"Lumley, Brian - E-Branch 3 - Avengers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

Chapter 22: News from Porton Down - The End of Things - Jake: Remembering . . . 296
Chapter 23: Transitions 311
Chapter 24: Tilting at a Windmill 326
Chapter 25: Revelations, Reservations, Resolutions 341
Chapter 26: Final Preparations 356
Chapter 27: Perchorsk 371
Chapter 28: Opening Skirmish 384
Chapter 29: The Final Battle . . . ? 397
Chapter 30: Or Merely the First of Many? 414

By Way of an Epilogue: Not So Very Devious After All 430


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INVADERS AND DEFILERS:

A RESUME

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WHAT HAS GONE BEFORE:

INVADERS AND DEFILERS


Three years ago, three Great Vampires - two Lords and a 'Lady' of the Wamphyri, the alien originators of the alleged vampire 'myths' or 'legends' of Earth - entered our world via a trans -dimensional Gate under the Carpathian mountains. Having split up following their covert 'invasion,' the trio went their own ways. Lord Nephran Malinari ('Malinari the Mind'), enthralled an Australian billionaire to set himself up in a casino aerie in the exclusive resort of Xanadu in the Macpherson Mountains. Lord Szwart, a metamorphic 'fly-the-light' in the truest sense of the term, headed for London, settling in a forgotten Roman 'temple' in the deepest, most inaccessible bowels of the city. And Vavara -'beautiful' mistress of mass-hypnotism - defiled an order of nuns by infiltrating their fortress-like monastery on the Greek island of Krassos.

Their plan to overthrow the planet, reducing it to a vampire paradise, was in essence a simple one: to plant gardens of deadspawn fungi and bring them to deadly maturity. Nurtured on the life fluids (the mutated DNA) of sacrificed vampire thralls or lieutenants, these toadstools, when they ripened and spawned, would release myriad spores into the Earth's atmosphere, to be breathed by an unwitting human race! Then, as men became blood-lusting monsters who hid from the sun during daylight hours and hunted by night, and nation fought nation as the world sank into chaos, and no one - least of all the mazed, blood-addicted victims - was able to understand or even consider fighting the incurable 'disease' that was converting them . . . then the Great Vampires, the Wamphyri, would emerge from the shadows and come into their own.


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As in the earliest days of their pre-dawn Vampire World of Sunside/Starside, their thralls and lieutenants would go abroad in the world, carrying their monstrous plague with them as they consolidated their masters' (and mistress's) territories, where the laws of the Wamphyri would be the only laws. Malinari would take Australia, expanding into all the islands around and eventually into Asia, and Vavara would take the Mediterranean and Africa, spreading east to form a border with Malinari. As for the metamorphic horror that was Lord Szwart: while it would seem he had been disadvantaged, with only the British Isles, France, Spain, and the northern and westernmost regions of Europe coming under his control, as he deployed his forces west across the Atlantic he would quickly seed the Americas with his deadspawn and, when the time was ripe, he would move his power base to New York. The metropolis's sprawling underground network would provide access to all parts of the city, whether in daylight or darkness, while its greatest building would be Szwart's aerie, its every window lacquered black and draped against the sun.

These had been the ambitions of the Wamphyri, and they had seemed infallible: their dreams, and an unwitting mankind's as yet unrealized nightmares. But, despite their legendary cunning and leechlike tenacity, the three Great Vampires had not reckoned with E-Branch.

E-Branch (E for ESP): a top secret arm of the British intelligence services, many of whose psychically talented agents had dealt with vampires before, not only in this world but also in Sunside/Starside. Ben Trask, the members of his London-based organization, and a small handful of people in the Corridors of Power were the only human beings who knew of the alien invasion. And because of the planetwide panic any disclosure would cause, they dared not speak of it to anyone outside their circle.

But having traced Malinari to Australia (with the ever-grudging assistance of their Minister Responsible in Whitehall and his help in covertly informing an Australian counterpart of the problem and enlisting military aid), Trask and an E-Branch task force had ventured down under to confront Malinari in his aerie. There in Xanadu they had destroyed his fungi garden (though not without the timely assistance of Jake Cutter, a young man whose extraordinary powers were not yet fully developed or even understood) but The Mind himself had escaped.

As for Jake Cutter (though more especially from Ben Trask's necessarily cautious point of view):

Jake seems an entirely wrong-headed man with something of a chequered background. Having fallen foul of a gang of international drug-runners and suffered at their hands, he was bent on settling old scores when strange circumstances brought him into contact with E-Branch. (He


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