by Jim C. Hines
I tried to distract myself by figuring out the physics of our magical flight. There was no visible propulsion—at least, I was 99 percent certain Mahefa wasn’t somehow shooting rocket exhaust out of his ass. The state of my stomach meant his vampiric blood-magic hadn’t completely excused us from the normal rules of acceleration and momentum.
How much energy did it take to fly the two of us at this rate? Call it 350 pounds total, guesstimate our speed at several hundred miles per hour and climbing . . . by my off-the-cuff calculations, we should have caught fire five minutes ago.
One way or another, movement obeyed Newton’s Third Law. Mahefa could fly upward by basically jumping off the Earth, but how could he change directions, especially once we reached the vacuum of space? What was he pushing against? Everything in the solar system was chained to the sun’s gravitational pull, but gravity was a relatively weak force for the speed and power of this flight. On the other hand, once you escaped Earth’s atmosphere and gravity, you should need far less energy to maneuver.
With adequate blood supplies, could we send a vampire out to explore Jupiter?
That thought summoned a new fear. What if somebody already had?
“Hold on,” Mahefa said over the radio. “Let me get my bearings.”
We coasted higher, rotating at a slow speed that was perfect for inducing vomiting. I tried to focus on the sun, using it as a fixed—if moderately blinding—point on the horizon. My inner ear kept trying to tell me I was falling in every direction at once.
The cold was unpleasant, but no worse than a typical November morning in the U. P. I gripped the harness straps and waited.
“We’re early,” he said. “You’re lighter than I expected. Looks like we made better time.”
We sped higher, angling away from the sun. The stars were so much sharper than I was used to, without the Earth’s atmosphere to distort their light and color. I tried to engrave the sight in my memory for later, when I might be able to appreciate it.
“There we are.” Mahefa changed course again, moving slower this time.
We headed for a rectangular shadow that blotted the stars from view. “All this needs is Also sprach Zarathustra playing in the background,” I muttered.
“What’s that?”
“Nothing.” Save the 2001: A Space Odyssey reference for someone who might appreciate it.
The orbiting blood bank made me think of a stealth bomber. The skin was matte black, and the closer we got, the more I could make out the irregular angles of its surface. It seemed to hang motionless in the darkness, hiding in the edge of the Earth’s shadow.
Before I realized what was happening, Mahefa unbuckled the harness holding us together. I tried to twist around, but he slipped free before I could grab him.
My efforts had started me rotating. I spread out my arms and forced myself not to panic. Slowly, my body and brain realized I wasn’t plummeting to my death. Though given our current vector, the Earth’s gravity would pull me back down eventually, which meant I was plummeting. I was just plummeting very, very slowly.
I brought my arms in, and my body spun faster. I extended my legs, testing how each change affected my movement. I slowly stretched out both arms and pinwheeled them backward, trying to visualize the different angles and their effects in a frictionless environment.
“Your maneuvering jets.” Mahefa caught my shoulder and handed me the two fire extinguishers from his backpack. “Don’t overdo it. Your instincts will make you overreact. A little thrust goes a long way up here.”
I took one extinguisher in each hand. Mahefa pulled the pins and tossed them aside. They tumbled end over end until they vanished from sight.
“Once you reach the satellite, plug the card into the console by the door. There’s no air inside, so do not remove your helmet. The computer system should come up automatically.” He seized my harness. “You have the list?”
“Yes.”
“Gather everything on that list, then get the hell out of there and jump toward me. You get your long-distance phone call to your dead pope. I get my new vintages. Everybody wins.”
I raised the extinguisher in my right hand, lining it up on a path that should take me to the satellite.
“Save your fuel until you need it.” Mahefa spun me around and gripped the back of my harness. Before I could react, he hefted me overhead like a javelin and hurled me at the distant satellite.
My muscles went utterly rigid, as if the cold of space had turned my body to ice. My mind was little better, stuck on an infinitely repeating loop of oh shit oh shit oh shit. Then my radio crackled, breaking the spell.
“Veer up and to the right, or you’re going to miss it.”
I positioned the extinguisher in my left hand and gently squeezed the handle. Mahefa was right about the thrust. A split-second burst corrected my course and started me rotating backward like a slow-motion boomerang.
“A little higher. There you go.”
I did my best to stay on target and minimize my body’s excess motion. Half of my corrections made things worse, but I managed to keep the satellite in sight.
I was glad I had left Smudge behind. He might have enjoyed zero gravity, but he had a severe phobia when it came to fire extinguishers.
I guessed that our flight into space had covered at least a thousand miles, but these last hundred meters seemed to stretch out the longest. My hands cramped from holding the extinguishers. Sweat burned my eyes, and I had no way of wiping them. My jaw and neck were locked like rusted steel.
One moment I was flying through space. The next, my brain rebooted my perspective, and I was falling headfirst toward a satellite the size of a semi-truck trailer. At this speed, I’d bounce like a basketball, breaking who knew how many bones in the process. I brought both fire extinguishers around and tried to slow my approach.
It wasn’t enough. My left arm struck the satellite first, hard enough to bruise the elbow. The satellite’s black skin felt like brick. One of the fire extinguishers bounced from my grip and tumbled free.
Mahefa’s voice blasted my ears. “Watch it! You screw up and get stuck out there, I can’t come save you.”
I used my remaining extinguisher to shoot myself back toward the satellite at a more oblique angle. I skipped along the wall twice more before reaching the end my mind insisted on calling the bottom, as it was facing the Earth. I made my way around the corner and looked up at a black computer screen alongside the outline of a small rectangular door.
There were no handholds. Flying vampires wouldn’t need them. I floated in front of the door and pulled the bag off of my shoulder to retrieve the electronic lockpick. The interface looked like an ATM machine, with oversized plastic buttons, a curved glass screen, and a single data port.
The first time I attempted to plug the cable into the port, all I managed to do was shove myself away from the satellite. I tried not to look at the Earth stretched out beneath me. “How did they get this thing into orbit without anyone noticing the launch, anyway?”
“They carried it,” Mahefa said.
Vampires. Right.
I made my way to the console and tried again. This time, I managed to align and insert the cable without knocking myself away. The circuit board lit up, and a blinking cursor appeared on the screen. “Now what?”
“Don’t touch anything. Just cross your fingers and hope they haven’t upgraded their security.”
Seconds later, oversized text scrolled across the screen, welcoming me to Satellite Theta. The doorway—little more than an oversized doggie door, really—cracked open, and lights flickered on inside.
“Here goes.” I left the lockpick in place and squeezed inside.
Glass-fronted storage cabinets ran the length of the satellite. Orange text scrolled down the computer screen on the far side. I grabbed my list and pulled myself toward the screen. The cabinets took up most of the space, and the remaining crawlspace was perfectly sized for inducing claustrophobia.
“H
urry up.” Mahefa sounded antsy, like a getaway driver waiting for his partner to finish robbing a bank safe.
Each sample on his shopping list was coded by wall, cabinet, tray, and position. I left the list floating in front of me and searched for the first one: 2-8-3-E4, 2007.03.18—Burtley6.
The satellite was clearly labeled and organized, at least. I turned to wall number two, slid open the glass door to cabinet eight, and pulled out the third tray. Each aluminum tray was segmented like a checkerboard, and each square held the gleaming steel hybrid of a thermos and test tube, roughly three inches in diameter. I pulled out E4. A black plastic label from an old-fashioned label maker confirmed this was the Burtley6 sample from March of 2007.
One by one I raided trays and began to fill my bag with frozen vampire blood. There was little room to maneuver, and I banged my knees and elbows repeatedly. When I was about a third of the way through the list, I noticed black smoke leaking from beneath the monitor.
My first thought was a computer failure of some sort. My second was that it would be too much of a coincidence for the computer to break down just when I was robbing the place. Though it was possible Mahefa’s hack had somehow damaged the system.
My third thought was that gas in a zero-gravity vacuum should diffuse into an ever-expanding cloud, not twist and branch out, condensing into what appeared to be a man. “Mahefa, I may have a problem here.”
I moved toward the exit, but a hand clamped around my ankle. A pale, emaciated man, little more than a skeleton, slammed me against the nearest cabinet.
“You’re human.”
I heard his words inside my head. “Mahefa, you didn’t say anything about an undead rent-a-cop!”
“What exactly do you expect me to do from out here, Isaac? Scold it?”
Blue-black lips peeled back from the vampire’s fangs. Cloudy, frozen eyes seemed to peer through my body. His tongue was a pale, desiccated lump of flesh. He moved stiffly, as if his joints were continually freezing and had to be broken loose. “It’s been four years since I’ve fed. Shall I drain you now, or wait for your blood to freeze, then chew you up like a popsicle?”
I had used up a month’s worth of fear on the way here, and I had nothing but anger and impatience left. I reached into my bag for the shock-gun. The lightning bolt normally required a path of ionized air, which wouldn’t work here, but direct contact with the barrel should conduct the charge into his body. The gun’s insulation would hopefully prevent it from frying me as well.
The vampire yanked me closer, seized the bag with his other hand, and tossed it behind him. Canisters of frozen blood tumbled loose, bouncing soundlessly off the walls. So much for that plan. His reaction suggested he could probably read minds as well as project, and I had no defense against telepathy anymore, dammit.
What else did I know about him? He could dissolve into mist and didn’t need a spacesuit. Or clothes of any kind. That narrowed down the list of possible species, but not enough to figure out how to fight him. The oversaturated market in vampire fiction had led to countless new book-born species of vampire, each with their own customized—and far too short—list of vulnerabilities.
I kicked him in the face, but he didn’t release my leg. His claws pressed harder. Hunger hadn’t robbed him of his strength, which made sense. If you were going to leave a guard in space for years at a time, you’d want someone who could take out an intruder after four years of hibernation.
I grabbed for the fire extinguisher and slammed it against the side of his head.
He smiled. The tip of his tongue poked between his teeth like a swollen blue slug emerging from a cave of yellow bone.
I tried the fire extinguisher again, this time bringing it down on the back of his hand. I bruised my own leg, but his fingers loosened enough for me to pull free.
Four years since he last fed. Four years of starvation, surrounded by blood. What had he done to earn such a punishment, and how did they stop him from gorging himself on bloodsicles? I could feel his hunger pressing into my mind. There was no way he had voluntarily refrained from sampling the merchandise.
I threw the extinguisher at his face and snatched one of the blood canisters. I tried to unscrew the lid, but the gloves of my suit made it difficult, and then he was on me. We flew against a wall hard enough to crack the glass. I hoped it was the glass. It might have been my shoulder.
“Too late, Porter.” He wrenched his jaw open and brought his fangs toward my neck. I could see his thoughts, his eagerness to bite through my suit and into my neck, to rip me open and gorge himself.
I wedged the metal canister into his mouth. It barely fit, popping into place behind his fangs with what I’m sure would have been a gruesome scraping sound. He jerked back. For a moment he reminded me of a dog with a metal bone. He let go of me and reached for the canister.
I grabbed the top of his head with both hands and slammed my knee into his jaw. Fear and desperation gave me strength, and I felt his fangs punch through the side of the tube.
His mental agony was like a blowtorch to my senses, searing my eyes and forcing acid into my throat. The flesh of his cheeks and jaw eroded like a crumbling sand sculpture. The pattern of dissolution would have probably given me another clue to his species, had I cared enough to watch.
I dragged myself away. Whatever they had added to the blood to turn it toxic, it worked quickly. It would need to be something that could be easily filtered out later. Silver, maybe? You could probably rig up a way to separate out the silver using electrolysis.
The broken tube tumbled past me. Blood sprayed from the holes like morbid little geysers, boiling away in the vacuum.
When I looked back, nothing remained but a slightly pitted skeleton drifting in a slowly expanding cloud of gray dust.
I brought the skeleton out with me. The idea of leaving his bones trapped in a floating vault in space was too horrific, no matter what he had tried to do to me. Bracing myself in the open doorway, I shoved his remains toward the Earth. He shot away like a torpedo from a submarine. Between the sunlight and the heat of reentry, he should be gone soon enough.
I double-checked my bag and fire extinguisher, pulled myself through the doorway, and yanked the electronic lockpick loose. The door slid shut. I tucked the lockpick into the bag and made sure my gun was at the top where I could reach it.
Mahefa shone a light in my direction to orient me. I crawled to the side of the satellite, braced myself, and jumped. I was a little off course, but Mahefa had no trouble intercepting me. He caught my harness with one hand and reached for the bag.
“Not yet.” I yanked it out of his reach. “Tell me which sample will let me talk to the dead.”
He looked genuinely saddened by my mistrust, like a disappointed parent. “Søndergaard18.”
The name sounded familiar. I prayed it wasn’t the one I had sacrificed fighting the vampire. I dug through the bag, checking one tube at a time. I found it near the bottom. According to the label, this sample was twenty-seven years old.
“Go ahead and hold on to that if you’d like,” said Mahefa. “I’ll carry the rest—”
“Not until we’re on the ground.” I kept my hand in the bag, gripping my shock-gun.
He laughed. It was an ugly sound, heavy with mockery. “You think I plan to double-cross you? Perhaps to ‘accidentally’ drop you on the way down?”
“Most criminals don’t like letting witnesses go free,” I said warily.
“You’re not a witness, Isaac.”
He was too damned confident. “How do you figure?”
He pointed to the satellite. “If this was simply a matter of bypassing a lock and fighting a single guard, I’d have gotten myself a magical signal dampener and helped myself to their stock years ago.”
It was like the vacuum of space had seeped into my chest. “What are you saying?”
“I needed someone with no connection to me,” Mahefa continued. “Someone who could have plausibly discovered the vampires’ secre
ts.” He smiled. “Someone who would appear to be acting alone when the controllers in Chernobyl reviewed the video feed.”
Oh, shit. “And it never occurred to you to wear a damn mask?”
“A mask wouldn’t block the scanner you passed through on the way in. They peeked right through your suit to record every wrinkle and birthmark on your body.” He pulled me closer, until our helmets touched. “You’re not a witness, Isaac. You’re a scapegoat.”
I can’t decide whether to kill him or commit him.
I don’t pretend to know what Isaac is going through. The entire town mourned the loss of so many innocent people, but Isaac hasn’t allowed himself to grieve. He blames himself. I don’t know if he’s searching for punishment or redemption. And then Gutenberg took away the thing that most defined him. I watch him fight to hold on to that world and that purpose, clinging like his life depends on it. He’s lost and angry and terrified.
Isaac isn’t the only one in pain. I lost most of my career. I lost clients and colleagues I worked with for years. Lena was forced to kill Deifilia, the only blood-family she’s ever known. Lena has been spending far more time in her tree than she used to, and grief blunts her joy. Whether that grief is her own or Isaac’s, or even mine, I couldn’t say.
I worry about them both, but if Isaac continues on like this, with the depression eating away at him, his pain could smother Lena as well.
In some ways, his reaction tracks closely to the grief and anger that follow an unexpected amputation. So far, he’s turned most of that pain inward or tried to focus it through action. His tunnel vision keeps him pursuing a vanished child and a thread of hope.
It was a mistake to bring him to Euphemia. The aftereffects of her song have driven his loss deeper, like shrapnel seeking his heart. I want to help Jeneta, too, but not at the cost of Isaac’s life.
I can’t force him to get help. I can’t stand by and watch him self-destruct. And I can’t leave, not without tearing Lena apart. I love her, but that love chains the three of us together, and if Isaac’s downward spiral goes on . . .