'I mentioned the Dark Ages, but I think we could probably go back, oh, a couple of centuries earlier than that…
'… So, you see, we couldn't tell anyone. It was our baby, and we'd just have to handle it ourselves. BUT… if we handled it our way — E-Branch's way, the right way — then we might have a chance. And in fact there were several clues that indeed we had a chance. 'It was a question of thinking it all through, then using our combined talents to check on our conclusions. Very well, so why had Vavara, Szwart, and Malinari left Starside to come venturing in our world? Where were the benefits for them? What was wrong with Sunside that they'd left it to their lieutenants and burgeoning vampire army in favour of Earth?
'But they were known on Sunside, indeed they were figures from legend there, and the Szgany knew how to fight them; fight them with alien weapons and the incredible skills of the Necroscope, Nathan Keogh. Also, these vampires were ambitious beyond the bloodiest dreams of almost any other Lords or Ladies of the Wamphyri before them. Perhaps the world of Sunside/Starside was too limiting in its scope. But Earth…
'They'd learned of Earth from Mikhail Suvorov and his ill-fated team of explorer-prospectors. They knew us: that without our weapons we were softer far than the Szgany of Sunside. And there were millions, indeed billions of us, spread out in many different nations across a world that was as wide as its horizons. Not merely a single strip of habitable woodlands between barrier mountains and burning deserts, but a huge and thriving termite's nest of sprawling humanity! A land of milk and honey — and blood, of course — stretching out forever.
'Better far, we didn't believe in vampires! In our world a vampire was a fiction, a creature in a book, a myth out of our superstitious past. Even in Romania, Hungary, or the Greek Islands, you'd have trouble finding more than a handful who truly believe in vampires today. In E-Branch, however, we have known for a long time that they never were a myth, that indeed there were vampires in our world once before, and maybe more than once.
'And Zek, she knew it, too, and knew it better than most. She had actually lived in the Lady Karen's aerie, on Starside.' So perhaps the mentalist Lord Malinari took something from her after all, the fact that earlier invaders had learned an important lesson: in this world longevity is synonymous with anonymity. But having faced — or having sent their thralls to face — Mikhail Suvorov's firepower on Starside, maybe they'd known that before they set out.
'There's evidence of that last, too. Suvorov's party went through from Perchorsk, emerging into Starside through the surface Gate. But the Wamphyri chose the other route, the original or natural Gate into our world, probably because they knew that Perchorsk was once again a semi-military base and defended, and all of its weapons concentrated in one spot, the Perchorsk Gate itself. Hardly a good place to commence a covert infiltration.'
'But the best evidence that Malinari and the others intended to keep their presence secret, at least for the time being, lay with those poor dead kids and murdered staff. For they had not been vampirized! No vampire essence — nothing of that sort — had been allowed to get into them. So plainly it wasn't the intention of the Wamphyri to start a plague. Not yet, anyway.
'But people had been killed, murdered by vampires, and the Old Lidesci wouldn't be satisfied until the bodies were burned. While he had found no trace of infection in them — not even in the six who'd been used, drained — still he was insistent. And since no one in this world has Lardis's experience in such matters, the experience of so many years, no one argued the point.
'What was more, the… the cremation that Lardis insisted
upon fitted perfectly with a plan we were shaping, however gradually. For not only were we unable to bring the presence of the Wamphyri into the open, but we must actually disguise it, cover it up, assist them in their efforts to remain secret! Secret to the world in general, at least, but not to us, not to E-Branch. No, for we knew our enemy of old.
'There was fuel oil, plenty of it, at the Refuge. Ben saw to it that the entire contents of a fifty-gallon drum went down the wrecked inspection ducts, then we punctured the rest of the drums and let the fuel leak through all the ground floor rooms. And finally we stood off while Nathan struck a match. That one match was all it took.
'It could only be the act of a maniac or group of maniacs, some kind of crazed sect. Or perhaps sabotage, the work of some anti-British terrorist organization? Or maybe a band of utterly ruthless criminals, determined to cover up their crime. At any rate, that was how it would look…
'Well, Romanian rescue services are notoriously slow, and where the Refuge stood across the Danube from Radujevac… it wasn't the most populated or accessible region. The Danube itself was the most frequented route through the countryside. Fortunately for us there were no landing stages, wharves or docks on the Romanian side, and the nearest fire engine was all of a hundred miles away!
'So we watched the Refuge burn, and eventually Nathan took us home again. But back in London we took our time before calling the authorities in Belgrade, Sofia, Bucharest, to tell them we'd had an SOS, a Mayday, from the Refuge, that a gang of raiders was sacking the place. It took them a couple of days to get back to us with their condolences; their security forces would do all they could to bring the unknown marauders to justice, of course, but since the Refuge had been gutted there was precious little to go on…
'And meanwhile, we were busy.
'Nathan suggested returning to Sunside for Anna-Marie English, but to what purpose? The invaders were leaving no 'blight' behind them. As yet, they weren't vampirizing anyone. Murders? But there are always murders, and there are always missing persons. No, we couldn't hope to track them that way. In any case, Anna-Marie wouldn't have come back; she has dedicated her life to the orphans of the bloodwars, and to her man in Sunside.
'The mindsmog thing puzzled us a while: the lack of it. For where there are vampires, and especially Lords of the Wamphyri, there is usually mindsmog: a tainted, impenetrable cloud on the psychic aether… unless that was something else that Malinari had stolen from Zek's mind? But of course it was! He had also been about to learn something of E-Branch from her — until she had deliberately shortened his interrogation by showing him his intended doom, which had precipitated and mercifully shortened her own.
'But just how much did he know? How much had he sapped from Zek's mind, her memory, her knowledge in general and especially of the Branch? We had no way of knowing. But it must have been sufficient that he and the others felt the need to lie low and control their alien mental emissions. Or perhaps we were wrong and they were simply being cautious, biding their time.
'Nathan stayed with us for five days, just long enough to look up a few old… well, acquaintances? But he was needed in Sunside
and dared not delay any longer. And remember, his problem was as great if not greater than ours: a small army of aspiring Lords lieutenants, thralls, and warrior creatures, left behind by our trio of Wamphyri invaders; an army which now inhabited the toppled ruins of Starside's ancient aeries, from which they raided on the Szgany as before. No, we had no claim on Nathan; indeed, our long-term debt to him could never be repaid. And so we had to let him go, with our best wishes — and as many weapons as he could take with him — back along the Mobius route to rejoin the battle for his vampire world.
'And through all of that time, that terrible, frantic week, the only one of us who wasn't busy was Ben Trask. He had simply withdrawn from a world that would never be the same again, and I admit that I thought E-Branch had seen the last of him. Fortunately I was wrong, and when he returned he was stronger than ever — well, in some ways — but in his resolve, for sure.
'And now I'll tell you something that even he doesn't know. I was Duty Officer that night at E-Branch HQ — that night when Nathan brought Lardis through from Sunside, and Ben nightmared about Zek — and the moment that Ben came in and I saw the state he was in, I… I knew about Zek. I mean, I knew!
'Oh, I couldn't tell him, but where he was uncertain and daren't allow himself to be sure, I knew and hated myself for knowing. Just seeing him like that, Ben's future was immediately apparent to me. In one way it was the clearest picture of anyone's future that I'd even seen, yet in another it was the vaguest — which was how I knew.
