The Last Aerie

  “On the other hand he might find himself cocooned, stored intact, and later changed by the metamorphic skills of his Lord into just such a flyer or warrior—or part of one! A creature like the thing which came through the Gate that time and destroyed a pair of heavily armed, highly sophisticated Soviet aircraft before the Americans shot it out of their airspace. Oh, yes, the Wamphyri can work such … what, miracles? Or if not miracles, horrors, certainly. For human flesh is like clay to them …

  “But let’s suppose that our specimen thrall is the right stuff. Ah, but then his prospects could be very different! Kept as a true thrall, he might be trained, given the rank of lieutenant, injected with more of his master’s evil. And in time—with fifty, a hundred, or five hundred years of longevity guaranteed—why, such a one might even aspire to become Wamphyri in his own right!

  “This could occur in several ways. He could inherit his master’s ‘egg’—a weird reproductory seed or self-contained organism, produced in the leechlike body of the vampire Lord’s symbiont—or he might even generate his own egg from scratch. Don’t ask me how the system works. Nathan himself doesn’t know. I can only tell you that a symbiont egg is the alkahest or catalyst which will transmute a man into a monster, which will in fact make him Wamphyri!”

  She paused to let Tzonov concentrate on controlling the snowcat. There were scattered rifts in the cloud ceiling now. The sky had brightened; it had stopped snowing; the light was much better. They were down into the foothills and Tzonov was turning off the road onto a vast snow slope that swept on for a further fifteen miles or more to the dark-canopied forests and so-called pioneer logging camps. But the Russian’s thoughts were bitter, less than patriotic as he scanned the white desolation ahead:

  We’ve been pioneering this region for close on a hundred years now! This should be our Yukon, our Canada, our Norway or Sweden. Old-style Communism was to blame, but in the last quarter century we’ve learned the lessons of history. Or rather, I have learned them! But in the past I was only the student, and from now on I must be the teacher!

  Tzonov’s thoughts were so vehement, so determined, that despite Siggi’s shielded mind she picked them up. She “heard” his thoughts and maybe even felt something of his megalomania. Then, shivering a little—perhaps from the cold, too—she shrouded her mind again.

  Taking a sweeping downhill course designed to slice the snowfield in a mighty diagonal to the southwest, Tzonov wound up the throttle and let the snowcat skim the drifted snow like a surfer on the swell of a timeless wave. The miles flew by in a hypnotic hiss of skis; the snowcat paralleled an icy, black-pulsing river like a vein in the dead white flesh of the land; soon they were into the woods.

  And in a clearing beside a pyramid of logs, there Tzonov brought his machine to a halt and stepped down to stretch his legs. Siggi dismounted, too, and lit a cigarette. Tzonov, who didn’t smoke, cautioned her. “Is that an American brand? Huh! On the one hand we’re admonished to clean up our act countrywide, to depollute and let the world breathe, and on the other we’re encouraged to ruin our lungs! Now tell me, what good is a healthy land without a healthy people? Well, one day in the not too distant future, all such shit will be banned! Mark my words.” A mood was on him. His frustrations were starting to spill over.

  Another “vice” of mine that Mr. Perfect has never approved of! Siggi thought, but kept it to herself. While out loud: “I only smoke one or two a day,” she said, “as I require them, to soothe my nerves. We came down the snow slopes in something of a hurry.”

  “Speed has the opposite effect on me,” he growled. “It’s a stimulant. It’s as good for me as sex is for you.” His words were harsh, grating, deliberately hurtful.

  She still wasn’t off the hook. Well, to hell with it! She tossed her head, looked away as he took out a flask and sipped brandy. She glimpsed the flask in the corner of her eye as Tzonov proffered it, but shook her head. And then, quite suddenly, she felt his menace anew and stopped wondering why she was out here, why he’d wanted her to accompany him. She knew it was so that he could keep an eye on her, in more senses than one. No, she wasn’t off the hook by a long shot, not yet. And:

  “What is it?” she said, still looking away from him.

  “Look at me,” he said. She did, and saw his eyes: huge, glassy, staring as if to cut into her flesh. If speed really did work on the Russian like a stimulant, he was still pretty high on it. She saw the bulge in his pants, sluggishly mobile there …

  “No”—his voice was deep, dark, guttural now—“don’t look at me with those goggles on. Take them off.” That would be the same as taking her clothes off, or much worse. For with Nathan fresh in Siggi’s mind, Tzonov would see everything they’d done together. He actually wanted to see them together! The bastard wanted to watch Nathan fuck her—to know who had fucked whom—wanted to be sure they weren’t both fucking him!

  Siggi stepped back a pace in the silence and the solitude of the woods, and shook her head. “I don’t want you in my mind anymore, Turkur. Not ever. There are things in there that are mine alone, private. Oh, we’re still in league, far too deeply to pull out and go our own ways, but from this point on it has to be business pure and simple. We have to be partners all the way, and no more Mr. Big and Miss Little.”

  His face changed. His jaw tightened and his eyes were like mirrors reflecting her mind. But in reality they only reflected her snow goggles and the swirling mental fog behind them. Then … he very slowly and very deliberately reached up and removed the goggles, and the first thing he saw was her bruise and the flaring anger in her eyes …

  And the next thing he felt was Siggi’s gun in his ribs!

  Then, taking back her goggles from his momentarily frozen fingers, she told him, “And that’s something else, Turkur: you must be sure never to hit me again. If you do, then believe me I’ll strike back. Perhaps with this”—she aimed her small but spiteful automatic right into his snarling teeth—“or if not with this, then with whatever else I can lay my hands on. But be sure I will strike back!”

  She put the goggles back on and continued to face Tzonov down, until gradually he came to terms with it. He had to, for right now there was nothing—not a thing—that he could do about it. But after they had both calmed down a little, and as they mounted the snowcat again, Siggi was nauseated to catch a last whiff of the Russian’s mind. And it was just exactly like that: like a bad smell, a mental stench.

  For a moment she thought she saw a picture forming in the slime of his mind. A picture of a machine—of the machine—the gleaming metal vampire which Nathan had feared. And all of its siphons were sucking on the brain of some poor, shuddering victim.

  Except this time its victim wasn’t Nathan …

  6

  Off and Running

  Twice they crossed the winding road to Kozhva. On the first occasion there were faint impressions under the fresh snow, but on the next the heavy tire tracks were black against the white where rubber had stripped packed snow right down to an ice-sheathed surface and only a few grey flakes had speckled the glassy tarmac. Tzonov had an out-of-date map (but then, he told himself resignedly, almost everything in the greatly diminished USS was out of date these days), which he stopped briefly to look at. And grunting his satisfaction with their progress, at least, he at once set off again.

  “We’ll be in Kozhva in about forty minutes,” he informed Siggi over his shoulder. “From this point on I could just as easily stick with the tracks and catch the truck on the road. But if we take one more shortcut to the village, we should be there in time to get a bite to eat and something hot to drink while we’re waiting for the truck to show up. Meanwhile … I think we should put our differences behind us. Why don’t you finish what you were telling me?”

  Siggi made it as brief as possible. But in any case, she could only tell Tzonov what she herself had been told or shown. She knew that Nathan hadn’t revealed everything, not with complete candor, because certain scenes from his history had be
en either very obviously contrived or else deliberately obscured. For example, he’d shown Siggi only a glimpse of his mother and the other people he’d grown up with, and done little more than mention the childhood sweetheart who had become his wife.

  Also, he had made a number of brief references to a race of near-alien, aboriginal desert dwellers with whom he seemed to have spent a deal of time, but such was his reticence with regard to their society that the few pictures which Siggi had managed to retain were hopelessly confused and without resolution. Other areas were likewise blank, especially with regard to the Szgany in their settled period, and the communities in which they’d dwelled prior to the return of the Wamphyri. As for the rest of it, there wasn’t much to tell. She couldn’t possibly relive it for Tzonov, as Nathan had done for her.

  “Nathan grew up on Sunside,” she began. “He knew a girl there, Misha, and they had plans. But when he was eighteen the Wamphyri came back yet again. His tribe was attacked and scattered, and his girl taken as a thrall. So he thought, anyway. He took to wandering, became a true Traveller, spent years in the wilderness moving from tribe to tribe. Until he, too, was taken by the Wamphyri.

  “His vampire Lord was fascinated by Nathan’s light skin and colours, which are rare among Sunside’s Szgany. And so he was kept as a sort of pet, and never vampirized. Eventually he escaped and made his way back to Sunside. There he discovered his girl, alive and well! They were married. But the Wamphyri pursued him. When he was retaken, his punishment was to be thrown into the Starside Gate. And so he came here …”

  Over his shoulder, Tzonov said, “But didn’t you tell me previously that he couldn’t understand his punishment? Isn’t there something of ambiguity here?”

  Despite that he couldn’t see her, Siggi shrugged. “If so, it’s Nathan’s ambiguity, Turkur, not mine. Perhaps there were things he wanted to keep to himself. Is that so strange? Don’t we all have little secrets which we would prefer to keep private?” It was going to be a sore point with her for a long time to come.

  Tzonov answered with a suspicious grunt, and said: “Somehow I can’t help thinking that there are far too many ‘little secrets’ which this Nathan would like to keep to himself. But I shall discover them soon enough.”

  In her own secret mind Siggi thought, You could be right, of course. But first you’ll have to catch him …

  They followed a logging trail right into Little Kozhva’s main street. Big Kozhva was three miles further on, and this was a logging camp of the same name which employed sawyers, lumberjacks, and other workers from the town. The road passed right through the centre of camp, and according to the people on the street the truck from Perchorsk wasn’t in yet.

  Tzonov put distance between the snowcat and a giant sawmill whose noise was deafening, and stopped outside a general store issuing food and coffee smells and a blast of warm air from a roaring log fire in the stone fireplace. An area had been set aside for eating; the coffee and “dogs” were of American blends and manufacture, of course. A handful of customers looked up from their late breakfasts or early lunches as Tzonov ordered coffee, eggs, fried potatoes and onions.

  One of the men, a huge, bearded lumberjack, whistled his appreciation as Siggi shrugged out of her parka and sat down with Tzonov at a rough wooden table. In a frontier place like this, she must surely be a sight for sore eyes. Ignoring the other staring faces all about her, Siggi glanced witheringly at the whistler and lit a cigarette. This time Tzonov made no complaint but simply said, “And now you see what I mean when I talk about such people as subhuman!”

  “No, I don’t,” she answered. “These are just men, and men are the same all over the world. But this is a hard place and so these men are grown rough, like the timbers they handle. I find it much harder to understand intelligent, so-called sophisticated men, whose bodies may be clean and smooth but whose minds are just as grubby if not worse than these!”

  Tzonov scarcely felt slighted. He would never have allowed it to cross his mind that she might be referring to him …

  Their table gave them a view of the dismal street. Fifteen minutes later the truck arrived and stopped. Tzonov had thought it might. A moment later, the driver came in grinning and slapping his hands together, and found the head of Soviet E-Branch waiting for him. The driver wasn’t one of Tzonov’s men, but he was a soldier; he’d seen Tzonov in Perchorsk and knew that he was a powerful, high-ranking official. He saluted as a matter of course.

  And Tzonov was into him in a moment. “You: what’s your name?”

  “Lance Corporal Ivanovich—sir!” He was young, burly, flustered under Tzonov’s cold, penetrating glare. He wondered what was going on, and what it had to do with him.

  Tzonov was looking out into the street; after noting that the canvas at the tailgate was flapping loose, he’d only taken his eyes off the truck for a moment. “Out!” he snapped. “Back to your vehicle. Did you stop en route here? And let me warn you, Ivanovich, it’s best not to lie to me.”

  “No, sir. Of course not—sir! Yes, I did stop, but only to warm up a little. A minute or two. That’s all—sir!”

  They stood at the tailgate. “Open her up,” Tzonov instructed curtly. And as the soldier was letting down the tailgate: “Is your radio on?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Didn’t you hear them hailing you? From Perchorsk?”

  “The complex? Nothing but static since I left the pass. I think it’s the radio to blame. It’s on its last legs—sir!”

  Tzonov looked into the back of the truck. A spare tarpaulin, coiled ropes, a box of worn-out parts from the Projekt’s cranky ventilation system. “What was your cargo?”

  “Just what you see.” Still mystified, the other shrugged. “I’m on resupply, not delivery. I won’t be full until I start back from the railway depot in Ukhta.”

  Siggi had finished her coffee and joined them. She, too, looked into the back of the truck. But she saw more in there than Tzonov had seen. He needed eye-to-eye contact before his talent came into play, but with Siggi … sometimes it was a lot more than just telepathy. Like now. Why, it was almost as if she could smell Nathan in there! As if she could taste him, feel the rush and whirl of his numbers vortex. He wasn’t here now, but he had been, certainly. And even now he wasn’t that far away.

  Tzonov looked at her. “Well?”

  “Nothing,” she lied.

  He turned to the corporal driver. “Ivanovich, we’re looking for a man, the prisoner we were holding at Perchorsk. It’s possible he escaped in this truck. These tailgate lashings were loose. Were they like that when you left the complex? Did you see or hear anything suspicious? Speak up!”

  “The tarpaulin was OK when I left Perchorsk,” the soldier answered. “It probably came loose on its own. I wasn’t carrying anything anyway and so had nothing to lose—sir!”

  Tzonov had been staring straight into the corporal’s eyes and knew that he’d fumbled the lashings in Perchorsk. At least, he knew that the man suspected that he’d fumbled them. It meant absolutely nothing. “Damn it to hell!” he snarled, and turned to Siggi again. And now his eyes were hard and bright as marbles. “Was he here?”

  “No,” she lied again. And her mind-smog swirled, dank and impenetrable.

  Whirling away from her and heading for the snowcat, Tzonov only paused to shout back over his shoulder, “Well, then? Are you coming? For God’s sake, let’s get out of here!”

  “My parka,” she called after him. “I’ll be a moment.”

  The young soldier went back inside with her. As he helped Siggi on with her parka, she asked him, “Where did you stop?”

  “About halfway here,” he told her, “just to warm up, as I said. And also …”

  “Also?”

  “Just outside of town, but very briefly. To let some travellers over the crossing.”

  Travellers! The word riveted her. “Gypsies?”

  He nodded. “They’re late this year—or early. It’s hard to tell with the travelling folk
. They just come and go.” Then, looking worried, he asked her, “Madame, am I in trouble?”

  Siggi only half-heard him. After a moment’s silence, she gave herself a mental shake and answered, “Eh, trouble? No, I shouldn’t think so.” And controlling an urge to laugh hysterically, she went outside to Tzonov and the snowcat …

  Standing some two kilometres to the north of Little Kozhva, a steep-sided knoll of volcanic rock—the plug of a once-mighty caldera—grew up above the forest some hundreds of feet high. The snowcat had skirted its thinly wooded base on the approach to the logging camp. Now, as Siggi and Tzonov headed north for Perchorsk, she asked him, “How much power does this thing have? Enough to climb that knoll?”

  “If I climb gradually, along the contours, and make a complete circuit, yes. Did you want to?”

  “The view from up there must be quite marvelous.”

  “Very well,” he grunted, however grudgingly. “It will cost us half an hour, but …”

  “Are you still worrying about Nathan? But I’m sure that by now they’ll have found his hiding place in the complex, or discovered him half frozen, trying to climb out of the ravine.”

  “Perhaps you’re right,” he answered.

  By then the clouds were breaking up and wan beams of sunlight were finding their way from the south. They weren’t much, but they cheered Tzonov up a little …

  At the top of the knoll, while Tzonov went off behind a rocky outcrop to relieve himself, Siggi found binoculars in the snowcat’s panniers and swept the forested country to the southwest. This was why she’d wanted to come up here: to see if she could catch a glimpse of—