The Crane War

by Graeme Rodaughan

  Cornelius’ rubbed his chin. The existence of vampires must remain secret. Humans could not be allowed to discover they were little more than cattle. They were far from being the rulers of this world. Awareness of their true status would puncture the thin veneer of rationality masking the depths of insanity lurking beneath. He’d watched Western Europe dethrone the concept of God with science, and the march of progress had radically decentered humanity’s position in an ancient and expanding universe. Against the vast sweep of infinite time, the life of any individual human being was little more than a brief spark illuminating an endless darkness, destined only to be forgotten by an utterly indifferent universe.

  The cold truths of science were ignored by most, and humanity’s willing ignorance was to be exploited. If true knowledge of vampires were awakened, it would fan the world into flames against him as humanity united against a common oppressor. Cornelius sighed again. Yes, an oppressor, it was a title he’d be a fool to disown but he wore it from necessity, not from a lust to rule others. In many ways, he’d organized the world to allow him to operate at a distance, to delegate, to allow him a measure of - peace.

  But to no avail; he stared at the high-def images of the Panopticon feeds. He was at war; he was always at war. He’d fooled himself with the temporary peace of the last twenty years. His lip curled derisively. His enemies were arrayed against him but he’d fought their like before, and he’d always survived. He had more than nine centuries of experience with winning the contest for survival. He’d proven his abilities time and again, and this time would not be different.

  He would defeat his opponents through mastery of information, through stealth and secrecy, and with the bloody edge of his blade.

  His eyes tightened and his lips thinned. It was time to go to war.

  * * *

  The heavy security door was marked with the bio-hazard symbol.

  Gareth Nightingale, the sole surviving Shadowstone agent in Jerusalem took a deep breath and pushed against it. It gave way, opening up into an extensive bio-medical laboratory. He lifted and panned his heavy-caliber H&K 417 assault rifle, the LED flashlight strapped beneath the barrel illuminating the lab. The air was cool, bordering on cold. The deserted Red Empire facility was deep enough to escape the early afternoon sun pounding the museum above. He’d received orders from General Armitage to check the remains of the facility. She’d provided instructions on how to access the lab from the city’s sewer system. He’d equipped himself with urban-camouflage combat fatigues and a high-impact weapons fit out. He’d begun the mission just after breakfast and progressed each step carefully. He was all on his own and the nearest backup was hundreds of miles away.

  Gareth stepped over the threshold, his combat boots barely making a sound on the tiled floor. There were two long workbenches filled with technical apparatus. Beyond them was an operating table equipped with thick metal restraints. The walls were lined with computers and cabinets, and there was a floor-to-ceiling cage at the far end of the room. He paused, waiting for any sign of movement.

  He’d cleared the outer rooms up to a guardhouse leading into a long corridor. The near-end of the corridor was littered with bloated human corpses in various states of dismemberment. The facility had recently been filled with smoke, the reek of whatever had burned overlaying the cloying stench of decaying flesh. He’d quickly established there was no one still living within the vicinity of the guardhouse, and retreated back into the prison section. He’d pointed his gun barrel down several of the cylindrical cells in the floor of the prison. They’d nearly all been filled with the half-melted remains of things that appeared vaguely human.

  White phosphorous grenades or something like them had been used, he surmised grimly. Whatever had happened here, it had gotten ugly in a hurry.

  Gareth proceeded down one side of the long laboratory. The facility was without power, the only lights he possessed he’d brought with him. With no one around, he tapped the edge of his light tactical headset wrapped around his close-cropped blond hair. A powerful LED lit up, providing a wide cone of light in whichever direction he faced.

  There was a rustle from the cage at the back of the room.

  Gareth snapped the rifle up to his shoulder, a tight cone of illumination spearing into the center of the cage.

  A young woman rose up behind the bars. She was dressed in a grimy hospital gown and little else. Long dark hair hung in lank locks over her thin shoulders. She held her emaciated arms over her chest. Her mouth opened, she swallowed, paused, then pleaded hoarsely, “Help me. Please help me.”

  Gareth frowned. He flipped the gun over, facing back to the entrance, there was no one there. He twisted back again to face the cell. The woman was pressed up against the bars. Her chalk-pale hands gripped the dark-steel bars as if she were about to rip them apart. He stared at her, she stared back, her eyes half-lidded against the glare of his LED flashlight. He closed the distance between them until the tip of his gun barrel lay just out of reach of her grasp, and pointed directly at her heart.

  Over the last few months a question had wormed its way into his mind. At first a whisper on the edge of awareness, it had become a roar dominating his waking moments. He decided to test her reactions and hissed. “Are you a vampire?”

  She giggled momentarily, her right hand flying to her mouth. “I was.”

  She wasn’t shocked by the question and he asked, “What do you mean was? It’s a one-way trip isn’t it?”

  “Not anymore,” she said with a knowing smile.

  “What? How?”

  She pushed herself up against the bars and whispered, “There’s a cure.”

  Gareth shook his head. “Come again?”

  She leaned away from the bars, peering up at his face. “Cute, but not too bright. They have a serum; it reverts vampires back to human.”

  Gareth frowned. “Prove you’re not a vampire.”

  “Got a knife?”

  Gareth nodded, holding his rifle with his left hand, he pulled a combat knife from a sheath at his waist.

  She held her left hand out in front of the bars. “Cut me, not too deep, but enough to draw blood.”

  Gareth flicked the knife expertly and thrust the tip into the middle of her palm. The blade flashed back, its edge bright red.

  She blinked and held her hand up. The blood ran freely down her palm, a red thread against the pale ivory of her thin wrist. “Wait for it,” the moment stretched. “I’m not healing from the cut; a vampire would close such a trivial wound in seconds.”

  Gareth waited another half a minute, wiping his blade clean and returning it to its sheath. The blood flow slowed to a stop but the wound didn’t close.

  “Look,” she said, stepping away from the bars and retrieving a gleaming metal net from the corner of the cell. She passed it through the bars to Gareth, letting it fall into his outstretched hand. “It’s silver. They used it to restrain me when I was a vampire. Once the serum reached full effect, the silver ceased to work, and I was able to escape the net. If I were a vampire, there is no way I’d willingly touch it.”

  The two points of evidence were convincing. Everything he’d deduced about vampires in the last few months indicated they had super healing powers and a powerful aversion to silver. He let the net fall to the floor and gripped his assault rifle with both hands.

  The woman studied him. “You’re Shadowstone aren’t you?”

  Gareth grinned lopsidedly and took a step back. “Now what makes you think that?”

  “You’re not Red Empire or Order of Thoth. If you were, you’d have been a lot surer of yourself, and your main weapon wouldn’t be an assault rifle. You don’t really know what’s going on, do you?”

  Gareth’s grin vanished and he looked around the lab - anywhere but at her. He finally turned and stared hard at her. “Tell me about the serum. Are there samples? Data packs? What do you know?”

  She stepped back from the bars, spreading her hands wide. “Have you got anything to
eat? Look at me, I’m starving. Give me something to eat and I’ll talk.”

  Gareth hesitated for the briefest of moments, shrugged, and pulled a protein bar from a pouch on his combat webbing. He tossed it through the bars with a flick of his wrist. The woman caught it easily, stripped off the wrapper and began eating it hungrily. As she ate, he patrolled around the lab. There was an open briefcase sitting on the operating table with eleven vials in it, and space for a twelfth. He tapped it with a finger and remarked. “Is this it?”

  The woman smirked. “People tried to leave in a hurry and didn’t take it. I think they would have been more careful if they’d more time.”

  Gareth considered her words carefully. He could easily leave her here to whatever fate awaited her. She would be desperate to prove her worth and more likely to tell the truth.

  “Data?” he asked.

  “Wiped. It’s gone completely, at least from here. The hard drives were smoked.”

  “These samples are all we’ve got?”

  She nodded.

  Gareth put his rifle down on the operating table, flipped the lid closed on the briefcase, and locked it by swiping his thumbs over a pair of sensors on the sides of the case. He picked the briefcase up, retrieved his rifle, and turned to the open door.

  “Wait!” she yelled. “You can’t leave me here.”

  “You’re not the mission,” Gareth said, striding between the lab benches. “Taking you with me is more of a risk than I care to take.”

  “Leaving me behind is the bigger risk,” she shouted behind him. “You’re losing everything I know about the serum. Take me with you, I’ll tell you everything there is to know about what’s really happening in the world. I’ll tell your bosses exactly how the serum works. I’m a goldmine of information. You can’t leave me behind.”

  Gareth’s eyes tightened with suspicion but he hesitated at the door into the prison section, his back still turned to her.

  “Shadowstone serves the vampires,” she called out from the cage. “Their king is Cornelius Crane. He set up Shadowstone late in the nineteenth century to help with keeping the existence of vampires secret. He’s been alive for nearly a thousand years.”

  A shiver crawled up Gareth’s back. Her words rang true, they were like a series of locks snapping open within his mind, one click after another. He whirled around and strode back to the cage.

  “Any keys?” He asked quietly.

  She shrugged. “All electric, they default to locked when the power goes off.”

  Gareth paused for a moment. “How have you survived? It must be more than two weeks since this facility was destroyed.”

  She pointed at the silver net on the floor. “The silver suppressed my metabolism, and the progress of the serum. The effect of the silver wore off in the last day or so, and yes, I’m thirsty too. I could use a drink of water.”

  Gareth pointed to the near left corner of the cage, away from the electric door lock. She moved quickly into the corner, making herself small, her thin arms covering her face. He lifted his rifle and aimed at the center of the lock. He fired once. The crack of the round reverberating through the lab, the bullet sparking off the lock, before ricocheting into a cabinet. He frowned, took a step forward and fired another four rounds. The lock broke apart on the last bullet, the cage door swinging an inch ajar.

  The woman was on her feet an instant later. “Thanks, there was no way I could break free of the cage by myself.” She pushed the door aside, grinning broadly as she stepped into the lab.

  Gareth would need both hands free to carry a weapon and the briefcase with the serum samples. He slung his rifle over his back, and pulled a 9mm Glock from a holster on his webbing. There was no point trusting this woman. He’d keep her just where he could see her. He flicked the barrel of the pistol at her and nodded at the open doorway. “You go first. I’ll give you directions as to where we need to go.”

  She smiled sweetly at him. Her eyes flicked down to the briefcase filled with serum vials lying on the tiled floor next to his left boot.

  Gareth frowned. She was a fraction too confident. A fraction too interested in the serum vials. His survival instincts flared, his finger pulling tighter on his 9mm Glock’s trigger.

  She blurred forward faster than his eyes could follow. Her right hand flashed upward, striking his throat like an iron bar. His larynx collapsed and his spine snapped like a twig, his body vanishing beneath him. The room spun as he fell, his head hitting the floor with a crack. He couldn’t draw breath, a moment later darkness swept in like a funeral shroud and took away all the light.

  * * *

  Chloe knocked on James’ front door.

  There was a rustle of cloth on the far side of the apartment. That’d be the curtains. It was followed by James’ footsteps as he walked up the corridor. His feet were muffled against the floorboards, he’s wearing socks. She’d sent him a text fifteen minutes earlier warning him of her imminent arrival. The door handle turned and the door swung open.

  James stood in front of her, dressed in combat fatigues, his brown eyes filled with tightly held excitement. “Gareth Nightingale is dead. He died in Jerusalem at 13:39 local time. However, all is not lost; we have footage from his tactical headset. The last ten minutes before he died contain something I’m sure you’ll want to see.”

  “Nightingale? Yes. I sent him to investigate the remains of the Red Empire citadel.”

  James led her into his lounge room and offered, “Watch this.”

  The main panel on his wall lit up with the feed from a single tactical head cam. The footage bobbed about as Nightingale moved through the ruins of the Red Empire prison and the medical research laboratory. The microphone picked up all the sound. The dialogue between the Shadowstone operator and the prisoner in the cage was rendered with perfect clarity. Chloe watched with avid interest. Nightingale was doomed the moment he started talking with the woman. The fatal knife-hand strike was merely the expected denouement. A moment after his skull cracked on the tiles of the laboratory floor, there was a snapping of bone and a ragged tearing sound of ruptured flesh. The sound was repeated a moment later.

  “It’s out of shot,” James remarked, “but I think she just tore his thumbs off to unlock the briefcase.”

  “It follows,” Chloe agreed, a slight smile curling the edges of her red lips. “She’s clearly a Ramp master, who got turned into a vampire. Who is she?”

  “What we know for sure,” James said carefully, “is she speaks English with a faint Japanese accent. The Panopticon picked it up. We also did a match with Hana Tanaka for face and voice prints. It’s seems they are sufficiently similar to indicate a genetic relationship; they are most likely sisters. Officially, Hana Tanaka only has one sister, Sakura Tanaka. Sakura is three years older, and has been missing, presumed dead for the last five years. The footage of the tactical cam allowed us to check for facial recognition. There was a ninety-six percent match with file photos of Sakura. The four percent gap was attributable to partial starvation, but she hasn’t aged at all since she disappeared.”

  “So, Hana Tanaka’s sister masters the Ramp, gets turned into a vampire, and shows up in a Red Empire medical lab at the center of research for a way to reverse vampirism. … So, what does she do now? Where does she flee to with her prize?”

  “The same place Hana is hiding?” James suggested.

  Chloe smiled quietly. There were too many coincidences for this to be random. Hana and her sister’s fates had to be linked by more than blood. The secrets to disarming the implant next to her brain stem and ‘curing,’ vampirism were with the Tanaka sisters. She glanced into James’ eyes. “Ready the Spike 512 for a flight to Tokyo. Be ready to move at a moment’s notice. We’ll need to accommodate the chameleons on the flight and have appropriate transport for them when we arrive in Japan. This needs to be off the books - Crane cannot discover we have gone to Japan.”

  James nodded. “I’ll make it so.”

  Chloe advised, “Include
my full combat fit out. I’ll need my auto-pistols, we can’t be sure what we’ll find in Tokyo, but I have a bad feeling about it.”

  James’ face paled with an unspoken question.

  “Yes. This is serious. Sakura Tanaka was an unregistered vampire. She was off the books for five years. No one knew of her, no one was cleaning up after her. Either she was a captive of the Red Empire for five years, or there is a cell of rogue vampires in Tokyo that have escaped the notice of the Vampire Dominion for decades, perhaps centuries. There are no novice vampires who could hide themselves from us. There is a secret vampire master in Japan, someone who is old, experienced, knowledgeable, and powerful.” Chloe blinked, Crane’s words from a briefing early in her life as a vampire coming back to her. ‘The Red Empire and the Order of Thoth are not the sum total of the threat of the Ramp masters. There are rogues from both factions operating singularly or in groups, and then there are wild talents on whom the powers of the Ramp come unbidden.’ Her opponents in Japan could be anyone or anything. “They could be someone firstborn of Mekra, stronger and faster than a regular vampire, like Crane. They could be a blood-cultist, or even a Metaframe sorcerer with unknown powers. When your opponent is this well-hidden … the risks are highest.” She tapped her lips with her forefinger, then smiled quietly. “But so is the prize.”

  She left unspoken the deeper question of why the Red Ghost would commission a difficult and expensive research effort to find a cure for vampirism. Understanding the core of Dalien Morte’s motivation would be the key to his future co-option within her end game. His quest to find a cure was a major clue. He cared about someone. Someone very important to him was a vampire and he wanted them back. There were no vampires on record who could be important to Morte, therefore there was a vampire who was hidden. The only questions that remained were who was the vampire? Where were they? And who had hidden them?