The Far Shores (The Central Series) (7 page)

He kept moving,
flash-blind eyes searching vainly for any sign of another ambush. Alex followed
Katya, running until his chest ached, only remembering his injured finger when
he tried to wipe the sweat from his eyes and instead smeared his face with
blood.

They rounded a
protrusion in the cliff face wall, and the superimposed image of the facility
telepathically implanted in his vision was supplemented by the glow of halogen
lights, still some thirty meters distant. Katya halted them for a moment,
surveying the distance between hesitantly, before nodding and leading them
across the remaining distance at a pace just short of a flat-out sprint.
Whether by luck or design, they encountered no further alarms, and any
remaining guards were wise enough not to make their presence known.

The sand in front of the
facility had been cleared of rocks, packed down, and then marked with
reflective paint to form a crude landing area for helicopters, so close to the
rock wall that Alex marveled at the bravery or foolishness a pilot must have
possessed to attempt a landing there. The aboveground portion of the facility
was little more than a concrete box two stories high, reinforced with steel
struts and doors, embedded into the base of the cliff. It reminded Alex vaguely
of photos of the fortifications the Nazis had built into the coasts of France,
an angular and rigid intrusion into the eroded folds of the stone.

Katya stepped fearlessly
into the circle of brilliant light cast by the halogen bulbs suspended on guide
wires around the ad hoc landing zone, a fistful of sewing needles clutched
between the fingers of her left hand, waving cheerfully at the handful of
guards who were nervously watching the other direction, watching the fire and
listening to the sounds of gunshots and violent, abrupt death.

“Hello, boys!” Katya
said cheerfully, extending the handful of needles as if she were offering them
a gift. “Also, goodbye.”

The guards never had a
chance. A few turned in their direction, and one even brought his rifle halfway
to his shoulder, before internal neurological trauma made even the smallest
controlled movements impossible. Alex followed Katya past the convulsing bodies
performing the jerking dance of their ugly deaths. He was getting to the point
that he was almost used to it.

“And here we are,” Katya
said, grimacing and holding a hand to her rib cage as she gestured toward the
magnetically bolted and thoroughly sealed security door. According to the
briefing, there were only three entrances to the compound, each composed of six
centimeters of high-grade steel reinforced with titanium – proof against drill,
ram, or explosive entry. They were at the primary point of ingress, while Miss
Aoki and Xia were currently making a mess of another. The third had been sealed
via a high-explosive demolition charge that Chike had placed shortly after he
apported them in. “Alex, you remember how to do it, right?”

He shrugged out of the
pack, leaving it in the sand, and crouched in front of the door, putting both
hands on the polished steel slab.

“I think so,” he said,
biting his lip. “It worked in the sims.”

“C’mon. A door can’t be
that hard to kill, right?”

Alex nodded uncertainly
and closed his eyes, activating his protocol and shivering as the Black Door
slid smoothly open. There was something troubling about how easy that had
become. In his dreams, Alex was frequently confronted by a Black Door that
would not close.

Eyes closed and protocol
centered, the world presented itself in an entirely different way. His protocol
recognized energy first, and mass a distant second, transforming people into whirling
sculptures of electromagnetic activity, cocooned by shrouds of radiant heat.
The nervous system appeared intricate and brilliant, fine veins of pulsating
energy forming a kind of second skeleton, intertwined with the warm fluid
dynamics of the circulatory system. The mass of flesh surrounding these systems
was little more than a mildly radiant halo, an illuminated smudge. Buildings
were little different – the compound in front of him was represented first by
the rigid, angular arrangement of electrical lines and the temperature
differential caused by the flow of air in the vents and water in the piping.

It wasn’t sight. It
wasn’t really part of any of the five senses. But in reaching for an analogy –
and Alex needed an analogy to even attempt to understand how it worked – the
sensory data his protocol provided was almost visual.

The door itself was
inert, steel radiating fractionally more heat at the edges, and then cooling
toward the interior. The magnetic locks, however, and their electronic
infrastructure, shined like a beacon in the mass of undifferentiated metal.
Alex could see – or feel, or whatever – each individual wire and diode, the
current alternating like the rapid pulse of some incredibly uniform animal.
Alex strongly suspected, were he to spend an extended time in his protocol’s
peculiar awareness, that he would go mad. There was a macabre temptation to
lose himself in the contemplation of the lights that were not lights, the
vision that was something else entirely.

Instead, he focused on a
series of key points, working from a pattern he had memorized from diagrams and
simulations, relying largely on a protocol subroutine that Vladimir had
designed and Rebecca had implanted during days of intensive sessions. It seemed
like a great deal of work for a very small effect, but he felt satisfaction
nonetheless when the last step of the routine was completed, minute disruptions
introduced in a closed system. Vladimir had told him that devices wanted to
function, that programs wanted to run – but then he followed that with his
unhinged, almost mocking laughter, so Alex wasn’t sure that he believed him.

The polarity of the
electromagnets reversed, composite steel bolts sliding smoothly back into
housings as if the proper access codes and biometric parameters had been
supplied. Alex shifted back to normal perception with a faint sensation of
reluctance, easing the Black Door shut and watching with restrained pride as
the compound door slid open.

That lasted until the vampires
charged out.

***

Alex was spacing out with a weird
half-smile on his face, no doubt impressed with his own usefulness, when the
door started to open, and Katya’s eyes picked out motion in the darkness on the
other side. In a normal situation, there wouldn’t have been much anyone could
have done for him – Alex had just taken his hands off the metal surface of the
door, after all, and they had been waiting just on the other side – but this
wasn’t a normal situation, and Katya had prepared accordingly, hovering just
behind him in case something of this nature happened.

Oppa, barrier!

Katya hoped the
telepathic network was intact, because there was no time for words. Neal had a
reputation for losing it at critical moments. Katya would have felt better if
Haley or Miss Aoki were maintaining communications. With any luck, this
wouldn’t be one of those times that Neal failed. Otherwise, Katya would
probably be ripped to shreds by the vampires’ outstretched talons,
nanite-infused bone protruding through reanimated flesh, before she had a
chance to turn. Katya dove into Alex, knocking him away from the door and
rolling on top, putting her vulnerable back between him and the approaching
vampires, trusting that Min-jun would react in time to save them.

He must have, because
she didn’t die.

Alex had barely begun to
squirm when she pushed him aside and spun, lifting herself into a crouch to
face her enemies. Two vampires were in feral mode, claws on every finger and a
grotesque mess of teeth gnashing in hyperextended jaws, with more crowding the
door frame behind them. Min-jun’s barrier was a barely perceptible cerulean
tint separating them from a couple hundred pounds of undead fury. Katya glanced
behind her, and could see the massive strain on the Korean’s face, grimacing and
clutching his head near the edge of the barrier.

The barrier saved their
lives, but it didn’t give her much more than seconds to work with.

Min-jun’s barrier
protocol was unusual. He was an E-Class Operator, normally below the threshold
that would be considered for Audits, but his protocol had a number of atypical
properties that had caught the Audits department’s interest. His barrier was malleable;
he could mold it temporarily around moving objects, as he had done earlier
during combat with the perimeter sentries. Even better, the barrier was as effective
against psychic assault as it was against physical. Of course, nothing came
without drawbacks. Min-jun’s protocol was temporary, manifesting as long as he
could hold his breath, for whatever reason. It also had a limited capacity to
absorb damage, probably due to the same plasticity that Katya had taken
advantage of earlier, which meant that it couldn’t hold the vampires back for
long.

Fortunately, Katya
didn’t need much time. She extracted two handfuls of sewing needles from the
pouch on the inside of her waistband.

There had never been a
C-Class candidate for Audits before. Then again, there had never been a C-Class
Operator at the Black Sun assassination training program, and Katya had
excelled, until they expelled her.

There was a tendency to
think of apport technicians as a form of rapid transportation. By that
standard, Katya was useless, as she could move only a paltry few ounces of
material, and even that only a few meters. The devious mind of Anastasia
Martynova had seen tremendous potential in that ability, however, and Katya’s
talents had been honed to murderous edge by her assassin’s training.

Katya stood to face the
vampires scratching and battering the barrier – sensing its inherent weakness
or just worked into an animalistic fury – and held out her hand. Ten needles
were arrayed neatly in her palm, impaled in a thin strip of white cloth.

Then they were gone, and
the vampires broke off their attack to scream and thrash about.

It wouldn’t be enough to
kill them, of course. Not nearly. Murdering vampires pretty much required
massive bodily injury. Decapitation, a well-placed blast from a twelve-gauge,
removal of the heart, hollowing out the chest cavity – that sort of thing. Not
the discreet, subtle damage that Katya had been trained to deliver when she was
trained as an assassin, the kind of damage that made a murder into a mystery.

No, killing vampires was
well into the range Xia- or Miss Aoki–style damage.

That worked out rather
well, all things considered.

***

Wan-Li was busy barking orders into a
Bluetooth microphone, simultaneously manipulating the console that controlled
the compound’s automated defenses, when he felt the extrasensory tingle that
meant something had gone very wrong. He scanned the display in front of him, a
series of coded lights on the LCD screen representing attackers, defenders, and
various strategic emplacements.

The Society had spent
tens of millions of dollars constructing the facility, and even more employing
mercenaries to protect it. After the alliance had been formalized, and the
strategic value of the location was recognized in regard to the harvesting
operation, their Anathema allies had invested even more hard currency, in
addition to more esoteric and valuable resources, in order to assure security
as absolute as could be rendered. The harvest was crucial to the joined
ambitions of both the Society and the Anathema, and the Bohai Strait facility
was an important nexus for their ongoing endeavor. There were few places along
the coast of the Yellow Sea that were remote enough to provide the controlled
access that was required, and even fewer with the proximity to the major
population centers that provided raw material. Wan-Li suspected that the
Society’s uncontested control of the location had probably been one of the most
important factors that influenced the Anathema to accede in negotiations with
the Chinese branch of the Society, rather than liquidating it wholesale, as
they had done with the less valuable and accommodating European branch.

All of these factors
made this particular facility one of the better protected locations on the
planet, with a number of defenses that were exceedingly rare. Chief among them
was the Etheric interference generator, a massive piece of machinery the
occupied the entirety of the lowest level of the compound, excavated from
bedrock for the specific purpose of housing it. The command center, situated
directly above the machine on the facility’s next-lowest level, experienced a
constant, low-level vibration and hum that was so omnipresent that it became
white noise that staff only noticed at the beginning of a shift.

Or when it turned off.
Wan-Li’s ears rang with silence, while his subordinates glanced up from
consoles to exchange worried looks.

Because it
never
turned
off.

Wan-Li spun around in
his chair, the squeak of the bearings painfully audible, opening his mouth to inquire
angrily as to the problem, to direct resources to the immediate correction of
the situation. This left him face to face with a woman in black who had just
stepped out of the feeble shadow created by the fluorescent bars overhead to
survey the room with a ghastly smile.