ONSET: Blood of the Innocent Read online

  “The question stands,” Charlies replied, his tone becoming more serious. “As soon as me minions arrive on scene with their Wi-Fi repeaters and hard drive cloners, the entire computer network of yer new toy will be mine to play wit’. So, what do ye need?”

  “There were four trucks here last night,” the Commander told him. “They weren’t here this morning. At some point while we were waiting for the sun to rise, four eighteen-wheelers full of something left a major vampire den.

  “Given that the basement was full of cages and top-notch medical equipment but uninhabited, I’m guessing whatever left had something to do with that—and I want to know what it was and where it went.”

  “Ye don’t ask fer much, do ye?” the dragon said slowly. “It depends on how much they stored in their computers, Commander. They may not ’ave stored much of anything.”

  “We’ve got a few more arrows in our quiver,” David replied. “But I have faith in you, Charles. You’re my best hope.”

  “Flattery will get ye everything,” Charles replied with a deep chuckle. “I’ll talk to Leitz, see if we can nail down anything leaving Reno overnight. There cannae ’ave been that many convoys of four big trucks leaving together.”

  “I need to know where they went,” the Commander told him. “We expected more vampires here, and I don’t want to see a few dozen vampires showing up in a group somewhere.”

  “We’ll find them, David,” the dragon promised. “With the kind of starting point ye’ve handed us, they can’t hide.”

  BY NOON, the forensics teams had arrived, bespectacled and lab-coated technicians who swarmed over everything remotely resembling paper files or electronics, attaching cables and taking pictures as they went. David understood what they were doing, to a point, but he also understood when the best thing he could do was get out of the way.

  His Sight and training meant he wasn’t a complete liability to this process, but the teams that ONSET had been holding on standby to clean up after this op were the best they had. He wasn’t going to joggle their elbows.

  Especially not when he had his own work to do. He spent most of his early afternoon fielding questions from a polite but persistent Reno PD Deputy Chief.

  “We have been entirely cooperative with Homeland Security,” the man told David, “but I think you understand, Mr. White, that we have a real and legitimate cause to understand just what was going on here.”

  David sighed.

  “Deputy Chief Fiscella,” he said firmly, “I have tried to be polite and subtle about this, but allow me to be blunt instead: everything involved in this operation is classified at some of the highest levels. We are dealing with one of the most insidious internal threats the USA has ever faced, and I am not authorized to even share that much information!”

  “If my city is under threat…” Fiscella replied, trailing off.

  “We will keep you informed of anything we discover that is relevant to the security or safety of Reno and its citizens,” David told him. “Beyond that, I repeat, this whole affair is classified. I cannot tell you more and will not tell you more.

  “You know how this works.”

  “I know how it works,” the policeman replied, “but I’ve never had the Feds launch an airborne assault on a casino in my city before, either. Or been asked to evacuate a chunk of the city. What the hell was that about?”

  The evacuation had been as much to allow ONSET to go in with full supernatural force without having to worry about witnesses as anything else.

  “Chief, we knew the organization present here had access to military-grade weaponry,” David explained patiently. “While we weren’t worried about, say, weapons of mass destruction, it was quite possible that they had explosive stockpiles or poisonous agents sufficient to cause serious risk to the public.”

  For example, the artillery piece that had tried to kill him would have been perfectly capable of leveling a block a minute or so, given a chance. But that, again, wasn’t something he could tell the police officer.

  “It was safer to evac the area than risk civilian casualties,” he continued. “I much prefer having been overcautious to having even one unnecessary death.”

  Fiscella shook his head.

  “And that’s all I’m getting, is it?” he asked.

  “That’s all you’re getting,” David agreed. “We appreciate the loan of the transport busses, Chief, and we’ll have them back to you soon enough.”

  The Reno officer shook his head, clearly tempted to tell David to find his own damned prisoner transportation, but he just sighed in the end.

  “They’re on their way, Mr. White,” he allowed. “They’ll be here soon.”

  And with that, the overly long conversation was finally over, and David stepped away as his radio chimed, informing him of yet another crisis.

  Sometimes, the battle was easier than the aftermath.

  “WEEL NAE, we’ve got bad news and good news for ye, Commander,” Charles told David as the Commander watched the sun begin to touch the Rocky Mountains to the west of him. He and Kate Mason were sitting on the decorative bench in front of the Golden Twilight Casino with the senior forensics man while the dragon filled them in by radio.

  “It’s almost nightfall,” the Commander pointed out. “If those trucks are being driven by vampires, they’re going to be on the road again soon. Unless you’ve found something amazing in the casino’s computers, I hope you’ve found them.”

  “The bad news is that it looks like there were no electronic files associated with the clinic in the basement,” the senior forensics agent, a white-haired and somewhat stooped man who David suspected was wearing tweed under his white lab coat, named Brian Rose. “My best guess is that everything was in the paper records room you passed through next to the clinic.”

  “The one that blew up,” David concluded.

  “I suspect that destroying the records was actually the intent of that shell,” Rose told him. “While a hundred-and-fifty-five-millimeter shell could probably kill even you, the likelihood of hitting you is low.”

  David was a Class One Regenerator, capable of recovering from anything that didn’t kill him in relatively short order—and supernaturally tough enough that “didn’t kill him” was a very broad category. Nonetheless, he agreed with Rose’s assessment. A fifteen-centimeter artillery shell would almost certainly spread what was left of him in a wide enough area that he would be very definitely and finally dead.

  “What was in the records that they risked collapsing the building to destroy?” David wondered aloud. A 155mm shell could easily have collapsed enough of the foundations to bring the whole casino down. It was overkill for almost any single target, let alone one inside the building.

  “The records room was both physically and magically reinforced,” Rose replied. “If that shell had detonated two feet earlier, the shockwave would have killed your team. As it was, the same spells that would have stopped someone from blasting their way into the room kept the explosion contained.

  “Unfortunately, that also means that everything in the room, from the paper files to the metal cabinetry, was utterly destroyed,” the agent concluded. “We have no data on what was in the basement at all. We’re doing some serial-number analysis of the medical equipment, but the Familias have always been good at covering their tracks.”

  “Damn,” David said mildly. “What about the trucks?”

  “There’s no records that even say they were here, Commander,” Charles told him. “The receiving and shipping databases say the last trucks that came through left around noon yesterday. Nothing in the computers, no paper files. It’s like those four trucks in the satellite imagery don’t exist.”

  “So, that’s bad news and bad news,” David concluded. “I thought you said there was good news as well, Charles.”

  “The good news, Commander, is that yer Leitz is very, very good at what she does,” the dragon said. “We interlaced a few bits of surveillance footage and tracked the tr
ucks’ arrival back to the interstate and then several states over.

  “To the last toll road they were on,” he added, to be clear of what he’d found. “We matched the time slots, and I’ve got four toll transponders. Now, Nevada doesn’t have toll roads, so we can’t track them the way we could in, say, Massachusetts, but this particular transponder has a covert GPS included that Homeland Security would really prefer no one ever realized was there.”

  “You found them,” David said sharply.

  “They’re together at a motel on the edge of the Fremont-Winema National Forest,” the dragon explained. “Is very public, in the view of an entire small town. I presumed ye didn’t want to make a show of this.”

  “We need to catch them, David,” Mason pointed out. “But Charles is right. We can’t go after a convoy of vampires in the middle of a town.”

  “Most likely, they’re heading further north,” Charles pointed out.

  “We can ambush them on the road. It’s not perfect, but we can make it work,” David concluded. “We’ll need to keep an ONSET team and half of Klein’s people here to keep an eye on the casino, too.”

  “One of us stays, one of us goes,” Mason agreed. “And we’ve got to move quickly. Helicopters or not, that’s quite a way to go.”

  “Rock-paper-scissors you for it?” the broad-shouldered Commander suggested, but Mason shook her head.

  “I am not playing rock-paper-scissors with a Seer,” she replied. “Go! But you get Klein,” she added with a wicked grin.

  4

  “This is Klein. Convoy has left the motel, is heading north towards the park,” the Elfin Warrior reported. His Pendragon was holding a high surveillance course, wrapped in the veil of the battle Mage’s concealment spells, above the highway the vampires appeared to be taking.

  If there’d been any doubt that they were chasing vampires, the timing of the trucks’ arrival and departure from the motel would have helped dispel it. According to the motel’s computers, they’d checked in about twenty minutes before sunrise, paying cash, and they were leaving ten minutes after sunset.

  “They picked up some friends somewhere along the way,” Klein warned. “Four big Fords, red ones. Accelerate like they’re stuck in mud, soo…”

  “Armored,” David concluded.

  “Exactly. Pickup trucks, detachable covers. I’m guessing there’s a reason for that and one we won’t like.”

  Escorts. Likely armed escorts, from the sounds of the covers Klein described. Those could easily conceal machine guns or even an antiaircraft rocket launcher.

  The vampires knew who would be hunting them, and with the Golden Twilight Casino seized, they had to know they were being hunted.

  “It is what it is,” David concluded. “McCreery: I want those escorts dialed in. We’ll give them one chance to surrender”—after all, they might not be vampires—“but the moment they try and shoot back, I want them to be fireballs, clear?”

  “Gotcha.”

  “Klein, keep following them,” he ordered. “Once we get going, I want you to drop in behind them. No retreat.”

  “They won’t run far,” the battle Mage promised. “But…aren’t they going forward?”

  David smiled grimly.

  “Hellet and I will deal with that. We want those trucks intact, people. We need to know what the hell was so important they’re escorting it with covert armored vehicles into the middle of nowhere.”

  “This whole operation has left us with more questions than answers,” Klein pointed out. “I thought working for the government meant we’d know everything.”

  “Ha!” David chuckled. “The OSPI analysts are good, but we’ve been playing spy and counter-spy with the vampires for sixty years.”

  The Office of Supernatural Policing and Investigation had been the first of the Omicron agencies, created in the years between the World Wars to try and get a handle on the growing strangeness of the world—and to deal with the present and dangerous threat of North America’s vampire population.

  “They know our tricks and they’ve managed to keep their damned secrets. I think we’re about to blow a few they’d prefer we didn’t know wide open.”

  “And blow some fangs away in the process,” Klein replied with relish. “Have I mentioned, Commander, that I really like that part of this arrangement?”

  The Vampire Familias had made very few friends among the supernatural communities of the world. The Elfin might nominally be a social club, but the Warriors hadn’t existed to protect it from Omicron.

  “Let them get farther away from everyone,” David ordered. “We’re about to blow up a highway, let’s not do it in front of witnesses.”

  DAVID DIDN’T EXPECT the vampires to surrender—if nothing else, Omicron’s usual policy toward captured vampires was euthanasia—but the simple fact remained that his people were police and that left them with legal and moral obligations.

  The exact moment to act was hard to pick, even for a man with the ability to see the future. His usual prescience was less than a second, deadly in combat but otherwise only minimally useful, but if he focused hard enough, he could tell something as predictable as “Are there cars coming the other way in the next few minutes?”

  “Now,” he ordered calmly, his sense of the future finally clear of witnesses—something that would never have happened on a busier stretch of highway or time of day.

  “Go!”

  The two helicopters screamed out of the night, concealment spells dropping as they swept in over the trucks and their escorts. David keyed his helmet mike, linking it to the Pendragon’s external speakers.

  “This is ONSET,” he told the convoy. “Pull over now and surrender or we will stop you with lethal force.”

  The announcement would take some explaining if he was wrong, but on the other hand, no one innocent was going to be taking an escorted convoy down a deserted highway in the middle of the night.

  He was completely unsurprised, however, when the response was for the four escorting pickup trucks to lose their covers, the plastic-and-canvas structures falling free almost instantly from vehicles moving at eighty miles an hour.

  What he was not expecting was to be immediately pinged by military-grade tracking radar as four antiaircraft turrets, presumably liberated from some National Guard unit’s stored air defense gear, revealed themselves and immediately spun to try and target the helicopters with their missile pods.

  Unfortunately for the gunners, McCreery matched their superhuman reflexes and had already dialed them in. Hellfire air-to-surface missiles blasted free before the turrets even began to move. Only a single missile made it into the air before the turrets and their attached pickups disappeared in the detonations of the armor-piercing warheads—a missile McCreery intercepted with a shot from the helicopter’s cannon that no mundane pilot could have matched.

  The weapons were designed to take out tanks. It was probably overkill—but from the trucks’ sluggish acceleration and clearly present armament, it might well not have been.

  The lead eighteen-wheeler swerved, trying to avoid the burning wreckage that had been its forward escort. The convoy had been too close together, the escort less than twenty feet in front of the truck. The driver managed to avoid the fireball but not to avoid jackknifing the truck.

  The big transport tumbled, falling over on its side and skidding along the road in a shower of sparks. The following trucks were barely luckier, two of them slamming headlong into the flipped truck and grinding to a halt.

  The fourth truck managed to brake to a final halt…with the tractor grinding over half of the wreckage of one of the escort vehicles.

  “Dropping now!” McCreery announced, stopping the helicopter a handful of inches off the ground to allow David and the rest of his team to jump out.

  The Commander hit the ground heavily, his helmet’s AR display warning him that Klein’s people were deploying opposite.

  “Sweep in and meet up with the Elfin,” he ordered Hellet
and Stone. “Secure the trucks, I don’t want them disappearing on me.”

  “After that crash, they can’t possibly be…”

  Hellet trailed off as they approached the chaos they’d caused. Despite having jackknifed, crashed into each other, and driven over a burning pickup truck, all four trucks were basically intact. Armor could only allow a vehicle to survive so much—for that level of invulnerability, magic had to be involved.

  And if the trucks had survived that well…

  “Take cover!” David snapped. “I doubt the drivers are unarmed!”

  His prescience flared a moment later as he rushed into the shadow of the jackknifed truck. A pair of submachine guns opened fire, the shooters trying to take down his companions.

  Stone’s machine gun answered, two short bursts that silenced the smaller weapons.

  “Multiple hostiles,” the big gunner reported. “Two down, but I’ve got movement. Watch your backs.”

  David ignored Stone’s suggestion and vaulted onto the jackknifed truck, his own battle carbine swinging free from its quick-release harness as he landed on top of the disabled vehicle. Prescience flared a warning and he fired a burst of silver bullets at the same moment that one of the vampires popped up with an SMG.

  He dodged the incoming bullets. The vampire didn’t, sprawling backward as the silver short-circuited his inhuman healing factor.

  Leaping down from the truck, he opened fire at a hint of movement, dropping a second vampire as the creature charged out of the shadows of another eighteen-wheeler with a combat shotgun in its hands.

  “Sir, down!” Stone shouted as the occupants of the last two cabs emerged as a coordinated unit, automatic shotguns and submachine guns alternating as the gunfire forced David back behind the jackknifed truck.

  Several bursts from the big man’s M60 held the vampires up—and then a glittering blue blast of chain lighting smashed out of the sky, a fork of the bolt hitting each of the four vampires and incinerating them simultaneously.