DISCLAIMER:
If you think I own 'Buffy' or any of the canon, seek psychiatric help. :-) Barring Wesley, Travers, and maybe Merrick, everybody here is mine, all mine.
Character visualisation tip: while the physical resemblance is limited, anyone who's seen 'Forever Knight' would think Gerhardt von Hausmann and Lucien laCroix went to the same school of 'Being a Bad-Ass Master Vampire'. :-)
One shot in a revolution, one drop from a poison pen,
One fruit too small and bitter, one tree too proud to bend,
One man to start the trouble, one kiss to seal your fate,
One kid that needs some action, one link in a chain reaction....
'Chain Reaction', John Farnham
04:12, TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 26, 1995, LIMA (16:12/25-09-95 ZULU)
OFFICES OF TEMPLAR ENTERPRISES/VON HAUSMANN'S LAIR
"What is it, Rechner?" asked Charles Worthington, President/CEO Stormhawk Security Services, not turning to face his number-two as he studied the painting on the wall. A painting of himself, as he'd been just before he was Turned: a spare, aristocratic, self-impressed fellow, wearing the finest suit Savile Row could offer - and the brassard of the Imperial Fascist League, the British Nazi party. Now he wore the finest Armani and the collar-pin of the New Zealand Free Republican Party... but the rest hadn't changed much.
"News about our delivery, sir." Rechner's voice was the model of respect, masking his abiding contempt for his boss: Stormhawk's staggeringly successful 'Trojan Horse' marketing strategy had been Worthington's brainchild. Nobody harboured any illusions about his ambition, and he made no bones about resenting Rechner's stance of reasoned moderation - or that it had won him the Freiherr's favour from the outset. "Once the fires at the hangar were extinguished, we identified the bodies. One was Lohrfeld's assigned bodyguard; another has been tentatively matched to the description of the man he was to meet. Both had been picked clean, and there was no trace of either the money or the merchandise." Or Lohrfeld, he didn't have to add.
"I see." Worthington deliberately took a black push-pin from a container and thumbed them into the map at the oversized symbol that stood for the airport - joining a cluster of others - then turned and walked across the room, still outwardly calm and human. He stayed that way until he reached the human standing next to Rechner, an aide from the COO's analytical staff - then let out a bellow of animal rage, Shifted visages, and almost casually backhanded the man across the chest, smashing him back against the wall. Bones crunched under his arm, and blood sprayed across the polished hardwood floor. The door-guards, SPG troopers wearing the black facings of von Hausmann's personal Praetorians, looked on in poorly-hidden horror as Worthington plunged his hands right into the flesh of the man's back at shoulder and hips, seized him by his spinal column, lifted him shoulder-high, and broke his spine like a schoolboy snapping a ruler.
Rechner flinched, horrified by Worthington's stupidity. Oh, that's going to do wonders for morale!
"You were supposed to have taken CARE of them by now!" the former Englishman roared, flinging the corpse aside and rounding on Rechner, unmindful of the gore coating his arms and spreading across the floor like a crimson lake.
Rechner caught the SPGs' attention and sent them outside with a tip of his head. We need them to believe us united and strong - not going for each others' throats like we're about to. That done, he turned back to his superior and inwardly braced himself. He'd always given his superiors the truth straight from the shoulder; like many in power, Worthington wasn't much of a fan of unpleasant truths, but anything less than absolute candour would be an invitation to disaster for them all. "How, sir? They're too cagey. They've never left a single survivor who'd seen their faces, so we have no descriptions; the DNA samples we have don't match any of the profiles in the police systems that we've been able to access. The structure of Stormhawk's contract with the government precludes our mounting an overt, active investigation, and just enough of the national police know just enough about us, and them, to make the value of their help questionable at best. These 'Wraiths' choose the targets they hit at short notice, with little reconnaissance to tip us off; we can't be strong enough everywhere to deter an attack, and without advance warning we can't set an ambush for them.
"And butchering a valuable intelligence tool like a well-trained analyst in a fit of pique doesn't help our cause either," he added acidly, indicating the shattered corpse. "Men like Shakirov aren't cheap to train or especially easy to find, and we need their talents if we're to shut down Nga Kehua's operations. He was supposed to brief you on our counter-intelligence efforts; it'll be hard for him to do that now - unless you intend to convene a séance."
"You forget yourself, Rechner!" Worthington snapped.
"Still," a soft, almost gentle voice inserted from the armchair in the corner. All eyes turned to regard the figure that sat in that chair like a dragon reposing atop its hoard... the embodiment of power, momentarily dormant and indolent, amused by the antics of its lessers - for now.
It was odd, but in his human visage, Gerhardt, Freiherr von Hausmann looked positively inoffensive. Only of average height, he was a bulky, square-faced fellow, with a slightly rugged look one might expect more of a blue-collar worker than a corporate executive... which was one of the many reasons for his business successes. He was something of a chameleon, in Rechner's eyes: by turns the avuncular, charming president of the Templar Trading Group and darling of the media; when dealing with his troops, the staggering, almost hypnotic oratical presence that rivaled Hitler himself; the subtle, keen-minded political animal who had once given pointers to Cesar Borghia and Niccolo Machiavelli; and like right now, the sheer, dominating force-of-personality that was the (figurative) living, beating heart that drove the Ordo Astra onwards. Many vampires claimed the title 'master', many without anything resembling real justification. Gerhardt von Hausmann was the real deal without even trying.
Even when the Baron had been a member of the Teutonic Knights, he'd always been the sort to out-manoeuvre an enemy politically, economically or tactically rather than smash him head-to-head, to work indirectly and through proxies rather than take the fight to an opponent personally. Why someone with so subtle a mind would let someone as crude and brutal as Worthington hold power for any length of time was quite beyond Rechner's comprehension.
No, the Baron's chosen Warrior admitted to himself. Who am I trying to fool? I know exactly why he uses Worthington, just as I know exactly why he uses me. In a court full of sycophants who tell him what they think he wants to hear, I tell him what he needs to know; as well as his general-in-chief, I am his 'voice of reason' and his moral 'insider's perspective' on what we do and how it is seen. Worthington is a brutal, petty-minded thug - but he will do the things I refuse to, like suggesting and implementing the 'marketing strategy' that brought us to where we are today.
"Rechner is right, Charles," the Baron continued in his cultured English, his tone only gently chiding. "You don't destroy valued assets just when you need them most, and you don't throw temper-tantrums where they can be seen unless you're making a point."
"Sir, I -!"
Von Hausmann lifted one finger - no more than a centimetre - and Worthington shut up so fast it was amazing he didn't bite off his own tongue in the process. That was power. That was Gerhardt von Hausmann. "Could they have known of the meeting, Rechner?"
"Directly? I doubt it. Only seven individuals had that information; three of those are dead, three others are in this room, and I can see no reason why our connection in London would betray us. It seems more likely that they learned of the aircraft somehow, planned to destroy the escort fighters, and ambushed the deal as a target of opportunity."
"A bloody expensive one!" Worthington muttered sourly.
Von Hausmann paid him no attention. "What of the aircraft and its passengers?"
"The charter was arranged by the Watcher's Council through their front organisation, the British Museum. We can't trace the money any further than that."
"Do we have any pictures of the man?"
"Lohrfeld was meant to give the courier a phone-number; once his supposed principal was settled in, he was to call us with a name, description, and other particulars. Unfortunately, Nga Kehua pre-empted that contingency. A team was assigned to follow him," Rechner added as evenly as he could, "but Director Worthington stood them down as 'a wasteful extravagance'."
"The Council wouldn't be stupid enough to send someone out here who might rock the boat," Worthington explained, giving Rechner a poisonous look. "They need us too much."
"I see," the Freiherr mused. "So now, a man whose capabilities we haven't measured and whose agenda we can't predict is roaming Napier completely unknown and unsurveilled, and we may have lost a golden opportunity to find and kill this Slayer... all on your judgement?"
Vampires can't blanche, but that didn't stop Worthington. "M-My Lord, I-I doubt he would be stupid enough to lead us to the Slayer -"
"This, from someone who did exactly that fifty years ago?" Von Hausmann looked away from him. "Rechner, do what you can about finding him. What was Shakirov going to say?"
Rechner knelt by the pool of gore to retrieve the folder Shakirov had been carrying; as he'd feared, it had been soaked through and all the documents within were completely illegible. "I assigned him to analyse Nga Kehua's operating patterns, specifically where they hit and the list of people who knew the value of those locations. That would have allowed us to identify their sources, so we could either neutralise them or use them against Nga Kehua. Unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge that analysis was recorded in only two places: this file, and Shakirov's brain. Neither of which is now available to us. Reconstructing that information will be an uncertain, time-consuming and expensive process, sir."
"Have your people try anyway. Their attacks are too precise to be guesswork."
"I must concur, My Lord, but there's another consideration," an ashen-faced Lieutenant-Colonel Ilya Stefanovich Krukovskiy added from his seat before Worthington's desk, trying to brush the dead analyst's blood from his uniform. The sector commander's rank-badges had the black edging of the SPG, but unlike most of his subordinates, who were former-Comm-Bloc military, he'd come to Stormhawk as surplus from the KGB. "I'm sure I don't need to remind you of how... sensitive Operations Bastille and Robespierre are, particularly the aspects pertaining to our public image. Sooner or later, the New Zealand government will start getting suspicious about this string of 'accidents' we've suffered and step in, in one way or another. We can't keep spin-controlling these incidents forever; even now, we may not have admitted they exist, but Nga Kehua's campaign is an open secret in the city, and it's eroding our troops' authority among the citizenry. Not to mention the effect they're having on morale and the troops' nerves: sooner or later, someone's going to get too jumpy and there'll be a bloodbath."
"As if there haven't been already," Rechner murmured in his native tongue, knowing Krukovskiy understood him and not particularly caring.
"I'm simply following my orders, Rechner," Krukovskiy smirked acidly. "Wasn't that what your Nazi comrades always said?"
Only Rechner's knowledge of how much the Freiherr needed this human as a live stalking horse kept him from ripping the man's face off on the spot - unChanged. His expression never even flickered; Krukovskiy would never know how close he came to dying in that instant. Nazism be damned: he'd fought because it had been his duty, and he'd done it with dedication, courage, and above all honour. Like many of his fellows, he'd been a professional soldier, first, last, and always, and the butchery perpetrated by the Nazis had turned his stomach... as did the deeds perpetrated by those of his 'fellows' and sept-brothers who served in the Special Purposes Group.
The city's Stormer commander looked back to his vampiric master. "My Lord, the... transaction you have planned for Sunday morning. Without the courier's delivery, how will you proceed?"
"There are alternatives," von Hausmann shrugged, still not the least perturbed. "The terms Tin Tei Wui offered were... flexible. Granting them a share of the methamphetamine market in New Zealand -"
"Would only give them ideas about competing with us in that market, My Lord," Krukovskiy countered as forcefully as he dared. Which wasn't very.
"If we don't give them something, our supply of food-slaves will be almost halved!" Worthington snarled at the human. "If that shortage closes the hospitality clubs, we'll lose that much more revenue, and buying more will be even harder! Without those clubs as a control mechanism, the rank-and-file clansmen and all the indigents will start to get ideas about finding their own food, and that sort of thinking would lend itself to rebellion and anarchy!"
And what of the humans' reactions to such a contingency? Rechner wondered acidly, noting one of Worthington's curious blind spots: he never considered how the humans over which he sought dominion might react to this or that. Leaving aside military and moral concerns, the public-relations aspect alone could be disastrous. And considering that a mere handful of humans are playing hob with our operations here, I can't understand how he can think like that.
Wait a minute. Humans' reactions.... Rechner crossed to the map, half-listening to the snowballing argument behind him as an idea percolated through his mind. We can't ambush Nga Kehua because we don't know where they'll choose to strike next, but if we choose the place for them....
"Rechner!" von Hausmann called to him, cutting the two squabbling executives off in mid-sentence.
"Sir?" he blinked, his full attention turning back to his liege-lord.
"You have something?"
"I was just... thinking."
Von Hausmann cocked his head and motioned for him to continue. This was, after all, why he'd chosen Oberscharführer Rechner as an advisor, however inconveniently independent he might be.
"The main problem right now is Nga Kehua. If we take them out of the equation, the club trade will normalise, we'll stop hemorraging troops, matérial, funds and food here in Napier, and Operations Bastille and Robespierre will be secure."
"Stop stating the obvious and get to the point!" Worthington snapped.
"Have you never heard of 'laying the groundwork', Charles?" Von Hausmann's gaze crossed to the youngest vampire present. "Continue, Rechner."
"We can't hope to catch up with the Wraiths - so we shouldn't try. We should get out ahead of them and wait for them."
"How?"
It took Rechner less than a minute to lay out his thinking. When all was said and done it was an elegantly simple operational-concept, but that didn't stop his fellows from voicing objections. Loud ones.
"And who'll lead the assault company? You?" Worthington sneered. And when Nga Kehua are dealt with, you'll be the audacious hero who pulled it off, won't you, Erik? his expression added.
I'm a soldier, Worthington; don't judge me by your politician's standards. "I was actually thinking that Colonel Krukovskiy should lead the counter-force. After all, there's little that could improve Stormhawk's public reputation more than the commander of the Napier sector personally leading the neutralisation of a terrorist cell that the regular police wouldn't even admit existed."
"What you propose is an awful risk, Rechner." Von Hausmann had observed the by-play between his subordinates with a keen eye, and as always, Rechner got the uncomfortable feeling that he'd known exactly what they had both been thinking. "It had better work."
"You're going along with this, My Lord?" Worthington gaped.
"Conventional avenues are yet to yield results; a calculated gamble would seem to be in order." Von Hausmann turned a cold smile on Worthington. "That is, if you approve, Director."
Worthington wasn't quite that stupid. Any dissent would be tantamount to mutiny - and mutineers inside the Ordo Astra led existences that were as eventful as they were abbreviated. And I can't make it to the top of the Order if I'm packed away in a thimble somewhere. "Very well, Erik, you'll have the troops you need for this - what are you calling it?"
Rechner thought for half a moment, then smiled thinly. "Operation Siren."
05:19, SEPTEMBER 26, LIMA (17:19/25-09-95 ZULU)
ZYRIANOV RESIDENCE
Misha eased the bedroom door open and peered inside. Sure enough, Taz was still curled up snugly under the covers, only one arm and her braid visible, muffled snores the only sound in the pre-dawn stillness. He shook his head fondly and breathed, "Taz."
Her response was muffled by the pillow. "Mmph."
Every morning, the same sneckin' thing. He sighed and slipped into the room to stand at the foot of the bed. "A-hem."
"Grrmmmmph."
He kicked the end of the bed gently. Just enough to shake the cobwebs loose. "Up and at 'em, Atom Ant."
She turned her face free of the pillow and managed, "Blrrrrggh!" without opening her eyes.
"Taz -!"
"I know, I know," she groaned, her voice sleep-slurred and distinctly surly. "It's 0520 - time for our morning run." She threw off the covers and sat up, bleary-eyed. "I swear, if I ever find out who invented the concept of 'morning', I'm gonna go jump up and down on his friggin' grave." It was an oft-repeated threat.
"What're you talking about? It's a brand new day!" Misha chirped. This was one of their oldest running jokes: the woman who spent most of the day operating at 125% started those days with an hour or so as an extra from a 'Living Dead' movie, while he, whose condition specifically barred him from making full use of the day, always woke up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. It was one of the many idiosyncracies that gave her such a lock on his heart. "Fifteen kays ought to wake your ideas up."
She gave her best friend a filthy look. "You just enjoy my misery."
He didn't answer that directly. "C'mon, MacGyver, kick it loose."
Sticking her tongue out at him for a moment, she headed for her dresser, absently stripping off her singlet as she went. Misha quickly averted his eyes - she only ever slept in a tee and briefs - but not before he caught sight of the old scar on her belly, just above her left hip: a nice, neat white circle about the size of his palm. He'd been there when she stopped that bullet, and a more terrifying moment he'd never had in his life.
When she'd slung on a fresh tee and a set of track-pants, Taz sat back on the edge of the bed and started hauling on her socks and jogging shoes. "Where are we going today?"
"Figured we'd head south, take a look at the Ravensdown 'fertiliser plant' as we went."
Taz nodded absently. Napier wasn't really a large city; depending on their route, they could go right around half the main suburbs if they chose. Their morning jogs served to maintain their physical fitness, granted, but they doubled as reconnaissance patrols: they could unobtrusively check out anything they ran past - including Templar installations, drug-houses, Stormer checkpoints, what-have-you - and familiarise themselves with the street layouts and normal patterns of activity. That way, they'd know if anything was out of place and anticipate problems. Not to mention the way we can lop off any vampires who might be up this close to daybreak, she added to herself with a feral grin, strapping a sheathed Ka-Bar to her right calf and tugging her pants-leg back down over it. A twin-sheath went on the other calf, holding a pair of stakes that had started life as three-quarter-inch dowel in the Saint G's woodwork shop. Those concealed sheathes were a bitch to get at quickly, but they beat the hell out of being unarmed - yet one more lesson they'd learned the hard way.
Of course, it wasn't just the stray fangs they had to worry about. Being carded by Stormer checkpoints was almost routine, and twice they'd been stopped where there weren't any onlookers and escaped being 'detained for questioning' only through the application of extreme violence. And leaving no survivors. The fact that out of the total of seven Tacticals who'd stopped them on those occasions, three had been vampires, spoke volumes about their probable fate if they'd gone quietly.
Taz shook her head as she tied her sneakers. Woolgathering again. God, do I need coffee! "Okay, Mister Sadist, let's get going."
Elena was waiting for them on the verandah when they returned a little over an hour later. One might expect the mother of the defender of humanity to be a haughty, vaguely aristocratic woman, much inclined to parenting by diktat and unforgiving of shortcomings.
Oops.
Elena Gregoriyevna Zyrianova was in her early fifties, classically beautiful, but she also weighed five kilos more than she should have and Tatyana, her youngest child, already stood two inches taller than her parent. Her shoulder-length chestnut hair was streaked with silver, and though she was good-looking and knew it, she wasn't quite vain enough to resort to dye, despite her profession as the boutique manager in Napier's most expensive hotel. Her grey eyes were gently wise, and she was fully inclined to mother anyone who'd give her half the chance, including her half-brother (despite his being a good eight years older). Even now, she sat on the verandah steps, waiting for her daughter and her more-or-less foster-son with a smile, two tall glasses of sports-drink, and Taz's real operating fuel: a large mug of coffee laced with milk and seasoned with cardamom, cinnamon, nutmeg, triple caffeine and four heaped spoonfuls of brown sugar. The stuff was strong enough to jump out of the cup and belt you between the eyes if you weren't careful.
Taz came to a halt, grinning widely, only the thinnest sheen of sweat on her face and her breathing deeper than usual but regular and unlaboured. "G'morning, Mama," she smiled, starting her warm-down exercises almost as she reached the steps. No point stiffening up at the start of the day, after all.
Misha came to a halt right next to Taz, sweating and puffing no more than she was, which was admirable considering that he had none of her Slayer powers. His smile was genuine, but as always a little crooked. "Hey, Elena. Catch you at a bad time?"
Elena rolled her eyes. She loved the boy to death, but it was beyond her how someone with so much of the weight of the world on their shoulders could be so chirpy, much less at such an early hour - especially since she knew they'd only made it to bed just after two o'clock. "Not at all, Misha. In fact, Andrei dropped some documents by while you were running, and asked me to give them to the both of you. Something about your 'new arrival'?"
He might have blinked, but the mirror-shades made it impossible to tell. "That was quick, even for The Boys," he observed, starting his own stretches.
"Makes you wonder what they found," Taz agreed. Finished with her warm-down, she shot her mother a grin and virtually snatched up the waiting mug. "Coffee!"
"You sound like the Cookie Monster getting a fix, Taz," Misha smiled.
She shot him a finger even as she half-drained the mug. You could virtually hear the stuff affecting her system, like a jet turbine spinning up from idle to full-throttle.
"Those files are on the table inside. I don't want either of you getting into Slayer homework until you've showered, changed, and had breakfast, clear? I know how engrossed you two get in your work."
"Yes, Mama," Taz smiled.
"Understood, ma'am," Misha nodded.
07:44, SEPTEMBER 26, LIMA (19:44/25-09-95 ZULU)
ZYRIANOV RESIDENCE
Misha was just finishing the Windsor knot on his tie as he walked into the kitchen. Taz, who (as always) he'd given first shot at getting cleaned up, was (as always) whirling about the kitchen in a manner almost identical to that of her cartoon namesake, simultaneously reading through a file-folder, piling butter and jam onto two more pieces of toast, putting yet more bread in the toaster, and dropping her oversized lunch-box into her school-bag. Nikolai and Katerina were also getting ready for school, and whether the two of them were more in Elena's way than Taz on her own was a matter of opinion.
"Hey, hey, hey: Kolya, Katya, sit down and eat like civilised people, okay?" he called.
"But Auntie Taz is eating standing up," Kolya protested, with the near-incontestable logic peculiar to children.
"Perhaps, but then again she's not playing chase'em in the kitchen," Misha pointed out.
Katya took the hint, grabbed her protesting sibling by the collar, and dragged him into the living-room so they could watch cartoons while they ate.
"Thanks, Misha," Elena sighed, heading for the lounge herself to keep an eye on her rambunctious grandchildren. "Those two are almost as much of a handful as you and Tatyana were at that age."
"I'll... take that in the spirit it was intended, ma'am," he grinned crookedly. When Elena had departed, he crossed to the counter, reached around the Slayer, and swiped one of her ready pieces of toast, eyeing the half-centimetre-thick layer of raspberry conserve with a wry half-smile; while their lifestyle was very energy-intensive, he'd always been of the opinion that Taz had a broad streak of the closet sensualist in her.
She shot him a twinkling-eyed dirty look as he poached part of her breakfast - notwithstanding the fact that she'd already demolished a third of a loaf of bread without slowing down - then set about the surviving slice as she read. "Well, well, well...."
"Come again?" he asked, setting his food aside to shrug into his blazer.
Taz almost absently reached over and cranked up the radio on the window-sill; while the music drowning out their sotto voce conversation wouldn't completely defeat modern listening devices, it would certainly make their life harder without looking like a security measure. And let's face it: we're not paranoid, they really are out to get us. Why give them clues about who they're out to get? "Andrushka ran Hahndorf's Stormer-ID photo through Interpol and got a hit on it. Turns out he was in the Stasi until Reunification back in '89; floated around for a year or so as a merc, then just flat out disappeared. Up until then, he was a very bad boy."
"Uh, Stormhawk, Taz - 'bad boy' goes without saying. What about his principal?"
"The fuzzy-cheeked infant?" She snorted. "Nothing. But the plane's an interesting case." She dug out another piece of paper, and Misha sat down and absently stole another piece of toast out of her fingers as he read. "It's a Bombardier Global Express, an executive transport jet with a range in the area of sixty-five hundred nautical miles unrefuelled, enough for a single-hop trip from London to Jakarta. The interesting thing is, according to Zorro, the Global Express design is still in testing - the prototype's not even supposed to be rolled out until late next year, and when production actually does officially start, if we can get change out of thirty US mega-bucks for one, Zorro wants to know where."
"Gerry does have a thing about buying toys with sex-appeal," Misha murmured. "Any idea who signed the cheque on the rental?"
"You jest, yes? That information's on a TTG database in Zürich, and even if The Boys could get to it physically, we'd still have to crack their encryption scheme."
"Which we haven't achieved in almost three years' trying," he nodded, almost sighing at hearing that old refrain.
"We'll manage without it," Taz shrugged blithely.
"Yeah, I guess. C'mon, let's get these papers burned and grab our gear for school. Can't afford to be late again, not with Tovarishch Tarakan as our tutor-group teacher."
"'Comrade Cockroach', huh? Nice one."
"I liked it."
"You would."
10:17, SEPTEMBER 26, LIMA (18:17/25-09-95 ZULU)
HIGGINS WHARF, AHURIRI (PORT OF NAPIER)
'Andrew Hazelton' glanced up from his clipboard as one of his fellow cargo-handlers came up to his shoulder. "Hey, Drew, y'hear the latest?"
"What's that, Dave-o?"
"I just talked to Matt over at scheduling. Guess what? The Lairds On High just ordered Cassidy Quay kept free for the next week - seems they're bringing Guardian in."
Andrushka cocked an eyebrow at him. "She only left port a month ago - she shouldn't need supplies for another three!"
"It's not a resupply," Dave snorted. "They're gonna be doing four days of port-visits. Y'know, letting the tourists and locals aboard?"
Which is a PR and/or recruitment manoeuvre. Why now? And what does it get them? "You sure about that?"
"Yup - tours are set for Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Monday. They laid it on in a hurry, too - Major Seibenberg's over at the Security office screaming his head off trying to get the arrangements in place, calling in extra people. Doesn't that make your heart pump custard?" the younger man drawled sardonically. The Stormers might make Napier 'safer', but that didn't make them any less obnoxious.
"Yeah - it's a real tragedy. Thanks for the heads-up - y'better get back to work before the Lairds come by."
As his colleague departed with a grin, Andrushka turned the possibilities over in his head. The Stormers had never before allowed civilians aboard one of their destroyers, and port visits were not affairs one could lay on in less than a week - the last such visit to Napier had been a Canadian frigate three years ago, and that had taken a month's planning. More importantly, it had required a large number of security personnel and guides... which meant that the 'port visit' was an excuse to almost double the Stormer garrison here at Ahuriri. Question is: what are they really up to?