Erasure and Affirmation (Hypernaturals 11)

Digital Sludge

Morgan, Helen, Jessica, and I rode in Denise's Jeep since as my guardian, Denise does not like me being out of her line of sight. I say 'her Jeep', because it is not dissimilar to the one I saw her drive in Austin, but she picked another like it out of the Crew Carpool up here. I think Denise likes four-door Jeeps. I can see it. Open roof motoring when you want it. Go anywhere drivetrain. I guess Crew sometimes needs to leave the road for things. Jessica's Honda has four-wheel drive, as does Nakoma's Subaru, but neither of them can go where this thing can. If she drove this thing around with the doors off, the top off, in a Bikini, and picking up surfer-dudes, she'd be a Hollywood stereotype.

A pushing 600 Vampire from the 'old country' (she calls it) that is having a guilt complex over how many people she has killed Hollywood stereotype.

Away from the Siren lab we just made to disappear into trucks and out onto the roads of New England, our comms are much quieter. All the signal blocking taken down and removed. That had caused a hiss in the comms as our comm gear compensated. I do not miss it. The Crew erased every last trace of us having ever been there, other than the utter lack of the lab still being there. I have seen their work before, but it always impresses me.

The things you can do when you have centuries to learn your trade! I can't wait to start on new things, like Astrophysics.

We are not the last car out, because that was Luciana. Some Crew local to the area remained behind, hidden and at a distance to watch the former facility. The tech Crew is still tapped into the security system to see all the building's cameras.

Excitement over, driving away sedately as if we did nothing, it was oddly serene all of a sudden. I watched out my backseat window as the landscape rolled by. It's really pretty up here. The New England area looks nothing like Austin. As often happens in times of decompression, random thoughts come flying in. Looking out at the landscape so different from my home, I suddenly missed my other home, The one in France. It looks different there too.

That made me grin at being sassed by Fiona. I snapped back to now as I realized we are still here, and technically on the run from some soon to be pissed off Sirens.

Up on the dashboard, there is a computer screen mounted that had status tracking of our convoy. Pretty soon Sirens would kill to know where those vehicles are. When I looked between the front bucket seats to the screen, I saw many dots with attached numbers moving in a broad mesh out and away from the scene of the Siren crime. Those dots represent an amazing amount of hauling space: An entire building gutted and trucked away in an ever-expanding sphere. Not the furniture. Not even Vampires could have done that in so little time.

It's going to be a stone bitch to put it back together. The lab and all its related materials jammed into boxes and loaded up, with no attention to where it came from or what it is. That's going to be the mother of all jigsaw puzzles. Led by Jessica and Mom for the genetic parts of the lab, Uma, Crew Doctor, for more general medical aspects, some Crew technorati to put the data center back together, and lots of Crew re-organizing and feeding the specialist teams things as they find it.

I could imagine a Crew person open a box of black, snaky, specialized looking cords and going 'Hey! Tech heads! Want some cables?'

Other technical people (Vampires are people too) are busy right now. Somewhere out there in Crew-land, there are computer techs tracing data from clues we found. Finding caches of backups of the lab data here and there, and grabbing it.

I listened to Denise getting status from that effort on the car phone with interest.

Denise answered when the phone rang. "Hi, Olivia. What you have?"

"You would not believe how dumb these people were about some things." Olivia said.

"Not so dumb we knew about this place until recently." Denise did not sound like she is happy with how long this lab went undetected by Crew even as Crew has known about Sirens for years now.