"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."
Narcist favored him with one of her long looks before shaking her head.
"I don't disagree with a thing you just said, Lash," she indicated. "Get the rest of the team back to base and debriefed. Roger that. But we need to hit that safehouse! Maybe if just you, me, and Truk go, something surgical, we can catch the Hand prematurely celebrating our defeat at Castle Magnar and take them out."
She hesitated slightly.
"And maybe before the white flames clue them in to our escape," the tech added.
Lash's expression tightened as he slowly nodded. It wasn't a bad plan by any stretch of the imagination. As Qos Viran he had participated in dozens of covert penetrations into enemy-held territory with minimal assets available. And he was just as certain that the veteran Truk and the extremely capable Narcist had participated in a number of similar operations themselves. Not to mention he simply wanted to find the filth that had been tracking them this whole time and ash them in the sun.
In the end, it wasn't as hard a decision as he thought it might be.
"Very well," he said. "Just the three of us."
"Outstanding!" Narcist declared with a rare smile, prompting Lash to hold up a quick forestalling hand.
"Before you get too excited, we're going to have to play this as smartly as possible," he said. "Daytime penetration, posing as humans, and assuming that every human down in that city has ties to the white flames." His expression tightened. "This will be as covert ops as I've ever participated in, deep, deep behind enemy lines!"
"Like we're walking into France and Brotherhood HQ to steal the keys to the Bentley," Narcist said with a quick, agreeing nod, her initial enthusiasm now tempered by a grim resolve. "Hard stealth the entire way!"
"Hard stealth," Lash agreed with a nod of his own.
Just then Truk stepped back into the darkened hanger and began to jog towards them.
"We found an active comms set at the fallback secondary," he indicated as he came close. Coming to a halt beside Lash, he looked over at Narcist then back at the big Qos Viran.
"Lady van Tallert had our transpo on orbit so we called it down. It should extract us in approximately ten minutes."
"Ten minutes," Lash repeated. "Good. That'll be just enough time to plan out how the three of us are going to use hard stealth to penetrate Galway City and find the Hand safehouse that's been hoarding the intel they've been skimming off the van Tallerts for months!"
****
Lash frowned as he watched the transport plane lift off the end of the tarmac and begin climbing into the sky. As he did, he couldn't help pondering the last few moments before and after their capture by the white flames.
Why did Anna van Tallert tell him it was dangerous where they were, just before the white flames captured them? And why hadn't they put a collar on her like they did the rest of his team, including him? If he was any judge of expressions, there was something on her mind that she wanted to talk to him about after they used Mordecai's portal to retreat to Galway Airport. Something that haunted her.
With the first two questions already bouncing around his mind, he had been too uncertain of her to entertain that conversation. And now, as he watched the plane climb into the cool, autumn sky, he found himself wishing he had.
Maybe she had some morsel of intel she had been hiding from them, something that could've stopped the slaughter at Magnar's estate. Or their capture by the white flames. Maybe it was something darker, something more ... dangerous. It would certainly explain some of her antagonistic attitude when they first met at van Tallert Castle.
"I didn't think I'd ever say this, but daylight's wasting, Wolf," Truk said from a few meters away.
A look over at the veteran nestari found him in civilian clothing, consisting of denim jeans, hiking boots, a long-sleeved t-shirt and a heavy canvas jacket, something they would see on any human male in the cosmopolitan Galway City, a popular tourist destination. It was an outfit similar to what he now wore; the three of them pulled the civilian clothing from the emergency cache that had been hidden near the airport by Ventru familiars years before.
Beside Truk, Narcist sported a slightly more feminine version with leggings instead of jeans, and her dark hair pulled back into a functional tail. It was an appropriately touristy ensemble that deftly hid her body armor and electronic protection. Both had packs similar in look to the ones backpacking tourists would use, each bulging with supplies, extra ammo magazines, and spare clothing.
"I'm not sure why human women wear these things," the van Tallert tech grumbled as Lash joined them, plucking at the legging's thinner material. "They wouldn't stop a biting insect, little yet a knife or a bullet!"
"Human civilians rarely think they're in danger at any time," Truk explained as they began walking towards the airport's bus terminal. According to the brief they had read before coming to Ireland, it would take them into the coastal city's heart in less than thirty minutes.
"That's what makes them such easy prey!"
"Not these ones, Truk," Lash grimly pointed out. "We don't know if the humans in the city are somehow affiliated with the white flames. And, as much as I would like to think our withdrawal to the hanger went unnoticed, I'd say the white flames leader's knowledge of the ambush was enough to tell me the hanger is monitored."
Narcist nodded as she took up the warning.
"They'll suspect we've left someone behind, if they got a head count of everybody that got on the transport," she pointed out. "But hopefully not before they discover their downed team. If we can reach the city before the white flames know we've escaped, ..."
"Aye, I know," Truk said with a rueful smile. "They won't yet know, so they won't yet be looking. You two only explained it to me at least two dozen times!"
"We'll have to switch to English when we start interacting as well," Narcist then suggested, looking from Truk to Lash. "If white flame operatives are looking for vampires, speaking our native tongue will give us away. Even speaking a human language with a bit of an accent will be safer."
Then they were at the bus terminal, a medium-sized building that looked like it could handle good crowds and multiple buses at once. And just in time; just as they made to step into the station to purchase their tickets, a serviceable, fairly-modern gas-driven bus with Bus Éireann written on the side, pulled up into the first available parking spot and, with a hiss of air brakes, the door opened.
"Galway City!" the driver, a rather worn-looking human in a rumpled green uniform, declared in a gently accented voice. "Have your tickets ready to board!"
"Can we get them from you?" Lash asked, now speaking English.
In response the driver pointed to a pair of automated ticket kiosks standing between two glass and metal rain shelters. He then pointed to four manned ticket windows on the side of the building but visible from where Lash and the others were standing.
"The machines won't take coin, if you have it," the driver said. "And they prefer credit cards. Seventy five Euros each to the city center."
Nodding his thanks, Lash quickly directed his comrades to the kiosks. Thankfully he still had Qos Viran-issued credit cards from his mission to North America. They would have plenty of credit left on them to afford the three tickets.
A few minutes' of effort put tickets in their hands and, after steeling themselves mentally to be spending a significant amount of time in the presence of non-familiar humans, they returned to the bus. Pulling out an IR scanner, the driver scanned each ticket's barcode as they came up the steps before gesturing at the empty bus.
"Seating is first come, first serve," he indicated before wearily smiling. "Don't get lost back there."
"Thank you," Lash said as he let Truk and Narcist squeeze past him to make their way into the bus first. Having spent a fair share of his time on human-operated transport to travel to various missions, the bus wasn't bothering him. But he could tell by Narcist's body language, she wasn't enjoying being this close to a non-familiar.
"When are we scheduled to depart?"
"About five minutes, lad. But I might delay a bit to see if I can pick up any on the next flight landing." He pointed to a tablet screen attached to his dash that showed a listing of incoming and outgoing flights from the airport. "The next one scheduled to land is a local. They usually have people here to pick them up."
"Fair enough," Lash said. "Thanks again."
At the driver's acknowledging nod, he turned and made his way to where Truk and Narcist had picked seats somewhere close to the middle. As he dropped into the empty side across the aisle from where they sat, he could hear Narcist sniff distastefully.
"I can smell unwashed human flesh," she hoarsely whispered. "I know they are primitive beasts only useful as cattle, but surely they know how to bathe!"
"If you were using that smell to track prey on a blood hunt, you'd be salivating by now," Truk bluntly pointed out.
"But I'm not, and it's disgusting," the van Tallert tech quickly retorted.
"Here," Lash leaned across the aisle to hand her a small vial of smelling salts. Even though he knew the bus had been thoroughly cleaned, as evidenced by the smell of cleaner, he also knew by experience that vampires that weren't used to mass human exposure often 'mentally' smelled a strong human scent in similar circumstances. Thankfully he had a good trick to shake Narcist out of her nose.
"We use these on foundlings for their first trip on human transport. While it won't deaden your sense of smell, it masks the smell of humans in a closed space for a good hour or so. Which should be long enough to get to Galway."
Nodding her thanks, Narcist took the vial and quickly snapped it under her nose, briefly filling the air with the strong smell of ammonia. A quick inhalation then she was nodding.
"Much better."
"Good," Truk said as, with a jerk, the bus began to reverse out of the parking spot, the driver confirming over the radio connected to his dispatch that no future bus passengers were on the inbound flight. "Now put your human face back on. Your fangs were showing for a moment there."
That earned the veteran nestari a raised eyebrow. Then they were all settling in after the bus doors finally closed without any additional humans coming on board. A minute later the bus was in motion, wheeling through the terminal's parking area and back onto the highway leading into town.