“We’d made the penetration and were proceeding to his quarters. All good. No issues. Then every damned siren in the base went off. ‘Hostile human intruder on base!’ ”
“Never fun,” the Himmit said. “I do hate the whole ‘Intruder alert!’ thing.”
“Yeah, you would,” Papa said. “But it was one intruder. And then they started giving a description and location. Wasn’t us.”
“Interesting.”
“The op was blown, though,” Papa said. “They started shutting down the base. Going into hard lock down. We had secondary and tertiary extraction points. We pretty quickly figured out we couldn’t go for the secondary. We headed for the teriary. Things were going nuts. Before we knew it, we were the only people running around the base who weren’t security.
“They kept broadcasting locations. And either there was more than one guy with the same description or he was so fast it wasn’t funny. We’d memorized the layout of the base and he was all over the place. I couldn’t figure out what he was doing from the calls. But it was sort of working for us because he wasn’t anywhere near our route.
“Then we ran into a defense point. We came hauling ass around a corner and there was a squad hunkered down behind a battle station. They had us dead to rights. I decided, hey, maybe we could talk our way through. They weren’t buying it. I don’t think they thought we were hostiles. But in a security alert like that, you take anyone who isn’t where they are supposed to be under arrest. If they really looked into our background we were screwed. But it was surrender or die fighting. I was still hoping we could talk our way out.
“They told us to place our weapons on the ground and come forward. Which we did. We were about halfway down the corridor when there was this scream from behind them.”
Papa paused and took a sip of the mysterious beer.
“I’ve heard a lot of screams in my time,” Papa said, his eyes distant. “There’s the scream of somebody who’s had a blade shoved into their belly. Never nice. It has a particular pitch to it. The scream of somebody who’s hurt bad on the battlefield. The scream of a woman. I’ve never heard a scream like this one before or since. Mortal scream, the person was dying. And it was a scream of abject, absolute, terror. Not just fear of dying. Fear of why they were dying.”
He paused and sighed.
“The security guys had forgotten all about us. They’d reoriented to the rear. I considered quietly tiptoeing away but didn’t. Don’t know quite why. I guess I was just stupid-curious to see what in the hell could make somebody scream like that.
“We were in a maintenance tunnel. Big. Five meters across, ten meters high. The across is what matters. The defense point was at an intersection. So, I’m trying to make up my mind what to do and all of a sudden a body comes flying out of the side corridor. And all the way across the corridor to land on the other side.”
He looked at the Himmit and cocked an eyebrow.
“Comments?”
“That would normally presume a mechanical force,” the Himmit said.
“Yep,” Papa said, then took a sip. “They were rigged out in full battle rattle. Average male weight in Europe, and this was an average enough guy, was about one-eighty. With battle rattle, that makes about a hundred kilos. Distance was five meters, bit short of twenty feet, around two hundred twenty pounds. And he hadn’t been spun. He was going straight as if he’d been shot-putted. Going up coming into the corridor and then down as he left. Don’t know how far into the side-corridor he made it. Wasn’t alive anyway.”
“That is a remarkable toss,” the Himmit said. “Especially if the tosser was the human-appearing intruder.”
“I would have put it as mechanically impossible for the human body,” Papa said. “But there it is. There was more. Screams. Crashes. Speaking of sounds you don’t often hear. There’s a very specific sound of a person hitting a barrier that kills them. I’d only ever heard it once before when a guy I knew burned in on a jump right next to me. It’s a weird ‘squish-crack’ as the bones in the ribs break. This was coupled with the ring of Galplas. Someone had been thrown into a wall hard enough to smash. Again, wouldn’t have believed it if I wasn’t there. But I was.
“Then the ‘intruder’ came into view. Five-five, buck-fifty. Brown hair that was kind of long and shaggy. I’d have pegged him as one of the refugees that trickled in in dribs and drabs. Worn out Russian camo top and jeans that had seen better days. Barefoot. And just about shot to fucking shit. Blood was flowing down his chest and arteries were spurting. You don’t often see a person walking, running, fighting, with spurting arteries, believe me.
“He had an odd expression. Not angry, not violent, just as if he was pushing aside brush looking for something. Most of the security guys had run. Some of them had run past us. A few were still trying to take him on. There’d been shots. I’d been sort of ignoring them for the other stuff. I saw one of them shoot him point blank, multiple times, in the chest, with .308. Didn’t seem to faze him. He just hit the guy so hard his neck broke.
“He’d found what he was looking for, which was the commander of the security point.”
Papa stopped and shook his head.
“That’s when I knew what it was,” he said, softly. “He picked the guy up by the throat, opened up his mouth and bit down. When he opened his mouth, fangs like a snake dropped down. And he sunk them into the guy’s neck. The spurting stopped and, I shit you not, while I was watching him suck the life out of that LT, he healed right in front of my eyes.”
“I am accepting your reality,” the Himmit said. “Go on. You survived. Again.”
“Yeah,” Papa said. “He finished with the LT, looked kind of interested as if he was digesting something. Something in his head, not the LT. Then he looked at us and sort of cocked his head to the side and said something in a language. A word, maybe a name.
“I looked at him and raised my hands: ‘Friends?’ I mean, I wasn’t going down without a fight but I also knew I was going down, if you know what I mean.”
“Understood.”
“Then he said: ‘Bane Sidhe.’ It had a weird accent to it, but I recognized it. He spouted some other gibberish at us but I didn’t understand it. One of my guys did, though. Not the words, apparently. He just said ‘Gaelic?’
“I said: We don’t speak Gaelic. But, yeah, we’re Baen Sidhe.”
“ ‘Where is the Elf?’ he asked. Odd accent. Sort of Eastern European, sort of not. Swallowed. I don’t do languages the way that Nathan does but it wasn’t an accent I’d ever heard and I’ve heard a lot in my time.
“Now, we knew there was a Darhel ‘liaison’ on the base, but he was off-limits cause of the damned Compact. Apparently he wasn’t off-limits to the vampire. Maybe he liked blue blood.”
“More purplish,” the Himmit said.
“ ‘Room Four-Two Bravo-Alpha-Four,’ I said. ‘We’re not authorized to take him.’ ”
“ ‘Then you are not true Bane Sidhe,’ he said, pretty contemptuously. ‘Leave the base. There is a way clear to an exit. Do not return.’ And he was gone. And by ‘gone’ I mean it was like he vanished like one of you guys. I actually think he just moved so fast our eyes couldn’t follow.
“Well, we made fucking tracks to the exit, let me tell you, buddy. And we swore up and down we’d never repeat the story to a soul. The pick-up was at the entrance and we told him somebody else had attacked the base and the hit was off and we scooted. He had a ground-car and we could get out of the security ring that was setting up around the base. They were sending more troops in to try to catch the guy. We got questioned but all we said we knew was that there’d been a security alert and, it not being our business, we were di di mao. We weren’t the bad guys, as far as they knew, so they let us go.