Into the Light

by David Weber

  She and Lyadov—a former CEO of MEZHTRANSAVTO, one of the largest transport companies of the Russian Federation—greeted Taylor and Dvorak affably enough, but then dived back into their own quiet conversation. Ägrid Furstenfeld, the former CEO of Deutsche Bank’s Corporate and Investment Bank Division, who’d become the Secretary of the Treasury, was hosting a conference of member state treasury heads and would be unable to attend, but Fred Tanner, one of his assistant secretaries, walked in behind Cao and Lyadov.

  Secretary of War Zukowski and Secretary of Planetary Security O’Sullivan arrived together, accompanied by General Landers. From their expressions, they looked forward to the day’s gathering about as enthusiastically as Dvorak did, but they were at least polite as they found their chairs.

  The last to arrive were Howell and Vice President Jolasun Olatunji. At five-ten, Howell wasn’t exactly short, but Olatunji was almost four inches taller than the president. He was also broad shouldered and black-skinned, a Christian Yoruba from southwestern Nigeria with broad, powerful cheekbones and a blade-like nose. He’d been a fanatic soccer player—only he called it “football,” of course—in his youth, but he was sixty-five now, and he’d given it up. Until the antigerone treatments kicked in, at least. Now he’d returned to the soccer pitch, and the PSD agents assigned to him had been known to bemoan the fact that he hadn’t taken up something like golf.

  Or possibly chess.

  “Good morning, people,” Howell said, settling into his place at the head of the table while Olatunji took the facing chair at the opposite end. “I’m sorry Jolasun and I kept you waiting, but there’s always something to get in the way. And—” he grimaced “—to be fair, I don’t suppose I was any more eager for this than the rest of you.”

  A murmur of agreement ran around the table, and Howell tipped his chair back and nodded to Zukowski, O’Sullivan, and Landers.

  “This is more in your bailiwick than anybody else’s, except maybe Dave’s, Kacey,” he said. “So why don’t you and the General get us up to speed? And after that, Pat, I guess we need to hear anything the PIA has to share with us about aftermath.” He grimaced again, less cheerfully this time. “I don’t imagine we’re going to be happy to hear any of it.”

  “Of course, Mister President,” Zukowski said. “We brought along the video, if anyone really needs to see it.” Howell snorted harshly. Virtually every human being on and around the planet Earth had seen that live-streamed video by now. “Since I assume no one will,” she continued, “I think it would be simplest to just let General Landers begin. Truman?”

  “Thank you, Ma’am.” You could tell Landers was a soldier, Dvorak thought; there wasn’t even a trace of sarcasm in his courteous tone as he thanked her for what he knew would be a thankless task. “Yesterday, at approximately nineteen hundred hours, local time, our diplomatic mission landed in Naya Islamabad, as I’m sure all of you already know. Initially, it appeared that—”

  Dvorak tipped his own chair back, eyes half shut while he listened.

  * * *

  “AND YOU DON’T have any idea where this … Cecilia is now, Mr. O’Sullivan?” Cao Ming asked twenty minutes later, when Landers and the Planetary Security secretary had finished their presentations and invited questions.

  “No, Ma’am.” O’Sullivan clearly didn’t like admitting that, but his expression was unflinching, and he went on steadily. “To be honest, it’s virtually certain that we won’t find her until she decides to find us.” He shrugged ever so slightly. “We’ve been working with the vampires for fifteen years now, and we’ve never been able to track them, even with Hegemony-level sensors.”

  “Zamechatel’no,” Lyadov muttered in a disgusted tone. The neural educator had taught Dvorak Russian when Larissa Karpovna and her kids came to live with his own extended family, and he snorted. “Wonderful” was one way to describe it, he supposed.

  “That’s definitely something we need to be concerned about, but it’s also something we can’t do very much about,” Vice President Olatunji observed in musically accented English. “I’d like to ask Secretary Dvorak if his read on the … consequences of this is as bad as my own?”

  “That depends, Mister Vice President, on how bad you think it is,” Dvorak replied bitterly. “Because the truth is that I haven’t found a single upside. Well, that’s not entirely true. If anyone’s paying attention, Abu Bakr did his damnedest to keep her from killing Ghilzai, so I suppose we should get at least partial credit for that. Of course, it’s offset by the fact that it only proves that not even we can control the ‘monsters’ we’ve set loose on the world.”

  “Ease up, Dave,” another voice said. Dvorak turned towards the head of the table, and Howell leaned forward to tap an index finger on the polished surface for emphasis. “It’s bad, yes. But it’s not a total disaster, and if your brother-in-law and the vampires weren’t mixed up in this, you might be able to recognize that. Hell, you did recognize it in the hot wash analysis your people wrote up for Jolasun and me!”

  “That may be so, Mister President,” Dvorak began, “but—”

  “But me no buts,” Howell said sternly. “Stop feeling like this is somehow your fault and hit the high points for us. The good ones, as well as the bad ones.”

  “Yes, Mister President,” Dvorak said after a moment. He sat for a handful of seconds, composing his thoughts, then straightened his shoulders.

  “The bad points. Our ‘diplomatic mission’ killed the prime minister and the commander-in-chief of the armed forces of a sovereign nation, on camera, streamed live to the entire world. Hard to see a plus in that. Maybe worse, if anyone actually listens to the sound, they’ll realize Abu was doing his damnedest to stop Cecilia every step of the way and that she totally ignored him. And anyone who watches her and the other two in action, will realize that nothing the Pakistanis had could have hurt any of the three of them in any way, so except from the perspective of protecting Abu, it’s hard to argue they had to kill anyone in self-defense. Anyone who’s predisposed to view the vampires as uncontrollable, demonic, soulless, accursed, undead monsters just got confirmation of all his phobias on live tridee, and the religious zealots—especially the Islamic fundamentalists, but quite a few of their Christian counterparts, as well—who look at this, watch it, listen to the way Cecilia talked to Ghilzai as she ripped out his heart and held it in front of him, are absolutely going to buy into that narrative. And let’s face it—where Cecilia and her actions are concerned, they’ll have one hell of a lot of justification.

  “Those are the diplomatic and political downsides. Oh, I’m sure there are others, but my people and I are in agreement that those are the big ones.

  “Now, as the President’s reminded me, there are a few upsides. First, most of the people who’ll be enraged and frightened by this and try to use it to beat on us are people like the Pakistanis themselves—holdouts against joining the Planetary Union. For them it will justify their resistance. People in nations that have already joined the PU are likely to be upset, disquieted—even frightened—but they’re already invested in membership in the Union, and it won’t change their minds. I also doubt that it’s going to change the minds of any fair-minded, reasonably well-educated people—like the Swiss—who are still in the process of deciding whether or not they want to join.

  “There are a couple of reasons for that, but the biggest one, to be honest, is the fact that Ghilzai had obviously intended to murder Abu and the vampires from the outset. He made that abundantly clear himself, before Cecilia killed him. And Abu is not a vampire, which means the silver bullets that didn’t kill the other three certainly would have killed him if they hadn’t prevented it. That means their initial attack on the firing squad was totally justifiable, although I think it’s probable that they didn’t have to actually kill everybody in sight. In a situation like that, though, the primary objective is to completely incapacitate the aggressor. Dead is about as ‘incapacitated’ as someone gets, and their responsibility
was to Abu, not to the murderous bastards who’d planned to kill all four of them.”

  He paused looking around the table. No one seemed prepared to dispute that, and Landers nodded firmly in agreement.

  “Some of the allegations hitting the news services and—especially social media—about Colonel Wilson’s rescue mission are way out of line, in my opinion,” Dvorak resumed levelly, “although I expect that’s pretty much inevitable. As the President’s just more or less pointed out, I have a personal stake in seeing Colonel Wilson’s actions in the best possible light, so I deliberately took myself out of the loop when my analysts evaluated his actions. General Landers’ people weighed in on that, as well. In fact, Truman—?”

  He looked across the table at Landers, who shrugged.

  “Aside from being what might be considered a trifle … overexuberant in the way his assault shuttles dusted off the landing zone for him, my people haven’t found a single thing in Colonel Wilson’s conduct to criticize,” the general said flatly. “Even that was well within the scope of his mission brief and instructions, given the quantity of air defense weapons Ghilzai had mounted to cover the Presidential Palace, and I don’t think any reasonable person could legitimately second-guess his people after they breached the Palace to rescue Abu Bakr. We’ve reviewed the footage from the drones, from the satellites, and from the troopers’ individual cameras, and it all confirms that, with the single exception of a group of hostiles who were apparently running away from one of the vampires, the members of his team did not engage a single individual who wasn’t already engaging them. And under the circumstances, when a group of men charge out of a corridor at you with guns in their hands, I believe you might be reasonably justified in assuming they have hostile intent. The truth of the matter is, though, that by the end, Colonel Wilson’s people were actually saving Pakistani lives by hauling militiamen out of the melee before the vampires got around to ripping their throats out.”

  “That’s approximately what my people concluded, as well,” Dvorak agreed. “Expecting people who already don’t like the Union to recognize that would be more than a little unrealistic, however. And we’ve already heard from a couple of our own ‘human rights’ critics that it’s obvious the Heinlein armor made our Marines as effectively invulnerable as the vampires themselves. So, obviously, there was no justification in utilizing lethal force against people who were only trying to kill them.”

  He couldn’t quite stop an eye roll of disgust, and Howell snorted in bitter amusement. It never ceased to surprise Dvorak that there were still people capable of putting forward that particular argument with a straight face, despite everything the Shongairi had done to humanity. Most of the human race had rather significantly reconsidered how and when one should turn the other cheek to those bent on homicide; they hadn’t. Their most frequent response when someone quibbled with their viewpoint was “But we’re supposed to be better than the Shongairi.” Dave Dvorak couldn’t argue with that point, and he supposed he preferred people who didn’t want to wade through any more blood than they had to, but he’d found his own exquisite sensitivities somewhat realigned since someone had dropped by and murdered the majority of the human race.

  “That’s well and good,” Tallman said, “but there’s another issue here. What the hell happened? I mean, we know what happened, but how did it happen? I’ve watched that footage several times now, and there’s no question about it. She was in a full-bore, Hollywood monster-level, killing frenzy. For that matter, she was determined to kill Abu Bakr! And as far as I can tell, this is the first time—ever—that we’ve actually seen a vampire’s eyes turn red. So what the hell is going on?”

  She looked very pointedly at Dave Dvorak, and even as he returned her gaze steadily, he felt his heart sink. He was the Cabinet’s resident expert on vampires—for his sins—and he’d known someone was going to ask the question. The problem was that he really, really didn’t want to answer it.

  On the other hand, better it should be him than someone else. In fact, that was why he’d made certain Jasmine Sherman wouldn’t be here today to field Tallman’s questions. Nor had that been solely his own idea.

  He looked away from the Secretary of Management to glance at the other person who’d signed off on his decision, and Judson Howell didn’t look any happier than Dave Dvorak felt. The President’s nostrils flared, but then he shrugged.

  “Go ahead, Dave,” he said, but then he held up a hand, pausing Dvorak. “What Dave is about to tell you is, for obvious reasons, as classified as information gets. And before any of you ask, Dave and his brother-in-law—and Pieter Ushakov and Major Torino—made sure that I got this information within a day or so of when Dave himself became aware of it. In other words, this isn’t something that either he or the vampires attempted to conceal from me.”

  That was just a tad overly generous of the President, Dvorak reflected, recalling how reluctant Ushakov and Torino had been to share that information with him in the first place. It was accurate enough to be going on with, though, so he only nodded and looked back at the others.

  “According to Pieter and Longbow,” he began, “a certain small percentage of vampires … go off the deep end. It doesn’t happen to very many of them, it sometimes takes quite a while to develop, and there’s no way to know ahead of time who it’s going to be true of. The behavior Cecilia displayed in Naya Islamabad is a textbook example of what they were talking about, I think, and it’s probably the basis for a lot of the more horrific legends about vampires in general. You’re right, Jessica—she was in a frenzy, and from what Pieter and Longbow had to say, once you fall off that curb, there’s practically never any coming back.”

  “Well, isn’t that just peachy,” Tallman said. “So what the hell do we do about it?”

  “That is more than I can say,” Dvorak admitted. “From what Abu said and from everything Colonel Wilson’s said—for that matter, from what Jill and Susan had to say—they couldn’t hurt her any more than we could. They could get between her and Abu, they could keep her tied up trying to get past them, they could physically intercept her to keep her from finishing him off, but they couldn’t hurt her, and they damn sure couldn’t kill her.”

  “If they can’t, who can?” Tallman asked, and this time there was an edge of genuine fear in her voice.

  “All I can tell you, is that Pieter and Longbow have assured me they’ll ‘deal with her.’ They haven’t told me how, but as far as I know, those two men have never lied to any of us about anything. If they say they can ‘deal’ with her, it’s because they genuinely believe they can.”

  “I agree with everything you’ve just said,” Secretary Mussett said, “but that rather brings up a point I think all of us have been dancing around for a while now. The truth is that we’ve learned a lot about the Hegemony’s medical technology. For that matter, we’ve already tweaked its effectiveness in several ways, and we’ve learned to apply a lot of it to human physiology. But we still don’t know a damn thing about vampire physiology. Well, we know that apparently they subsist on directly absorbed energy, not the blood diet of legend. In fact, that’s the only way you can tell one of them is around if he doesn’t introduce himself. They don’t show on any of our other instruments, but they make a sort of … hole in the electromagnetic spectrum about them. If the Puppies had known what to look for, that might have let them detect, maybe even track, Vlad’s strike teams when they assaulted their ground bases. It might not have, too; it’s just the only possibility we’ve been able to come up with. But that’s it, the sum total of our ‘knowledge’ about them.

  “Leonard Gillespie and Nancy Kaufman and I were talking about this even before what happened in Pakistan. We’ve been dropping hints for over fifteen years now, and somehow none of the vampires have ever submitted to any sort of medical exam. Well, obviously they don’t get sick and they don’t get hurt, so they don’t need doctor’s care. And they’ve always had a dozen places they had to be at any given moment, so
it’s understandable that they don’t have time to sit around in labs right at the moment we ask. But after fifteen years, I expect they could’ve found the time if they really wanted to.”

  “I understand what you’re saying, Charlie,” Dvorak said sharply. “But I also understand the entire human race would be dead without them. The only reason we’re around to be worried about the fact that they’re not letting us treat them like lab rats is because they damned well saved our lives. And they haven’t asked us for a single damned thing in return—not one! They’ve cooperated with us, they’ve helped put the world back together—hell, they’ve actually put themselves into the formal military chain of command so that the President can order them to do things! Have you really thought about what that means? That these creatures—these people—who can pour themselves through key holes, disappear into a cloud of smoke, walk through a solid wall of bullets, and who don’t need a single frigging thing from us—not even food—are willing to take our orders and fight our battles.”

  He realized his voice had risen, and he sat back suddenly, shaking his head.

  “Sorry.” He raised both hands. “Sorry, Charlie! Didn’t mean to sound like I was ripping anybody’s head off. And it’s not like I haven’t had some of the same thoughts. But still—”

  “But still, we’re talking about a massive invasion of their privacy and, at least potentially, about their allowing us—helping us, really—determine if they have any vulnerabilities we might capitalize on,” Howell completed his sentence quietly. Dvorak looked at him, then gave a choppy, unhappy nod.