Will Hill - Battle Lines

“OK,” said Dominique Saint-Jacques. “Let’s get going.”

Holmwood nodded. “I’m sending squads out with lists of five likely target locations. I’m authorising daylight operations, so destroy them before the sun goes down if you can. All usual containment protocols remain in place, and I want it made clear to all Operators that these targets are significantly more dangerous than the vampires they usually encounter. I’m putting in place a hard window of eight hours, after which you come home. I don’t care whether you’ve destroyed all five of your targets, or two of them, or none of them. Eight hours, then return to base. Having what’s left of this Department exhausted and careless is not an option. Clear?”

“Clear, sir,” replied Dominique.

“Excellent. I’m officially activating all Operational Squads that include rookies until this threat has been eliminated, then they go back to training. Look after them out there and bring them back safe. Clear?”

“Yes, sir,” chorused the Zero Hour Task Force.

“Good. Dismissed.”

Jamie stepped out of the lift and strode along the central corridor of Level B.

Search and destroy , he thought. Just like that. Search and destroy three hundred super-powerful vampires. No problem at all.

He had left the Ops Room with his stomach churning uneasily. There was no doubt in his mind that the mass escapes of the previous night had been orchestrated by Dracula, or at the very least by Valeri, and that they had the potential to cause widespread carnage. There was a positive aspect to the move: such a large action, designed so clearly to occupy Department 19 and its counterparts around the world for a significant amount of time, strongly suggested that Dracula was not far in advance of their Zero Hour timeline, if at all. But that was going to be of little comfort to the men and women who were by now already heading out to hunt down the escapee vampires.

Jamie pulled the console from his belt and typed as he walked.

M-3/OP_EXT_L1/LIVEBRIEFING/BR4/ASAP

He pressed SEND and knew that, far below him, in the circular confines of the Playground, the consoles belonging to John Morton and Lizzy Ellison would now be vibrating into life. He wondered how long it would take them to make their way up to Briefing Room 4 on Level 0, and guessed at ten minutes.

It’ll probably take them five minutes to find the right room , he thought, smiling to himself. It used to for me.

Jamie reached his quarters, pressed his ID against the keypad set into the wall, and pushed his door open when the red light turned green. He flopped down on his bed, grateful for a few minutes’ rest; given the situation that Cal Holmwood had described, he doubted there were going to be many similar opportunities in the next few days. Not that there ever really were; life inside Department 19 was physically and mentally exhausting, a result of the high stakes that were constantly in play. If Jamie and his colleagues failed to do their jobs well, people died; it was as simple as that. Every Operator understood this, found a way to process it and carry on, but it was not always easy.

Jamie felt his eyes begin to close, even though he had only woken up three hours earlier, to find a box in the middle of his console’s screen telling him that he had a message waiting from Larissa. He had pressed OPEN and read the lines of text that appeared.

Hey! Hope you’re OK? Will be awake for the next hour or so if you’re around and fancy giving me a call… x

Jamie had checked the time stamp on the message. It had arrived at 7:30am, when he had apparently been so soundly asleep that he hadn’t even heard it beep. He had quickly done the time-zone maths in his head.

Half past eleven in Nevada. Late.

He had considered calling her anyway – he didn’t think she would be too annoyed if he woke her up – but had decided to let her sleep. Now, as he contemplated the scale and horror of what he had just been told in the Ops Room, he wished he had made the call; it would have been good to hear a genuinely friendly voice. For a second, he considered walking round and knocking on the door to the quarters next to his own, the quarters occupied, technically at least, by one of his best friends, but knew it would be a waste of time.

Matt Browning was almost never in his room these days, unless he was asleep. Jamie knew he had turned down the chance to move into one of the larger quarters inside the Lazarus security perimeter, and while he admired the reasoning behind his friend’s refusal, a spirited attempt to avoid devoting his every waking moment to his work, he thought it had, in fact, been largely pointless. Matt’s life now revolved entirely around the Lazarus Project, and that was that. Jamie missed his friend, but wasn’t annoyed with him; how could he be, when what Matt had devoted himself to was arguably the most important project being carried out in the whole of Blacklight? However, he did think he should try to press Matt into having a drink in the officers’ mess, or at least into sharing a table at lunch; it had been a while since they had talked for longer than a minute or two in a corridor, when both were on their way somewhere else.

On the other hand, it had been barely seventy-two hours since he had talked to Larissa, but he still missed her terribly. They had spoken for almost an hour over a secure video connection, Jamie battered and bloodied by the operation he had just returned from, Larissa bright and smiling, eight hours behind him, her day just getting under way. The pleasure and excitement in her voice as she told him about Dreamland, the NS9 base, and the men and women who inhabited it, was bittersweet to his ears. He knew she had been furious with Holmwood for selecting her for the NS9 secondment, and he knew she missed him as much as he missed her, but she now had a levity about her that he both relished and feared.

He was happy that she was happy: God knows she deserved it after what had happened to her over the last few years, and what had been done to her during the attack on the Loop, when she had been burned down to little more than bones. But he was also jealous of her temporary new life, away from the darkness that surrounded Blacklight, that seemed to follow him wherever he went; jealous that she was meeting new people and experiencing new places, new things. And a tiny piece of him, the vicious, self-loathing part that had been birthed by his father’s death and nourished by years of bullying and loneliness, kept asking the same two questions, whispering them in the darkest recesses of his mind.

What if she forgets about me? What if she doesn’t want to come back?

He pushed such miserable thoughts aside and climbed off his bed. He pulled a bottle of water out of the small fridge beneath his desk and headed out into the corridor, pulling the door to his quarters closed behind him, trying to focus on nothing more than the task at hand.

Jamie logged in to the terminal at the front of Briefing Room 4 and found his squad’s target list waiting for him. He moved it up on to the wall screen behind him, and waited for the rest of his newly activated squad to arrive.

They kept him waiting for less than two minutes. Morton and Ellison burst through the door, clad in their dark blue training uniforms, red-faced from what Jamie knew would have been several minutes of running along the curving corridors of Level 0 in search of the right room. They were caked in sweat and drying blood, but their faces wore identical expressions of determined enthusiasm.

“Good to see you both,” said Jamie. “Get lost on the way up here?”

Morton looked about to deny it, but Ellison opened her mouth first. “Yes, sir,” she said. “The corridors all look the same, sir.”