by John Conroe
“Hmm, that’s a tough one,” Omega said, and his depiction of being momentarily stumped was dead on. “Well, the Vorsook are an interesting species. Basically, they are all businesspeople, most similar to human hedge fund managers, private equity investors, and activist investors, but on super steroids. They seek to take over worlds like a corporate raider takes over a company. Then they reconfigure those worlds to produce resources for their ongoing operations or strip all the resources and leave a husk. And they’re cheap, using just the very smallest number of resources to conquer each new world.”
“Most of those capitalists I’ve ever met tend to almost live in their offices,” Brystol said.
“That’s a good analogy. Yes, I suspect a response, if one was made, using entanglement, would likely hit the aliens’ office, for lack of a better term.”
“Which may or may not injure said alien,” she said.
“Right; no way to know,” Omega said. “But it would do maximum damage to operations, even ones with redundant backups. That would send a pretty strong message, don’t you think.”
“Yeah, I could see how it would. How much energy would that be, do you think?”
“Well, do you remember when that asteroid hit New Hampshire?” Stacia asked.
She nodded.
“It would be a lot more than that,” Omega said. “Quite a lot more.”
In our apartment, Tanya turned to me on the couch where we were watching the live show. “But we’ll likely never know the results. Omega’s right—there’s no way to find out.”
“Actually, I don’t agree with that. I think there is a way,” I said, standing and holding out my hand to her.
Chapter 33
The chapel was empty, as I’d hoped it would be. It was about fifty-fifty odds these days. We had been rather shocked at how many employees had begun to use it since Tanya had ordered its construction and consecration. I had suggested that something about an imminent war of the worlds might possibly bring about a newfound interest in prayer. Lydia had immediately proclaimed me an idiot, expressing her own opinion that working for a company run by actual angels of God, fallen or otherwise, would likely have a pronounced tendency to strengthen religious faith. It was pretty obvious that she, herself, wasn’t overly impressed with at least half of those angelic supervisors.
The nondenominational chapel didn’t stay empty, though. As soon as we stepped into it, Barbiel appeared, sitting on the raised platform of the altar, his back against the pulpit, his legs crossed at the knee, hands folded over his kneecaps. “About time you thought to come to me,” he said.
“Human brain, bound by human thoughts,” I said, pointing at my skull. “As opposed to an actual angel, who wouldn’t be bound by anything, even physics.”
“You’re hoping I have an update on your witch’s counterattack,” he said. It was more statement than question.
“That’s your clever idea?” Tanya asked, looking at me.
I shrugged. “He doesn’t have to mess with the whole light-years-of-distance thing, right?” I asked as I looked his way.
“If you remembered the secret, then you would know that distance is really just a construct of your own minds. Every point in space sits right next to every other point, at least if you fold it the right way,” he said, standing up. “But to answer your question, I don’t know what happened… yet. What say we take a look?” He walked over to us, holding out his hands, one to each of us. “Hold on to my hands and hold each other’s, like, say, we were sitting down to pray before dinner. You do remember about praying before dinner, right?”
“Our family is a bit different, as you well know,” Tanya said. “We don’t all get to enjoy pizza night together.”
“Excuses,” Barbiel said. “Hang on.”
And the chapel was gone. As was the building… the city… the world. We were just suddenly floating in the vast blackness of space, stars and nebulae swirling around us. No temperature, no feeling of having air or not having it, which made me realize it must all be occurring just in my mind. It was still dizzying, oddly even for me and my vampire, until our spinning slowed and stopped. Then we began to move through the cosmos, faster and faster, and one of those distant stars grew to become a glowing red globe that expanded to fill our view. I looked to my right and found my vampire, head back, staring forward, enraptured by the view. A glance left and I found Barbiel watching me, completely amused. When my eyes met his, he smirked and pointed up with his chin. We seemed to be flying like Superman does, heads back, and now we were curving around the giant red sun that filled the space in front of us. Arcing around it, we passed a light gray planet, then another, this one dark, almost violet, our path circling us closer and closer to the red star until we straightened out on an approach to yet one more planet. This one was massive and striated like our own Jupiter, bands of red and tan alternating across its vast surface. As we got closer, the planet filled our view, the stripes of color growing to become all that we could see. A small speck appeared in the middle of those bands, a speck that grew to become a pinhead orb, expanding through all the various ball sizes till it too filled our view, almost blocking the planet behind it. Then Barbiel swirled us around behind what was clearly a planetary moon, twisting us till the planet was behind us and only space was visible behind the moon.
We moved closer and suddenly, detail became evident. The moon’s surface, much like Earth’s moon, was pockmarked with craters from ancient impacts. But one crater looked raw and new, a big bite out of the smooth arc of the surface. In fact, it was so new that debris still floated in space above it, moving away from the surface and behind the moon as the orb circled around its parent planet, leaving a trail in the vacuum.
We got closer and the crater grew and so did the details of it, as well as the material in the debris field we had just entered. Much of it was rock and dust, but there were also glimmers of metal, silver and bronze, gray and black, bits of alien machinery that I couldn’t begin to identify.
“Is that it? The alien’s base?” I asked, not stopping to think about things like atmosphere and a lack thereof.
“It was… It was its place of, as your computer friend called it, business,” Barbiel answered, his voice sounding completely normal.
“That’s a massive crater,” Tanya noted, her eyes narrowed and focused on the moon’s wound.
“That seems to be what happens when an excessive pulse of occult energy arrives inside an underground quantum device unexpectedly,” Barbiel said.
“What about the actual alien directing the attack?” Tanya asked.
He nodded with his chin at someplace over her shoulder. We turned and looked. Floating almost next to us, less than thirty feet away, was a small frozen corpse, with only one arm and one and a half legs. Big, bulbous head, though, with black eyes that were now covered in frost.
We all just looked at it for a moment, then Barbiel turned back to the hole in the moon. I followed his gaze and noticed movement, visible now that we were closer. Tiny insect-like things were crawling around the remains of what had clearly been some kind of underground base.
“Rescue operations?” I asked.
“Salvage,” Barbiel said. “The Vorsook are pretty independent of each other, and extremely opportunistic.”
“Whoever dies first, the rest are divvying up their gear sort of thing?” I asked.
“Exactly, but even worse. They have no concept of inheritance. This one’s portfolio of worlds is now up for grabs.”
“Kind of Wild West sort of stuff,” Tanya noted.
“Which is one of their greatest weaknesses.”
“It’s actually very capitalistic,” my vampire answered, looking thoughtful. “Does this buy us time?”
“Perhaps, but maybe not as much as you might like. The root thing your young witch did is probably just as valuable, as whoever is salvaging that base down there will be looking to take over that network of agents back on Earth. Now that you have a means of identifyin
g them, you can neutralize their threat.”
“Even the ones who didn’t call 9-1-1?” Tanya asked.
“Ask Declan. I suspect he has a way of finding the rest.”
Suddenly everything swirled away like a kaleidoscope and we were just simply standing in our own chapel, holding hands with each other but our free hands were empty, the angel nowhere to be seen.
I grinned at Tanya. “Pretty good idea, right?”
“Genius. Even Lydia will be impressed,” she said, her sapphire blue eyes gleaming with excitement.
Chapter 34
“What’s your verdict?” I asked Nika.
“Give her a moment to process,” Tanya admonished. “She just read both of our memories of whatever that was that Barbiel did to us.”
“No, I’m good,” Nika said. “Your memories are similar but different. That’s good.”
“Good?” Arkady asked, puzzled.
“If they were identical in every way, they would be suspect,” Declan said.
“Planted?” Lydia asked with uncharacteristic seriousness.
“Yeah, no one remembers things the same way,” Nika said. “Tanya has a near photographic memory, so it’s like watching a video. While Chris…”
“Can barely remember his own name?” Lydia asked helpfully. And she’s back.
“I was going to say his memories are a blend of senses, visual, auditory, and scent, with a kind of personal narration thrown in,” Nika said.
“What?” Stacia asked.
“It’s a mix of things, but it’s overlaid with thoughts and judgements, which is incredibly helpful. Not everyone does that, so it’s interesting,” our resident telepath said. “So yes, they both saw some kind of planetary body in space with a big crater freshly blasted in it. Chris felt it was a moon. There were machines salvaging material from the wreckage. And they saw a dead alien, completely consistent with the one I killed, and Barbiel identified it as our most current enemy.”
“Wow, we killed it?” Stacia asked.
“It appears so,” Nika answered.
Omega appeared and no one so much as flinched. “Your verbal descriptions depict what would be a fairly normal operations center for a fairly successful Vorsook. Also, the scavenging is entirely in line with Vorsook culture. You most likely saw not one but several different factions attempting to recover information and assets.”
“So they can take over the worlds it left behind?” Declan asked.
“Yes, as well as find out what mistakes it made in its attempts to conquer Earth.”
“So we’re not done?” Lydia asked.
“I’m afraid not. There will likely be a lag before the next contender steps up, as they take apart his portfolio and attempt control of agents still here on Earth.”
“Which we have identified, right?” Lydia asked.
“For the most part. There are still others out there. I have located an additional fifty-six individuals who have been hiding their sudden manifestation of roots, rhizomes, and corms. It only makes sense that there are still some that I haven’t found.”
“Remote viewing,” Declan suddenly said. His words were met with collective confusion.
“What Chris and Tanya experienced… I think it was a form of remote viewing—a jacked-up, angelic version.”
“What is remote viewing?” Lydia asked.
“Is brains seeing places and people far away with just power of mind,” Arkady said.
“The Russians have been big into it in their secret spy programs,” Declan said with a nod.
“No, Discovery Channel,” the giant vampire said.
“Oookay,” Lydia said. “What’s your point?” she asked the witch.
“Just trying to identify the phenomenon so we have more information to work with,” he said.
“Can you remote view?” Tanya asked him.
“Yeah, it’s something Aunt Ash is really good at, but I can do it to some degree,” he said.
“And who have you viewed… remotely?” Stacia asked, her tone innocent but the hairs went up on my neck.
He flushed a little, but somehow, I think he missed the danger point that I saw in her question. “I’ve used it to check up on important people in my life, mostly when I needed to find them,” he said. His blush made instant sense to me but oddly, Stacia seemed to miss it.
“Like, say, your classmates?” she asked, voice still dangerously bland.
“No, you moron,” Lydia said. “The little pervert checks up on you.”
“Not like that,” Declan rushed to say. “I don’t invade privacy, just like Nika doesn’t. And I have checked on the twins, and pretty much all of you at one point or another. It’s not something I do a lot and I’m nowhere near as good as Aunt Ash.”
“Hmm,” Stacia said, watching him.
“How does knowing what this was help us?” I asked, throwing my young friend a lifeline.
“Because, first, it helps make it thoroughly plausible and, second, perhaps even something we could replicate,” Declan said.
“How?” Tanya asked. I had felt her annoyance at the byplay between the witch, the werewolf, and the smallest vampire, but now she was interested.
“I’m not fully sure we can. Remote viewing works best between people who know each other. The stronger the relationship, the better the view,” he said.
“So how do we connect with the Vorsook?” Tanya asked. “Oh, like how you just blasted that moon base?” she guessed at her own question.
“I guess, although we’re all out of minions with Vorsook nanotech in them,” he said.
“As I have said, there are undoubtedly components of the intelligence network still hidden,” Omega said. “There is a very high probability that at least one more of these minions, as you call them, Father, is still around. I am searching.”
“So we grab one and you, what? Use it like a television set?” Lydia asked.
“Me or Aunt Ash—with Nika watching through our eyes too,” he said. “Maybe glean some important intelligence.”
“Glean? Attempting some intelligence of your own, Warlock Darren?” Lydia asked.
“Darren wasn’t a warlock,” Nika protested. “His wife was a witch, but he wasn’t.”
“What the hell are you two talking about?” Stacia asked.
“Bewitched,” Lydia said, frowning. “The show?”
Tanya, Declan, Stacia, and I all just looked at each other in confusion.
“Never mind; it was before your time,” Lydia said.
“Okay, Grandma,” Declan said with a grin.
“Having a chance to observe our enemy would be a nice change of pace,” Tanya said. “If Omega can find one,” she said, turning to the avatar.
The AI’s holograph was frozen in place, not moving. After a second, he came back to life. His head lifted and he turned to me. “Chris, there is a problem with your grandfather.”
Chapter 35
“Gramps?” I asked, surprised and suddenly worried.
“He’s been attacked by a werewolf. His friend Len is dead, but he’s still alive. The transport is still on the roof.”
“Screw that. I’ll open a portal,” Declan said, pulling chalk from a pocket.
In less than two minutes, a mirror floated in air in the middle of our conference room. It was the longest two minutes of my life. At Declan’s nod, I stepped through, finding myself in my old bedroom in my grandfather’s house. Declan had been here exactly once, yet he remembered it well enough to rip a gate through reality to it. Barbiel’s words came back to me: Every point is next to every other point, if you can fold space.
I was out the door and headed downstairs even as I thought those thoughts, the sound of Tanya’s footsteps right behind me.
Gramps was outside, surrounded by the St. Lawrence pack, covered in blood. Fifteen feet away, a blood-soaked blanket covered what was clearly a body. Both of my dogs lay on the ground, throats torn out.
Then I was through the weres and kneeling by his side.
My loyal, loving, brave old grandfather had been thoroughly savaged. His left forearm was torn to shreds, and a bloody wad of what might have once been a yellow t-shirt was being held over his stomach by Kelly, the female Alpha. His pain-filled eyes found me as soon as I leaned over him, and he tried to speak but only blood came out of his mouth.
No, no, no. This was not happening. I pulled my aura together and shoved it into him, into his stomach, into his arm.
“Chris, stop,” Tanya said, softly, her mouth near my left ear.
“I can’t. He’s dying,” I said, pulling more aura to myself, gripping the God Tear that hangs on my chest.
“No, he’s not,” she said simply.
I glanced at her and she pointed at Gramps’ arm. The bleeding had stopped, the blood coagulating.
“Use your Sight,” she said. I looked at her, confused, but she just took my head in her hands and gently turned it toward the old man on the ground. “Sight,” she encouraged.
I shifted vision, turning on the part that lets me see auras. My grandfather’s blue aura was dim, but liberally flecked with bright green around the stomach and arm.
“The LV is already healing him. You may have just helped it along,” my vampire said.
Kelly looked at her, then leaned down and sniffed the t-shirt she was using for direct pressure. “She’s right. It’s taken hold. He might live through it.”
Stacia pushed through and bent down to sniff Gramps’ arm. “No, he’s definitely going to make it. The LV is thriving.”
The virus generally either killed anyone it infected or turned them. Death usually resulted when the host’s body fought too hard against the invader, like a transplanted organ being rejected. A thriving virus indicated acceptance.
“What happened?”
“We had a trespasser. A loner,” Brett Mallek said from behind me. I hadn’t noticed him among the crowd. “He just appeared. Came from the south. Demanded entrance to our pack. We didn’t like his smell. I drove him off. He came back and attacked Len and Alex.”
“Why?” I asked, baffled. Len was dead and my grandfather was likely about to become a geriatric werewolf. Why had this happened?