The Dark Edge Chronicles - Clan War

The Search for Answers

"What ... in the name of the Night Father just happened?" Truk stammered, eyes wide as he stared at the human that had just been holding him down with his gloved hand an instant ago.

"And what is that?" Narcist demanded to know, pointing at the still open portal.

"Our gateway out of here," Lash indicated, once again all grim business. "One that doesn't stay open for long. It leads back to the hanger at the airport. I've already sent our transports there and almost used up the battery that powers the wormhole generator I got from my psionic friends. So if we don't move now, we're going to get left here to be discovered when the humans come looking for their friends!"

Nodding, Truk quickly climbed to his feet and, after feeling for the collar that had been around his neck and breathing a sigh of relief to find it gone, he began urging the rest of the survivors to get up and go. Who, after doing much the same thing, leaped up to comply.

"Our weapons, Wolf?" the veteran nestari commander asked as he paused on the near side of the portal to look back at the grimly thoughtful Lash.

- In the transports, - came Mordecai's voice into the depths of Lash's mind to say.

"In the transports," Lash repeated out loud as he felt the momentary touch of the psylord's mind disappear once more. "Make sure you rearm as soon as you're in the hanger!"

Nodding, Truk turned to wave the survivors through.

"You heard Wolf, move, move, move!" he urged.

Then it was just Truk, Narcist, Anna, and Lash.

"Take her Ladyship," Lash directed Truk as Anna moved toward him, an unreadable expression on her face. Nodding, the van Tallert captain gently took the still weak vampire woman by the arms and guided her through the portal. But not before she threw Lash a long look over her shoulder.

"You'll have to tell me once this is all over, how you took out all those humans," Narcist said as she joined him in quickly striding towards the portal. "Especially without us seeing a thing!"

"When this is over," he promised. Then they were going one at a time though the open gateway.

Lash had just enough time to turn and look back at the portal before it collapsed in on itself in a shower of dark light and disappeared.

"Good timing," he muttered.

"Wolf!" Truk called out and Lash turned to catch his rifle that the nestari commander had tossed through the air at him. A quick check was enough to tell him it was still operational.

"We need comms, Truk," he said, making sure there was a round in the chamber before he safetied it and put his readiness harness over his head to settle it into place, putting his weapon within easy reach should he need it.

"I want to be off this rock and onto friendly territory before those white flames discover we deep chilled their operatives and bugged out."

"Copy that, Wolf," Truk said, settling his own readiness harness into place before grabbing two of their pitifully small number of nestari. "You, check the cache at the back. And you, the secondary outside, near the road. Go!"

"What about the safe house we identified in Galway?" Narcist said as they watched Truk and the two nestari go in three separate directions. "Can we afford to let the spies in our ranks remain unidentified?"

"While the answer to that is a resounding 'no', I'm no longer confident we have sufficient resources to investigate," Lash reluctantly admitted as the van Tallert tech accepted her weapon from one of the other soldiers. "We've cleared Magnar's name and got his data vault. We need to return to Belgium to get it deciphered as quickly as possible to see what my commanding officer was trying to hide from his captors."