E. E. Knight - Vampire Earth 3 - Tale Of The Thunderbolt

TALE OF THE THUNDERBOLT

THE VAMPIRE EARTH 3

E.E. KNIGHT

Possessed of an unnatural and legendary hunger, the Reapers have come to Earth to establish a New

Order built on harvesting of enslaved human souls. They rule the planet. I thrive on the scent of fear. And

if it is night, as sure as darkness, they will come. It's the forty-eighth year of the Kurian Order. The alien,

vampiric Kur and their avatars, the Reapers, control most of Earth-their new feeding ground. Humanity is

scattered and survives only at their new masters' whims.

But the Resistance is attempting to reclaim Earth. David Valentine, member of the elite Cat spy force, is

in enemy uniform aboard the aging gunboat Thunderbolt. Whispers have reached him of the discovery of

a long-lost weapon in the Caribbean-the first glimmer of hope for humanity to finally defeat the Reapers.

Control of the ship lies in the hands of a tyrannical captain, and nothing short of full-scale mutiny can win

it back. With only a few loyal sailors at his side, Valentine embarks on a terrifying journey through the

deadly waters of the Gulf, searching for the weapon that will guarantee that this year- the forty-eighth

year of the Kurian Order's domination of Earth-will be the Kurians' last....

Glossary

Aspirants: Teenagers, often sons and daughters of those in a particular caste, who travel with the

Hunters and perform assorted camp functions.

Bears: Hunters and the most fearsome of the Lifeweavers' human weapons; warriors who go into a

battle-fury resembling that of the berserks of old. The Bears are proud to take on anything the Kurians

can design.

Cats: Trained by the Lifeweavers, these Hunters act as spies, saboteurs, and assassins in the Kurian

Zone. Some work in disguises; others work openly.

Dau'wa: "Forward-thinkers"; the minority of Lifeweavers (mostly concentrated on the planet Kur), who

used vital aura to become immortal, i.e., vampires.

Dau'weem: "Backwards-thinkers"; the majority of Life-weavers, who eschewed use of vital aura to

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become immortal.

Golden Ones: A Grog variant, more verbal and organized than the more common Gray Ones.

Fawn-colored fur on their shoulders blends to white on their bellies.

Gray Ones: The most common kind of Grog, an apish humanoid with thick plates of gray skin.

Marginally intelligent, though quick to adapt to human tools and weapons.

Grogs: Any of the multitude of creations the Kurians have designed or enhanced to help subjugate man.

The term grog is in general use for introduced life-forms, but properly belongs just to the humanoid

variants. Grogs come in many shapes and sizes; some are intelligent enough to use weapons.

Hunters: Human beings who have been enhanced by the techno-magic of the Lifeweavers to cope with

the spawn of Kur.

Interworld Tree: An ancient network of portals between the stars, the doors of which allow

instantaneous transportation across the light-years.

Kur: One of the nine planets of the Interworld Tree. A great storehouse of touchstones was found here;

it was a center of Lifeweaver science and learning. Later it became a renegade world when the Kurian

Lifeweavers began to use vital aura to extend their lives, touching off a civil war that has spilled over to

Earth.

Kurians: Lifeweavers from the planet Kur who learned how to indefinitely lengthen their lives by

absorbing vital aura. They are the true vampires of the New Order.

lifesign: Energy given off by any living thing in proportion to its size and sentience. The Reapers use it, in

addition to their normal senses, to track their human prey.

Lifeweavers: The ancient race who discovered the old Pre-Entity Gates between the Nine Worlds.

Pre-Entities: The Old Ones, a vampiric race that died out long before man walked the Earth. From their

knowledge, the Kur learned how to become vampires by living off of vital aura.

Quislings: Humans who assist the Kurians in running the New Order.

Ravies: A virus the Kurians distributed to break up the social order of man, allowing them to take over

more easily.

Reapers: The Praetorian Guard of the New Order, they are in fact avatars animated by their Master

Vampire. They permit the reclusive Kurians to interact with humans and others, and more important,

absorb the vital aura through a psychic connection with the avatar without physical risk. Reapers live off

the blood of the victim, while the aura sustains the Master Kurian. Also known colloquially as Capos,

Governors, Hoods, Rigs, Skulls, Scowls, Tongue-Tong, Creeps, Hooded Ones, and Vampires.

Touchstones: Record-keeping technology used by the Pre-Entities and discovered by the Lifeweavers.

Touchstones hold anything from knowledge to memories; the data is accessible by a sentient being's

touch. This can be dangerous for less-developed minds, such as humans'.

vital aura: An energy field created by a living creature. Sadly, humans are rich in it.

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Wolves: The most numerous caste of the Hunters. Their patrols watch the no-man's-land between the

Kurian Zone and the Free Territories, and they also act as guerrilla fighters, couriers, and scouts.

From the east to the west blow the trumpet to arms! Through the land let the sound of it flee; Let the far

and the near all unite, with a cheer, In defense of our Liberty Tree.

—Thomas Paine, "The Liberty Tree"

They sailed away for a year and a day To the land where the bong-tree grows.

—Edward Lear, The Owl and the Pussy-Cat

Chapter One

New Orleans, January, the forty-eighth year of the Kurian Order: Formerly glorious in its decay, under

the New Order the city transformed from an aging beauty into a waterlogged corpse. Much of the Big

Easy rots under a meter of Mississippi River water—save for the old city's heart, now protected by two

layers of dikes. The rococo facades of the French Quarter, once browning into a fine patina, fall to

pieces in quiet, unmounted. The stately homes of the two great antebellum periods, pre-1861 and

pre-2022, have vanished under a carpet of lush kudzu or riverside saw grass. As if the flooding and years

of neglect were not enough punishment, New Orleans suffered a major hurricane in 2028: a titanic storm

that rose from the Gulf like a city-smashing monster in a Japanese movie. No FEMA, no insurance

companies showed up afterwards to clean and repair the storm-battered city. What was destroyed

stayed destroyed; the inhabitants found it easier to shift to still-standing buildings than to rebuild.

But the mouth of the Mississippi is too important, even to the reduced traffic of the Kurian Order, to be

given up entirely to nature. The metropolis, both the section behind the dike and the Venice-like portions

of the flooded districts, still support a melange of denizens from all across the Gulf of Mexico and the

Caribbean. Counting those living among the lakes, bayous, and in the Mississippi estuary, New Orleans

boasts a population of over two million—a total that few other cities known to the Old World can match.

The rich harvests of seafood, fish and game of the swamps, and mile after mile of rice plantations feed the

masses concentrated at the sodden bend in the river.

The Kurian Order encourages fecund populations. A Kurian lord must breed his polls to supply him with

enough vital aura, for only in feeding on the energy created by the death throes of a sentient being can he

revitalize his immortal lich. The Masters of New Orleans have no regrets about its silenced music, its

smothered culture, its reduced cuisine, or its broken history. Healthy, mating herds of humans, kept from

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escape and from the clutches of rapacious competing Kur, are the only form of wealth that matters.

For the human race, living to see another year is now the paramount pursuit in a city once known for its

sensual diversions.

Though the Easy Street was only a waterfront dive, it was his waterfront dive, so Martin Clive took

pride in every squeaky stool and chipped mug of his saloon. From grid shielded-electric lights to

sawdust-covered floor, he loved every brick of it.

His customers, on the other hand, he could take or leave.

Not that he didn't need them. Clive's herd of cash-bearing cows, properly milked, provided for him.

Clive surveyed the noisy, smelly Thursday-night crowd as the winter rains poured down outside. Safe

behind the badge sewn to the money vest he seldom took off—-even to sleep—and in the ownership of

the biggest bar on the dockyard district of the dike-hugging waterfront, he passed his time and occupied

his mind in sizing up the men as they talked, smoked, and drank. The few women in his bar were there on

business, not for pleasure.

Clive perfected a three-step practice of evaluating customers over the years, now so ingrained that he

did it unconsciously. Separating the "payers" from the "bums" came first. Knowing who had the cash for a

night's drink and who didn't had been second nature to Clive since before he acquired the establishment.

Distinguishing "gents" from "trouble" was yet another specialty. As he aged, and passed the responsibility

of serving out drinks and rousting the "bums" and "trouble" to younger, stronger men, he took up a third

valuation: that of predicting the remaining life span of his customers.

Clive looked at a bent longshoreman, hook over his shoulder and a pewter mug of cheap beer at his lips.

The man had drunk, smoked, and wheezed out a few hours in the Easy Street six nights a week for the

past ten years. Clive had watched him age under grueling physical labor, rotgut alcohol, and bad diet. If

the longshoreman could stay in the good books of his crew chief, meaning handing over kickbacks out of

his wages, he could probably spin out as many as ten more years if he stayed out of the hold. Sitting two

seats down from him, a merchant sailor drank plain coffee, sixty if he was a day, dye rubbed into his hair

to darken it in an effort to look younger. Soon no captain would hire him on, no matter how sober and

upstanding a character he might be. He was due for the last dance within a year or two. On the next

stool, a boy kept an affectionate eye on the aged sailor, perhaps a relative, perhaps just a shipmate. The

boy did not drink either, and with hard work and a clean nose could expect to live another fifty years as

long as he kept indoors after nightfall.

Over at a warm corner table, a young officer drank with three of his men. The officer was a welcome

combination of "payer" and "gent," to the point where Clive bothered to name him. The officer was "the

Major" to Clive, and the Major always ordered a good bottle and never complained about the cheap

whiskey substituted inside. That made him a fine payer. The Major and his men rarely caused trouble;

therefore, they qualified for genthood. They wore the mottled green uniform of the Carbineers, one of the

horsed troops of paramilitary Cossacks who kept civil order and patrolled the streets of New Orleans.

Maybe in other city establishments the Major threw his weight around, took food and drink without

paying, and had his uniform silence objections. But not in the Easy Street. Clive had friends at the top of

the city's food chain.

Clive learned in his youth that if you were in good with Kur, you could thumb your nose at the Port

Authority, the Transport Office, even the police and militia. With Kurian patronage, he bid for ownership

of the moribund Easy Street. A whiff of anything going on in the bar that Kur wouldn't like, and he picked

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up the phone. Clive wore his third ten-year badge on his chest, not due to expire for six more years, and

he was certain of acquiring another. The badge put him off-limits to the Kurians' aura-hungry Hoods—

well, mostly—and brought him peace of mind that muzzled any protest from his conscience.

The inner door of the entry vestibule opened, and Clive heard the wind and splatter of the rain pouring

down outside in the moment before his doorman swung the outer portal shut. Clive liked the rain. It

drove customers indoors and flushed the filth from the city's gutters.

A stranger stood silhouetted in the door.

The man didn't remove his raincoat. Clive took a closer look. A coat could conceal any number of

unpleasant accoutrements. The Easy Street's owner relaxed when he caught a glimpse of uniform under

the coat's heavy lapels. The flash of navy blue and brass buttons revealed the stranger as a Coastal

Marine. From the fit of the coat and the good though mud-splattered boots Clive judged the man a

payer. But something about his face made Clive reserve judgment on whether this man would be trouble

or not.

The marine was tall and lean, but not remarkably so in either aspect. Clive put him in his mid-twenties: he

had the narrow, crinkle-edged eyelids of a man with a lot of outdoor mileage, and the bronze skin of

someone with a hefty dose of Indian blood. The stranger walked with a trace of stiffness in his left leg,

not a false limb but perhaps an old injury. He was good-looking in a clean-shaven, sharp-jawed way,

judging from the looks exchanged by a pair of whores keeping each other company at the end of the bar.

Shining black hair hung in wet tangles, a ropy opal mane thrown back over his collar. A thin white scar

traced his right cheek from the outer corner of his dark eye to his chin like the path of a milky tear.

With a moment to get a good look as the marine moved, Clive judged the man to be wearing a pistol at

his hip, then the capped tang of some kind of knife appeared as the entrant turned. Clive knew how to

spot weapons, long coat or no.

The new customer glanced around the room. His gaze flicked from the massive fireplace at the west end,

big enough for a barbecue, to the game tables at the east.

The marine froze. Clive followed his gaze. Before he could determine whom he had recognized, the

scarred stranger approached the bar nonchalantly. Clive guessed he had recognized the Major, for the

table in the corner had gone quiet. Probably some old quarrel over a girl, or a smuggling deal gone bad.

The Coastal Marines, with their mobility and lack of supervision, were notorious black-marketeers on the

coast stretching from Galveston to the Florida Floods. Intrigued, Clive looked across the bar to the

Major's table. The gents had their heads together. Clive's nose, after years of smelling the various aromas

of a saloon—tobacco, liquor, sweat, urine, sawdust, and vomit (usually in that order)— was not as

straight as it once had been, but he smelled trouble.

'Tea and rum, if you've got either," David Valentine said, dripping from head to foot on the

sawdust-sprinkled floor. His coat trapped the wet of his shirt better than it kept the rain out.

"Got both, Coastie."

"The hotter, the better," he said, pulling his hand through his slick hair again to get it out of his eyes. The

gesture gave him a chance to look at the corner table. A silent mental alarm had tripped a switch in his

nervous system, warming weight around, took food and drink without paying, and had his uniform silence

objections. But not in the Easy Street. Clive had friends at the top of the city's food chain.