Inside the vehicle's Ops section, the Duty Officer and the pre-cog lan Goodly were seated within the central control area. Liz was standing outside the desk, her elbows on its no-longer-cluttered surface, her chin cupped in her hands. Apart from minimum services — the permanent telephone array, one small radio crackling with static, and a dimly-luminescent wall screen — Ops had been more or less unplugged and decommissioned, however temporarily.
The muted conversation tailed off awkwardly as Trask and Jake entered, but the Head of E-Branch held up a hand and said, 'It's okay, I want all of you to stay. I have to speak to Jake, and I can't see any reason to leave anyone out. lan, if I slip up and forget some important detail, you'll be here to correct me. And
Liz, there may be the odd tidbit of information that's new to
you, too.'
He hitched himself up onto the desk, and Jake let down one of the wall seats and sat opposite. Then, without further pause, Trask told his part of the story.
'Jake, Lardis Lidesci has told you something about his world, a parallel world called Sunside/Starside by its inhabitants. He's told you about Vavara, Szwart — and Malinari, too. So by now you know that these aren't just legendary or mythical figures but a very real threat to everyone in our world. They're here, biding their time, hiding out somewhere on Earth. Now, please take that for granted and believe that it's so, for last night was a mere lesson — a primer, a single leaf— out of the Great Textbook of the enormous threat posed by the Wamphyri.
'So let's deal with it step by step. How they got here has to be the first question, that's obvious.
'Five years ago the Gate in Perchorsk was closed. That was in large part Gustav Turchin's doing, for which our thanks. But Turchin is only one man, and Russia is a big place; the expansionist element hasn't gone away; there are still plenty of powerful people in the former USSR who hanker after the 'good old days', when their satellite subordinates paid tribute to Mother Russia. So while Communism may have been wounded, its scars are quickly healing and the scene is set for a resurgence. The Russians are rather well known for their capacity for the odd revolution now and then, and their armed forces are now political factors in their own right. Well, the fact is they always have been, but never more so than now.
'In E-Branch we all remember how Turkur Tzonov, then head of the Opposition — our term for the USSR's answer to E-Branch — planned to take his partly nationalistic but mainly egomaniac schemes, along with a dedicated crack military unit, into Sunside/Starside to conquer it for Russia. But Turchin had his own ideas about Tzonov's real motives, and so did we.
Sunside/ Starside is rich in gold, far richer than the Yukon's Klondike in its heyday. And it's not some kind of localized motherlode: gold is common in the vampire world, it can be found literally anywhere. Working with Turchin, we tried to keep that a secret, too, for obvious reasons. Or maybe they're not so obvious, so I'd better clarify:
'Russia is broke. Her army, navy, and air force are destitute, or so close it makes no difference. They can't even afford to decommission their clapped-out nuclear submarines and leaking missiles but have to dump them in someone else's backyard! But Russia's generals, her admirals and air marshals are still very powerful. When that lunatic Turkur Tzonov went into Starside to get himself killed, he left many of his men behind, trapped in Perchorsk by Gustav Turchin's security forces. Tzonov had promised his men gold, and we all know what gold does to men.
Gold is power, power corrupts, and ultimate power…?
'So then, Sunside/Starside was literally one big goldmine, and the only sure access was through Perchorsk in Russia's Ural Mountains. Oh, it was blocked, flooded, that's true. But if you can turn a tap on, you can also turn it off.
'Okay, the rest of this can't be guaranteed as pure fact, but we're E-Branch and we do what we do, and we're not usually very far wrong. We keep our eyes and our ears — oh, and a lot of other equipment — open, and try to keep up to date. And we also have what Nathan Keogh told us. So it's a patchwork quilt of sorts, but pretty accurate, we think…
'Where was I? Oh, yes: the Perchorsk Gate was closed, but somebody wanted it open. Enter Russian Internal Security, a militarized, updated KGB lookalike headed by General Mikhail Suvorov. They stepped in and did just that: diverted the Perchorsk dam waters back into the ravine and let the Gate drain the complex dry. Then they had to decide who was going to explore Sunside/Starside, though 'exploit' might be a better word for it. But in any case, it didn't quite come to that.
'More than eighteen months had passed since Turchin closed the Gate, since when he'd had a hard time fighting off Suvorov, who of course wanted it opened up because he had heard rumours about the gold. And Suvorov eventually won the fight, because Turchin was over a barrel. Russia was in the red and Suvorov — who was very Red — had the answer: a huge goldmine in a primitive world at the other end of an interdimensional tunnel whose only accessible entrance lay deep in the earth and deeper still inside Mother Russia!
'Thus Turchin had very little choice: he could step aside and let Suvorov get on with what he'd promised would be a 'limited' exploration, or Suvorov would tell all the hungry Russian people about the unlimited wealth that their Premier was striving to deny them! Well, we all know what that would have meant… only think back on the Klondike and you'll see what I mean. Everyone would want a piece of the action. And remember, Gustav Turchin knew something about the horrors of the vampire world — knew as much if not more than we do about what happened at Perchorsk in its early days. Certainly he realized that the fewer people who entered the Gate, the smaller the odds they'd bring something back with them out of Starside. Something other than gold, that is…
'And in all that time — some eighteen months — we'd had no word from Nathan Keogh, who of course had made his home in Sunside. But how could we have heard from him, since the Gates had been closed? Ah, but Nathan had his own route to Earth, through the Mobius Continuum! That's the place where you go, Jake — er, between going places? — it's the darkness between leaving one place and arriving at the next.
'Okay, I know that's not good enough, but more later…
'Anyway, Nathan probably had his own reasons for breaking contact with us, but it wasn't as if we felt let down; indeed, without him we'd have been in a hell of a mess, 'we' being our entire world. It's bad enough that we have three of these monsters here, but without Nathan we'd have had an army. Come to think of it, lan and I wouldn't even be here right now to talk about these things, and none of you would be here to hear what I'm saying.
Oh, you would probably still be here — somewhere in the world — but not the way you are now. And damn few other people, not as you know them.
'Very well, Nathan's reasons for breaking contact: 'In turning his world and working out a means of preserving its integrity — for it had been Nathan's idea to flood Perchorsk, not the Russian Premier's; Turchin was acting mainly on Nathan's suggestion — he'd also secured a measure of isolation for Sunside/Starside. Maybe he thought that if he left us alone we would leave him and his alone. He knew how far ahead we were technologically speaking… I don't know, perhaps he preferred to keep his people out of the rat-race? Also, he wouldn't have forgotten that there were some people who would continue to see his world as a threat despite all precautions, and he knew they had the means to destroy it. And finally… there was all that gold, useless to the Travellers except as a malleable metal, but valuable beyond measure on Earth. An irresistible lure for the Hell-landers? — meaning you, me, us — probably.
'Well, enough of that… he simply didn't contact us for whatever reasons. And during that same period of time Nathan's world was swinging back again, the shadows lengthening on Starside, and the sun settling back into its old, accustomed orbit. And far beyond the boulder plains, under the flutter and weave of strange auroras, a lot of the northern ice had melted.
'Enter Szwart, Vavara, and Nephran Malinari. The only possible explanation is that they had been locked in the ice — or they had locked themselves in the ice, preserving themselves in suspended animation — when they'd been thrown out of Starside. Wamphyri, they could do it; they must have done it, deep-frozen themselves, a handful of thralls, and however many flying creatures they'd required to bear them into the Icelands when they were banished from the aeries of the Wamphyri. The natural, or unnatural, tenacity of the vampire.
'And meanwhile, here on this world, our world, we weren't even aware that Mikhail Suvorov and a party of scientists,
geologists, and prospectors — not to mention a platoon of heavily armed Russian soldiers — had entered Starside through the Gate in Perchorsk. Perhaps Turchin had been warned not to inform us; I like to think so. Or
