ONSET: Blood of the Innocent

by Glynn Stewart

  And then more artillery shells arrived as David hoisted the limp—but still alive, according to his Sight—form of Elfin Lord Jamie Riley over his shoulders.

  “Fall back to the final surface position,” he ordered as the helicopters swept back around, cannon blazing in the night.

  “And McCreery?”

  “Sir?”

  “One pass with the cannons. Then get the hell out of here.”

  “What about you?” she asked.

  “We hold,” David said flatly. “One way or another, we hold or we die.”

  FOR TWO MINUTES, the guns pounded the vampire assault, six massive shells slamming home every fifteen seconds as Major Wilbur’s battery wore their barrels out. With two Familias leaders dead—or at least cripplingly wounded—in the same span, the vampires paused under fire, taking cover in the remaining APCs.

  It was long enough for David’s people to complete their withdrawal to the final dug-in position around the main bunker entrance. What was left of them, anyway.

  ONSET Six was gone, wiped out by Ambrose before she’d killed their commander.

  ONSET Fifteen was better off, with both Mason and two of her three agents up. Pierre Dupond wasn’t dead, but the big Empowered had been rushed back into the Mountain along with the other wounded. David didn’t know enough to say if he would pull through or not.

  His own team was intact, though with McCreery currently leading the helicopters to safety, he only had Stone and Hellet. They were down to six ONSET agents on the ground from twelve, a brutal winnowing he was sure was going to cause problems later.

  The Elfin were even worse off. Klein was dead. Silas, the leader of the scouts, was missing, and his five companions were dead. They’d started with forty Elfin Warriors, plus Riley and his Second. They now had nine and Young, though many were wounded instead of dead.

  There were a lot of dead Elfin and ONSET people on the slopes of Mount Scott tonight, and David doubted it was any reassurance to anyone that there were far more dead vampires and Thralls. Every stolen M1 Abrams was wrecked. Most of the Strykers and Bradleys were gone as well, as were a massive number of the M113 APCs.

  “We’re done,” Wilbur told him. “Gun six just blew her barrel to pieces. Two of my people are injured, but no fatalities and she’s still mobile. We are out of here.”

  “Drive fast, drive safe,” David replied. “And, Major?”

  “Yes, Commander?”

  “Thank you. And you should probably lock down your CBRN systems.”

  Wilbur was silent.

  “Seriously?”

  “I have no idea how this is going to go down, Major. Make certain your people are safe.”

  “Understood. Locking down our radiation seals. Good luck.”

  Mason, Young and Santiago approached him. His “leaders” were a quarter of his remaining people. It wasn’t a good place to be.

  “What do we do now?” Santiago asked.

  “Well, unless whoever’s left in charge over there is completely useless, they’re discovering about now that we collapsed the silo entrances earlier today,” David replied. “The only way into the Mountain is through us.”

  “Lovely,” Young snapped. “Riley’s in there. He’ll live, but…” She shook her head. “He’s vulnerable.”

  “I know. So are we all. Leitz.” He poked the analyst. “Any idea on what we’re looking at for numbers?”

  “Looks like they’re abandoning the APCs and bringing up the remaining Strykers and Bradleys,” she reported. “Most likely because those have grenade and missile launchers. Half the damn hill is on fire, David; it’s hard to get any kind of count, especially with vampires.”

  “Eyeball it,” he ordered grimly.

  “Three, four hundred,” Leitz answered. “Can’t get better than that.”

  David whistled softly. He’d lost most of his people getting this far, but they’d taken out over six hundred vampires and Thralls.

  “They’re moving,” she warned them. “APCs are sweeping on the silo doors, but you’ve got the Bradleys and Strykers heading for you.”

  “Understood.”

  THE VAMPIRES HAD STARTED with forty of the more heavily armed light armored vehicles, but only sixteen of them were left to make the rush, still evenly split between the Bradleys and Strykers.

  The Strykers moved first, their remote-controlled grenade launchers and machine guns spitting fire to try and keep everyone’s heads down. Vampire commandos moved with them, using the armored vehicles for cover while peppering the barricade with bullets whenever someone tried to return fire.

  One of the Elfin Warriors popped up with an anti-tank missile and managed to launch it, the weapon blasting the first Stryker to pieces, before taking at least three separate silver bullets and collapsing in a crumpled heap.

  “Keep your heads down,” Santiago snapped at his people. “Wait until they’re closer; we’re only going to get one decent shot to push them back.”

  It turned out they should have been wondering just what the Bradleys were doing. The eight M2s had been using the more lightly armed Strykers as screen and had spent the entire night shooting with their 25mm chain guns and machine guns.

  They had to be running low on chain gun ammunition, but none of them had used their other primary weapon. Now, the last eight of the armored fighting vehicles crested the hill in an even line, trained their turrets on David’s final fallback position, and launched their anti-tank missiles.

  He was flung back as the warheads exploded, shattering the sandbagged position, his ears ringing from the explosions as he tried to establish what was going on. The Strykers were adding to the confusion by dropping smoke grenades into the defensive position.

  “Fall back!” he shouted, almost unable to hear his own voice. “Fall back into the bunker!”

  Vampire commandos landed in the wreckage of his position even as he spoke, impossible leaps carrying them from beside the advancing armor to on top of his people. Memoria flashed out, the smoke only a minor impediment to his Empowered vision, and two of the vampires died before they even knew they’d reached him

  “Everyone fall back!” he bellowed again, charging into the growing concentration of the enemy. A machine gun chattered and he sidestepped, allowing Stone’s fire to tear apart a vampire about to shoot him, and he charged forward.

  There were two Elfin Warriors desperately lost in the smoke. He grabbed their shoulders and pointed, sending them to safety.

  Here was Hellet, smashed to the ground by a trio of vampires, one of who was tearing at her armor with fingers and fangs. David shot two of them with his off hand, his wounded shoulder barely absorbing the recoil, and decapitated the third, grabbing the Mage and half-carrying, half-dragging her toward the bunker.

  By the time they reached the massive, only partially open entrance, he wasn’t sure how much of the crowd around him was vampires versus his own people—then there was a flash of power as Young and Mason charged into action.

  First, they blasted the smoke away, and then they rained fire and lightning on the vampires intermixed with the retreating defenders. It bought David and his people distance, but that was all. More of the vampires were pouring into the tunnel behind him, and his hands were full carrying Hellet’s half-conscious form.

  “Someone help me!” he snapped—and then Stone was there.

  “Get us through the inner door. We’ve got to get under cover.”

  “They are right behind us,” Mason told him. “Whatever you’re going to do—”

  “We’ve got to move.”

  “They’re using shaped charges to breach Silo C,” Leitz reported in his head. “I’ve got nothing. What do we do?!”

  David pulled through the inner door after Stone, the last of the survivors to make it, and saw it begin to close. It was thoroughly oiled and moved smoothly and quickly, but it still seemed to take an eternity.

  And when it finally closed, he pulled the remote detonator from inside his armored vest
and clicked the button. There was no complexity to this. All of the codes had been input before he buried the bomb.

  The surface of Mount Scott disappeared in nuclear fire—along with the remaining vampire vehicles and any portion of the assault that wasn’t under the surface.

  35

  The entire bunker trembled around them, the mountain above them shifting as a massive chunk of its surface was removed and scattered. The tremors continued but slowed, and David looked over at Mason.

  “Kate?” he asked quietly.

  “The door is sealed.” She gestured at the big metal barrier to the outside world. “Some of them…a lot of them made it into the tunnel, but they’re not getting any further.”

  “That wasn’t what I wanted to know.”

  She sighed and nodded.

  “I can’t tell if the cleaner worked from in here,” she admitted. “I can tell you it triggered, but I don’t have a lot of experience with trying to contain the radiation from a nuclear explosion.”

  When they’d buried the bomb, Mason and Riley had put together a spell that should have limited it to the heat and blast effects, cleaning the radiation before it could cause long-term catastrophe. Even if the spell hadn’t entirely worked, it should, thankfully, have reduced the impact of what was already a “clean” weapon by nuclear standards.

  “We’ll need to get back in touch with the outside world, but right now, I need to know what’s going on.”

  “I can tell you that much,” Jenna said softly, the white-robed vampire seeming to appear from nowhere. She carried a computer tablet in her hands that she turned to show him. It was displaying the feeds from multiple security cameras throughout the hardened complex.

  “Just over a hundred of them made it into the tunnel and survived,” she told them, gesturing at the big door behind them. “The entrance has collapsed, someone will need to bring in major earth-moving equipment to get us out, but they also can’t get in. They are trapped until you decide what to do with them.”

  “Then that’s it, isn’t it?” David asked. “We did it.

  “Sadly, no,” the other of the two Sisters told him, Gabriel helping the Arbiter into the room. “Because despite our collapsing the entrances, they managed to open Silo C, and there are now about a hundred commandos and Mages, all from Familias Reginald, I believe, making their way in from there. They are not contained.”

  “Let me speak to these, Commander,” the Arbiter told David. He looked…injured. Drained. There was something wrong with him, something that hadn’t been there before. “There has been…so much death. I don’t know if I can take any more.

  “Let me talk to them, convince them to agree to my Truce, and I will bind them as I have bound the others before,” he promised. “Deal with Joseph Reginald—you must—but leave these to me. I will make them harmless; I swear it to you.”

  “His oaths are bound in magic and blood,” Gabriel snapped, despite the Arbiter’s angry glance. “He is sworn to preserve the race; this many deaths so near him is destroying him, Commander.”

  “Please, Gabriel,” the old vampire said weakly. “My weakness is not a weapon to be used.”

  “No,” David agreed, “but it’s part of the calculation, as Gabriel well knows.” He glanced over at his handful of remaining people. All of the remaining Agents had made it in, but Hellet was badly injured, clearly bitten.

  “Do we have any antivenom?” he asked, his gaze on his Agent.

  “If you don’t, we do,” Jenna told him. She flashed a smile at him as he looked at her in surprise. “Where did you think your people got the formula, Commander? You haven’t had that much opportunity to study vampires, after all.”

  The Arbiter crossed over to Hellet and knelt by her. Magic flickered from his hands as he studied her, and then he looked up and met David’s gaze with his strange black eyes.

  “She is too injured, Commander,” the vampire whispered. “Her body wars with itself, but she is beyond even magical healing now. If you let the virus take her, she may live. If you give her the antivenom I gave your people, she will die.”

  The Arbiter touched the Mage’s head gently.

  “There are things we can do to encourage the transformation, but she will either turn or die, Commander. Even my power cannot save her.”

  That was…one hell of a choice.

  “Help her,” David snapped. “Then talk to your people.”

  He turned to the Elfin.

  “Santiago, keep what’s left of your team here, just in case. Mason, Fifteen and Thirteen are with me.”

  David shook his head grimly.

  “Joseph Reginald was one of ours once. One way or another, Omicron will deal with him.”

  LEAVING the Arbiter to speak to the trapped vampires, David led the ONSET Agents deep into the underground complex. The Keepers had provided them a map that Leitz had loaded into their AR systems—systems that were shielded well enough to survive the EMP of the surface nuke—to guide their way to Silo C.

  The last thing David was expecting to hear during that journey was his phone ringing.

  “What the hell?” he exclaimed aloud, carefully adjusting the balance of his sword to pull out his Omicron-issued smartphone. A number was flashing on the screen—a number with no name attached.

  The phone was linked into a government directory, and only a handful of people had the number who weren’t in Omicron. All of them were programmed into the contacts. His phone had only run like this once before…

  “David White,” he answered crisply, still following the path on his HUD.

  “Commander, you can guess who this is,” the softly accented voice of Caleb Dresden, Patriarch of the Familias Dresden, said in his ear. “So, you survived. I wondered if you’d nuked your own position.”

  “I had alternatives,” David replied. “What do you want, Dresden?”

  “I need to know something, Commander. Something very, very important.”

  “I don’t have time for this,” David snapped. “Get to the point.”

  “Is the Mountain Crèche intact?” Dresden asked. “Are the children of my race alive, despite the fact you just blew up their safe haven?”

  “Yes,” David told him. “Despite your people’s attempt to kill everyone here.”

  “I have not participated in the attack,” the vampire said dryly. “Some of my people appear to have, which I will…deal with, if any have survived. Certainly, my allies have.

  “But Familias Dresden will not wage war on Omicron,” the Patriarch of that Family concluded. “You have defeated the massed forces of the Familias. I’m sure there’s some cleanup you’re still doing, you aren’t almost running for nothing, but I recognize when the war is over, Commander White.”

  Was the vampire suggesting…

  “You know my price,” Caleb Dresden said quietly. “If the Committee will lift Standing Order Twenty-one and provide a blanket amnesty for actions prior to the Truce, I will bind my Familias to the Arbiter’s Truce. I would see my family be citizens once more.

  “And I will not sacrifice their immortality for nothing,” he finished. “And the fact that I suspect I am the only remaining Patriarch except Sakura, who has conceded to me, leaves me many options in a more peaceful future.”

  “I can’t promise anything,” David told him. “That’s up to the Committee.”

  “I know,” the vampire leader confirmed. “For the moment, I guarantee a complete cease-fire on the part of every vampire outside the Mountain. If the Committee agrees to the Truce, we will provide a full detailing of our arms and facilities and engage in a cooperative process of disarmament.

  “If you can pound sense into your leaders, I now have the power to force the Vampire Familias of North America to honor the Arbiter’s Truce. Thank you for that, Commander White. It’s always nice to have someone else destroy one’s enemies.”

  Dresden chuckled.

  “I’ll hang on to this phone for a while,” he promised. “Though, believe
me, I’ll know the results of the Committee meeting before any attack could be launched on me.

  “I hope we speak again in better times, Commander White.”

  The phone clicked to silence.

  DAVID DIDN’T HAVE a lot of time to process the conversation with Dresden before they reached the chokepoint they’d been heading toward—and discovered that the vampires had made it there first. He yanked Mason bodily back out of the line of fire as his prescience twinged, then a fusillade of bullets smashed down the hallway.

  “They look pretty dug-in,” Stone noted. “That’s a lot of bullets.”

  The two ONSET Commanders traded glances. They were down to five: David; the two Mages from ONSET Fifteen, Mason and Bella Samuels; Mason’s flame elementalist, Tsimote; and Stone.

  It wasn’t much to contain a hundred vampires from trying to break forward.

  “We need to throw them back,” David said softly. “Grenades?”

  “You won’t be able to throw them without getting shot,” Stone replied.

  “But we can move them,” Samuels, Mason’s junior Mage, pointed out. “Commander Mason and I can drift them down the hallway, and then Tsimote can blow them.”

  “I can detonate them from a distance,” the elementalist confirmed, fire flickering around his hands as the man tried and failed to contain his hatred of vampires. “It will be good to send more of these scum to their graves.”

  “Control yourself, Tsimote,” David warned. “This…might well be the last time we fight vampires.”

  “Then I shall have to kill as many of them as I can tonight, won’t I?” Tsimote replied, his tone sending a shiver down the Commander’s spine. “I can detonate many grenades. How many do we have?”

  Combing out everyone’s gear produced a total of twenty fragmentation grenades. Only a quarter of them had silver in them, the rest would only injure or shock vampires unless they were very close, but they’d make a hell of a bang.