Quest for the Ark

by Taggart Rehnn

  That night two of the new traps caught a couple of Odessatron’s operatives trying to get into the property. They became food for the mastiffs. Another drone was downed, this time by a lightning strike. The EMP stopped another large snake-drone. A small delay followed the inescapable power reset. Otherwise, nothing seemed able to stop the group’s dogged determination. Watching one of the mastiffs run around with a human leg, Pierre whispered in the Countess’ ear, as he refilled her coffee cup: “Pretty uneventful night, n’est-ce pas, Votre Grâce?”

  “Just another night at the office, cher Pierre!” she replied, snorting.

  27—Last Night Before Saint-Pierre

  Next day dragged along in a daze of frenzied cicadas singing, red-eyed hosts and guests taking brief trips out of bed, some taking turns to arrange last-minute logistical nightmares, check the castle’s surveillance logs and query the artificial intelligence to optimize this or that, as last minute information kept arriving non-stop. The choreography of this most complicated grand ballet was, at long last, taking shape.

  For a few days now, Tony and Severian’s watching of the dark web had brought increasingly worrisome details about Odessatron operatives planning an attack on the group, somewhere between the castle and Chartres. Tony had also discovered David had tried to go over sophisticated sandboxes, some with data quicksand, data minefields and very convoluted VPNs to access the dark web and also attempted to cover his tracks. That reinforced some suspicion he had about him, but decided not to ask questions, pretending he hadn’t noticed instead. If his hunch was right, this might be a good thing, after all—and he had enough of a headache now with Odessatron getting far too close for comfort.

  Unable to figure out yet exactly where, or exactly when, or exactly how they would attack, the quest for the Ark would be delayed one more day, to add another safety layer. Regrettably, this would also increase David and Haim’s stress: Judaism allows deviations from worship, but the new start date became problematic for them. So Tony kept looking. And when he, eventually, discovered what neo-Nazis were planning, a simple maneuver to thwart Odessatron’s ambush was agreed upon. This further delayed the quest—but, paradoxically, also helped David and Haim celebrate Shabbat as customarily.

  Beauce, the region where Chartres is situated, is France’s breadbasket. And Severian being very peculiar regarding from whom he buys flour for his croissants and other pâtisserie products, knew several farmers very well. One of them, in particular, had a colossal warehouse—‘the size of an A-400 hangar’—where the trucks loaded at the castle Oskar’s precious ‘undies’ and all the rest of the equipment could be safely stored near Chartres.

  Near the time at which the mission should start, decoy trucks would converge on the target from three directions, carrying beer, wine and lighting equipment, to throw the Wotanists off. They should arrive ten minutes before the ‘real trucks’ carrying the equipment, David, Siegfried, Severian and Conrad, with all schedules being constantly readjusted by checking traffic flow in highways and minor roads. Once the trucks discharged, they would leave and not come back for two days—the maximum length of time the expedition supplies would allow a human to stay alive if all the ancient lead pipes were obstructed; and possibly, also, the length of time some false lead Tony had planted in the dark web might keep their enemies distracted—also, the reason he had discovered David’s irregular attempts at messaging someone Tony knew all too well.

  During those two days and nights they would have to drill, find the tunnels, unclog and follow them, get to the Ark, perform the ritual, and exit. The decoys would then come to Saint-Pierre, at a time when the church would be closed, and for the benefit of any neo-Nazi scouts and passers-by, put on a display of people carrying container-type boxes in, and leave taking container-type boxes from the church as well.

  In preparation for the whole operation, the Countess had visited all sort of religious authorities and influential laymen. She had cajoled and pushed around, begged and called old favors; and abundantly explained, to all of them, that the mysterious donor of those church restoration funds preferred to work without curious tourists getting on his people’s way; and, thankfully, at the end of her P.R. marathon, they had agreed to it—only, on condition there would be Church-appointed people supervising the tasks, approving or refusing every single undertaking before it could proceed.

  Conrad, Severian and Mircea assured everyone this would be a non-issue: the church ‘supervisors’ would be glamorized, and so made to authorize anything. All the same, some repairs would have to be done, lest there would be nothing to show for it, and this absence of results would eventually be followed by an investigation—one the Countess was most definitely not looking forward to.

  Although the tasks involved mostly preventing flooding problems by correcting seepages and such, Church archaeologists had been added in case during excavation something of archaeological value was found—more precisely, the Countess commented, Church authorities were hoping Conrad might find Fulbert’s tomb; hence the added archaeologists. “More people to glamorize wholesale,” had whispered Mircea, splaying his hands. For a moment, Severian seemed visibly jolted by that particular remark—as if he were having some eureka moment, but he made no comment at the time.

  Remained still the problem of who could operate these robots, the ‘undies’ that would ultimately do the digging. Conrad and Severian and Siegfried had gone to visit Oskar, Siegfried’s brother, who lived in Berlin. And there, the three had learned how to operate the equipment: as Oskar lectured the three of them ‘the traditional way’, the two vampires have gotten inside his mind and soon knew it in as much detail as the master himself. At the same time, they learned archaeological techniques, to better preserve any findings made during their impending underground quest.

  In the meantime, David had practiced respiration with a full mask, and with just a carbon filter mask in case of oxygen tank failure or depletion.

  Looking for the lead pipes left to ventilate the tunnels so long ago, Tony’s people had had very mixed results: with the right metal-detecting equipment, finding them had been reasonably easy. And lead is usually quite impervious to corrosion, due to the formation of lead oxide or lead carbonate—unless exposed to a humid and acid environment, such the one provided by acid rain, human or dog urine, and such. Therefore, those pipes might be corroded and/or blocked by mud far away from the upper opening and/or be so fragile that trying to remove obstructions could altogether break the tube and render it useless to provide ventilation, no matter how limited.

  Discretely testing their capacity to carry air was a bit more challenging, requiring some ingenuity and no small amount of guesswork. Even so, Tony’s surveyors concluded that, of the forty percent of so of the pipes found, about half should still be able to provide ventilation and mapped those operational tubes as precisely as they could. The locations of those pipes were now superimposed to the tunnel diagrams Conrad had brought; and the resulting schematics of ‘air ducts’ David then studied, relentlessly, until he felt confident he knew them by heart, to avoid having to rely on even more mind implants while still being able to react fast in the event of mask failure after oxygen tank depletion.

  Conrad explained vampires could travel under soil, even quite compacted gravel, a bit like moles. That would allow him to explore parts of the tunnels ahead of the ‘undies’, to avoid wasting time and to prevent possible cave-ins—should the ‘undies’ programming lead them to make a wrong turn.

  Mircea would be staying at the castle, protecting it and its ‘war room’ crew. So, while Conrad would be doing ‘mole work’, Severian’s main task would be making sure Conrad’s blood-son wouldn’t drop by impromptu at the tunnel, and, in an emergency, assist David. All the same, David might have to deal with oxygen failure or minor cave-ins on his very own for a few minutes. For that, he had prepared as best he could.

  “A human brain cannot afford more than a few minutes of apnea,” David’s scuba instructor had told h
im, hardly reassuring him much. Conrad had then offered to work on his claustrophobia, to what David replied that his mind used to be his own private playground and now it had started to feel like a discount whorehouse—so that option was quickly abandoned.

  Also, the list of people to hypnotize/glamorize kept getting longer and longer, and that visibly annoyed Conrad. Glamorized people create some sort of ‘background noise’, he explained, scattering the ‘vampire senses’ of any undead doing the glamorizing—a bit like fireflies under a starred night: get too many fireflies too close to you, and watching the stars would require extra concentration because of ‘light pollution’ near your telescope.

  Another problem David found positively unsettling—when Mircea eventually mentioned it—would be ‘drifters’: Some vampires love summer events, where lots of young people, overflowing with ebullient hormones, gather in clusters, looking for equally ‘motivated’ mating partners. Such youth can easily be glamorized to believe they’re about to get lucky, to instead be ‘grazed’—bled without killing or turning them—then left to recover in a shaded spot, ‘like milking cows’ Mircea said. David had mooed and frowned, asking him to explain why he mentioned them.

  “‘Drifters’ would probably be lurking in sewers and undergrounds made loose by archaeological exploration, in as yet undiscovered buried buildings from the days of Gallo-Roman occupation and such,” Mircea clarified. “Serendipitously, they might as well be found in one of those tunnels you, Severian, Conrad and the ‘undies’ will be opening up.”

  “Faced with the rotating blades of an ‘undie’,” he then added, “an old enough vampire could cause significant damage. On the other hand, faced with a human left unattended, an old enough vampire might decide to have a lazy snack,” making David instinctively rub the side of his neck, and that, making Mircea ominously smirk.

  Finally, aside from possible people investigating unexplained noises coming from the underground—despite the high-performance noise- and vibration-reduction features built-in into ‘undies’ to preserve fragile artifacts and ancient ruins—the problem remained of those ‘undies’ themselves malfunctioning when buried several meters underground.

  “If one ‘undie’ should fail, the other could be used to drag it—consuming more battery and possibly requiring a battery replacement, spares that would add to the payload you shall carry into the tunnel,” Siegfried explained during the final rehearsal. “Given the ‘undies’ substantial power requirement, you ideally would use a permanent outside energy source—which we ruled out to decrease the probability of you being discovered and/or sabotaged, but there is a logical solution,” he expounded, proud of his own resourcefulness.

  Although the solution Siegfried found much reduced chances of being discovered once in the underground, it also made David rather nervous: a tiny prototype of spherical thermal aqueous homogeneous nuclear reactor. “It weighs less than 5kg and has a radius of about 10cm, and is fuelled by a solution of Am-242 trinitrate in water,” Siegfried explained. “Such a small fission reactor requires substantially less combined shielding to prevent gamma and neutron exposure to users than the larger, more usual ones. Coupled with a small Stirling engine and appropriate heat transfer hardware, it can produce more than enough power to keep the ‘undies’ working hard, illuminate the tunnel with LED cold lights, power water pumps in case of leaks/flooding—and even operate the emergency crank platform to stop a cave-in from crashing you like bugs.”

  Hearing that, Severian and Conrad nodded approvingly. By then David had at least stopped looking terrified and begun looking intrigued. A bit more relaxed now, Siegfried winked at David and continued: “On an emergency, this reactor can also power up the two jackhammers our crew will carry as auxiliary digging equipment. Fortunately, vampires are strong enough to dispense with slow cranes—which would require anchoring to carry heavy equipment. Your superior strength,” he said facing Conrad and Severian, “also spares us from you having to carry an endless assortment of wrenches to adjust or fix hammers, allowing you to just take a multi-use set, which even David could operate on an emergency.

  But now,” said Siegfried leading the way towards the dinning room, “enough digging in French soil. It’s time to dig in, and enjoy the pleasures of French cuisine.” Of course, at this point, Severian, Conrad and Mircea left, to go have their own locally sourced, free range nourishment.

  Unbeknownst to Conrad, before going to feed, Severian then came back to the castle, to visit Adolphe and Loïc at the gardener house. He was following a ‘hunch’ that had started nagging him since the Countess spoke about them and Irène, made even more pressing by what he had read from Tony’s mind. And what he discovered there confirmed his worst fears. Soon after, already hatching a new plan he left to join Mircea who by now was merrily and copiously feeding at La Villeneuve, a neighborhood in Grenoble.

  All the while, at the castle, David truly ate lake a ravenous wolf—understandably, since after this one last stupendous hearty meal—in which the Countess extravagantly displayed a glorious selection of French specialties and wines—he would have to live on energy bars for two or three days.

  Even though, as his rabbi and friend of years, Haim also felt compelled to offer David all the moral nourishment he could, these last few days he did not know what to tell him. He too was feeling miserable—and it showed. Both men were torn between, on the one hand, hoping the highly irregular ‘thing’ they had built using a tallit—that now, covered in stones taken from hollowed ground seem even harder to look at— and those three slivers—were they really pieces of the original Tables of the Law? — would save the world; and, on the other, a visceral fear—a horror, really—they might, instead, damn it.

  At times, this emotional yo-yo threatened to drive both bonafide mad. If those were, indeed, really, three slivers from the Tables of the Law, did they even have the right to deprive their ‘people in the Biblical sense’ of them? There was no time to ask the poskim.

  That anxiety was particularly painful for Haim. After all of this, could he somehow go back and become a ‘normal’ rabbi? Could he one day tell his children truthfully—minus the vampires—what he had done, and not feel embarrassed, ashamed, pasul? When is a lie told to protect someone’s innocence no longer a ‘white lie’? When does urgency justify the means? Would he even dare ask the poskim? Shivers run through him. They would think him mad. And then, there was David. Could David ever forgive his friend and rabbi’s ‘cowardice’? Haim was far less corpulent than David, and not once in his life had experienced claustrophobia. David, on the other hand, had for decades—in fact he had changed careers for it, and for Deb’s sake—and had only lately started fighting it, like a dare, like a game, to explore this grotto, this beautiful cave, looking for a fresh spot in the Provençale roasting weather—and, providentially, he had emerged victorious.

  And providentially perhaps as well, his struggle with claustrophobia had taken him to discover poor Irène, who one day had even chased him to that same cave, trying to satiate her unquenchable thirst for sex. At one point, Haim had briefly tinkered with the idea that David might have succumbed to the temptation, betrayed his marriage vows, and killed Irène to silence her, something he never had the courage to confess to him. (That one fellatio, Irène had taken to her grave. Although Haim would never either inquire or find out about it, memories from it would haunt David for years: he would never stop speculating whether she had visited the cave, hoping for seconds, one afternoon too close to sunset.)

  So Haim wondered: Would confessing his doubts to David’s face help his friend forgive him or, instead, create an irreparable rift? As things stood, Haim didn’t see any practical need to bring the subject up; yet, he wasn’t so sure he could live in peace should David die in that underground—and he, instead, survive, only to be whipped by guilt for the rest of his life, forced to go on constantly haunted by remorse. Even worse, ha had agreed with sending his friend, a big strapping man—who by his sheer musculature would nee
d to consume more oxygen; a man also prone to claustrophobia, possibly made even worse by the terror of being underground with at least two vampires—to spend two days and two nights into an unpredictable, confined space. What if David were to die from asphyxia there?

  Haim had prayed, and cried, and remonstrated, and felt as miserably useless as he possibly could. Being unable to contact Rebekah to tell her how he missed his family, how he needed to share with her this emotional maelstrom, made it even more unbearable. Trying to cope, he had kept himself busy, helping test all manner and mode of instruments, from communications hardware to hacking software. He had even gone to Lyon to get David enough kosher nutribars to use during his underground expedition—and still found no peace, ‘trapped’ by his own religious sensitivities, regretful at times after deciding to help Tony with this unsanctioned monstrosity, no matter how well intentioned.

  His one source of solace: the Countess and he now seemed to be getting along famously, discussing the Crusades, anti-Semitism in Europe and what not, even as he was helping her cook this colossal feast for tonight, another form of occupational therapy.

  Admitting this enigmatic lady seem genuinely on the side of defeating evil, and incredibly conversant—if at times longwinded— in matters of history, had gone a long way into taking some of that weight off his chest. Had she not freely admitted that—her anti-Semitic far-removed Christian ancestor—Theodosius II had survived to become Emperor of Byzantium and to create the walls of Constantinople (that would take the Turks a thousand years to defeat), thanks to the Zoroastrian shah-in-shah Yazdegerd—who had a Jewish wife, Shushandukht—adopting him at the request of Theodosius’ father Arcadius? “God is a mystery,” the Countess had said, “and those who hate in His name sometimes show just ignorance. More often than not, though, they are simply evil. And fortunately, neither ignorance nor evil has to be an hereditary condition.”