Brian Lumley - Necroscope - Invaders

But it had been ngreat error to open his mind and accept Bruce Trennier's agonized communication — his final communication — when these people had tracked him down to the Gibson Desert. For, even as Malinari had felt the heat of his lieutenant's funeral pyre, so he'd known a different kind of heat: that of discovery, when a probe reached out from halfway around the world to seek him out, zeroing in on him like a Starside bat searching for a juicy moth, or a Sunside hawk stooping to its prey.

A mind had touched his, and left its fingerprint, its signature there, so that he would know it again. And in this last few days he had come to know it only too well. Now it was here in Xanadu, but if he studied it too closely, and if it were to lock on to his location—

— That flying machine, that jetcopter, was equipped with armaments that could cut through the false facade of this hollow chimney like a battle gauntlet through the ribs of a disobedient thrall! But it all added to the excitement, the thrill of the game, what little it afforded him: their weird talents, and their puny human minds, against The Mind himself…

So, this seeker, bloodhound, locator, or whatever he was, was one problem — and his talent was one that Nephran Malinari understood readily enough, for he had used just such skills in Sunside four hundred years ago to seek out the Szgany in their hiding places — but the locator's wild talent wasn't the only one that this E-Branch commanded, and it wasn't the only problem. Zek Foener's mind had been full of such things.

A man who could see the future, for example (though obviously he couldn't see it too clearly, else he would never have come here to die), and Trask himself, to whom a lie was like a slap in the face… there would be no deceiving that one! And as for mentalists: no lack of those. Well, that last wasn't so rare; even the Szgany had something of that in them. It was in their blood, a legacy of their centuries under Wamphyri domination. But these E-Branch people weren't Szgany. No, they were adepts, much as Malinari was an adept, but lacking the advantage of his several… refinements? And of course without the ultimate advantage of being Wamphyri!

Take Zek herself, for instance. What? A woman who could reach out her thoughts across the whole world with such crystal clarity as to be able to speak to a man like Trask — not himself a mentalist — and make him to understand? Oh, he was a loved one, and so there had probably been an element of rapport in it, such as is found in twins. But still and all, that was a talent!

Or it had been…

Adepts, rivals, enemies, and bloodhound trackers who would never let go. All the more reason why they must go, and tonight. But it would have been so useful to know more about them first. Such people as this precog, and this locator, and Ben Trask himself… and this girl.

The girl, yes…

She wasn't an adept, not yet; she hadn't attained Zek Foener's level of achievement. But to another telepathic mind (for instance, Malinari's mind) she was like a small flame guttering in the psychic aether, and he had sensed her there from the moment these people arrived in Brisbane. But at such close proximity — because she was close now, and inexperienced — he might perhaps intrude for brief periods without fear of her detecting his presence. Of course, that would leave him open to the locator. But only introduce some small diversion into the game, and that would take care of that. Men, even talented men, when they are concerned for their own skins, have little time for casting about with their minds. Except that they look for boltholes, of course.

Very well then, a diversion. For, in any case, the game was moving far too slowly.

From his high vantage point, Malinari looked down on Xanadu and the Pleasure Dome casino (dark in the night but clearly visible in every detail to him) and chose a switch on his array. Down there, his enemies had deployed into first-phase positions. There were men held in reserve, four of them, evenly spaced out at the rear of the leisure area of gardens and pools that surrounded the casino. These four would believe they'd 'secured' or 'made safe' their strategic positions behind low walls just forward of the innermost circle of chalets. Equipped with superior, heat-seeking, image-enhancing weapons, they would consider themselves 'ideally situated' to engage an enemy in flight from the central area.

And so they would be — if not for the fact that two of the four locations were mined.

Malinari's hand lingered over the chosen switch, while his scarlet night-vision eyes swept over, scanned, and committed to memory the second phase of the enemy's deployment.

In the last few minutes a large vehicle — an articulated truck marked with the symbols of a well-known beer manufacturer — had climbed the access road, entered through Xanadu's gates, turned about, and hissed to a halt in the otherwise empty parking lot. A party of four heavily armed men had issued from the rear of the truck and were hurrying forward into the resort in the direction of the Pleasure Dome.

Inwards — at the inner edge of the gardens toward the casino — five NCOs from the helicopter fanned out to surround the huge rotunda of the central dome itself. The men from the truck were now replacing the four in their rearguard positions behind the low walls, which allowed them in their turn to move forward and reinforce the assault force around the dome's perimeter.

Now, or when they were so ordered, three of these Special Forces men would go in through the Pleasure Dome's main doors; the rest of them, dispersed around the perimeter, would create individual points of entry. The casino's curving fa£ade of interlocking concrete panels, glass, and reinforced plastic would scarcely suffice to stop them, Malinari was sure. It was, after all, a Pleasure Dome, not a fortress!

So much for the fighting men. And Malinari presumed correctly that their commander would be with Trask's E-Branch party where they were now gathered in a group behind the smaller vehicle on the main esplanade some seventy or eighty feet in front of the steps to the casino's canopied entranceway. He knew that this was them because of their mental emanations. Hah! Rut they might as well be carrying illuminated signs! They were as Visible' to him as they must be to the pilot of their flying machine… as indeed he would be, if he were down in the resort.

So, they were all set to go, and the onset of hostilities, which must be imminent, might create sufficient of a diversion in itself, allowing Malinari to insinuate himself into the mentalist girl's mind without alerting the locator to his presence — but he thought not. Much better to be safe than sorry.

Let them be the sorry ones.

Earlier, before these people got here, Malinari had started a mist. His body and being — even his existence here in this or any world — these things were all contradictions of Nature. He was a poison that worked like a catalyst on and against any natural or mundane surroundings.

When he opened the pores of his metamorphic body and willed it, his pores would breathe a mist. Not only that but Nature would be made to respond, to answer his call. And even from the dry earth Malinari could call up a writhing mist like vile, airborne sweat, to disguise his presence. In Sunside it had served a dual purpose: to carry his probes more surely to their target (for the mist was like an extension of himself, or a medium for his mentalism) and also to hide him away should he have reason to make a covert exit — in short, a smokescreen.

But this time, so as not to draw attention to himself, he had merely started the thing, set it in motion. And now a fine, milky mist lay on the surface of the pools, and formed a barely visible ground mist in the gardens. But only let Malinari will it, it would spring into being at his command. And in the holocaust to come he would call it up in earnest to carry his mentalism, instil its primal terror, and add to the general confusion.