"What happened to Darin?" the Himmit asked.
"Oh, he ran into a claymore about two weeks later," Papa said.
"That's how most of your friends end up," the Himmit noted.
"Unfortunately true," Papa said. "Not that I'd call Darin a friend. Just one of the guys on the teams."
"You have had a remarkable ability to avoid being killed, given your life experiences," the Himmit said. "Statistically amazing, in fact."
"This is right good brew," Papa said, taking another sip. It was, too. He'd had a lot of beer in his time but this was very good. And he did not begin to recognize it. "Don't suppose you'll tell me where it comes from?"
"Nowhere accessible to you," the Himmit said. "And I, unfortunately, do not have any more."
"Well, then, I'll have to make it last," Papa said, belying that by taking another sip. "But since we ain't got much more and I don't tell stories well without something to wet my whistle, I think I'll tell you one that will not only pay for this trip, but for this very fine brew you have provided."
"I am eagerly awaiting it," the Himmit said.
"And you've got lots of ears," Papa replied, grinning. "The thing is . . . I want you to understand . . . Soldiers tell stories. Sometimes they . . . exaggerate."
"All stories, of the necessity of communication, contain some element of fiction," the Himmit said. "I personally doubt the one about the CS."
"Truth," Papa said, placing his hand over his heart.
"I do not doubt that the patrol was killed," the Himmit said. "That would be the outcome of the method. It was the packing into orifices. There was insufficient material."
"Well, all of 'em weren't like that," Papa admitted. "But that factoid makes the story better."
"Elements of fiction," the Himmit replied. "When we transmit our stories, we avoid all such elements. However, we relay your stories precisely as given. With the caveat that they contain some element of fiction."
"Point accepted," Papa said, taking a sip. "But what I want you to understand is that this story is truth. Pointed, complete, truth. There's nothing worth exaggerating in it. But you're not going to believe a word."
"Why?"
"Because it's the story of when I met a vampire."
He paused.
"I'm waiting for you to say something like, 'Pull one of the other ones, it's got bells on.' "
"Why?"
"You believe in vampires?" Papa said. "I know I didn't. 'Til I met one."
"I accept the possibility of there being of such condition as you would refer to him or it as a vampire."
"Interesting response," Papa said, musingly. "Given that I don't think there's anything you Himmit don't know."
"Very little."
"Well, I've never told this story to anybody," Papa said. "And all the rest of the guys who saw it . . . Well, they ain't around no more. That statistical thing you mentioned. And we didn't tell anybody, even in the debrief. It's not something you admit. So this is a story that nobody's got. Must be worth something."
"Agreed."
"We was doing an op in Europe," Papa said, sitting back in his chair. "Which we didn't do much as it was hard to get there. But the European networks had just gotten screwed to hell by the invasion. And there was this guy working in one of the Austrian defense bases . . . The Texans had a law at one point: A guy who just needed killin'."
"Most of your stories surround such people." The Himmit had learned that Papa needed a certain amount of prompting for his stories to flow.
"Yeah," Papa admitted. "He was a fairly minor logistics officer. But he had his fingers on a lot of stuff. And he looked incompetent. So stuff that was needed one place ended up in the wrong place, usually meaning that some unit that desperately needed it lost a battle and a bunch of soldiers got killed. The usual way that the Darhel worked in the war. And since the war. He wasn't incompetent, though. He was too consistent. And, hell, we had his money trace and some of his orders from the Darhel. Taking him out was practically a mission from God.
"Problem being that he was in the St. Polten PDF. It wasn't a line defense base, it was one of the rear area support bases for the Vienna Defenses."
"I know of it."
"Basic plan was as simple as you could get for taking out someone in a major defense base," Papa said. "Go in as an American liaison team. Since the bases were occasionally under attack, you could carry weapons on base. Find the target. Take him out in his quarters. Extract as if nothing had happened. We had passes for the base, uniforms, weapons, covers. I hate it when you have to depend on somebody else for all that, somebody you don't have any knowledge of. But it was all good.
"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 tertiary. 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.
"We got about an hour, maybe, down the road and there was this shaking like an earthquake. Turned out the base had blown up. A PDC makes one hell of a fall of rock when it blows up, let me tell you. We were in another valley and it was still raining hot granite.
"So that's my story," Papa said, taking his last sip of beer. "And I'm sticking to it. Never told it to another soul."
"It is a good story," the Himmit said. "Well worth the price of the trip. I shall gain favor by its retelling."
"You don't seem particularly surprised by it," Papa said. "Of course, if you guys can even look surprised."
"That an intruder was involved with the destruction of the St. Polten PDF is well known," the Himmit replied.
"And it being a vampire? Did you know that, too?"
"Thank you for the very good story," was all it said.
"Your Ghin, the altar calls you."
Resignedly, he turned his thoughts away from his latest problem and cleared his head. Any input from the altar would be critically important. One did not use it for less. Confining the altars' use to the vital and avoiding group business rivalries removed anyone's temptation to decide their own interests might be better off without the existence of the devices. Security came in many different forms. The Ghin was in a position to enforce communications discipline, and he did so. That it served his personal interests to do so was an accepted down side. He was as close to strictly neutral between groups as it was possible to be, which was the best anyone could ask for. That he also considered the interests of his species of paramount importance was all to the good.
There had to be someone in the highest seat of arbitration. Each group being absolutely certain it could write a more skillful contract than the other groups solidified his position. His deserved reputation for being meticulously and impartially literal gave every group the certainty that his presence in the position gave it an edge over the other groups. He, and the other Ghins before him, had maintained the sanctity of contract through the Galaxy since his race were first allowed—the taste of the price was still bitter—off their homeworld. That was as close to order as anyone could ask for.
He carefully lit the sticks of incense on the altar and made his ritual obeisances—one of the few circumstances in which a top Darhel would willingly perform such actions. The relic was sacred. Besides, there was the partially superstitious notion that somewhere, somehow, someone might be listening in.
The device, although communication was nearly instantaneous, took a certain amount of time to make initial contact. The Ghin sometimes wondered if the Aldenata had crafted the prescribed rituals merely to create the illusion that the wait was shorter than the reality. Besides, the drill supported calmness—paramount when dealing with urgent matters.
The hologram focused in slowly, bringing one Tir Dol Ron into his office space. The Ghin twitched in irritation. "Oh. It's you," he said. The small snub was precise.
"I arrive," the Tir replied, responding to the Ghin's display of bad manners by omitting his title.
"This is doubtless important enough to merit imploring the gods of communication." The Ghin managed to convey that he did very much doubt such importance. The matter was, of course, important. He just already knew the details of the situation and didn't appreciate being interrupted from contemplating the details of his options. Besides, Tir Dol Ron was, to put it bluntly, a pain in the ass. "How go your plans for the humans, Tir?" he asked.
"Badly," the Tir admitted baldly, surprising him. "I underestimated your concerns about recontacting them."
Such an admission was very out of character. He must want something big.