The Crane War

by Graeme Rodaughan

  She landed in a controlled slide across the smooth concrete, then gained traction and followed Justin toward the left exit. Two more stairwells descended from the front and right-hand side walls. The tunnels were filled with the cries, squeals and yells of the frenzied vampires. Their mad cacophony came from every direction and they were closing in.

  Li ran at Justin’s right hand, her head on a swivel. Her squad automatic weapon ready to fire, the Green Dragon loose in its scabbard at her waist. The two force teams ran in two lines, Sam, Taylor, Patrick, Tim and Red behind Justin, and Peter, Chiara, and Jay behind her. She’d volunteered for the point role, primarily because she had Justin on her left and Peter behind her. Against a horde of vampires, it was best to bring the heavy artillery. The boots of the rest of the team slapped the concrete behind her in steady rhythms, an orderly counterpoint to the discordant noise of the vampires.

  A squeal of delight cut through the air from behind them. A moment later automatic gunfire erupted from the rear of the team. Li chanced a glance behind her. Jay, Tim Leung, and Red Cevarre were covering the rear of the combined team. The vampires had managed to get behind them, an almost solid wall running down the stairs toward the Ramp masters. The SAWs hammered and smoked, fire ripping into the front ranks of the vampires, but more came, clambering and leaping over the dead, scaling the walls and clawing their way along the ceiling. Their avid eyes filled with hunger, lit upon her own. A cold shiver accelerated up her spine and she swallowed against a suddenly dry mouth.

  Screeches and howls burst through the air from the left exit. Justin opened up with his squad automatic weapon, a stream of rounds removing the top of a vampire’s head as it rose above the stairs. A solid mass of vampires swarmed over the falling corpse, bursting into the chamber, their hands reaching for the members of the Blake force team. The path to the SAMs was blocked.

  Manic laughter brayed from the right. Li pivoted a hundred and eighty degrees from the left exit. Justin had Sam and Taylor just behind him, and if those three couldn’t deal with the threat, no one could. A mass of vampires poured into the chamber from the right stairway. Peter fired from the hip, sending a stream of rounds flashing into the front rank of vampires. He was joined by Chiara adding her own machine gun fire.

  The room dimmed. A horrible sense of impending doom swept through her. Li turned toward the distant hangers. Vampires were crawling along the ceiling from the forward stairway, using their innate strength and physical hardness to punch finger grips into the concrete. Beneath them, more vampires surged forward. Everyone around her was already engaged to the left and right.

  She stood alone.

  Li snapped her SAW up to her shoulder and pulled the trigger. The gun vibrated in her hands, spitting fire, silver, and lead at a wall of vampires four wide spilling like a rogue wave onto the landing. Her rounds ripped into the first two vampires. They slumped to the floor, their blood painting the vampires behind them like a Jackson Pollock masterpiece.

  Samuel Taylor stepped in on her left, ragged tongues of flame wreathing the muzzle of his SAW. A stream of rounds tore into the swarming vampires reaching at them with outstretched fingers. Vampires crawled along the walls and ceiling, scuttling forward like a ravenous hive. They obscured the lights, plunging the room deeper into shadow.

  Li shook her head once. The SAWs were great guns for sustained fire, and the silver and lead hollow-points were tearing the vampires to pieces. The silver ensuring that once a vampire was down, it stayed down. But … she dove deep into silence, reaching for her most potent Ramp. The action slowed around her. The SAWs strobing the twilight lit room with muzzle flash, individual rounds whipping through the oncoming vampires. Their faces resolved, leering, twisted, mouths agape, fangs prominent against dark lips, and pale skin. Eyes, dark with blood lust, tracking her every movement.

  A human voice screamed in terrible agony behind her, then cut off just as quickly as it had begun. The vampires hooted in triumph. There was no time to look behind. Red Cevarre, the Blake force team combat surgeon shouted, “Tim,” in a voice verging on panic.

  Li kept her finger on the trigger of her weapon. Caseless ammunition riffed through it, melting away to propellant stench while flames spat around the end of her barrel. She pivoted, striking three vampires in a row with combinations of silver and lead hollow-points. They shuddered, tripped and spasmed, falling to the concrete floor in spreading pools of blood.

  Still more vampires replaced the ones that fell.

  One dropped down from the ceiling, snapping a hand over the barrel of her gun. She released it, and he whipped it away as he landed on his feet.

  In a single motion, the Green Dragon arced from its scabbard, entered the vampire just above its right hip, slicing up through its torso, exiting in a splash of blood above the creature’s left shoulder. The vampire fell apart to the left and right, a look of shock etched in dark shadows on his face.

  The Green Dragon felt good within her hands, a natural extension of her deepest self. She whirled and lashed out with the shimmering blade, carving through a hapless vampire’s head. He fell away, his hands flapping uselessly, his skull above his mouth missing.

  Two more took his spot, another dropped from above.

  Li blurred to her maximum potential.

  It was time to do or die.

  * * *

  The truth speaker had to be saved.

  Tamsah had tracked the Order teams through the maze, while watching the frenzied vampire militia swarm into position around them. The creatures had behaved like a single amoebic organism, as if they had established a hive mind with a single goal - the destruction of the humans. He had never heard of such a thing, but Tamsah was inclined to believe the evidence of his own eyes over any received truth.

  The thinnest part of the swarm had converged behind the Mirovar and Blake force teams. Tamsah had inserted himself into their midst. They ignored him, convinced of his allegiance by his vampire nature, and blind to his lack of frenzy by their own submission to abomination.

  The members of the Mirovar force team he knew well from his encounter with them in the dungeons beneath Armitage’s manor house on the cliffs above the town of Whitby. He would spare them if he could, they were well motivated to protect the truth speaker. As for the other Order operatives he would have to take one. It was a necessary violence. The smell of fresh blood would draw the mob away from the truth speaker.

  The flash of gun fire had ceased, now blades worked against vampire flesh and bone. The lights continued to flicker as vampires scurried across the ceiling like loathsome insects. Shadows grew and shrank without rhyme or reason.

  Tamsah selected his target. He approached unseen, making full use of the Ninjitsu skills of a Red Empire assassin. He moved like a shadow, hidden behind the manic advance of the militia vampires. His boots sank into the gutted body of a vampire. It was impossible to advance without stepping on the corpses littering the floor. The concrete ran with vampire blood, and not a little human blood. One of the Order operatives had been literally shredded by the vampire horde. Bodies were heaped where they fell, variously slaughtered by silver and lead hollow-point rounds and razor-sharp blades wielded with super-human skill, speed and strength.

  The Ramp masters were glowing hot within the infra-red portion of his vampire vision. They could not keep up this level of continuous intensity for much longer. Tamsah’s intervention was essential to save the truth speaker before they exhausted themselves beyond the capacity to Ramp, and the vampires tore them apart.

  A vampire to his right fell to the elegant swordsmanship of a young man with blood-streaked, dirty-blonde hair. Tamsah assisted the vampire to the floor with a well-timed push, and flashed through the vacated space. He jagged hard left to avoid any counter strike from the young Mirovar operative. He beat past the young, red-headed woman’s sword with his left dagger, came in close and stabbed her three times in the chest. Each blow missed her heart. He needed her alive for now, but in time any one o
f the blows would prove fatal.

  Her face paled with shock and her eyes rolled. Tamsah struck her twice more, his daggers tearing long wounds along both her arms. Her katana fell away and she slumped forward. Tamsah ducked beneath her, catching her in a fireman’s carry over his right shoulder. He blurred forward, twisting hard to the left, positioning her body between his head and the Order operatives fighting to stay alive in an ever-decreasing space in the middle of the chamber.

  Someone shouted, “Red,” as he cut past the center of the landing. He threaded his way through the vampires and leaped over the dead. The woman on his shoulder moaned, a distinctly human sound amongst the cacophony of the vampire swarm.

  Her voice was like the bleat of a wounded sheep amongst a pack of ravenous wolves.

  Most, but not all the vampires turned as one, tracking his progress toward the forward stairwell. He stabbed a vampire in his way with his left blade, tearing a great hole through its heart. It was enough to break the spell. The Red headed woman screamed, her arms flailing, sending ribbons of arterial blood spraying in his wake.

  The vampires surged. The air in the tunnel pushing against him as the vampires flooded after him.

  Success! Now the truth speaker will survive.

  Tamsah blurred deeper into the maze, a horde of crazed vampires howling behind him.

  * * *

  Red Cevarre screamed as the short dark-clad vampire carried her out of sight.

  The Mirovar and Blake force teams were dying a death of a thousand cuts. The swarming vampires forced extended Ramps in response to their incessant attacks. Li’s team mates were rapidly approaching exhaustion and overheating. They had fought long fights in the recent past, but had always had time to snatch a break between ramps. This was different. This was dangerous in a way they had never faced before. They could be ground into exhaustion, overheat, and fail to Ramp. Defenseless, the vampires would tear them apart.

  The vampire in front of Li hissed and withdrew. Vanishing down the stairwell after the ill-fated Blake force team combat surgeon. Another attacked her on the right, she slashed the Green Dragon beneath its head. The vampire separated into its head, and the rest of its body. The head bounced on the floor and rolled to a stop at Li’s feet, the headless body slumped backwards, fountaining blood over the carpet of vampire corpses littering the chamber.

  A couple of thuds resounded behind her as dying vampires discovered the floor. The rest of the swarm fled the chamber, noses in the air, hooting and hollering after the blood spilling from Red Cevarre.

  Jay leaned on his sword for a moment and said, “Hell, that was close.”

  “All of us together drew them like moths to a flame,” Samuel Taylor suggested.

  Justin nodded; his eyes tight with restrained grief. “Jay, we need to split up. Sam, Taylor and Patrick will come with me for the missiles. You take your team to secure the hanger.”

  Jay wiped his hand down his face and shivered with reaction to surviving the mad onslaught. “You’re right. Get the missiles. My team will secure our path out of here.”

  Justin reached across and squeezed Jay’s shoulder and stared hard into his eyes. “Godspeed, my friend.”

  Jay slapped Justin’s shoulder; his hand staying to squeeze it. “Good hunting.”

  Justin called out once to the survivors of his team and cut down the left-hand side stairwell toward the missile caches.

  Jay looked around the team, conducting a quick visual inspection to make sure everyone was fit to fight on. His right hand chopped out toward the right stairwell. “Follow me, we’ll go to the hanger and secure the private jet.” He strode past Li’s left shoulder and began scaling the dead vampires.

  Li turned to follow him. She clambered over the dead, her skin crawling with disgust. There was no way to get out of the chamber without touching a dead vampire. She spotted her SAW discarded against a wall and scooped it up. She paused just long enough to slot home the replacement ammunition satchel, and the ammo counter on top of the weapon reset to ‘200.’ She stepped over another three bodies in a pile and got clear of the abattoir of the landing. She joined the end of the line of Ramp masters and followed the rest of the Mirovar force team to hanger number one.

  They had to secure a private jet to get out of here before vampire reinforcements arrived. If more vampires showed up, she didn’t know how they would cope. The last attack had excoriated her soul. There was a big difference between fighting vampire soldiers that simply wanted to kill you, and fighting a mad horde that saw you as prey to tear apart and feast upon.

  It was the difference between being confronted by an active evil that needed to be stamped out, and being overwhelmed by a madness that could overtake the world.

  Evil and insanity were not the same thing.

  * * *

  The echoes of gunfire had faded away half a minute ago.

  The screams, yowls and manic laughter of the vampires shifted away in the maze back toward the hanger side of the airport.

  “Oh my God,” Anton whispered. He had to believe the gunfire ceased because the Mirovar and Blake force teams had run out of opponents to kill, rather than they had been overwhelmed. He had made the wrong decision; he was sure of it. Whatever fate had befallen the combined team he hadn’t been there to share it with them. He felt ashamed. He’d shirked his duty. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Order nightglasses had provided him with a map, but not a way to find his team mates in this maze, and he was now more or less lost.

  A vampire screamed to his left. The creature had crept up on him before its inherent madness had taken control. Anton lashed out with the Blue Dragon taking the vampire through the chest. His draw cut sliced the vampire’s heart in two and it fell forward onto the cold concrete, a pool of blood spreading around it.

  The dying creature seemed to be the last of a handful of vampires that had caught up to him.

  He staggered back to an intersection.

  Something moved on the edge of his vision, a sliver of black blurring across an intersection far to his left. It was vampire armor; there was only one vampire wearing armor in the maze - Chloe Armitage.

  Anton flicked the Blue Dragon clear of blood. Perhaps something could be salvaged from this terrible day.

  He blurred after the running vampire.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “My strategy relied on their competence. The only way I could trap them, especially trap them both, was if they truly believed I’d made every effort to avoid tracking and capture. The merest hint of a lure would tip them off and result in disaster. It was imperative Crane saw himself as having the upper hand, and Armitage is the very soul of cunning. I had to keep their discovery of our exfil plan believable so they would not see the trap inherent within it.” - Arthur Slayne

  “Of course, I had to motivate them properly to commit themselves to a hand to hand fight - that was essential. Hence the Panopticon, hence the remains of the Order. It doesn’t matter if the Order is destroyed if we destroy the Vampire Dominion at the same time. What need do we have for the solution if the problem has been extinguished? Without Crane and Armitage, and with the information buried within the Panopticon, the rest of the vampires can be readily mopped up.” - Arthur Slayne

  - Notes to Self. Marked, ‘Do not open unless personality re-integration fails.’

  * * *

  Nevada, Arthur Slayne’s Private Airport, Warehouse Number Three, September 11th, 20:45

  The retractable roof clanked to a halt; the cloudless night sky revealed in all its glory above the warehouse.

  Cornelius stood alone, wreathed in shadows beside a shipping container on the south side of the warehouse. The building was two hundred yards long and a hundred yards wide. It was not lost on him, that these were the very same dimensions of the warehouse on the Boston docks where he’d lost six praetorians and nearly sixty Shadowstone operatives in a debacle that had kicked off the recent troubles besetting his Dominion.

  With a life tha
t spanned nearly a thousand years he’d seen many allies and foes come and go; vampires, Order and Red Empire operatives, people of note who’d contributed something to his advancement, or opposed him and been destroyed. He was accustomed to playing the long game. Often, he simply needed to outlast his opponent du jour to claim victory, but this time was different. This time, he had foreknowledge of events courtesy of the Metaframe sorcery of Jean Philippe Allemande. He’d faced cusp events since the late 1850s and survived. This was another, but in this case, he’d detected a qualitative difference. Arthur Slayne had managed to hide himself from Cornelius’ precognitive powers until the last day. No one had ever done that before.

  While the younger Slayne was a dangerous berserker learning about his fell powers, it was the elder Slayne who was the true threat to his life. The most important thing he’d learned over the last one hundred and seventy plus years was that precognition did not reveal destiny. There was no fate. A skilled power operator could always shape events to their will. The advantage of the power granted by Allemande’s sorcery was a superior awareness that overshadowed what anyone else could bring to the game.

  Which is why Arthur Slayne perplexed him so much. How had he managed to remain in the shadows for so long? Was his grandson a proxy for his strategy? A pawn to be pushed forward over the chessboard, only to be sacrificed for advantage at an opportune time. Would Arthur Slayne wipe out his own family line in service to his war against the Vampire Dominion? Cornelius could not rule it out, and he was no closer to piercing the deception that surrounded the elder Slayne’s strategy.

  A shipping container door on the opposite side of the warehouse creaked open on dry hinges. Arthur Slayne stepped through the doorway and into the light. The P-Case was in his left hand, the Black Dragon in his right. A .50 caliber auto-pistol was holstered on his right thigh. Cornelius would have to take care with the latter. A well-placed hyper-velocity round could definitely ruin his night.