.

  The door itself was inert, steel radiating fractionally more heat at the edges, and then cooling toward the interior. The magnetic locks, however, and their electronic infrastructure, shined like a beacon in the mass of undifferentiated metal. Alex could see – or feel, or whatever – each individual wire and diode, the current alternating like the rapid pulse of some incredibly uniform animal. Alex strongly suspected, were he to spend an extended time in his protocol’s peculiar awareness, that he would go mad. There was a macabre temptation to lose himself in the contemplation of the lights that were not lights, the vision that was something else entirely.

  Instead, he focused on a series of key points, working from a pattern he had memorized from diagrams and simulations, relying largely on a protocol subroutine that Vladimir had designed and Rebecca had implanted during days of intensive sessions. It seemed like a great deal of work for a very small effect, but he felt satisfaction nonetheless when the last step of the routine was completed, minute disruptions introduced in a closed system. Vladimir had told him that devices wanted to function, that programs wanted to run – but then he followed that with his unhinged, almost mocking laughter, so Alex wasn’t sure that he believed him.

  The polarity of the electromagnets reversed, composite steel bolts sliding smoothly back into housings as if the proper access codes and biometric parameters had been supplied. Alex shifted back to normal perception with a faint sensation of reluctance, easing the Black Door shut and watching with restrained pride as the compound door slid open.

  That lasted until the vampires charged out.

  ***

  Alex was spacing out with a weird half-smile on his face, no doubt impressed with his own usefulness, when the door started to open, and Katya’s eyes picked out motion in the darkness on the other side. In a normal situation, there wouldn’t have been much anyone could have done for him – Alex had just taken his hands off the metal surface of the door, after all, and they had been waiting just on the other side – but this wasn’t a normal situation, and Katya had prepared accordingly, hovering just behind him in case something of this nature happened.

  Oppa, barrier!

  Katya hoped the telepathic network was intact, because there was no time for words. Neal had a reputation for losing it at critical moments. Katya would have felt better if Haley or Miss Aoki were maintaining communications. With any luck, this wouldn’t be one of those times that Neal failed. Otherwise, Katya would probably be ripped to shreds by the vampires’ outstretched talons, nanite-infused bone protruding through reanimated flesh, before she had a chance to turn. Katya dove into Alex, knocking him away from the door and rolling on top, putting her vulnerable back between him and the approaching vampires, trusting that Min-jun would react in time to save them.

  He must have, because she didn’t die.

  Alex had barely begun to squirm when she pushed him aside and spun, lifting herself into a crouch to face her enemies. Two vampires were in feral mode, claws on every finger and a grotesque mess of teeth gnashing in hyperextended jaws, with more crowding the door frame behind them. Min-jun’s barrier was a barely perceptible cerulean tint separating them from a couple hundred pounds of undead fury. Katya glanced behind her, and could see the massive strain on the Korean’s face, grimacing and clutching his head near the edge of the barrier.

  The barrier saved their lives, but it didn’t give her much more than seconds to work with.

  Min-jun’s barrier protocol was unusual. He was an E-Class Operator, normally below the threshold that would be considered for Audits, but his protocol had a number of atypical properties that had caught the Audits department’s interest. His barrier was malleable; he could mold it temporarily around moving objects, as he had done earlier during combat with the perimeter sentries. Even better, the barrier was as effective against psychic assault as it was against physical. Of course, nothing came without drawbacks. Min-jun’s protocol was temporary, manifesting as long as he could hold his breath, for whatever reason. It also had a limited capacity to absorb damage, probably due to the same plasticity that Katya had taken advantage of earlier, which meant that it couldn’t hold the vampires back for long.

  Fortunately, Katya didn’t need much time. She extracted two handfuls of sewing needles from the pouch on the inside of her waistband.

  There had never been a C-Class candidate for Audits before. Then again, there had never been a C-Class Operator at the Black Sun assassination training program, and Kat
ya had excelled, until they expelled her.

  There was a tendency to think of apport technicians as a form of rapid transportation. By that standard, Katya was useless, as she could move only a paltry few ounces of material, and even that only a few meters. The devious mind of Anastasia Martynova had seen tremendous potential in that ability, however, and Katya’s talents had been honed to murderous edge by her assassin’s training.

  Katya stood to face the vampires scratching and battering the barrier – sensing its inherent weakness or just worked into an animalistic fury – and held out her hand. Ten needles were arrayed neatly in her palm, impaled in a thin strip of white cloth.

  Then they were gone, and the vampires broke off their attack to scream and thrash about.

  It wouldn’t be enough to kill them, of course. Not nearly. Murdering vampires pretty much required massive bodily injury. Decapitation, a well-placed blast from a twelve-gauge, removal of the heart, hollowing out the chest cavity – that sort of thing. Not the discreet, subtle damage that Katya had been trained to deliver when she was trained as an assassin, the kind of damage that made a murder into a mystery.

  No, killing vampires was well into the range Xia- or Miss Aoki–style damage.

  That worked out rather well, all things considered.

  ***

  Wan-Li was busy barking orders into a Bluetooth microphone, simultaneously manipulating the console that controlled the compound’s automated defenses, when he felt the extrasensory tingle that meant something had gone very wrong. He scanned the display in front of him, a series of coded lights on the LCD screen representing attackers, defenders, and various strategic emplacements.

  The Society had spent tens of millions of dollars constructing the facility, and even more employing mercenaries to protect it. After the alliance had been formalized, and the strategic value of the location was recognized in regard to the harvesting operation, their Anathema allies had invested even more hard currency, in addition to more esoteric and valuable resources, in order to assure security as absolute as could be rendered. The harvest was crucial to the joined ambitions of both the Society and the Anathema, and the Bohai Strait facility was an important nexus for their ongoing endeavor. There were few places along the coast of the Yellow Sea that were remote enough to provide the controlled access that was required, and even fewer with the proximity to the major population centers that provided raw material. Wan-Li suspected that the Society’s uncontested control of the location had probably been one of the most important factors that influenced the Anathema to accede in negotiations with the Chinese branch of the Society, rather than liquidating it wholesale, as they had done with the less valuable and accommodating European branch.

  All of these factors made this particular facility one of the better protected locations on the planet, with a number of defenses that were exceedingly rare. Chief among them was the Etheric interference generator, a massive piece of machinery the occupied the entirety of the lowest level of the compound, excavated from bedrock for the specific purpose of housing it. The command center, situated directly above the machine on the facility’s next-lowest level, experienced a constant, low-level vibration and hum that was so omnipresent that it became white noise that staff only noticed at the beginning of a shift.

  Or when it turned off. Wan-Li’s ears rang with silence, while his subordinates glanced up from consoles to exchange worried looks.

  Because it never turned off.

  Wan-Li spun around in his chair, the squeak of the bearings painfully audible, opening his mouth to inquire angrily as to the problem, to direct resources to the immediate correction of the situation. This left him face to face with a woman in black who had just stepped out of the feeble shadow created by the fluorescent bars overhead to survey the room with a ghastly smile.

  “Hello, leeches! My name is Alice Gallow…”

  The guard assigned to the elevator had admirable reflexes. He had his sidearm out of his holster before she opened her mouth, firing half a magazine worth of armor-piercing rounds toward the Auditor’s back before she finished her sentence.

  Not a single round connected. With anything, the target or otherwise. Wan-Li, an avid reader of enemy dossiers, assumed that they had disappeared into Gallow’s own shadow. He was flabbergasted at the level of intelligence the Auditors must have had on the facility to be so precisely aware of the arrangement of the lighting in the room – as Alice Gallow stood a meter away on the raised podium of the command center, directly beneath a large bank of lights that cast a cluster of slight shadows in a half-circle behind her. He wondered where the bullets had been sent.

  Alice Gallow spun around, firing an automatic shotgun from the hip Judging from the destruction caused by the thunderous volley, she was using buckshot, emptying her magazine in her attacker’s general direction. The guard was hit in a dozen different places, and collapsed in a bloody heap, along with several other unlucky staff and virtually all the equipment that occupied the space between them. Wan-Li’s ears rang, and the air stank of gunpowder and burning plastic, while staff fled or scrambled to aid the screaming wounded.

  The Auditor casually surveyed the room while she ejected the fat plastic magazine and replaced it with another from her belt, scanning for any remaining potential interruptions in the room. Wan-Li remained perfectly still, not bothering to reach for the pistol he kept in the top drawer of his desk. He was well aware of the futility of trying to outmatch the Chief Auditor. He was an administrator, not a gunman.

  “…and I am here in regard to an ongoing Audit, the subject of which is classified,” Alice Gallow continued calmly, as if she hadn’t just killed someone, “but that probably won’t come as any surprise to you assholes. I bet you’re wondering what happened to your little apport interference machine, right?”

  Wan-Li nodded. He would have agreed with anything she said, but in this case, he was legitimately curious. The device had multiple redundant power supplies, electromagnetic shielding, and two centimeters of composite armor housing protecting its innards, so sabotage seemed near impossible.

  “You got some smart boys out here in Shandong. Build all sorts of clever things, including your little toy. Guess the Outer Dark doesn’t have much of an industrial base, or they’d do that sort of thing in-house.” Alice Gallow shrugged and sat down on one end of Wan-Li’s desk. The remainder of the staff moved toward the perforated elevator in fits and starts, torn between the desire to flee and fear of being noticed. “Did a pretty good job covering your tracks, I have to say. Distributing production between a number of firms, so that none of them could figure out exactly what they were building, that was a good move. Killing off three of the project engineers and two industrial designers so they couldn’t repeat the job was even better. All you left us to work with was a bunch of broken little pieces.”

  One staffer made it as far as the elevator console, extending a trembling hand toward the call button. Alice whipped the combat shotgun around to point in his direction, gesturing him away from the elevator with the muzzle. The staffer took the hint and scurried away from the elevator to hide behind an intact desk.

  “’Course, if you are basically a living supercomputer, then a bunch of fragments and some time is all you really need to put Humpty Dumpty back together. Took the Director all of a weekend to figure out what you bloodsuckers had built. Not like he reversed-engineered the thing – that would take weeks – but we didn’t need to. Didn’t need to know how it worked, just how to break it. And there are so many smart guys in China these days. Betcha some of the engineers that put your toy together helped out with ours – and what we wanted was a lot simpler. That’s the thing about your machine – the Etheric interference kept us from porting in, but it also stood out like a sore thumb to the remote viewers when they surveyed the area. Like using a loud radio to screw up hidden microphones. You might mess it up for the spooks, but neighbors are gonna notice the noise.

  “Found one of your maintenance technic
ians during his off time, and provided him with some additional machinery to install in your generator the next time he changed out the fuses. Haley worked him like a puppet – made him install the new gizmo and then erased the memory. All we needed was to get you to pull all the scary guys with guns out to the perimeter, so that I wasn’t jumping into the middle of a shooting gallery. Kids did alright with that, don’t you think?”

  Wan-Li nodded again. There didn’t seem to be any reason not to. The best he could hope for at this point was that the Auditor needed him alive for something, so he intended to be cooperative.

  “You’re a good listener. I appreciate that.” Alice looked so pleased that he was prepared to believe that she actually did appreciate a receptive audience – excepting the fact that her smile was grotesque. “I’ll get to the point. We know what you’ve been doing here – and since I’m here, I bet you’ve already figured out that it ends today. Have to assume that you are doing it all over the place. What we don’t know, though, is where.”

  Another nod. He understood, and felt slightly fortunate.

  “Million-yuan question here, my friend,” Alice said, resting the shotgun across her thigh so that the contoured muzzle break pointed at – but did not touch – his midsection. “Do you know?”

  Wan-Li nodded.

  “Talkative motherfucker, ain’t you?”

  ***

  Regarding the transported bullets.

  They didn’t dematerialize. They just disappeared from Alice Gallow’s vicinity. They reappeared a microsecond later, retaining their original velocity and orientation. Another fraction of a second, and they were embedded in the internal organs of one of the vampires standing in front of Katya. It wasn’t enough to kill a vampire, of course, but it was enough to get its attention.