James looked askance and asked, “Hang on a second. Why on Earth would the Red Empire want a cure for vampirism? Don’t they have a religious belief in killing vampires?”
Chloe arched an eyebrow. “Why, indeed?” She sniffed, momentarily bemused. “I’m sure we’ll find out in due course.” She turned away from James, her gaze drifting away from the world as her mind speared into plans and counter-plans. A climax was coming, powers were converging, events were accelerating. Her capacity to ride the rising tide of chaos would be tested.
Of that she was sure.
Chapter Four
“The first question I had to answer was how do you defeat an opponent who can see the future?” - Arthur Slayne
* * *
Utah, The Panopticon Fortress, September 11th, 05:00
The distant Vampire Dominion facility rose in stark contrast to the otherwise deserted floor of the valley.
Anton Slayne lay facing east. His body pressed flat against hard rocks, staring with his good right eye through a pair of electronic binoculars at the Panopticon fortress. The field of view was enhanced for night vision, range, and available metadata. Peter lay to his right and Francis a yard beyond him. Jay and Chiara kept watch on the approaches to their position while Li conducted a netmaster hazing operation from one of the two SUVs parked beneath a stand of trees.
The access road into the low mountains overlooking the western side of the fortress was little more than a dirt track for the last half dozen miles. The road had veered off just before the abandoned ghost town of Cedar Fort, and then headed up into the hills in the general direction of Flat Top Mountain. The Mirovar force team had completed the nearly twelve hundred miles from Minneapolis with hard driving and sleeping in shifts in the cars. Even with a day of driving and broken sleep sitting in the back seat, Anton was keyed up - here was a target worth taking down.
Anton burned with a deep need to destroy the Dominion facility squatting like a malign and alien horror in the valley below. For the first time, they had useful intelligence about the enemy. They could seize the initiative and strike hard, disrupting the Vampire Dominion’s ability to track them. With the Panopticon gone, the Vampire Dominion would be blind and Li could dominate the networks, find out where the enemy were hiding and the war would turn in their favor. Winning the next battle was critical to winning the war against the vampires.
Failure was not an option.
Anton scanned the fortress with his electronic binoculars. It was six miles distant from where he lay. The main facility was enclosed within a rectangular thirty-foot-high wall. The digital range finder scoped the space enclosed by the wall as a mile long by a twelve hundred yards wide, the data appearing as tiny red digits over lines framing what he was looking at. Tall guard towers surmounted with domes and ringed with weapons rose two hundred feet above the wall on each corner of the rectangle, creating overlapping fields of fire covering every open spot in the valley.
To Anton’s right, a landing field centered between two hangers filled the available space on the south side of the facility. A pair of black nightfalcon helicopters gleamed under bright lights on the western side of the dark tarmac.
To his left, on the north side of the facility squatted a multi-story administration building. The nearside left corner of the admin building was dominated by a massive tower rising at least three hundred feet above the ground. The tower was crowned with a shiny black hemisphere, eighty feet in diameter and half that high. The tower’s main weapon, a tri-barreled gun projected forty feet past the black surface of the sphere. Sleek silvery fins ran the length of each barrel, forming a ‘Y’ for anyone with the misfortune to be facing the weapon.
Half a mile outside the north and south walls sat a pair of large rectangular buildings surrounded by a ring of lesser structures. The billowing plumes of steam rising from three large funnels running along the spine of each building marked them as power stations.
Surrounding the whole complex was an outer perimeter fence six miles on each side. A road ran between the landing pad and the main admin building, exiting the main base through a guardhouse on the nearside western wall. The single access road strode across a vast open plain to a second guardhouse on the outer perimeter fence. The whole extended site was lit with rows of lights running in spoke lines from the main facility to the outer fence, which itself was lit with powerful lights eliminating any shadows within a hundred yards of the facility’s outer perimeter.
Anton suggested quietly, “A mouse couldn’t get across that open area without being seen.”
“Peter, what are we looking at here?” Francis asked softly.
“Well, working from the outside in. If you focus on our lower right at the outer perimeter guardhouse, you’ll see a couple of things. The outer fence is twenty feet high, electrified and topped with razor wire, but that’s just for keeping out the riff-raff.”
Peter paused for a moment. “The serious stuff is all at the main facility and we’ll get to that. However, the outer guardhouse is just a small, low-key affair, sized to hold about a dozen troops, but see those long buildings behind it - they’re drone hangers. I’ve counted five tracked ground drones so far patrolling the open space and the outer fence line. They’re about four feet high, eight feet long and carry a .50 cal machine gun. Bad puppies and no doubt slaved off the Panopticon.”
“Slaved?” Francis asked. “Are you suggesting the Panopticon would have direct control of the weapon systems?”
“Yes, for anything that’s automated. Once engaged, the drones will respond with lightning fast decisions and ruthless efficiency.”
“What about fliers?” Anton asked.
“Ahh… Okay. Got one. About three hundred yards in, hovering above the road to the facility. Can you see it?”
“Got it,” Anton said focusing on a five-foot wide saucer shaped object hovering above the sole road inside the outer fence. Francis followed a moment later with a low whisper of assent. Anton added, “Any ideas on what the flying saucer does - apart from watching?”
“Weapons are not obvious, but I’d assume any fliers were armed until proven otherwise.”
Francis tilted his head and asked, “No armored personal carriers or other heavy equipment?”
“Nope!” Peter said quickly.
“What, no Commander tank?” Anton offered, with a straight face. “How are we supposed to break in?”
“No,” Peter answered in a low voice. “They don’t need a tank, everything in this valley is within range of the specter defense towers on the corners of the inner perimeter wall. If they had a Commander tank, and we captured it, they’d kill it and us within the first ten seconds of combat.”
“Specter defense towers?” Francis asked. “I’ve never heard of them.”
“Yeah. Total state of the art and this is probably one of the few sites in the world they’ve been deployed. There are sixty vertical launch cells built into the walls of each tower. They’ll contain hypersonic land attack cruise missiles armed with anything up to and including nuclear warheads. Note how each tower looks like a long column with strands of barbed wire wrapped around the neck. There’s a command and control center in the dome at the top of each tower. There are four rails ringing the neck of each tower beneath the command and control center. Each rail carries a pair of mobile weapon systems. The rails allow the weapons to move and cover a full three-hundred-and-sixty-degree circuit around each tower. The rails are all maglevs, they roll fast, completing a round trip in under two seconds.”
Peter paused for a moment. The team waited in silence. The difficulty of what they faced was being laid out in fascinating and horrific detail. “From the bottom up, I count two 20mm rotary cannons, they’ll be anti-personnel weapons good out to two miles. Two 30mm auto-cannons to deal with light vehicles out to about four miles. Two lasers for drone swarms and incoming weapons, they’re good out to the horizon and will keep firing as long as they have power. Finally, there are two rail guns, same spe
c as a Commander tank for anti-cruise missile defense and general bad-assery.”
It was almost too dreadful to ask, but Anton had to know. “What’s the big tower in the middle?”
“I was getting to that.” Peter tilted his head left and right, as if weighing up the options of how best to break the bad news. “It’s a nemesis defense tower. I’ve only seen it on the web as speculation. It has everything a specter tower has, but bigger and better. See that huge mother of a gun hanging out of the black hemisphere on top. It’s a rail gun phalanx. Each second, it can shoot three forty-five-pound kinetic spikes at eleven times the speed of sound. With satellite targeting networked with the nemesis and specter tower’s advanced quantum field sensor arrays, it can hit anything a yard wide within a thousand-mile radius.”
“Like the rail gun on a Commander tank?”
“On mega-steroids. What the commander tank has is like a Glock 9mm compared to a 30mm auto-cannon.”
“How do we take them down? Could we take out those power stations outside the main facility, would that make a difference?”
“Internal fuel-cells in the towers will keep them running for a day or so. Plenty of time for the vampire cavalry to arrive and kill us. In any event, we can’t reach the power stations.”
“At least not across the surface,” Francis suggested. “That’s a lot of steam coming out of those cooling towers. Where’s the water coming from? There’s no river.”
Anton offered softly, “No river we can see. It must be underground … could we swim in with air tanks, and gain access via the power plants’ water supply?”
“I hate to rain on your parade,” Peter suggested quietly, “but we don’t know where the underground river is or how to access it. We’d need to map it to find out where the inlets are, plus access paths are sure to be monitored and guarded by drones linked straight back to the Panopticon if not humans or vamps.”
Anton sighed, then stated, “Okay, we can’t approach from above or below, that only leaves a deception. We have to convince them to let us in. Could we steal a nightfalcon from somewhere else and fly it in and provide them with,” Anton put down his binoculars, rested on his elbows and air quoted with his fingers, “‘the access code,’ to let us land? Could we hack their networks to find out what those codes would be? Li’s a marvel at that.”
Li piped up over the tactical network running through their earbuds. “You’ve seen too many Hollywood movies. This is real life, I’m not that much of a marvel.” She fell silent again, presumably absorbed with the task of hiding their presence from the Panopticon.
“Perhaps we need more insight into what is possible,” Francis said firmly. “Li, are you up for attempting a loremaster vision?”
The silence stretched, then Li replied, “Yes, just need to make an adjustment to give me a window for action. Wait … okay, now we do it.”
Nothing happened for a dozen seconds. Anton found himself holding his breath, then let it out slowly.
Li uttered a low moan of grief.
“Something is wrong,” Anton muttered, rising in a flash and blurring back to the SUVs.
* * *
Unbidden, a dark wave of loss swept through her.
Li clenched her eyes tightly shut, but it didn’t stop the loremaster vision overtaking her mind. Bright fire burned in her right forearm. The world shuddered, splitting in two. A vivid reality flooded her senses, trapping her soul within a nightmare.
She walked on polished floors between racks of server computers, the subsidiary elements of the Panopticon, the mighty quantum processors were yet to be revealed. Her breath plumed in grey mists in front of her. The air was chilled to near-freezing temperatures to support the icy logic of artificially intelligent systems.
Behind her whispers murmured, one was Anton, but there was another voice she didn’t recognize. She whirled, but Anton stood alone, he frowned momentarily, running a hand back over his tightly cropped dark hair, then frowned incredulously at his scarlet palm dripping blood onto the immaculate floor.
He started to fall.
The rows of computer racks writhed like giant serpents, transforming into massive industrial pipes. Perspiration slicked her brow from the oppressive stifling heat. Francis and Jay stood before her, their faces set with grim determination, assault rifles blazing, rounds whipping past her. Return fire slashed through the room, deafening, thunderous, overwhelming. Great pipes burst asunder. Ravenous steam billowed in clouds cutting through the space where Francis and Jay stood, turning bright pink with their blood.
The blood-drenched mists evaporated to reveal the fortress beneath her feet. Peter loomed over a console. The air was alive with the tang of electric current. Streams of fire lanced across a bright sky. Behind her steel struck on steel, Chiara cried out in sudden agony. Peter turned to look through her, a fatalistic grin seizing his features, his red hair flying free, his hands blurring to his axes. The floor lurched as inbound cruise missiles detonated against the sides of the tower.
She was falling, falling through concrete and metal debris, she searched frantically for a hand hold, something stable to hold onto. Sharp dark steel impaled her outreaching hand, splashing a warm ribbon of blood across her face.
The world shuddered again.
Tears streaming down her face, she sobbed, “We’ll … die in there. No one … escapes. It’s a … death trap!”
Anton cradled her in his arms on the dirt next to one of the SUVs, his eyes flashing with anger. “We need to get out of here.”
“The roadhouse back toward Salt Lake City,” Francis ordered. “We’re too exposed this close to the Panopticon without loremaster overwatch. Peter, Jay, get the SUVs on the move. Team, we’re out of here.”
She gasped. “There’s someone else here.”
“Who?” Anton said, lifting her like a child into the back seat of the nearest SUV.
Li looked at him, her dark eyes wide. “I don’t know … I don’t know.”
She lay back in the seat, bringing her knees up to her chest, hugging them tight. A moment later, Anton was next to her, his powerful arms holding her close. Peter was in front of them in the driver’s seat. The big car’s engine thrummed and it swung forward, driving back down the lonely track and away from the fortress.
She couldn’t get away from the place quickly enough. She cursed the information she’d got from the tactical helmet in the stormwater drains beneath the conclave hall. It was a false lead; the fortress would kill them all.
No one could destroy the Panopticon.
* * *
Anton rubbed an itch over his left eye patch and stared at his second mug of black coffee.
The team had polished off a small mountain of eggs, steaks, pasta, and salad greens; refueling after the rigors of battle in Minneapolis and a long, fast road trip.
They sat at the back of the roadhouse away from the entrance. Li had remarked about the lack of cameras or other surveillance devices installed in the building - a small silver lining after the shock of her vision. The building was a dead zone for the Panopticon and practically deserted. A grizzled old man ran the place, thin as a rake with a long wispy beard, he looked like a wizard from a Hollywood movie transported into the twenty-first century. There was a fry cook who knew his stuff working in the kitchen as the food had been excellent and freshly prepared. The roadhouse sat on the ‘fortress,’ branch of an intersection with the main road heading back toward Lehi. The fortress branch led to the deserted town of Cedar Fort, and then past the Panopticon facility toward the southwest.
With no one around to overhear, the team had freely discussed the options. Li’s devastating vision of impending doom had not gone down well, the team splitting into two factions. The Li and Jay faction that advocated avoiding the fortress, and the Anton, Peter, and Chiara faction that were set on proceeding despite Li’s dark vision of doom.
Reassured that Li had not been harmed by her vision, Anton was willing to discount it. As bright as she was, she was
a loremaster novice. How much could her vision be trusted, and should it be weighed against the opportunity to destroy the Panopticon? Anton was willing to bet she was wrong this time, that the vision had erupted more from unacknowledged concern and love for her team mates, than a genuine grounding in a future about to be realized.
Francis had stayed out of the debate, letting each group explore the options, willing to allow a consensus to emerge before he made a decision. Occasionally, he’d ask a question, or probe a suggested pathway, looking for undue risk or poorly grounded assumptions. With the skills and abilities in the team, Francis would be mad not to let them explore the possibilities and thrash out a solution, then step in and back a direction that everyone had already bought into.
However, a shared solution for attacking the Panopticon fortress was nowhere in sight.
“I can’t explain it.” Li asserted, spreading her hands apart. “It’s just … an overwhelming sense of doom. That place is a death trap. It’s built to kill anyone who attempts to get in there without authorization. That facility was designed and protected with utter ruthlessness. It was established by a mind without mercy, and it will kill us all if we attempt to infiltrate it.”
Anton looked across the wooden table at Li. “We can’t just rely on you to guard us. You have to sleep, there’s a window every day for us to be discovered by the Panopticon. We have nowhere to go that the Panopticon can’t find us. We have to take it out. It’s pivotal. A must do. We have this one God-given opportunity to do it, and we’d be crazy to step away from it now.”
“Haven’t you been listening?” Jay asked, leaning forward to peer past Francis. “We don’t actually have a way in. The place is impregnable.” He pointed across the table at Peter. “Peter said as much.”
Peter shrugged his massive shoulders in silent acknowledgment of Jay’s words and then confirmed, “Sure, there is no way to do a frontal assault.”
The Crane War Page 7