Brian Lumley - Necroscope - Invaders

'And that's not the end of it. Hell, I've barely started! Sooner or later the world would find out that the Russians had actually made the Gate at Perchorsk, an experiment that didn't work out. And the same world would demand that they destroy it. Too damned late, of course, but destroy it anyway. Oh, really? What, with Mikhail Suvorov's henchmen in Moscow still waiting for it to pay off) They should shut down a potential goldmine just because the gold-greedy West couldn't stand the competition? And can't you just see the old Iron Curtain slamming shut again, and that old red flag flying as before?

'Oh, they might get the message eventually — when nights turned to nightmares — and then they'd destroy it quick enough. But how? As they were ready to do it the last time around, with nukes? For just like the rest of us the Soviets have made "progress" in the last quarter-century, and I really don't care to speculate about what they might do now… but I will, if only to make the point and get this over and done with:

'Nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons; missiles with multiple warheads, launched through the Gate at Perchorsk. The total devastation of a world — Nathan's world — and Nathan and all his people, all the Szgany, with it. Neutron bombs, yes, so that all life would die but the gold would still be there, with no one and nothing to deny its plundering, its massive, planetwide tomWooting! Which is fine, or not, except we don't even know if neutron radiation will kill the Wamphyri. Only that it will kill everything else.

'And meanwhile the vampires would be raging on this world.

Because if we killed a couple of thralls, the Lords would make more. Survival, people: the damned survival of the damned! And how long before total embargoes — in effect, sieges — were laid on entire islands, nations, continents, as the terror overtook them one by one? And how long then before the missiles and the neutron bombs were flying again, this time on our world? We've had "final solutions" before, but there are holocausts and holocausts.

'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. was busy, bending all my efforts to scan the future as never before. But… the simple factp> is I can't force what I do, can't control it. I see what I see when I see it, and that's it. And our locators were busy, none more so than David Chung. But where to look? There was no more mindsmog, and there were no borders in continental Europe. The three invaders, their lieutenants out of Starside and their "raw" recruits, they could be anywhere. They could have crossed the river west into Yugoslavia, gone east into Bulgaria, headed north into the Carpathians, or caught a boat up-river for Hungary. In daylight hours they'd go to earth, or to any dark, safe place. But at night… no one travels as fast as the Wamphyri.