ONSET: My Enemy's Enemy

by Glynn Stewart

  Leaving the Mage behind, he moved into the warren. The first layer was food, but as he went deeper, he began to see different labels and types of containers. The space was half-full of food—and the rest was chemicals and bullets.

  “I’m seeing lots of ammunition and piles of industrial chemicals I don’t recognize over here. I’m guessing for that drug lab Freeman said was here. What have you got, Michael?” he asked.

  “Desks, paperwork, an accountant hiding under one of said desks,” the other Commander replied. “One more prisoner, but both upper floors are clear.”

  “One more floor to check here, then we’ll rendezvous on the main floor,” David told him as he picked his way back through the boxes. “I don’t think there’s life up there, but we’ll see what other surprises this place hides for us.”

  Hellet was still waiting by the stairs, the Mage looking nervously at the steps up to the next floor.

  “There’s something up there,” she reported. “No people, I don’t think, but I’m getting hints of something with the Sight.”

  Focusing on his own Sight, David could see it as well. Just hints, scraps of something leaking through.

  “Let’s go check it out,” he said calmly. “With me.”

  Taking the steps three at a time, he moved up to the last un-cleared part of the Night Stallions’ building. He wasn’t entirely surprised to discover that the top floor above the kitchen was a drug lab. He recognized the equipment to manufacture meth from his old, pre-ONSET, training.

  That gear made up only a fraction of the room’s contents. There were at two more sets of complex equipment that David presumed were, like the neatly organized meth equipment, together for the manufacture of specific drugs.

  The strange fragments of power that had drawn both him and Hellet were emerging from the far side of the lab, where a hospital centrifuge was spinning away, fragments of power and decay spinning away from its contents.

  “That’s…not good,” Hellet said slowly as they approached the bench.

  From this close, David could sense the same feeling of decay and power he’d felt in Talon Security’s office, and yanked open a drawer. Inside was a stack of thirty neatly organized hypodermics, each marked with a symbol. There were at least four different symbols in the stacks, each likely marking a source vampire, since repeated use of blood from the same donor would provide more control of the thrall.

  “Well, if we were doubting what we’d found, there’s our answer,” David said grimly. “Among the drugs these guys were making and smuggling was vampire blood.”

  There was silence on the radio network.

  “There’s nothing up here of interest to us right now,” he concluded finally. “We’re returning to the ground floor; get ready to kick in the access to the power plant.”

  It was time to hunt vampires.

  Chapter 32

  Joining O’Brien and Ix, David saw that the other Commander hadn’t been exaggerating when he said the utility room access was more locked down than it should have been. The armory had been closed off with a heavy steel door in a reinforced frame, one that the werewolf had easily ripped apart.

  The “utility room” access looked more like a bank vault, a massive construct of steel mounted directly into the concrete of the building. Mere brute force wasn’t going to open the heavy, presumably powered door.

  Of course, that was why they had explosives, and Ix had been laying shaped charges while everyone else had swept the building.

  “We’re ready on your command,” the demon reported.

  “Blast it,” David ordered, gesturing everyone back out into the main hall.

  Once everyone was clear, Ix flashed them all a bright white grin that showed disturbingly pointed teeth—and triggered his detonator. The entire building shivered as the demon’s carefully calculated shaped charges ripped apart the massive metal door.

  “Fire in the hole,” he said a moment later, still grinning.

  David shook a reproving finger at Ix, then moved in to survey the aftermath of the demon’s work. The heavy vault door lay flat on the floor on the other side of the wall, blocking most of the stairs leading down into the power plant.

  He and O’Brien each grabbed a corner and hauled the massive slab of metal back out into the hall. The door weighed at least a ton, a challenge even for the two inhumanly strong supernaturals, but they got it out of the way.

  “Well, they know we’re coming,” O’Brien warned him.

  “I’m counting on it,” David replied. “Let’s go.”

  He led the way down the stairs, noting the sound of straining air circulation and filtration systems as they climbed down two stories. By the time they reached the bottom of the stairs, he was already picking up hints of what the filters were trying to deal with.

  It was still a shock when he opened the door at the base of the stairs and the smell of the biomass power plant hit them all.

  “What is that?” Hellet said in a slightly sick voice.

  “Biomass power involves dumping everything that can rot in a giant pit and siphoning the methane it produces off to run gas generators,” O’Brien pointed out. “It’s a…smelly process.”

  “So I see…I mean, smell,” the Mage replied.

  “Watch for hostiles,” David ordered. “They won’t like being in here any more than we do, but that doesn’t mean they won’t try and ambush us here.”

  The next set of doors opened up into a massive underground cavern, brightly lit by enormous halogen lights. At the bottom, covered by metal hatches that clearly failed to contain the smell, was the biomass pit where all of the waste from the compound ended up.

  Above those hatches rose tanks, filters and pumps that captured and processed the methane, feeding it to the gas generators noisily lined up along one side of the room. A series of catwalks crossed the cavern, stairs reaching down to the various machines.

  “That’s…a lot more complex than I would have expected,” Hellet said slowly.

  “And more power than the compound needs,” David agreed. Just what was down there? “Looks like we’ve got two exits over there, heading in deeper.” He pointed.

  “Cameras,” Ix warned. “They definitely know we’re here.”

  That, of course, was when the doors opened and the shooting started. Both of the doors David had identified sprang open simultaneously, each disgorging a trio of soldiers in the same black body armor as the assault squads that had hit Talon Security.

  They were shooting as they came through the door, the cameras Ix had identified giving them an idea of where to shoot to hit David’s people.

  Fortunately, they hadn’t accounted for Hellet. The Mage threw up a shield as the doors slammed open, her barrier absorbing the bullets with flashes of light.

  “Silver rounds,” she hissed through gritted teeth. “Can’t stop them for long.”

  “Right,” David confirmed. “Take them down!”

  Fitting actions to his orders, he charged forward and opened fire. Dodging under and around the vampire’s bullets, he walked deadly precise bursts across one trio of vampires. They were fast enough that perfect accuracy was impossible even for him, but two of the vampires went down regardless—one of them missing enough of his head that even a vampire wasn’t getting back up.

  The two survivors focused their fire on David as he closed, silver rounds smashing into the catwalk around him as he charged, twisting around the gunfire as his own weapon clicked empty. Shifting the rifle into his left hand, he slid Memoria free as he leapt between catwalks and charged into blade’s reach of the vampires.

  The wounded vampire never managed to struggle to his feet. Memoria slashed out and removed the creature’s head as he rose. The other managed to get his rifle adjusted and fired at point-blank range.

  At this distance, even David couldn’t dodge. He managed to twist his torso so the rounds hit at an angle that didn’t penetrate, the bullets creasing his armor and leaving streaks of silver as they r
icocheted off with rib-cracking force.

  Heat flared in his chest as the cracked ribs began to knit back together, and Memoria flashed back up to cleave the vampire in half before he could fire again.

  Three down.

  “Clear!” he announced, twisting to check on the other trio. All three were down, but O’Brien and Ix were still hanging back behind Hellet’s shield, having shot the vampires.

  “Bullets do work, you know,” O’Brien told him dryly.

  “I ran out,” David replied calmly, sheathing his sword and reloading his carbine. “Let’s move. There’s more down here than six grunts.”

  #

  The doors both led into a very modern security checkpoint, presumably the usual station of the six vampires who’d charged out to try and take them by surprise. Despite the array of biometric scanners and security camera monitors, there was barely more cover than there was in the industrial complex outside.

  Despite the efforts of a pair of noisy air scrubbers, the security checkpoint still stank. All of the fancy security gadgets lasted mere seconds as David and O’Brien smashed their way through the checkpoint with armored fists, clearing a path for everyone to follow.

  There was only one door leading out from the security checkpoint, and it looked completely out of place in the super-modern bunker. The door was a nine-foot-tall rounded wooden monstrosity cut from a single slab of dark oak and carefully decorated with reinforcing black iron.

  Inlaid into the wood and the black iron was an intricate tracing of gold runes. Even without his Sight, David wouldn’t have figured it was safe to kick open the door. With his Sight, he could tell that anything that touched the door without the Noctus virus in their veins was going to die.

  Painfully.

  “Agent Hellet,” he said calmly. “Could you please deal with the door? Carefully.”

  The Mage gave him a grin, then conjured a bright ball of blue flame between her hands and flung it at the door. The fireball slammed into the center of the door, melting its way into the wood and runes…and then exploding as it ripped apart the original runes.

  The door came apart with the spell matrix, shattering into wooden and metal shrapnel that Hellet’s spell corralled and unleashed as a shotgun blast into the corridor behind it.

  That corridor was gorgeous, the underground tunnel carefully covered in a mix of light wooden paneling and drywall painted in muted murals. Thick carpet covered the floor, and soft lighting suffused the space.

  Then the debris blast ripped the panelling to shreds, tore the surface from the murals, shattered the lights—and ripped the two vampires standing on the other side of the door into bloody chunks.

  “Go!” David snapped as he charged into the debris field with O’Brien and Ix on his heels. The corridor opened up after about ten feet into a good-sized gallery. Someone had blasted out a three-story-tall cavern and then turned it into a near-perfect facsimile of a Renaissance ballroom.

  Curtains swathed the walls, presumably covering doors and exits. Small tables that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the palace at Versailles occupied niches carved into the wall, though they held very modern-looking blood transport containers normally used by blood banks and hospitals.

  At the far side of the ballroom, an immense set of stairs swept up to the second-floor gallery. Kneeling in the middle of the steps, their hands cuffed behind their backs and whimpering in terror, were a dozen hostages, ranging from a fortysomething man in hiking gear to a probably eighteen-year-old girl in a clubbing outfit.

  Four more black-armored vampires stood behind the hostages, assault rifles at the ready. David’s empowered senses picked up others in the gallery above them, taking cover behind ornate pillars as they tracked the ONSET team.

  “Welcome to my home, Commanders,” a woman’s voice told them. She emerged from behind the curtains to descend the steps, clad in a skintight black sheath dress that showed off a figure still voluptuous despite more years than David cared to guess.

  Two young-looking men in old-fashioned black suits followed her down. David didn’t need his Sight to realize that all three were Elders, vampires with centuries of experience versus the years and decades of the rest of the fanged monsters in the room.

  “I am Ekaterina Romanov,” the woman told them. “I consider it courtesy to warn enemies of who will kill them.

  “You killed my sister, Commander White. I am so pleased you’ve made your way to my home.”

  The vampire Elder made a gesture and the soldiers behind the prisoners lifted their rifles.

  “Now, Commander, you and your agents will lay down your weapons and surrender, or these innocents will die. Do not force my hand.”

  “You’ve already lost,” David pointed out. “The Night Stallions have been defeated and arrested. The compound above is surrounded and we know where your hidden exits are. All killing your hostages will achieve is to guarantee that you die. Quickly.”

  He started to shift forward, but his Empowered hearing easily picked up the sound of the soldiers clicking their safeties off.

  “Oh, believe me, Commander White, simply killing you would be enough to make this whole disaster worth it,” Romanov told him sweetly. “Lay down your weapons, or the children die.”

  She walked down amidst the hostages, running a long, pale finger along the face of the teenager. The girl was crying silently, sobbing in absolute terror as tears streamed down her cheeks.

  “Let them go, Romanov,” David told her. “Surrender and I will guarantee your life.”

  “Hardly, Commander. I know your policy toward vampires,” she replied. “I have walked your country since before your Omicron offices even existed. I know your fears, the terror that tremors within you when you face your natural predator.

  “Your kind are too afraid to let us live. Your policy is wise.”

  “There are always exceptions,” he said levelly. “Surrender. I have the authority to spare your lives.”

  “I think not.”

  Her hand suddenly latched onto the teenager’s throat with crushing force, yanking the girl backward and choking the life from her in a single vicious gesture.

  David was already moving. His rifle fired, its report echoing terrifyingly in the underground chamber as his bullets tore into Romanov’s arm. The vampire recoiled, releasing her victim as her ancient blood spattered across the marble floor.

  The girl collapsed to the ground, unconscious if she wasn’t already dead, and the soldiers opened fire on the other hostages. Their bullets slammed into an invisible barrier, David’s “discussion” with Romanov having bought Hellet time to throw up a barrier between the hostages and their intended murderers.

  “Cover Hellet,” O’Brien snapped. The shield around the hostages would stretch her abilities to the limit—the farther away she was sustaining the spell, the more energy it required.

  Gunfire echoed throughout the hall as the vampiric foot soldiers opened fire. Bullets smashed into the decorative floor around David as he charged, shooting as he came. With Romanov reeling backward, his fire was now directed at the vampires threatening the hostages.

  Two of the four went down, silver bullets punching through their chests and heads and spraying blood across the marble stairs. The surviving pair wisely turned their fire on David, who dropped his now-empty rifle and drew his pistol again as he ducked under the bullets.

  The heavy pistol fired, its three-round bursts straining against even David’s strength. One vampire went down, but the last survivor, wounded but still on his feet, slammed into David’s personal space with blurring speed.

  Knocking aside David’s pistol, he tried to bring his own weapon up to fire at point-blank range. Before he managed it, David smashed his own elbow into the middle of the assault rifle with enough force to bend the weapon.

  The vampire pulled the trigger anyway, the ensuing backfire sending him reeling back and allowing David to take his own shot. Three heavy rounds slammed into the reeling vampire sold
ier and smashed him to the ground.

  Gunfire continued to echo through the underground hall, interrupted now by the echoing howl of an enraged werewolf’s war cry. Leaving the rest of the vampires to O’Brien and protecting the hostages to Ix and Hellet, David charged up the stairs after Romanov.

  The other two Elders met him. Neither bothered with weapons, their fingernails lengthening into iron-hard claws as they closed. As David opened fire with his pistol, the first of the pair reached him, those unnatural claws slicing clean through the gun’s barrel with a single slash.

  Letting the wreckage of the pistol drop, David dodged backward as the second vampire lunged at him, claws slicing through empty air as he evaded. With both vampires closing on him, he tried to go for his sword.

  A claw sliced along his forearm, opening up his armor and skin alike. His arm heated as his skin stitched itself together, but David stumbled backward, blocking the next series of strikes with his hands as the two Elders pressed him, keeping him too busy defending himself to go for his sword.

  The vampires were fast. Neither was as fast as Marcus Dresden had been or truly fast enough to challenge David on their own, but together they pressed him step by step back down the wide marble staircase. It took every ounce of his focus just to hold them back, only his prescience and speed letting him stay uninjured.

  When his prescience flared a different warning, he didn’t have the time to defend himself. The two Elders had neatly pinned him between him, trapping him in place and preventing him from evading the massive blast of black flame that Ekaterina Romanov hurled at him.

  His armor was incinerated, his skin and flesh burning as the fireball picked him up and flung him backward. Agony ripped through him—then he hit Hellet’s shield around the hostages and bounced.

  David slammed back into the marble steps with bone-cracking force. Everything hurt—his burnt skin and smashed ribs swelling with heat as his body tried to regenerate multiple sources of damage.

  He was only vaguely aware of the two vampires charging down the stairs to finish the job.