Brian Lumley - Necroscope - Invaders

And Joe asked Chung: 'Did this talent of yours really lead your people to that Gibson Desert nest? I mean, we haven't seen you around until today — and you weren't out there — so…?'

'Bruce Trennier had a very powerful aura/ Chung answered. 'But as a comparative newcomer among these creatures — even as a lieutenant — he wasn't too good at hiding himself away. When he slipped up, myself and some other E-Branch people, we picked him up from London. Since when the rest of them seem to be masking their presence — a kind of mental camouflage, you know?

So I came out here to get a little closer to the action. Well, and now we might have found some.'

'You picked Trennier up from London?' Joe said.

The locator nodded, and thought, Yes, like a dense bank of jog on a sunny day. Fog that's there one minute, gone the next. Minasmog! But out loud he only said, 'Yes, we did.'

To which there was no answer, and the two W.O.s could only look at each other and shake their heads in wonder…

In the other helicopter an hour later, Jake Cutter was lost in his own thoughts, somewhat moodily enjoying the mountain scenery, when Lardis Lidesci reached across the narrow aisle, jogged his elbow and said something.

'Um?' Jake murmured a response: He had long since removed his headset, and so had Lardis.

'I said, what's that?' the Old Lidesci said again, pointing out of the window on his own side of the aircraft.

'Why not ask the pilot?' Jake grumbled. 'How am I to know what something is?' But, loosening his belt, he stood up, leaned across and looked anyway.

lan Goodly was seated in front of Lardis. Feeling the movements, he looked back, saw where the others were looking.

They were on the return trip, covering different mountains than on the outward-bound leg. A thousand feet below, a massive geological 'wrinkle' in the Macpherson Range had left a tightly angled dog-leg fold. In the west-facing lee of the fold, a saddle or roughly oblong-shaped false plateau maybe two and a half by four acres in extent stood out in stark contrast to the surrounding heights. For it wasn't naked rock. Anything but.

At an elevation of almost three thousand feet, someone had built… a small town? No, not a town but a complex of sorts: with gardens, pools, fountains, a monorail, tennis courts, bowling greens, even a small ski-slope up against the mountainside, and terraced chalets to house the guests. The walkways between concentric rows of red-tiled chalet accommodations radiated out

from a roughly central location: a circular garden surrounding a great, silver-shining bubble of a structure, with windows on three levels and a smaller dome on top.

Lardis was lost for words; he found it too fantastic. But Jake only grunted and said, 'You should see Las Vegasf While in his own mind he wondered: A holiday campp A fantastic hotel complex for the jet-setters and beautiful people? Or maybe—

'An aerie!' sighed Lardis. 'Now wouldn't that make a wonderful aerie? Er, without all this sunlight, of course.'

The precog was still wearing his headset, and he had been conversing with the pilot. Now he put a hand over the mike and said, 'Xanadu, and the centrepiece there… why, that can only be Kubla Kahn's pleasure dome! Put on your headsets. The pilot knows some stuff

Jake and Lardis complied, heard the pilot tail off:

'… There were some private homes here, hence the road up the mountain. But after the fire some kind of tycoon bought up the land and built this place. He's a philanthropist, uses the money from this for other "good works", allegedly. Huh! A typical tax gimmick, if you ask me. All of these fat-cat rich bastards are the same. Xanadu, yeah, that's what it's called. The dome's a casino, all three floors of it.'

'The fire?' said Goodly. 'You mean the Brisbane Fire?'

'Nah, not the Great Fire,' said the other. 'This was back in '97, an earlier El Nino. The place was a tinderbox, and the fire must have started in one of the weekend homes. They were simple timber cabins, holiday homes, you know? Went up like so much kindling.'

'Take her lower, can you?' The precog was plainly interested.

'So what's on your mind, boss?' With a chuckle, the pilot leaned his machine into a descending spiral. 'You want to wave at the girlies around those pools?'

'Er, something like that,' said Goodly.

And certainly the girlies were there, and sun-bronzed fellows, too. There were three pools situated equidistant from the central dome; they glittered like dazzling blue jewels in Mediterranean settings, and were surrounded by low windbreak walls and mosaic-paved sundecks. The sundecks were dotted with chairs and sunbeds. And sure enough, as the chopper circled lower, the girls were sitting up, tilting their mirror-shades at the furnace sky, waving lazy arms at their imagined aerial 'admirers'.

'That's low enough/ Lardis muttered, nervously. 'The next thing you know, I'll be swimming!'

And the Major said, 'Mightn't we attract a little too much attention?' He was on the headset and the pilot heard him.

'So what's the problem?' he inquired. 'Are you worried the people who run the place will complain? Nah! It's good free advertising, and we do this all the time. Tourists who can afford it sometimes take time out after they've seen it to come up for a few days' relaxation — though how anyone with red blood in his veins could relax up here is beyond me!'

Then the precog said, 'That… that's enough. We'd better get on our way now.' And there was a certain edge to his piping voice that had Jake looking at him across the aisle.

He saw that Goodly's face was suddenly drawn, and noticed how his hands gripped the armrests of his seat…

That evening at the safe house, when Trask's people had eaten, he got them together in the Ops Room to debrief them and start them working on the correlation of their findings. For he knew by then that they had been partially successful — or at least that they'd detected something out of the ordinary — and that a lot might soon depend on their observations.

For instance, the military contingent: it was most likely that the siting of the SAS back-up teams would be based on the as yet unproven suspicions or 'hunches' of Trask's espers. And in just two days' time those men and vehicles would start arriving and moving into harbour areas whose locations were as yet undecided. Time was of the essence.

After Trask had settled his people down, David Chung described his temporary contact with something during the landing at Gladstone, and went on to talk about the system of triangulation that they had devised.

'Taking Gladstone as the centre of a clock face,' the locator said, 'the first reading would see the minute hand at some thirteen minutes past the hour, or a few degrees north of east. As for the second reading, over Sandy Cape, that would be about twelve and a half minutes before the hour, or north-west.'

Chung stood before an illuminated wall map of the area and used his index finger to point out the coordinates, then traced the directional lines to their junction some sixty miles out in the open sea. 'Which puts it — whatever it is — right there/ he said. But staring at the map, he could only offer a baffled shrug. 'The last place on Earth that we'd expect to find a vampire or vampires. Right in the middle of an ocean, with nothing but water and lots, I mean lots of sunlight, for miles around!'

'But you got readings,' said Trask. 'You got mindsmog. So, how do you explain it?'

The locator looked at him, frowned and said. 'Explain it? But if it wasn't for Liz here I'd probably simply ignore it! A glitch, something out of kilter in my head… a headache? The evidence of the map, the location, it's all against us. I mean, what would a vampire be doing out there? Also, we know that in the past we've puzzled over similar effects from other espers, from talents outside E-Branch giving off vibes they don't even know they've got! So but for Liz I'd probably settle for someone on a ship out there — maybe a cruise liner? — using precognition to place bets in the casino, or maybe telekinesis to drop the ball on his numbers at roulette. Someone who's extraordinarily "lucky," who doesn't even know he has a skill — who thinks he has a "system" — but who's nevertheless been banned from half a dozen mainland casinos. That's what I'd be tempted to think, except…' He paused and looked at Liz. 'Liz doesn't think so. But there again, no matter what anyone thinks, nothing can change the fact that it's sixty miles out to sea.'