ONSET: Blood of the Innocent

by Glynn Stewart

  “I am prepared to offer a compromise,” the Arbiter continued. “I do not wish to fight you, but my oaths require me to secure the safety of the teknon. Your orders require you to murder them in cold blood, but you are a man of honor, I believe.”

  “Say your piece, vampire,” David finally allowed.

  “Allow me to take these fledglings, these teknon,” the old vampire asked. “My Keepers and I are sworn to peace; we will harm no one. We will simply take the trucks and go.

  “In exchange, these teknon will not rejoin the Familias Romanov. They will be mine and join my Keepers, sworn to pacifism and to never touch human blood. They will harm no one; I swear it.”

  “You can’t expect me to believe that,” David replied. “There are no guarantees.”

  “I offer only one guarantee, Commander White: that if they break the oaths I lay upon them, I will destroy them myself.

  “The Familias has brought enough bloodshed to our country, Commander,” the Arbiter told him. “Let it end for tonight. I offer you my word, my sacred bond, my oath upon the Cross of our Savior.

  “Whatever you will accept, I am prepared to swear,” he continued, “but I am not leaving here without the teknon.

  “I would prefer we all left here alive.”

  David didn’t have the authority to accept the deal. He knew that. Per standing orders and Omicron policy, there was only one thing he could do with the fledglings—the teknon, as the Arbiter called them. That meant he would have to fight the Arbiter, a battle he suspected would be more even than the vampire seemed to think, and yet…

  If he somehow managed to overcome a technically immortal being with centuries or more of experience on him, duty would then require him to walk into those trucks and shoot forty chained-up people in the head.

  Chained-up people who hadn’t chosen to become vampires. Who had no idea what was going on, who couldn’t even conceive of the fate that they’d been handed.

  Killing them was a mercy…and yet…

  “There are no guarantees my superiors will accept,” he told the vampire levelly. “No promises you could make, no oaths you could swear. They will never believe a vampire.”

  “So long as that is true, David White, then this war can only continue,” the Arbiter told him. “I believe there can be peace, that vampires do not need to be predators in the night, hunted like rabid dogs.

  “Let me make these men and women something else.”

  Three Land Rovers pulled up behind the sports car, the massive SUVs each disgorging four more vampires. These wore simple white robes that concealed their forms and could easily hide weapons, but none had visible guns.

  They stood by their vehicles, waiting for David and their master to decide if there would be more bloodshed tonight.

  “We’ll back you, sir,” Hellet’s voice said softly in David’s ear. “Fight him or let them go, we’re behind you.”

  David might be able to kill the Arbiter, but he doubted his team would survive the fight. He’d lose Stone and Hellet and likely most of the Elfin as well. He’d add a slew more deaths to his conscience, and for what? To enable him to add cold-blooded murder as well?

  He sighed and stepped to the side, gesturing the vampires to the trucks.

  “If you betray me, I will hunt you and every one of these vampires down,” he warned the Arbiter. “To the ends of the Earth and beyond all time. You will not be able to escape me.”

  “If I fail these teknon so greatly, you will not find me hard to catch,” the vampire replied, gesturing his minions forward. “I swear to you, Commander, they will be better than the vampires you have known.

  “Or I will destroy them myself.”

  6

  The white-robed vampires made their way forward to study the crash site. They seemed remarkably unbothered by the bodies and the wreckage that had been a Familias Romanov strike force an hour before, stepping around debris while they studied how best to move the trucks.

  They seemed equally unbothered by the watching ONSET agents and hovering helicopters, a lack of concern somewhat validated when they realized the wreckage of the forward escort truck was going to stop them moving the tractor-trailers.

  One of them, a young-looking woman who would have been stunningly attractive if David didn’t know exactly what she was, gestured at the wreck. There was a pulse of power, as much felt as seen, even to his Sight, and the wreckage simply…disintegrated.

  It was a twisted mass of metal, likely containing at least two and probably four or five bodies, one moment…and the next, it was faint white dust blowing away in the wind.

  The vampire Mage’s aura, however, revealed the truth. She might have made it look casual—these vampires were clearly trying to be impressive—but her aura flickered with an exhaustion she managed to not show as the spell completed.

  “Show-off,” Hellet murmured in David’s ear. “Sure, if it’s the only thing I’m planning on doing tonight, I can do that too.”

  “Behave,” he replied, equally softly. Three of the white-clad vampires returned to their Land Rovers while the others piled into the trucks, one into each back section—something David wouldn’t have been brave enough to do!—and one into each cab.

  Then the trucks they’d spent so much effort to track and catch were on their way, the black sports car in the lead and the three Land Rovers falling into formation around it.

  David watched them go, wondering if he’d done the right thing. As the sound faded away to silence, he tapped his communicator.

  “Charles, it’s White,” he pinged the dragon. “Those trucks are in motion again. Track them.”

  “In motion?” the dragon asked. “I thought ye’d taken them.”

  “I had,” the ONSET Commander confirmed. “A new player entered the game and I had to make a call. I want to know where that player takes those trucks, Charles. It’s important.”

  “If this ‘player’ is remotely competent and knows we could track them, we won’t be able to follow them far,” the dragon warned.

  “I don’t expect them to go far, but I know,” David replied. “We’ll likely lose them.”

  “I’ll track them,” the dragon agreed slowly. “But…just what deal did ye make, Commander? I’m not sure ye had the authority to let those trucks go.”

  “I didn’t,” David told him. “But I wasn’t going to shoot chained-up fledglings, either. Had to make a call.”

  “Aye,” Charles said. “Ye’re going to pay for that call, ye know that, right?”

  “I know.”

  DAVID TOOK another turn around the perimeter of the battlefield, then sighed. It was time to face the music, if for no other reason than that Major Traci Warner controlled his cleanup teams.

  “ONSET Thirteen Actual, reporting in,” he said crisply on the main command channel. “Situation is resolved.”

  “‘Resolved’,” Warner echoed back at him. “What exactly does that mean, White? One moment, we’re lighting up with reports of incoming vehicles, presumed hostile, and the next you go silent.

  “What the hell happened, David?”

  There wasn’t much point beating around the bush, and David White didn’t have much taste for that even if he thought he could escape the consequences of his choice.

  “We had incoming vampires but not, as it turned out, incoming hostiles,” he told her. “We met the vampire who was supposed to be taking in the fledglings, a very old, very powerful vampire named the Arbiter.”

  He paused.

  “No one briefed me on any millennium-plus vampires in the continental United States,” he said slowly, “so I’m guessing we didn’t know he existed.”

  “There aren’t supposed to be any millennium-plus vampires, period,” Warner replied. “What did he want?”

  “The fledglings,” David explained. “He called them teknon or his charges. He didn’t want a fight, but he was prepared to fight for them.”

  There was silence on the line.

  “What did
you do, Commander?”

  “I let him take them,” he said flatly. “He would have represented a fight my team was not ready for, was not prepared for, and would likely take brutal losses to win.

  “I was not prepared to take those losses to allow us to murder forty people in cold blood.”

  His words hung in the night air like bombs.

  “They aren’t people, David,” Warner replied quietly after several long seconds. “At that stage, they’re mindless beasts—mindless beasts who have almost certainly killed.”

  “We can’t just shoot every American citizen who gets infected,” he snapped. “There has to be a better way—and maybe this Arbiter can give it to us.”

  “He’s a vampire, David. He might be old and powerful and perhaps he decided to talk today, but he feeds on humanity. We can’t trust their kind!”

  “He swore to me, to a Seer, that he would bind them to never touch human blood and that if they broke that oath, he would destroy them himself,” David said flatly. “You know what I see of the souls of men and monster alike. He did not lie.”

  “You let them go.”

  “I let him take them. I chose to trust his word rather than commit an atrocity that would stain my soul,” he half-whispered.

  “That was a violation of both standing orders and my direct orders on this mission,” Warner pointed out.

  “I was the commander on the ground. It was my call. I will accept the consequences.”

  He heard the Major sigh.

  “All that effort to track them, and you let them go,” she repeated. “I have to report this, David. The Colonel will have to explain to the Committee why, after everything we went through to hit the Golden Twilight Casino and chase down those trucks, we let them get away.”

  The channel was silent.

  “Ma’am, there has to be a line we can’t cross,” David reminded her. “Or we aren’t police anymore. We’re just thugs.”

  She sighed again.

  “Cleanup teams are en route. Klein will be reassigned back to Mason. You and ONSET Thirteen are recalled to the campus.

  “Try not to get in any more trouble on the way home.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  7

  McCreery brought the Pendragon in to land amidst the Campus’s set of squat office buildings with practiced skill. No one aboard the aircraft said a word, each of them studying the home of their agency in silence instead of speaking.

  The Campus was a walled compound a bit over half a mile on a side, nestled in the mountains above Colorado Springs. Three office towers marked the central point, surrounded by a collection of small apartment buildings that housed the ONSET teams and their support staff.

  Even with all of the buildings, most of the ONSET Campus was underground. In those cavernous facilities, the US government’s Omicron Branch manufactured the strange mix of technology and magic that gave both OSPI and ONSET an edge over both mundane and supernatural opposition.

  It was also the closet thing David White now had to a home. It was slowly starting to sink in as they landed that his choices tonight might take that from him. He’d disobeyed orders and potentially loosed dozens of vampires on the world.

  It might cost him his career and his new life, and he’d regret it if it did…but he wouldn’t change his choice. David simply didn’t have it in him to kill men and women chained to a wall, especially not men and women who had no choice in what they’d become.

  It was a lot easier to fulfill a standing shoot-on-sight order when every encounter with vampire fledglings involved their mindlessly attacking.

  “David, it’s Charles,” the dragon’s brogue murmured in his ear. “Yer back on Campus?”

  “Just landing,” he replied. “What’s up?”

  “I need ye to come by mae cave,” Charles told him. “Soon. I don’t know how long ye’ll be on duty before, well… The Colonel is on the phone with the Committee and no one is happy.”

  The Committee of Thirteen was the Special Committee for Supernatural Affairs, the subset of Congress authorized to wield Congress’s full powers in supernatural matters. To all intents and purposes, they were the government of the United States when it came to the supernatural, magical, and parahuman.

  David wasn’t going to question how Charles, an expert hacker and the being in charge of ONSET’s communications security, knew that Colonel Ardent, ONSET’s Commanding Officer, was talking to the Committee, but if the dragon said he was in trouble…

  “I’ll send my team to their quarters and be right down,” he promised.

  WHILE CHARLES’S nature wasn’t exactly a secret, there was a significant portion of even the Campus’s population that didn’t know that “Charles St. Patrick,” a name chosen with vindictive glee by the dragon, wasn’t just a human IT administrator.

  Since the Omicron Branch also couldn’t allow the dragon to fly around where people could see him, Charles had massive, extremely comfortable quarters set up underneath the Campus. Even for those in the know, reaching the dragon’s lair required trekking through tunnels that looked little different from the rest of the maintenance tunnels underneath the massive complex.

  Reaching the lair, however, you passed through a hatch-like door that wasn’t big enough for the dragon himself and entered a vast open space floored in the blue plush carpeting ubiquitous to Omicron facilities. Bookshelves stacked fifteen feet high covered one wall, and a dragon-sized kitchenette filled one corner.

  The main feature of the space, however, was the massive computing setup with its floating-mount keyboard and trackball in front of the massive hybrid of a dog-bed and a sofa that Charles used as a working seat.

  The dragon was currently curled into that bed, his thirty-foot length compressed into a loaf-like position any cat owner would be familiar with—if on a completely different scale.

  “Welcome, Commander,” Charles greeted him. “Still feeling like ye made the right call?”

  David glared at the dragon.

  “Is this a test?” he asked. “Because I’m starting to feel like this is a test.”

  “Life is a test, my very young friend,” the dragon told him in his thick brogue. “I do not control fate, though, to be honest, I could not have written a better test of Omicron’s commitment to its ideals if you gave me weeks to think of it.”

  “Our ideals? How is a set of forty chained-up vampires a test of our ideals?” David asked, settling with a sigh into one of the comfortable chairs the dragon kept for visitors.

  “It has always been the intent of the Omicron Offices to apply the Constitution and laws of the United States of America to the supernatural population as completely as possible inside the limitations of keeping their existence secret,” Charles pointed out. “There has always been a conflict between that and the perceived necessity of eliminating supernaturals judged to be inherently dangerous.”

  “The vampires didn’t exactly give us much choice.”

  “Or did you not give them any?” the dragon asked. “The Omicron Offices inherited the prejudices of the old judges of the Omicron Circuit they replaced, and the policy of those elites was unofficially ‘shoot it or recruit it.’”

  The dragon shook his immense head.

  “The vampires wouldn’t play,” he concluded. “The United States government has been at war with the vampires for longer than I have been awake this time around. Longer than any living member of the Omicron Offices has been alive.

  “Do ye truly know how the war started?” Charles questioned. “Because, believe me, Commander, the vampires remember.”

  “Do you know?” David asked.

  “No,” the dragon admitted with a chuckle. “I was a rock formation on an Appalachian hill until the eighties, David. I was strange-looking granite for eight hundred years, only vaguely aware of even the passage of time.”

  David shivered. Human supernaturals were Mantled, touched by a spark of power that needed a host to manifest. Dragons were of a type known as Imbu
ed or Awoken, otherwise inanimate material give life by a supernatural spirit.

  “I thought you were from Ireland,” the Commander said.

  “A long time ago,” Charles admitted. “I left Eire before the end of the first millennium, as we count such things now.”

  “Why the accent, then?” David asked, considering the dragon’s thick Irish brogue.

  “All I spoke when I was Awoken were languages of tribes and nations lost to the world,” the dragon replied. “The most useful of those languages were Latin and Gaelic, neither of which I knew in a modern form.

  “My first translator was an Irish immigrant, a brilliant man who enjoyed the life of an Appalachian miner…but had learned Irish Gaelic at his mother’s knee. I was lucky he found me, or things might have gone far worse.”

  For everyone, David imagined. The negotiations to convince a thirty-foot-long, fire-breathing, magic-wielding, flying lizard to come live in a sealed armored cave must have been fraught enough with the ability to communicate with Charles.

  “Why did you want me down here?” he finally asked. “Did you have anything on those trucks?”

  “I did,” Charles confirmed, “but I wanted to show ye before it went up the chain, so you didn’t get ambushed with it.”

  That didn’t sound good.

  “Look at the screen,” the dragon continued, tapping a series of commands. The massive display changed into a map of the United States, and then zoomed in on the border between Nevada and California. Four blue dots appeared on it.

  They were clearly still moving and quite a distance apart from each other, neither of which David had expected.

  “Those are the trucks,” he said levelly.

  “They are.”

  “It’s daylight around there,” David observed. “The drivers I saw were vampires, and the trucks weren’t tinted enough for them to drive during the day.”

  “Plus, they were moving in convoy,” the dragon agreed. “For them to have split and still be driving in daylight…”