but… Wampyr? Are they really going to be part of the combat team?'
'That's correct, Sergeant. Do you have a problem with that? Perhaps you'd like me to issue garlic and crucifixes to the men?'
'No, sir. No problem, sir.'
'I'm glad to hear it.'
Silence broke the link, and the sergeant's troubled face disappeared from the screen. Although he hadn't actually come out and said anything, Silence knew what Null meant. The Wampyr weren't exactly battle troops, like the marines or even the espers. They were more like a weapon; you pointed them at the target and then stood well back and let them get on with it. The battle espers weren't that easy to handle, either. They were already borderline psychotic, or they wouldn't be able to handle working in a combat situation. You surrounded them with esp-blockers till you needed them, and then let them loose and hoped for the best. Pound for pound they could be more devastating than ranked disrupter cannon, but you couldn't always trust them to stop when you wanted. They'd been officially scrapped, and the fact that the Empress had insisted on the last few for this mission said a lot about how dangerous it was likely to be. Silence had decided early on to keep them all in stasis until just before the drop. Safer all around for everyone. He just wished he could have done the same with the Wampyr.
He frowned thoughtfully. Officially, they were Stelmach's pets, operating solely under the direct command of the Security Officer. It was the Wampyr's last chance to prove their usefulness. If they didn't distinguish themselves on this mission, the Wampyr project would be discontinued. That should encourage them to follow orders and not make much trouble, but Silence didn't hope for much more than that. The Wampyr made excellent individual warriors, fast and strong and utterly fearless, but they were no damn good at all at working with other troops. The never-ending thirst that drove them made them fierce fighters, but prone to… distraction. Silence sighed. He'd been putting it off as long as he could, but had to talk to them. He contacted their quarters and waited patiently. They had their own separate territory down below, keeping them apart from the rest of the crew, 10 the relief of all concerned.
A dead man's face appeared on his private screen. Its flesh was pale and bloodless, and its expression was cold and distant, as though listening to some absorbing song the living could never hear. Beyond the face, the Wampyr living quarters were as dark as night. They preferred it that way. Silence cleared his throat, and then wished he hadn't. It made him sound weak.
'This is the Captain. We'll be making planetfall within the hour. Are your people fully briefed and prepared?'
'Yes, Captain. We are most eager to begin.' The Wampyr had their own leader under Stelmach; something to do with alpha dominance. Just another thing the humans didn't understand about the race they'd created. According to the records, this particular Wampyr had been called Ciannan Budd. Once he'd been a living man, with hopes and dreams and human emotions. Then they killed him and filled his veins with synthetic blood, and whatever feelings he had now were no longer anything a human would recognize. Silence's mouth was almost painfully dry, but he forced himself to maintain eye contact.
'Any problems with the blood substitute we've been providing?'
'It nourishes, but it's not the real thing. It doesn't satisfy.'
Something in the flat, peremptory voice made Silence's skin crawl, but he kept it off of his face. 'Stand ready. I'll contact you again just before the drop.'
The Wampyr nodded and cut off the comm link from his end. Silence sighed quietly, slowly relaxing in his chair. It could have been worse, he supposed. They could have been Hadenmen.
'We can't trust them,' said Frost, almost casually. 'They're not human.'
'People have been saying that about you Investigators for years,' Silence said calmly. 'The Wampyr are a useful tool in certain situations, and they'll do their duty for the same reason we will: because nothing less than one hundred percent commitment will get us off Grendel alive. You let me worry about the Wampyr. I want you concentrating on the Sleepers.'
Frost shrugged. 'Show me one, and I'll give it my undivided attention. You keep saying
'Yes. When we break open the Vault, decisions are going to have to be made in a hurry, and I don't want to leave them to Stelmach.'
'Talking about me again?' said Stelmach, appearing soundlessly on Silence's other side, opposite the Investigator. Silence wouldn't give him the satisfaction of jumping.
'Just saying we'd better take one last look at the records the first contact team left us. Ugly viewing, but necessary. Anything we can learn from them could end up saving lives. There's always the chance we'll spot something new. Something useful.'
Stelmach nodded expressionlessly, and the three of them peered silently at the images appearing on Silence's private screen as he entered the restricted codes. Most of the footage from the first team's cameras was useless. It was fine until the team actually entered the city below the surface, and then just the proximity to the alien technology began to interfere with the cameras. They cut in and out, apparently at random, so that what was left was a shifting montage of people, scenes and events. A lot of it was blurred and uncertain, as though things had been happening too quickly for the cameras to keep up with them. Computer enhancement hadn't helped much. A lot of what was on the film was so strange, so different, that the computers had nothing in their records to compare it to. Silence couldn't bring himself to feel unhappy about that. He had a feeling seeing the whole footage, intact and uninterrupted, would have been enough to turn his hair gray.
The record consisted of impressions and brief bursts of detail. It began with glimpses of the alien surroundings, dark and disturbing. The huge buildings had no lights, and strange shadows moved slowly across their surfaces like drifting thoughts as the contact team proceeded. The structures weren't just buildings. Wrapped around them like dreaming snakes, or protruding from walls and windows like so many tumors, were all kinds of alien machinery. Nightmares of twisting, shiny materials that seemed almost alive. There were machines that breathed, and coiled tubes that glistened with sweat. Stranger shapes with unblinking eyes, and things that looked like they might have been moving until you got close to them. The contact team moved among the massive buildings like rats caught in a maze they could never hope to understand, and their voices grew high-pitched and hysterical.
The party's lights glanced across shifting scenes like flashes of lightning in a storm as they shorted in and out, until finally the contact team came to the great steel doors of the Vault of the Sleepers. According to the computers, they were twenty-three feet tall and ten feet wide; great featureless slabs of shining steel with no trace of lock mechanisms. The team fussed around with them for some time before losing patience and blasting them open with a portable disrupter cannon. The doors blew back, light flared within the Vault, and the Sleepers came boiling out.
Guns flashed desperately, but the aliens were everywhere. Huge creatures, eight to ten feet tall, wrapped in spiked silicon armor that was somehow a part of them. Mouths stuffed with steel teeth, gaping and grinning. Blood dripped and spattered from their jaws. Marines were firing in all directions. Swinging swords. Shouting and screaming. The aliens darting among them, almost too fast to follow, despite their size. A clawed hand tore a human head from its body, which walked on for several steps before collapsing. Another alien ripped a hole in a marine's belly, despite his field armor, and buried its face in his guts. Blood flew on the air, intermittent light from discharging guns, screams of pain and horror. A face filled the screen, begging and pleading, and then was snatched away. An alien posed for a moment before the camera, wrapped in human entrails. A marine stuck his gun in an alien's mouth and blew its head off. Another alien thrust its clawed hand into his back and out his chest, and waved the dying body like a banner. An alien ripped the lower jaw from a marine's face and used it like a club till it shattered. There were aliens running on the walls and on the ceilings, like huge impossible insects. The last marines fell, and the aliens swept past the bodies, heading for the surface. The screen showed light fading away into darkness, and then went blank.
Silence sat watching the blank screen for a moment, then reached forward and turned it off. The record didn't lose any of its impact, no matter how many times he watched it. Everyone who'd recorded those scenes was dead, their footage preserved by their ship's computers. He still found it hard to believe that the aliens had slaughtered the contact team so effortlessly. But he'd seen swords shatter on the alien's crimson armor, and disrupter beams ricochet, leaving the aliens unharmed. He was beginning to wonder if anything could stop them, short of another scorching.
