Free The Far Shores (The Central Series) by Zachary Rawlins

for
long.
    Fortunately, Katya
didn’t need much time. She extracted two handfuls of sewing needles from the
pouch on the inside of her waistband.
    There had never been a
C-Class candidate for Audits before. Then again, there had never been a C-Class
Operator at the Black Sun assassination training program, and Katya had
excelled, until they expelled her.
    There was a tendency to
think of apport technicians as a form of rapid transportation. By that
standard, Katya was useless, as she could move only a paltry few ounces of
material, and even that only a few meters. The devious mind of Anastasia
Martynova had seen tremendous potential in that ability, however, and Katya’s
talents had been honed to murderous edge by her assassin’s training.
    Katya stood to face the
vampires scratching and battering the barrier – sensing its inherent weakness
or just worked into an animalistic fury – and held out her hand. Ten needles
were arrayed neatly in her palm, impaled in a thin strip of white cloth.
    Then they were gone, and
the vampires broke off their attack to scream and thrash about.
    It wouldn’t be enough to
kill them, of course. Not nearly. Murdering vampires pretty much required
massive bodily injury. Decapitation, a well-placed blast from a twelve-gauge,
removal of the heart, hollowing out the chest cavity – that sort of thing. Not
the discreet, subtle damage that Katya had been trained to deliver when she was
trained as an assassin, the kind of damage that made a murder into a mystery.
    No, killing vampires was
well into the range Xia- or Miss Aoki–style damage.
    That worked out rather
well, all things considered.
     
    ***
     
    Wan-Li was busy barking orders into a
Bluetooth microphone, simultaneously manipulating the console that controlled
the compound’s automated defenses, when he felt the extrasensory tingle that
meant something had gone very wrong. He scanned the display in front of him, a
series of coded lights on the LCD screen representing attackers, defenders, and
various strategic emplacements.
    The Society had spent
tens of millions of dollars constructing the facility, and even more employing
mercenaries to protect it. After the alliance had been formalized, and the
strategic value of the location was recognized in regard to the harvesting
operation, their Anathema allies had invested even more hard currency, in
addition to more esoteric and valuable resources, in order to assure security
as absolute as could be rendered. The harvest was crucial to the joined
ambitions of both the Society and the Anathema, and the Bohai Strait facility
was an important nexus for their ongoing endeavor. There were few places along
the coast of the Yellow Sea that were remote enough to provide the controlled
access that was required, and even fewer with the proximity to the major
population centers that provided raw material. Wan-Li suspected that the
Society’s uncontested control of the location had probably been one of the most
important factors that influenced the Anathema to accede in negotiations with
the Chinese branch of the Society, rather than liquidating it wholesale, as
they had done with the less valuable and accommodating European branch.
    All of these factors
made this particular facility one of the better protected locations on the
planet, with a number of defenses that were exceedingly rare. Chief among them
was the Etheric interference generator, a massive piece of machinery the
occupied the entirety of the lowest level of the compound, excavated from
bedrock for the specific purpose of housing it. The command center, situated
directly above the machine on the facility’s next-lowest level, experienced a
constant, low-level vibration and hum that was so omnipresent that it became
white noise that staff only noticed at the beginning of a shift.
    Or when it turned off.
Wan-Li’s ears rang with silence, while his subordinates glanced up from
consoles to exchange worried looks.
    Because it never