“Good,” said the President. “Do it now.”
Jamie stared at the twelve vampires standing in the middle of the road, his eyes burning with heat.
For a long moment, nobody moved a muscle. Then, as if responding to a silent shout of ‘Charge’, the strike team sprinted up the street, Jamie taking the lead. He and his colleagues were outnumbered three to one, but the fight was still nothing short of a mismatch; it was over in thirty bloody, brutal seconds.
He accelerated towards the closest vampire like a human wrecking ball. The man swung a punch that would have annihilated most people, but which seemed to Jamie like it was moving in slow motion; he slipped past it and hammered a gloved fist on to the point of the vampire’s chin. The man was sent flying, his eyes rolling back white, his limbs limp, and collided with the stone wall above the door of a café with a bone-cracking impact, before sliding to the ground in a heap.
Beside him, Frankenstein crouched low and swung one of his tree-trunk arms into the stomach of a female vampire with blonde hair down to her waist and crimson hatred in her eyes; the breath exited her lungs with a sound like a bursting balloon, and she folded to the ground, her eyes bulging in their sockets. The monster plunged a stake into her heart as Jamie did the same to the vampire he had punched.
Two down, he thought, grinning savagely behind his visor.
Larissa tore into the vampires, her stake glinting under the remaining street lights. She plunged it through the heart of one, reversed it, and brought it around in a backhand sweep that was little more than a gleaming blur. Two vampires burst with thunderclaps of blood, but she gave no sign of even having noticed; she advanced on a third, who staggered backwards, a look of outright terror on his face. She leapt through the air, as fast as a striking cobra, and slammed the sole of her boot into the vampire’s neck; his face turned instantly purple as the red glow died in his eyes. He made a hoarse gasping noise, followed by a thick grunt as her stake broke through his sternum and a loud pop as he exploded across the cobblestones.
That’s five, thought Jamie.
One of the vampires leapt on to his back, but he threw it over his shoulder without so much as flinching. The woman spun up into the air, a look of immense surprise on her face, then shrieked in pain as he drove her down on to the street shoulder first. The bone broke, and her arm collapsed uselessly across the cobbles. The shriek reached an ungodly pitch and volume, and the vampire looked almost relieved when Jamie staked her.
Six.
“Catch,” said Valentin.
Jamie turned towards the old vampire, plucked something red and dripping out of the air as it flew towards him, and looked at it; it was a human heart, still beating in his gloved hand.
“Jesus, Valentin,” he shouted, and dropped the organ. He stamped it flat, and jumped as a man sprawled on the other side of the street burst into strings of gore. Valentin ran through the steaming mess, lifted two of the remaining vampires into the air by their throats, hammered their heads together with a sound like breaking glass, and hurled them down the road. They fell in a tangled heap at Frankenstein’s feet; the monster shook his head, then crouched down and staked them quickly in turn.
Nine.
One of the final three vampires, a man in his early sixties with a mane of silver-grey hair, rushed towards Jamie. He hammered his stake up through the man’s ribs, lifting him off the ground and splitting his heart in two; he saw no value in prolonging the man’s suffering. The vampire burst, drenching him with blood. Jamie gagged behind his visor; the smell of the steaming liquid was overpoweringly strong.
Ten. Time to finish this.
Jamie drew his T-Bone and fired it through the back of a vampire woman as she retreated from Larissa, her hands raised in surrender. He hit the button that wound the metal stake back in before the woman had even exploded; it sped back through a cloud of blood and lodged in the barrel. He turned and fired the weapon again, sending the dripping stake through the armpit of the last of the vampires, a man who was staring around at the carnage that had befallen his colleagues with wide-eyed incredulity. The man burst with a wet thunderclap; the stake wound back in as silence descended over the cobbled street.
Twelve.
Jamie flipped his visor up and looked at his squad mates. There were small smiles on all their faces, the thrill of the fight combined with the pride of overwhelming victory. Jamie opened his mouth to congratulate them, then frowned as gunfire echoed down the narrow street, from somewhere near the summit of the medieval city.
There are no Operators up there, he thought. What the hell is going on?
On the bridge of the Terrible, Commander Masson felt a shiver race up his spine as the command screen lit up.
A printer rattled instantly to life, spitting out the order that arrived from the Central Military Command facility at Mont Verdun. Masson tore off the sheet of paper and read the short paragraph.
“Sir?” asked Clément, the Terrible’s executive officer. “Is it a launch order?”
“No,” he said, and shook his head. “Give me weapons control.”
Clément nodded, and opened a line to the small station one deck below where the weapons officer sat hunched in front of a dozen screens and terminals. Masson lifted down his comms handset and held it to the side of his face.
“Weapons control?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Load targeting package 0193/3475. Arm missiles five through eight and await further orders.”
“Yes, sir.”
Masson placed the handset back in its cradle.
“Is this happening, sir?” asked Clément, his face pale.
“I don’t know,” said Masson. “Not yet, at least. I want an immediate ship-readiness report. If we are ordered to launch, I want the protocols followed to the letter.”
“Yes, sir,” said Clément. “Right away.”
“And tell the crew to stay calm,” said Masson. “This might still come to nothing.”
“Do you really think so, sir?”
“No,” said Masson. “But I live in hope.”
Guérin ran towards Field 1, his uniform soaked in blood that wasn’t his.
He had raised the alarm as loudly and widely as he could, but it had not been enough; the killing had already started as the security squad and tech staff and charity workers emerged from the mess hall, frowns of concern on their faces. The first screams had come from Field 11, but had quickly spread throughout the entire camp, which now resembled a scene from Hell; fires were burning in every field, filling the sky with an orange glow, and everywhere he looked were vampires, trailing glowing streaks of red light as they chased panicking men and women in all directions.
The gunfire that had briefly rung out as the security Operators attempted to repel the invaders had all but fallen silent; Guérin had no idea if any of them were still alive, or whether they had tried to flee with everyone else, and as he sprinted through the Field 1 gate, he realised it made little difference.
The command centre loomed before him, an angular sprawl of tents and buildings. He had been in Field 5, firing his MP5 at vampires that seemed as insubstantial as smoke, when Central Director Vallens’ voice had sounded in his ear, demanding an update on the situation on the ground. He had screamed something incoherent, his attention entirely focused on the massacre unfolding around him; he had temporarily forgotten the potential consequences of Paris believing the battle was lost, but now they filled his mind, huge and unimaginable.
A vampire dropped silently out of the dark sky in front of him, and he shot it in the face without breaking stride. The vampire crashed to the ground, rolling and screaming. Guerin knew it wasn’t dead, but didn’t care as long as he was not stopped before he reached the command centre and spoke to Vallens; what happened after that didn’t matter. He raced forward, as men and women on all sides were plucked into the air and came back down in pieces, then staggered as a huge explosion hammered the air to his right; he guessed it was the vehicle fuel store going up. He glanced over at the rising cloud of fire, steadied himself and ran on.