Broken Ice (Immortal Operative Book 1)

by J. R. Rain

“The documentation in this memory stick is all in Latin,” says Klaus.

  “Okay, that’s just a little messed up.” I glance at Andrew. “We’ve got a memory stick from the future with a file system from the present and data written in language from the distant past?”

  “That is one way to look at it.” Vinod smiles. “However, do your people not have a story of journeying to Earth from a distant world?”

  I shrug. “We do, but the myths aren’t very flattering to humans.”

  “You call them myths.” Klaus purses his lips. “But what if they aren’t?”

  “We won’t take any offense,” says Thom. “Please, in the interest of science…”

  “Okay.” I sigh and sit again in the same office chair I’d spent most of the morning. “The stories vary a little from one to the next, but they generally claim that my kind came to Earth before humans existed as a separate species from primates. In short, the stories claim we are the reason humans exist… due to our modification of simian DNA. I’ve heard everything from vampires built the pyramids, to the Nazca lines, to stories claiming we gave the ancient Mayans their knowledge of astronomy.”

  The techies react with a mixture of chuckles, whistles, and an eye roll from Miss Chang.

  “Yeah…” I glance at Annie. “I agree with you. It’s too far-fetched.”

  “Mina—is it okay if I call you that?” asks Klaus.

  “Sure.”

  He nods in acknowledgment. “This data describes a device used to allow the operator to empower their mind and exert control over… livestock. Your people all possess psychic talents. We think this device is or was a psychic amplifier that allowed an operator to broadcast mental influence over a wide area.”

  “It has to be some kind of prior civilization.” Thom taps a finger to his chin. “We’d made some finds in Antarctica similar to this, locating architecture that appeared far too modern.”

  I blink, processing what I’m hearing. Nothing like having one’s entire worldview upended in an instant.

  I move closer to the screen, nearly sitting in Klaus’ lap. “Let me see this.”

  “You read Latin?” asks Andrew from the video screen.

  “I’m a little fuzzy since I haven’t used it in a while, but yeah. My parents insisted when I was like thirty.”

  A few of the scientists give me a ‘you’re not even thirty’ look.

  “Thirty to me is like six to you.”

  “They taught Latin to a six-year-old?” asks Nakamura.

  I glance at her. “No, they taught Latin to a thirty-year-old. I was just learning to walk at six.”

  Everyone stares at me except Andrew. He’s used to the age gap by now. I pore over the data in the ‘alien’ memory stick, and the more I read, the more it makes me want to scream. This has got to be some sort of Dominion mind game.

  “If what I’m seeing here is accurate—and I’m not convinced it is—this data describes a telepathic amplifier that Origin vampires once used to keep large numbers of humans docile as basically subservient animals. Its range is proportionate to the strength of whoever channels their power into it, increasing if multiple vampires work together. I’d say it’s good for at least a hundred mile radius with one average operator, and probably maxes out at close to a thousand miles with five vampires working together.”

  Klaus blinks at me and begins to argue the meanings of a few words. Apparently, he learned an alternate form of Latin to what I know. Our debate screeches to a sudden stop after only a few minutes when Thom clears his throat.

  “What if humans had been created by ancient vampires and wound up absorbing some bits of what had been spoken by the vampires of the time. Humans could’ve invented a sister language that we know of as Latin but that differs from what’s been preserved among the Origins.”

  My turn to stare at someone, aghast.

  “Not to put too fine a point on it,” says Andrew, “but if that information is accurate, and that location in Siberia actually has one of those things…”

  “Then we can’t let the Dominion anywhere near it,” I say.

  “You sound less than thrilled.” Andrew gives me a concerned look.

  “I’m okay. Just having trouble believing the stories I’ve heard might be real. Oh, and the whole going to Siberia part.” I stand and tuck my hair behind my ear. “Guess I should pack then. I’ll need a decent coat.”

  “You got it.” Andrew nods.

  Annie Chang blinks at me. “Coat? I thought vampires were immune to frostbite.”

  “We’re not dead, lady. Our bodies create the illusion of being immune to frostbite because of our rapid regeneration. Technically, we suffer frostbite, get better, get frostbite again, recover, and so on and so forth. It’s more or less constant agony until we run out of energy, then we freeze solid, though we still don’t die.”

  “Oh.” She shivers. “Sorry I asked.”

  “On that note.” I point at Andrew. “How about some electric gloves?”

  Chapter Fifteen

  To the Bottom

  While the Agency makes preparations to send me to Siberia, I head into Berlin for a side project.

  After a private conversation with Andrew in which I explained the surveillance of Jake’s old apartment and what I found in the vampire’s head, he gave me the green light to check out the Dominion site, the black marble building I’d seen in the night walker’s thoughts.

  It’s not the best attire for infiltration, but entering an office tower without drawing undue suspicion requires a certain look. Hair up, light makeup, grey skirt suit, and heels. I’m not a big fan of high heeled shoes, but I’m agile enough that they don’t hinder me too much. In a pinch, I could always kick them off. Not like I paid for these.

  The high-rise is a forty-two story tower downtown with an oval footprint. Black glass covers the rest of the exterior, plain except for silver numbers: 920, the street address. I push through a revolving door into a huge three-story atrium that offers a view into the second and third floor corridors running between the various tenant businesses.

  No reception desk or security guards are in the way, so I cross the lobby to the elevator I remember from the night walker’s memory. A directory board near the elevators bears a listing of companies and their floor/suite numbers. I don’t see anything that suggests this is a vampire stronghold.

  Other than a few guys checking me out, I don’t get much of a reaction from anyone scurrying around the lobby. So far, it seems a legit place of business. I do need to use a mental prod to keep two guys and a woman from joining me in the elevator. Hey, there’s five others. They don’t need to use the one I’m in.

  As soon as the doors slide closed, I enter 7532159 using a numeric keypad below the 1-40 buttons. After a momentary hesitation, the elevator slides down without updating the floor number display, which still shows 1.

  When downward motion ceases, the back wall opens, revealing a plain concrete and cinderblock corridor with fat pipes and thin black tubes running along the corners of the ceiling. Narrow ones have high voltage warnings on them. A blue conduit almost big enough for me to fit inside thrums with the vibration of a distant HVAC unit. Hmm. Guess the Dominion went cheap and just took over an existing basement rather than build a secret operations center.

  The world must be in bad shape indeed if a clandestine vampire organization bent on world domination has to watch their budget.

  No sense announcing my presence with loud clicking, so I slip out of my heels and carry them down the corridor past electrical rooms, boilers, storage closets, and a server room. Some ninety feet later, the hallway corners to the right. A heavy, concrete slab door like something out of a military bunker hangs open at the end of a short spur. That’s both good and bad news. Good because I don’t have to figure out how to open it, bad because it means someone else is here.

  I edge up to the bulkhead and listen. Intermittent typing clicks over the background hum of electronics along with the occasional creak o
f an office chair. No conversation, and the activity isn’t terribly loud. Probably one-to-three people at most. Good. I reach up and hide my heels atop one of the thicker pipes where no one should notice them, and sneak past the door.

  Long strips of glass window run down both sides of the hallway beyond the reinforced door. The first room to the right is a dark and empty conference area with a big table and a giant screen on the inner wall. The room to the left sports rows of computer equipment and seems to be a lab-type workspace. Signs of activity emanate from the lab.

  A wall of rack-mounted computers blocks my view of the person inside, but I still drop into a crouch to get under the window before scurrying the forty feet to the entrance. Contemplative hums give away the occupant is female. Once at the door, I rise up enough to peer in the window. From this angle, I’ve got a clear view of a twentyish woman with long, black hair and light brown skin. She’s rocking a jeans and turtleneck ensemble, which makes me grumble at myself for dressing up.

  Six monitors in front of her display mostly pictures of a snowy camp full of Russian military equipment, though one screen has a familiar schematic… the amplifier. The Dominion must already know what is in that place in Siberia, but I have a suspicion that they haven’t—for whatever reason—gone inside.

  The information in that computer system might be valuable.

  I could try walking in like I belong here, but if this woman is Dominion, she’ll probably recognize me. Though, the brazenness of it will buy me a second or two while she tries to figure out if she’s really seeing me walk straight into their operations center. I ease myself up to stand and open the door.

  She turns toward me the instant the handle emits a squeak too faint for human ears to detect. Sure enough, an instant look of recognition flashes across her features along with a mixture of fear and annoyance. This woman is totally giving off a computer geek backed into a corner vibe. She’s no Origin as I can see her thoughts bouncing back and forth between hitting a ‘wipe everything’ button and going for a handgun in the desk.

  “Neither reaching for that master erase nor trying to take me out are going to end well for you.” I flash a sultry smile while walking closer. “Why don’t you just have a seat and stay out of my way? This doesn’t need to be unpleasant.”

  “Dammit,” she whispers, before starting to spin toward a comically large blue plastic button under a clear-plastic shield.

  I leap forward and seize the woman by the shoulders, pulling her back an instant after she swats the shield up, before she can hit the kill switch. She shrieks in startled anger, a trace of animal snarl in her voice. With a grunt, I spin and throw her toward the wall. She lands in a flailing, screaming heap. I reach over and close the clear box over the button.

  The girl springs upright, bares her fangs, and charges at me.

  Expecting she’s merely trying to make me dodge so she can get to the master delete, I stand firm and catch her into an attempted takedown flip. She’s faster than I expect, and between her sneakers and my stocking feet, she wins the war of traction. I cling, pulling her down with me. She grabs and thrashes, fighting with all the skill of a high school girl, which is to say—not much.

  However, she is energetic, which makes containing her a challenge. We wrestle around on the floor for a moment or two before I get frustrated and grab the wakizashi from its sheath strapped to my leg under my skirt. She shrieks when she sees the blade flash in front of her face, but I simply stab it into her brain instead of cutting her head off.

  The girl flops still, two thin trails of blood running down her forehead and gathering in her eyes. Looks worse than it is. She’ll be fine in about ten minutes or so since a thrusting wound from my little sword doesn’t do all that much damage to the brain… not like a 9mm hollow point. With a grunt, I yank the sword out and stand, looking around for something to tie her up with.

  A nearby shelf holds spools of network wire and a box of heavy duty cable ties. Perfect.

  After making sure she doesn’t have any weapons or nasty surprises hidden on her person, I toss her in the steel chair by the worktable and bind her to it with four ties each per wrist and ankle. Already, the hole in her forehead has shrank by about half.

  With her neutralized, I wipe the blood off my sword and put it away, then attack the computer system. They’ve got an external hardware device roughly the size of a pack of cards that appears to be the proper connection for the ‘alien’ memory stick. The other side has standard USB connections… this must be an adapter they came up with. Nice. I disconnect it and stuff it in my vest pocket. The Agency will likely be interested in that.

  The computer here has similar information regarding the amplifier as what we found on the memory stick, only with more details, suggesting they’d allowed a watered-down version to leak. I’m sure they didn’t want us actually opening it, but they had to give him enough to get excited about and report on.

  According to these files, the alien device located in Siberia is operational but not active. It does appear to be a psychic amplifier, but the ‘bandwidth’ is relatively narrow. I don’t think it would allow for sending specific commands to individuals or reading thoughts. Humans caught within the area of effect would all likely experience a continuous state of highly-suggestible near catatonia.

  Oh, great… this machine turns people into senators.

  This file also indicates the effective range closer to a radius of 2,500 miles with five vampires concentrating at once. I get sucked into the details concerning the synthetic core that ‘feels’ like a live brain to our psychic senses. Using the amplifier doesn’t sound much different from targeting a single human, only the effect is broadcast over a large area. A couple pages in, I find diagrams that look quite a bit like ziggurats and pyramids.

  Holy shit… Aztecs built a ton of those structures, as did Egypt… could the pyramids have been broadcast towers? And the areas around them farms... human farms?

  I shake my head, taking this in. What modern society thought of as advanced primitive civilizations may well have been the work of vampires. The humans had probably been treated much like farm animals, just standing around in a stupor, barely capable of eating on their own. Come to think of it, the humans have a story about enslaved people fleeing ancient Egypt…

  Gah. That’s horrible. Reading this makes me thoroughly ashamed of my ancestors.

  Assuming, of course, this isn’t all BS.

  I also have to believe that modern humans have evolved quite a bit from whatever the original vampires made, which had to be something closer to Neanderthals. Huh… is that why scientists couldn’t find the ‘missing link,’ that elusive long-ago transition between the primitive proto-human and modern ones? What if the link is missing because it didn’t exist? Vampires bio-engineered modern humans.

  But why would my kind do that? Humans today are quite intelligent enough to be a serious threat. Maybe the old vampires had suffered from a bad case of hubris biting them square in the ass. After all, to my best guess, Origin vampires are barely one percent of the global population, if even that.

  While my head fills with an imaginary human/vampire revolution, a war where the food fights back, the woman behind me grunts.

  I turn.

  “What are you doing here?” she asks in a snarly voice. Though she’s trying to sound tough, her expression and body language are all ‘please don’t kill me.’

  “Trying to understand what’s going on.” I step closer and lean down so our noses are only a few inches apart. “Relax. I’m not going to destroy you. Just… open your thoughts.”

  She struggles at the cable ties as well as my psychic drill boring into her head. Gotta give her some credit, of all the night walkers I’ve ever interrogated, she’s in the top five for difficulty. This girl might be a tech geek, but she’s got nerve. I need to push hard enough to get in that my eyes glow, bathing her face in amber light.

  Like forcing my way past a wall of gelatin, once I breach the initi
al resistance, my thoughts rush into hers. She goes slack in the chair and ceases fighting to move. One by one, her thoughts unfurl before my mind’s eye. The Dominion wants to gain access to the amplifier in hopes of reestablishing the ‘old society’ and putting humans in their place. According to this woman’s thoughts, two things are in the way. First, they haven’t been able to get into the site due to the Russian government moving the military in soon after scientists discovered the door into the structure. Second, they haven’t determined if it is an emplaced facility or some manner of ship. Talia thinks it’s a ship, mostly because even with a massive radius, its location in northern Siberia would make it functionally useless given the population distribution in the region, and it would’ve been pointless to build it there. The vast majority of people in Siberia live along the southern region where it’s more temperate, far away from the site in question.

  Not to get into that whole Pangaea thing, but what’s remote and cold now might not have always been. Present conditions don’t prove it’s a ship. They don’t prove it isn’t, either. I hate to say it, but if this telepathic amplifier thing is real, it does kind of point to there being truth to the idea that we came from another world. The thought of a society ruled by vampires with humans scurrying around as livestock is highly unsettling to me, even if I would be on the better end of that deal.

  I back up a bit in her memory and dig around for information concerning the Russians. She’s aware that they know, or at least suspect, what the device is, probably due to working with non-Dominion vampires who they have allowed to see images of the site. Fortunately, the Russians are wisely paranoid and haven’t allowed any vampires near the place. They also haven’t been able to get inside it as far as she knows.

  The only thing stopping the Dominion from going in thus far have been rumors the Russian military has developed devices capable of protecting humans from mental domination. Talia—the girl whose mind I’m presently probing—has no information about the devices’ function or even what they look like, only that one night walker who went in on a recon mission never returned, disappearing soon after sending a panicked text message wondering if he had encountered androids because the soldiers ‘had no thoughts.’