The rush never slowed. They came like an evil horde, uncaring of the black blood of their comrades besmirching the ceiling, walls and floor over which they traversed. Their faces were stretched into the rictuses of animalistic madness and their eyes held no comprehension that I could detect. It was pure instinctual hatred. Kill or be killed.
Now Sonafi threw a handful of her own little weapons. Not as flawless or perfect as the Human stars yet still deadly as hell. Four more instantly fell. At this point I almost felt an observer. Sonafi had taken her perceived gender and age discrepancy to heart and devised a strategy to level the playing field and now might very well be the most efficient killer among us. I thought that I was sure that if it would ever come down to it, if it ever became necessary, I could avoid her throwing weapons. I was fairly certain I could. I am twice her age, however, and even I am not fully sure. Not that it would ever come to that, but we are martial beings and to stay alive we must forever be thinking martial thoughts.
The Palag felt the sting of her martial artistry, but kept coming, uncaring, driven by some inner hatred that I could not even begin to understand. Their lives seemed to mean nothing to them. The only thing that seemed to mean anything to them was our destruction. Like quicksilver they poured down the staircase, over the walls and ceiling and upon us. I had never seen so many of them at once. Even I felt a moment of doubt. Even I was daunted.
This was not the first time I have ever been daunted, nor did I mean for it to be the last. 'Back to back!' I told Sonafi telepathically and we slipped into that old rhythm we knew so well. We knew one another so well, had fought side by side, or back to back so often our minds melded into one synergistic being, a creature with four arms and four legs, four eyes and four ears, but one fluid, sinuous conscious awareness of our surroundings and the Palag who were attacking us now from all sides. With our backs to one another, nearly touching but yet fully cognizant of one other, we met their attack squarely.
The Palag were every bit as aware of each other as a fighting unit, not only as individuals but as a whole, as were Sonafi and I of one another. They descended on us en-mass, and then there was no more time for thought. Our only advantage was that they couldn't all get at us at once. My last coherent thought, before they closed, was my surprise at still hearing the sound of bullets passing by overhead. Still hitting flesh! The sound was indistinct yet audible. They were still coming. The Palag were still coming. The second story of the house was already full and yet still they came. Then there was no more time for thought. They were upon us.
They came carrying cold steel. Their blades were strapped to their thighs, or their arms, like divers sheaths, or on their backs like I wore my own, keeping their hands and feet free as they swarmed in like army ants over all obstacles.
Steel rang on steel as both my blades danced intricately amongst the weaving, slashing blades of the Others. For the moment I could think of them as nothing else. It was the name by which I have called them for thirty-four thousand years. In the heat of the battle they were the Others, my old hated rivals, and I could think of them in no other vein.
Those around us were all Juvenile to us by many degrees. It was like slaughtering incompetent novices. They were all well trained, even Masters of the art of the weapon each carried, but they could not perceive the blinding speed with which we attacked. I parried an attack from my left and then stabbed the Palag through its neck before it realized its blade had even been deflected. Then I quickly yanked it free, coated in black blood, before the Palag I had stabbed in the neck began to fall, parried another blade among the mass either chopping or stabbing at me, and another and another and another, much faster than the thought, operating on muscle memory alone, before finding the barest sliver of a moment to strike back. While my Cumosachi wove a defensive ring of steel around me to my right, and my cane-sword danced the same caper to those on my left, as I swung the cane-sword back to parry yet another attack I let my arm slip out to its farthest reach and the tip of the blade opened the great black teardrop shaped eye of one of the Palag whose blades I had just parried there. As the Palag staggered back my cane-sword cavorted on, and the opening the Palag had left in the ring around us was filled with the next eager attacker. They came blithely on.
My Cumosachi Katana, though longer and heavier, moved with a grace that seemed to be animated by the blade itself. The balance of the Cumosachi was unmatched by any weapon I had ever held, excepting only possibly, the blade I had given my son, and it moved as with a life of its own, floating, weaving and buoyant among the blades besieging me, occasionally darting out to sever hands, nick the great black teardrop shaped eyes, or even liberate completely their overlarge heads with a deft slice at their thin, scrawny appearing necks.
Sonafi, smaller and more nimble than I, and fighting with her shorter weapons, was often away from my back as she literally danced among the attacking Palag, I trying to maintain our proximity only to find her once again beside me and expecting me to parry blades that were descending on her as she slipped under one or another of my arms to slice the unsuspecting Palag in front of me.
No two humans could have fought the way we did. We could not view all of our attackers all at once. They came from everywhere all at once but not in a coordinated attack that we might fight them in a systematic manner. We picked our targets on a most imperative basis, but it was all instinctual, autonomous and reflexive. We did not have time to think, to calculate. We had to act in the now. Their blades fell from every direction, and we fought them like the demented beings that we were.
This was a chaotic time and words unequal to the task of fully describing the events which occurred herein. Even though I was a participant myself, I was purely acting and could not recount every blow that fell within the heat of that battle. It was even to me little more than a blur of swinging blades, splashing black blood and Palag corpses piling up around us and Sonafi was now forced to remain at my back rather than moving freely at her will, but the corpses impeded the Palag as much as they did Sonafi and the tempo of the battle changed.
They piled up around us until our Palag attackers had to climb over their own dead to get at us, and then without warning the rest of the Vampires were among us. Black suited and helmeted, within their inclusive Field Generation units, I had not been able to sense their approach- nor had the Palag. They had no hint that they had been encircled until the blades were falling upon them and they had nowhere to turn, every avenue blocked and the numbers overwhelmingly now against them.
Before it was too late, I singled out a Palag cut off and alone in the far corner of the room. Suddenly without anyone to fight, it looked around wildly, seeking a way out; before it could act I leaped upon it, striking out at it with both blades, but tempering my attack to a velocity it could match. As I attacked it with my steel, I sent a second attack, a telepathic attack, crashing against its unsuspecting mind.
Shocked, it tried to rebuff me, all of its concentration suddenly diverted to the siege laid to its mind and its weapon falling from nerveless fingers. I could have chopped off its head, had I wanted, but I wanted control of its head, not its decapitation. I was more prepared this time. My experience with the Palag whose remains had etched the concrete just outside these walls had taught me all I needed to know and I slapped aside her defenses quickly and pulled myself into her mind. It was a violation worse than any other imaginable and she fought with all her might.
There was nothing she could do. I had her. While I held her, the rest were slaughtered.
CHAPTER 28
The Palag was a clone and younger than Brid. This was what struck me first. A child, nearly a newborn, caught in a conflict not of her own making. The Palag were hardly different from Humans or Vampires, when all else was considered, this Palag caught in the same racial struggle as the rest of us. The cause each species claimed may have been different, but she was stuck doing what she was ordered, what she thought they had to do and what Fate had dictated. Whatever her reaso
ns, they had been forced upon her the same as we are now forced upon our own course. She did as she must, the same as we, except that we are on different sides of the conflict.
I had supposed correctly. The Explorers, I now saw that they called themselves, had created a large batch of Juveniles in an attempt to deal with what they saw as a rising insurrection among the aborigines of their colony world.
“We are an insurrection.” I said to the Vampires now crowding around us. There were murmurs of murderous unrest and they began to crowd closer, but I waved them back. “This one is not for us. This one will go back. With a gift!”
I turned to Sonafi and nodded her forward. She knew what to do and readily stepped forward, handing her bloodied blades to another Vampire as she came. A clean blade appeared in her hand from somewhere upon her person and taking the Palag's limp hand in her own and with a deft slice opened the creature's wrist. Black blood poured out for a moment, then the wound quickly sealed itself. Sonafi cut it again and again, until the flow was much diminished, the Palag's blood pressure much reduced. Then she gave the Palag the injection. It was her blood.
Azavar stiffened as her body received the influx of alien blood- Sonafi's half Human and half Palag mixture. Azavar's cellular consciousness recognized the assault for what it was and her mind surged against my own, frantic and fighting for life, nearly breaking free. It did not matter that half of Sonafi's blood carried Palag genetics. It was half Human and invasive. It was primal. It began to attack her immediately. Her cells were overwhelmed and she thrashed against my mind, but it wasn't an equal battle and she soon fell quiescent, exhausted. There was nothing she could have done to stop it once she was infused. The transfusion of a single cell was all that was required. Once that transfusion occurred, there was no stopping or reversing the process. It was already far too late.
Now there was no resistance as I delved into her memories. Her thoughts stirred weakly, sluggishly, aware that I was in her mind, but forced into a tiny fragment of her overall consciousness and unable to control any of her motor functions or call out telepathically, a spectator in her own mind.
They were the Explorers. There was that word again. The Explorer Ships were the original colony ships sent out from a dying world to save their race from a planet slowly spiraling into its own star, thrown out of its stable orbit by a rogue black hole that passed close by their System. It had passed by seventy-nine light minutes outside their system, too far to affect it immediately, catastrophically, but not so far that it did not disrupt their orbit. Their planet was thrown out of its orbit only minutely, but had then begun a slow, decayed spiral into its star, dooming the world to extinction.
The Palag were young then. Newly industrialized. They had only just learned to defy the gravity of their own world when the rogue passed. By combining the efforts of their entire population, and the three hundred year span before their planet drew close enough to extinguish all of the life upon its surface, they had invented the technology necessary to perceive and measure gravity waves. To manipulate them to mechanical purpose. To mechanize them and to create starships powered by them. It was a race against time and in the end most did not escape. Those who did, however, were charged with a purpose; that of re-creating the Palag civilization on as many other worlds as was possible, so that the total extinction that nearly happened to them once might never have its opportunity again. They were to spread the Palag seed across the Universe until the Palag filled it from one end to the other.
The Universe is a large place, however, and ever-expanding. The Palag had already spread far and wide, yet as numerous as they are, they had only just begun to scratch the surface, and each new Palag awakened within the cloning chambers- from the billions of genetic sequences stored within the Palag Explorer Ship's databanks- came out with the genetically implanted drive to continue that expansion. The Palag's understanding of genetic engineering had been light years ahead of every other one of their sciences. It had been imperative, from the beginning of the Explorer’s commission, that the Palag spread themselves quickly, lest another freak set of disastrous circumstances doom the entire species once again. But they were still pushing now just as ruthlessly as they had been then, in the beginning, eleven million years ago. The imperative that had been placed within the DNA as an instinctual drive by their long-lost ancestors, ancestors to whom these clones may not have had any more likeness, inherently, then the Palag had for Humans, continued to push them forward long after the necessity. The DNA sequences stored in the databanks of the Explorer Ships were of the original Palag, but the clones reproduced to carry on this mission were enhanced copies of those originals, filled with as much helpful material as the original genetic engineers could envision. The first clones produced along the way must have been quite a shock to those Palag who had made the journey out from their doomed world, as advanced beyond them as Vampires were advanced beyond Humans.
The Palag colonies they left behind themselves, the genetic material derived directly from the database of the original Palag were nearly as different as the clones were to the old original Palag. The Explorer Palag had decided, on their own, their genetic programming no doubt incurring their disregard for other life forms, that it was far easier to adapt the Palag to the new worlds and environments they found- by stealing the life-forms already existing upon those worlds- than it was to adapt those worlds and stars to the Palag themselves.
Neither the enhanced Palag nor the computers which manned the Explorer Ships could have known how horrified the original Palag would have been to know to what extremes their Explorers had devolved. When those ships had been sent away from a dying world they had no idea into what difficulties they were sending their colonists. They could not devise in advance plans necessary to conquer and colonize worlds of which they were completely unaware. It had been the Explorers themselves who, under the demanding compulsions of their implanted imperatives, who devised the plans, once it became obvious to them that every planet capable of sustaining life already sustained it, and that the easiest, most efficient method of colonizing was to subvert the life that was already there. In few cases had that life already been sentient however. Though life within the Universe is abundant, intelligent life apparently, is not. They had found Earth and treated her as no different than the other worlds they had colonized, not seeing a difference between us and the many other species they had already subverted.
“But we are different!” I said aloud. Every Vampire present had deactivated his or her’s Field Generation unit, and had seen all that I had seen. No one said anything. Though we had learned much, it seemed as though there was little to say.
“Their star-maps!” Sonafi suggested.
“Burned indelibly into my mind.” I said, thanking whatever Providence had guided my study of mathematics, geometry, trigonometry, and those other studies which require, among other things, rote memorization. I could not forget something as important as their star maps, taken from Azavar's mind. Not when, all of a sudden, Sonafi and I had shared the same thought, that those star-maps might be the solution to Mankind's, and Vampirekind's, problems. “The Explorers are nearly as alien to the colonists they leave behind as they are to the original Palag, since only the DNA from the original Palag are used in their colonization efforts, while the computers which handle the cloning of the Explorers automatically add the enhancements which were designed to aid them in the completion of their commission. We may be able to enlist the aid of some of the other colonists they have left behind!”
"They may be as horrified as we are what the Explorers are doing to an already sentient and civilized species!" Volga said. I barely recognized her for the gore that covered her and was even now eating away at her clothes and even the riot helmet she hadn't yet taken off. The one thing the Humans had not been able to account for. The acidic nature of the Palag's blood! When it came in contact with oxygen, oxygen being one of the most corrosive substances on earth, the combination of oxygen and the acidic blood
reduced the Vampire or the Palag down to its constituent atoms in only minutes, and everything else it came in contact with.
The fumes in the house were becoming nearly unbearable. The oxidizing bodies of the Palag were already eating huge holes in the floor and I was beginning to become concerned for the inner structure of the building. That the whole thing would soon cave in. I looked sidewise at Sonafi.
"She's beyond redemption." Sonafi said of Azavar. "You may as well let her go." I did.
Azavar's weapon had fallen from nerveless fingers, but I held the point of my cane-sword against her throat anyway. As I released my grasp of her mind, she just as quickly reclaimed it and we stood eye to eye, staring knowingly into each other’s souls.
'What have you done to me?' Azavar's question slithered into my mind. There was no intimation of threat here, only resignation. I had not been sure what would happen, but the infusion of Sonafi's blood had shocked her beyond her imperatives, forced her to recognize the futility of her position. This was a first. I have never before seen one of the Others give up. It was almost the most shocking aspect of it all.
"Nothing that you haven't done to us!" Sonafi answered her aloud. "How does it feel?"
'It burns.' Azavar answered her literally, though the literal meaning had not been what Sonafi had meant. 'What will it do to me?'
"Give you some humanity." I said. "I hope."
"Get out!" Sonafi snapped. There could be little forgiveness in Sonafi, at least not at this moment, even though in twenty-four hours or less Azavar would be a newborn Vampire.
If ever there was an accord between our two species- or between all three- I was sure Sonafi would find the strength within herself to forgive, but now was not that time. She could find no sympathy within herself for the helpless Palag. We were three races at war and Azavar was a weapon with which we were attacking our enemy. She would keep her emotional distance.
The Vampire-Alien Chronicles Page 21