“It appears to be so.” Sonafi agreed. “The door is open!” She called, but I noted that her eyes strayed to the handles of her long knives where they rested on an end-table next to her. My own Cumosachi was within reach but I did not glance its way. I knew where it was. I always knew where it was.
Agent Irving came slowly through the door. No doubt he had some clear idea of what a knock coming from what we would perceive to be an empty hall might make us think and he was taking no undue chances.
“What do you think?” Agent Irving asked as he shut the door behind himself. “Could you tell who it was?”
“Not at all!” Sonafi granted. We stood and joined him as he entered through the foyer. The apparatus which blocked the brains telepathic waves was installed in a black riot helmet equipped with a full face shield which, we could see, had small wires running back and forth horizontally across it and was why, evidently, we had gotten no indication whatsoever that he had been there. Why these thoroughly blocked the telepathic signatures and Brid's had not. Irving pulled it off and we were immediately able to feel him again. Like a light switch.
“I did not think you would be able to.” Irving said. “It blocks my own abilities completely. I feel cut off within it! I had not realized how much I had come to rely on my telepathy, until it was taken away.”
“I'd call this a very effective weapon.” Sonafi said, taking the device and looking it over, before handing it to me so that I could do the same.
“The other thing I wanted to bring to your attention was our surveillance records.” Irving said.
“Surveillance records?” Sonafi and I both asked at once.
“Of the sky above the city.” Agent Irving explained. “As I have explained previously, our Air Force had long since desisted in its attempts to shoot down one of the Visitor airships. What are popularly known as UFO's. We have never been able to do so, of course, and were only drawing attention to that inability by continuing to attempt to do so. We ceased to attempt to do so several decades ago. Our ability to perceive and track them has only grown more sophisticated since, however. We know the places to which they visit, when they are in the skies above and when they are in the oceans below. We are just unable to do anything about it. The point I want to make, however, is that we have noted a huge increase in contacts over the city since your return. They are looking for you. Rather diligently, also, I must say!”
CHAPTER 26
We were left with much to think about. It dominated our thoughts that evening and much of the next. Sleep came the next day only reluctantly, and then I was awake even before the sun had set. Even seventeen stories beneath the earth I could feel the burning orb of the sun above, or to the West, preparing to set and knew the very moment it sank below the horizon.
Agent Irving left the device with us. There was also a large shipment of them coming in the next day, and over and over I continued to experiment with it. It was like immersing in a deep dark place to which nearly all sensation had been cut. My telepathy by itself contained more sensory comprehension of my surroundings than did all of my other senses combined. With the device in place and activated, I was truly flying blind. It was with a morbid fascination that I slipped it over my head, time and again, to feel my telepathy cut off, then restored, then cut off once again.
“You vanish and reappear. Vanish and reappear.” Sonafi said from the doorway to the bedroom. “You're making me dizzy.” The sun would soon be setting, so far above, I felt it going down and Sonafi wouldn't have awoken for another minute or two, but my curiosity had awoken me early and now I had awoken her playing with it.
“Sorry.” I said, taking it off my head and setting it on a table next to me. “It's such a strange sensation. I really do not like it.”
“I remember it well, though it was long ago.” Sonafi said.
I was still having a hard time thinking of them as the Palag. Thirty-four thousand years of thinking of them as the Others, in thousands of different languages so it was not an easy thing to set aside. The thing that was truly incredible I thought was that I could know other intelligent beings for thirty-four thousand years without knowing their name.
“We are now rushing down a precipitous course.” I said. “A course from which we will not be able to deviate, but must follow through to whichever bitter end Fate has decreed.”
“I have never known you to be a fatalist.” Sonafi said. “I have let my own concerns color your mood!” She walked over and picked up the riot helmet Field Generation unit from the table next to me where I had set it and slipped it over her own head with a grimace she could not entirely hide. What she was thinking I could not now know because I could not now see into her mind at all. The Human device worked flawlessly.
Brid and several dozen other Vampires arrived shortly at our door and Sonafi let them in. Brid had a serious look on his face and I took that to mean things were in the works. I was not wrong.
The sitting room was spacious enough to seat all of us in comfort. We quickly arranged the furniture so that we were sitting in a ring around the room, and took a moment to renew or make acquaintances. There were only four Elders other than the two of us though neither Samon nor Drye had come in. That made a total of only eight Elders. We were looking at the majority of Vampires who would come in. Not only would we have to make do with what we had, but from this number would we have to rebuild the Community afterward.
“Well this is mostly it.” Brid said once we had all looked around. In number we were just a few over three dozen. It was a paltry number considering the thousands who we had counted as among our number only weeks ago. We did not know how many had not come in having lost their places of security and with nowhere to turn. “Do we consider expanding ourselves?” Brid finished by asking.
“I wonder how the Humans would respond to that!” Volga warned.
“We don't have time to babysit newborns.” Sonafi said. Her thoughts turned momentarily to James Ray, but he had made such a miraculous Transformation that we were all a little astonished. No other Humans could be expected to make such an easy change, however, and she was right. Now was not the time.
“We'll have to make do with what we have.” I agreed. “I don't think now is the time to release a horde of newborns on the Human populace. We will have to worry about that after, if there is an after.”
“We'll have hundreds of Federal Agents backing us up.” Brid said. “The Palag are as susceptible to conventional weapons as are we. The Agents will be armed with silenced high-powered assault rifles. We'll have covering fire from dozens of surrounding locations. They'll have thermal scopes and be wearing thermally retardant clothing as well as their riot helmet Field Generation units. The Palag won't know what hit them!”
“Isn't the purpose of the whole endeavor to capture one of them?” Sonafi asked pointedly.
“Of course.” Brid said, realizing she was only bringing it up for the benefit of the group. “Nothing happens until we signal, or unless we find ourselves overwhelmed. The Humans are our back up and nothing more. They understand the necessities as well as we do. Subdue one or more of them, learn what we are able to learn while we infect them, and then send them back.”
“It's going to be much easier said than done.” I commented. It was a great plan on paper, but implementing it could turn out to be something else entirely. “Only time will tell.”
“Irving doesn't want me to be a participant.” Brid said. “He thinks it is an unreasonable risk. I am making good progress with some of the things they have given me to research. There are weapons systems, the inertia-less drive, a computer system I haven't even begun to understand yet, and others I haven't even had a chance to look but I am a Vampire first and foremost. I don't want to be a shirker. I would not want to be left behind, but I will leave it up to the consensus of the Community.”
“There are more ways to measure a Vampire’s worth than merely upon the field of battle.” I said, suppressing the thought 'now'.
“Nor is this a democracy!” Sonafi said harshly. Though we had for all intents and purposes stepped aside to allow the Community more autonomy of leadership, we are a race who has always been ruled by strength.
“This has been your brainchild from the beginning,” I told Brid, “and it would be foolish to risk you unnecessarily, but the decision is yours to make. You are the engineer.”
“You will Command the engagement itself?” Brid asked.
“I will handle it!” I said, and I was very serious, and angry. The Palag would get a taste of the surprise attack they employed. We would come out of nowhere and it would be their surprise this time.
I was by no means convinced the Humans would be any great help to us. At close range a Human with a gun was no match for Vampire or a Palag. The mind had to produce the thought. Electrical current had to carry this message to the finger, and then the finger had to move. A lengthy process. Vampires have the same basic wiring as Humans which governs those autonomous functions that operate outside conscious thought, as well as all our normal routine functioning, but Vampires- and presumably the Others- have the secondary ability to hyper-accelerate in times of need. During hyper acceleration the cells throughout the body talk among themselves, through direct telepathic communication, and short-circuit the slower normal method of electrical transmission. Electricity travels at a minute pace compared to the velocities at which the elemental particles produced in a telepathic brainwave, and was the reason why Vampires, and the Others, could both react, move and think faster than their Human counterparts.
However, if the positioning worked out where the Agents are able to get the Palag into their line of fire! A bullet fired from a silenced weapon and from concealment might be a different matter altogether. The FBI Agents would be wearing their Field Generation units. The Palag would not have that warning. They would be wearing their thermally retardant clothing. They would not be seen. The first inkling the Palag would have that they were under attack would be the hiss of the inbound bullets. I had no idea at what velocities those high-powered slugs would be traveling, but I knew that it would be greater than the speed of sound. I was sure that even the hiss of the slugs ripping supersonically through the atmosphere would arrive too late to help them then.
CHAPTER 27
I hated the helmet but we were all wearing them as we left the Federal Building and exited the downtown area. The Palag were unaware of our new sanctum-sanctorum and we were going to do nothing to change that. Even the Agents themselves would not return to the Federal Building, at least not immediately, once we had made contact with the Palag. A separate detachment had already been assigned guard duty of our retreat. We would, at least, have a safe haven in which to return to. It was a comfort I had seldom known.
What did that say about my life that I had never known but a few true days or nights of real security. It said that there was a lot that could be desired, I thought. It was an eat or be eaten, kill or be killed world where those with the biggest teeth and longest claws usually prevailed. Who would prove to have the biggest teeth this night?
“They won't come half-heartedly!” Sonafi said from beside me. We had been given our own car, in deference to our authority, but had declined the offer of a driver.
“We will not meet them halfheartedly!” I rejoined.
With stomachs already full of donated blood we pulled to the curb several miles from Brid's home and moved in the rest of the way on foot. We had no better plan than to make our presence known and wait for the Palag. Agent Irving had passed along the Area Reconnaissance report for the beginning of the evening when we had departed. Nine separate Unidentified Flying Objects had been spotted above the city since dusk. They could move so quickly and flitted from one place to the next randomly, one leaving the skies overhead to be replaced by another or others, so that accurately counting them was nearly impossible. But as Agent Irving said, they were sure of at least nine. They had counted nine all at once.
Agent Irving remained back at the Federal Building with Brid and several scientists working with Brid and Volga, on orders from his own superiors. He was too valuable to be risked. The Federal Building was under the tightest security it had ever experienced and I would just have to trust that it would be good enough. The playing field had been leveled with Bren’s new technology.
We left the nondescript car in a neighborhood familiar to us but not in any way personal. We had walked through it thousands of times, fed within it, just another of many such neighborhoods we had haunted, for lack of a more appropriate word, over the last fourteen years we had lived in this our City. There was almost no place we could go in this city that was not familiar to us, and we paid it no attention as we hurried through it. We wore our riot helmets activated. It was a strange sensation to move through this neighborhood I recognized so well without feeling the accompanying minds I knew I should now be sensing. For me, and no doubt as strange for Sonafi, it was like walking through a ghost town of specter inhabitants. I could still hear them with my enhanced hearing, see them behind windows and had to avoid several pedestrians, but yet it seemed all too empty, surreal. I could sense absolutely nothing beyond the field produced by this confounded helmet. Though Sonafi was moving at my side, she had absolutely nothing to comment on my thoughts. That by itself might have been the strangest aspect of it all. She couldn’t comment on what she couldn’t hear.
Sonafi and I walked right up to Brid’s front door and went in. Once inside I took the hated device from my head and cast it aside, but Sonafi retrieved it and together with her own found a place in the bottom of the closet to hide it.
“We can’t afford for this technology to fall into Palag hands!” She said by way of explanation.
“Our incremental technological advantage!” I said cynically.
“So how do we draw attention to ourselves without cuing them in that it’s a trap?” Sonafi asked as she went around turning on all the lights. The house soon blazed like a beacon in a field of black.
“I had kind of thought that our presence here alone might be sufficient, but I suppose we could go up on the roof and watch the stars.” The one thing about me that had rubbed off on my son was his love of stargazing and I knew he had a powerful scope mounted on his roof.
The Palag had already been here once. We had seldom ever returned, at least not openly, to a place where we had already had a confrontation with the Others and I hoped this wouldn't cue them, but if they meant to come in force it might be that they would not care that they were walking into a trap because they would see this as their chance to finish us.
“They may welcome it.” Sonafi agreed, finishing my thought. “This may be exactly what they're looking for.”
We went to the roof but not before I loosened my Cumosachi in its sheath and removed my walking cane from its belt clip. It was a beautiful cloudless night. A half-moon shone down from on high and visibility was excellent. The breeze was cool on my skin and I was very much a part of the community consciousness around me. The subconscious community of Human minds, all communicating with one another at the cellular level, about whatever it was cells had to say to one another, my own very much a part of it all, I just able to feel that interaction in a way Humans were unable. Sonafi pulled the hood off the telescope while I sniffed the breeze, I very much the wild animal freed from its cage, and looking it.
“They will have to know it is a trap.” Sonafi said, now scenting the breeze also, taking in the night and its multitude of sensory stimulus.
“They'll come anyway. They have to.” I said, and they did, but it was not until the early hours of the morning and we long returned inside.
They came through the roof. There were a lot of them, and they came quickly. They used some kind of unknown weapon to breach the roof, tearing a gaping hole through which they entered. There was a strange crunching, tearing and twisting noise and the Palag were inside, upstairs, and rushing down to meet us.
I felt them dying even before Son
afi killed the first of them rushing down the landing. Even inside the house I heard the crack of bullets whining over the house. The Humans had opened fire prematurely. Or maybe not, I thought as I felt the sheer weight of the Palag numbers pressing down on my consciousness. The Humans must have been shocked at the numbers of the Palag and had done the only thing they could think to do. Open fire and thin the ranks before they could all get into the house with us.
Sonafi and I are old but not febrile. We had time to glance at one another before they came swarming down the stairs, down the walls, and even out across the ceiling. A monstrous horde of ill-begotten hell-spawn, were a man of the cloth to attempt to describe their coming. My own estimation only fell slightly short of that. Enraged and maniacal, they might well have come direct from hell itself, if that place truly existed. Their fury was something to behold.
The FBI's machinists had been able to fabricate a new type of throwing weapon based on Sonafi's specifications, similar to a throwing star but reduced to wafer thinness and tapered to only the thickness of an atom at the edge. So sharp that so much as to brush against one of the star's edges was to lose the offending member, Sonafi handled the paper thin carbon disks like a professional card player and loosed a stack of them, bringing down the entire first wave as they swarmed into the room. They fell like flies, heads split, great black eyes ruptured and pouring gore, one an arm hanging by a piece of meat alone and clinging tenaciously to the ceiling with its three remaining appendages while it stared in incomprehension at its dangling arm. More than a dozen fell as Sonafi expended her stack of stars, all the FBI machinists had been able to produce in such a short time, the process extremely time consuming, apparently. Stacking atoms with alternating positive and negative charges- a process reverse engineered from the Roswell aluminum foil appearing hull debris- a material that was both light and flexible but stronger than steel.
The Vampire-Alien Chronicles Page 20
