The Dark Edge Chronicles - Clan War

Chapter 4: Mysteries of the Blood

Lash's eyes narrowed thoughtfully as he watched Narcist work on the tablet she had pulled out of her kit as soon as she had dropped into the sling seat she had picked from the half dozen set against the cargo plane's inner hull. A modified C-5 Galaxy that was additionally armored against the deadly ambient radiation that made daytime travel so hazardous for vampires, the cargo plane had been waiting for them on the tarmac at Van Tallert's private airstrip when their shielded helicopter dropped them nearby before returning to base.

The team had sprinted across the intervening fifty meters between where they hopped off the helicopter and the plane's lowered cargo ramp even as their skin began to burn from the approaching sunrise. The ramp closed just as the sun peaked above the horizon, narrowly blocking the first rays of sunlight from slashing into the cargo hold.

They had taken a moment to get settled, Narcist using an ambient radiation sensor to make sure the hold was safe. Then, as most of the team curled up to get some sleep in the sling seats the cargo hold was equipped with, she had pulled out that tablet and got to work.

For his part, already well used to operating during daytime hours thanks to his work with the psylord Mordecai during the campaign to defeat the Brotherhood of Advanced Intellects in Canada, Lash had slumped into a sling chair opposite van Tallert's tech expert. There, arms folded, he had watched with interest as she worked with smooth efficiency and speed, her hands fairly dancing over the tablet.

It could only be the parsing of the redundant signals they had gotten from the shattered phone that she was working on. Narcist had indicated the parsing was only partial by the time he, Truk and van Tallert had finished receiving her report and that it would take another ten, perhaps fifteen minutes to complete. And that had been with the fortress's mainframe at her beck and call.

Now, reduced to either working remotely via a commlink with the mainframe, or having downloaded the signal onto the tablet to do more hands-on work, he had little doubt that time frame had expanded exponentially. He could only hope that she could get it done in the two hours it would take them to fly to Carnmore Airport, the closest airport large enough to land the C-5, or their efforts to find the endpoint would face some serious challenges.

Thankfully vampire infrastructure in Ireland was extensive. One of the first places colonized by the then-young vampire race over 2500 years ago, shortly before the arrival of the Iron Age, and the Roman invasion of Britain, Ireland quickly became a refuge for early vampires fleeing persecution from humans on mainland Europe.

In the years following that colonization, they had built up their holdings, gathered resources, and prepared for a human onslaught on their fallback that never came. Instead, it left them relatively unhindered to continue developing their own culture, technology, and infrastructure far in advance of what the humans would possess. So, as soon as Lash and his team hit Irish airspace, they should have access to that infrastructure, including high-speed wireless information portals. Which should get any effort Narcist was making to parse the signal back on track.

Satisfied for the moment that his team was, despite not being the Qos Viran specialists he was used to working with, doing all they could to be prepared for whatever they faced on the ground, Lash turned his attention to his own electronic devices. Drawing out a small tablet he had gotten from the Van Tallert armory, he quickly called up what the Ventru database had on the Magnar estate.

One of the founding families of the Irish vampiric Houses, the Magnar holdings were almost as old as the colonization itself. So the estate was equipped with a proper castle of Irish stone quarried out of the nearby Twelve Bens Mountains in the Connemara. A castle that was heavily fortified against attack, and shielded against ambient radiation, possessing a level of military technology that would make most vampires hesitate to even consider attacking.