by Aaron Crash
The hydra had come undone enough for Blaze to carry Cali up to Ling’s starcycle. The Meelah helped him get her secured. The Mormon girl was fast asleep in her spacesuit. Blaze noticed that Ling had grabbed Ugly Betty, and she lay in a sheath on the bike.
Cali’s starcycle floated in the wreckage, but it was close to the Lizzie Borden, which was in the distance, waiting for them. The neutron star continued to spin inside the Etrusca structure. The top of the ruin was larger and wider than the bottom. Both parts were connected by bridges of the strange ancient metal.
“Fernando,” Blaze called through comms, “grab Cali’s starcycle and tow it over. We’re ready to be picked up.”
Silence.
Elle floated closer. She was pale, but she looked pretty good. She hadn’t used any of the three magical syringes she’d cooked up.
“Lizzie’s scans aren’t online,” Elle said. “And I can’t raise Trina, Bill, or Fernando on comms.”
Ling piped in. “Something is jamming our communications. It’s not affecting our implants, but it is disrupting our signals. As a necrotechnical demon, it’s surely Xerxes. Why he isn’t attacking us is more of the mystery.”
Blaze expected to hear Xerxes’s whispering, gasping, over-aspirated voice. But again, silence.
And the Lizzie Borden wasn’t moving. Why?
They were going to have to motor over to her and find out. “Ling, Elle and I will grab hold of your starcycle. Take us on over. But let’s be careful. I’m thinking the fighting is only just beginning.”
The gunny and his sister gripped the starcycle, and Ling applied the throttle, but only a little. They were going to approach the ship carefully. A big Terran colonizer vessel rolled into view, knocking other ships out of the way. Five miles long, a colonizer like that could hold a thousand people easily. Now, it looked completely abandoned. Lots of empty rooms and empty hibernation pods, which Humans had had to use before the SWD engines were perfected. Funny they hadn’t seen such a monstrously large spacecraft earlier, but there was a lot of crap floating around. And they’d been busy fighting. The name of the colonizer was written on the side…the Galway Bay.
Why did that name seem so familiar? Blaze couldn’t remember.
The neutron star pulled all the wrecks and debris closer, pushing some together and spreading others apart. The Lizzie tumbled end over end next to the colonizer. Blaze’s ship looked like a miniature model of a starship compared to the vastness of the other.
All of Lizzie’s running lights were off, every single one. In the graveyard of starships orbiting the neutron star, the Lizzie Borden seemed like just another corpse littering space.
EIGHTEEN_
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Blaze, Elle, and Ling gathered Cali’s abandoned starcycle. Blaze drove it with Elle on the back.
Cali slept on Ling’s back, her head resting on the Meelah’s armor. The two starcycles pushed through debris, which formed a wake behind them—a teddy bear, an antique pistol, banana peels wrapped around an SWD power coupling.
The Lizzie looked as abandoned as the colonizer dwarfing it. Good thing Xerxes hadn’t created a monster out of the colonizer…yet.
Ling cut the engines when they were a hundred feet away from Lizzie, drifting upside down.
“Elle, can you do a quick detect Onyx spell?” Blaze asked.
Behind him, Elle fished into a pouch and held a cracked piece of mirror in her hand. She cast the spell, her voice going rough with the Onyx speak. The mirror flashed. “There’s a cluster of Onyx energy inside the Etrusca ruin around the star, in the upper platform.”
“What about inside the Lizzie?”
Elle sighed. “I can’t tell. I’ve layered so many sigils and warding spells on the Lizzie that magic bounces off her. No one can get inside her unless you’re some sort of ancient necrotechnical archduke from the abyss.”
“Like our friend, Xerxes.”
Ling chuckled. “If you and Xerxes are friends, Blaze, we might need to have a long discussion on your life choices. Didn’t your mother have a saying, ‘Tell me who you walk with, and I’ll tell you who you are.’”
“Mom loved a good Mexican proverb,” Blaze said. “Arlo memorized a bunch of them, but he’d always screw ’em up.”
They lapsed into silence.
The Lizzie turned lazily, and they were given a view of the top. They watched the hatch slide open. Fear prickled the back of Blaze’s neck. A bad feeling lay like a snake in his belly. The Lizzie, caught in the gravitational pull of the neutron star, wheeled around, knocked a Clicker shuttle, and showed them the cargo bay doors, which were also open. It seemed every door on the ship was open. It might have been an invitation, but it felt like a warning.
Blaze hated being afraid as much as he hated not knowing what was going on inside his ship. “Let’s split up and give Xerxes multiple targets. I’ll go in through the top hatch, and the rest of you will enter through the cargo bay doors.”
“Splitting up is never a good idea,” Elle said. “You always want to split up because you like fighting alone. Not this time. I’ll need you and Ling to keep me covered while I prep my spellwork. So, no splitting up.”
Blaze gave in. His sister was right. “Okay, Ling, take us into the cargo bay. But take it slow.”
They fired the engines on their starcycles and soared down until they were lined up with the open bay doors. They entered cautiously, and the place was empty. Blaze parked his bike at the starcycle port. Ling slid in next to him. Blaze then used his CO2 exhaust to send him to a manual override panel. He’d tried his combat display, but it wouldn’t sync to Lizzie’s main computer since the mainframe was shut down.
The manual controls in the panel were equally dead.
Elle floated in closer. “How does it—” Then their comms went down. A second later, Blaze’s combat display on his ocular implants flickered off.
Blaze lifted his ax and triggered the blades. At least they had their weapons. And even without comms or power, Elle could still cast her spells. The gunnery sergeant snatched his fusion shotgun out of the sheath then connected it to his back; the nanotech seized the weapon and held it there.
Ling pulled Cali off the starcycle and cradled her awkwardly as he drifted off into the engine room. Elle and Blaze joined him. Nothing was working, and they couldn’t get anything online. The cellar storage area still had containment, though, thanks to Elle’s magic and the automatic locks on the three doors.
They couldn’t talk, not with comms shut down. Even yelling into their helmets wouldn’t work because there was nothing to carry the sound waves to each other.
Blaze found himself breathing hard, more pissed than scared. He strapped Cali to a chair so she wouldn’t float off or hurt herself, and he checked her bracelets. Locked. Without power, they wouldn’t open, which was good news for them all. They would seal her in the engine room in case any ghoulies were about on his ship.
Goddammit, of course there were monsters on his ship. He just had to find them and erase them before any worse crap happened.
Blaze pressed his CO2 exhaust, and the air pushed him out of the engine room, back into the cargo bay, and toward the door into the ship. His helmet lights were off, so he ignited his ax. Ling followed suit, turning on one of his fusion nunchakus. Elle held a glowing katana in her hand. And yet, the light from their weapons seemed dim…and fading. Was it his imagination, or was it getting harder to breathe?
Xerxes might have supernatural power over technology, but their spacesuits and weapons had warding glyphs that protected them from demonic interference thanks to Elle. How could any hunting team survive without an Onyx witch? Short answer, most didn’t.
Their weapons were safe, but why were their implants offline? Elle had warded them, and they had el Ojo de Horus tattoos. Blaze had no answers.
They only had a limited supply of oxygen in their suits. They had to get the Lizzie back online and find the others. The bridge had other manual controls to get thin
gs working. And if that failed, there was an emergency panel in the master suite that he could use to jump-start the ship. But the engine room should’ve worked.
The door out of the cargo bay looked like an open mouth. Darkness lay beyond. Ling and Elle flanked him as he floated through it into the airlock. He had to get physical with the interior door. Deactivating his ax, he opened a panel and used the hand crank to pry the door open.
Everything was deadly silent. He’d gotten used to noise when fighting inside the Lizzie. He liked the feel of her gravity. But now he felt he was scuba diving inside the wreck of a haunted vessel.
Slowly, the door cracked open. For an instant, Blaze saw a face there, the pale face of a woman, eyes black, spidery veins crinkling her nose and forehead.
The mouth opened, equally black, but fanged.
He raised his ax. But an instant later, the face was gone. He jacked open the door. The hallway was empty. The woman was gone.
He glanced at Elle, who was looking at him mystified. Damn, but the light from their weapons were so dim, he could hardly see in the gloom.
He mouthed the words, Did you see that?
She shook her head, concern in her eyes.
Blaze checked with Ling.
The Meelah shrugged, but even the Shaolin sloth looked uneasy, and nothing queso’d his dip.
Was he seeing things?
No, Blaze had been fighting evil long enough to know when he was being dicked with. He grabbed his shotgun from off his back and stuck his ax handle to the nanotech on his thigh. Barrel first, Blaze floated out into the hallway.
Ugly Betty had a light, and he flipped it on. Even then, the hallway was full of shadows. Something moved down by Elle’s room, but before he fired, he checked his target like a squared-away Terran Marine should. Nothing was there.
So pinche quiet. Dark and getting darker. He would’ve liked to ask Elle or Ling if they had seen the movement, but he couldn’t. Elle had said he liked fighting alone, which was true, but he wasn’t alone. He just couldn’t communicate with his comrades.
The three of them glided through the gloom toward the bridge on the second deck. They encountered the first of Elle’s decorations that had come unstuck. An incense holder and some incense cones drifted through the air. Ash hung suspended around a candle. Lots of ash. It had turned the corridor soupy, making it even harder to see.
Was that a hand, an arm, in his shotgun’s light? Fingernails sharp and black, cruel. Blaze got ready to fire, but again, nothing was there. They pushed through the ash and through the doors onto the bridge. Blaze wasn’t sure if he was relieved to find it empty or if that made things worse. Where were Fernando, Bill, and Trina?
Using a nunchaku for light, Ling checked a workstation, hit switches, pushed buttons, and tried the crank, but the ship wouldn’t fire up. Elle floated next to him, the curve of her katana blade glowing, however dimly.
Blaze moved to the window at the front of the bridge since he couldn’t access displays through his implants. The colonizer had drifted closer and took up the entire view. For a second, he thought he saw faces in the windows, a thousand dead faces, peering out the window at him. Like before, another glance, nothing was there. Blank windows in a deserted wreck.
They’re killing me. But I’m dead.
The voice came from inside his head, he knew it. Sound couldn’t travel through the void. And yet, it sounded like someone had whispered in his ear. It almost felt like there had been cold hands on his skin, reaching through his armor.
“Did you hear that?” Blaze asked. He knew Elle and Ling couldn’t hear him, but just saying it out loud made him feel better. “No, of course you didn’t. I didn’t hear it either, only I did. Okay, the engine room is a bust, the bridge can’t get things working. So let’s try the master suite. If that doesn’t work, we get the starcycles and we ride on out of here—maybe find another ship we can hotwire.”
Abandoning the Lizzie would suck ass, but he knew it wouldn’t come to that. They’d get power working and then kick some serious butt. Still, the lights were all so dim. Even more ash seemed to be in the rooms and corridors, reflecting their light. It was like swimming through inky, oily smoke.
Blaze, Elle, and Ling jetted out of the bridge, riding their exhaust through the corridor to the staircase leading up. Trina stood at the top of the stairs in a white dress. At least he thought it was her. She turned and ran out of sight.
“Couldn’t beat us in a fair fight, Xerxes?” Blaze roared in his helmet. “Now you have to use these pinche parlor tricks. Well, until one of your ghouls hits me, it don’t mean shit.”
The hallway leading to the master suite was black with smoke, and their lights barely worked. They had to fly through the darkness to get there.
Blaze didn’t pause. He wanted something to jump out at him so he could hit it with his ax.
The soft voice returned, whispering into his mind. They’re killing me, but I’m already dead. We’re all dead in here. All of us are dead. You are, too. You just don’t know it yet.
“I always was a dim-witted pendejo,” Blaze spat.
A lacy piece of gauze obscured his vision for a moment, like someone was above him, maybe Trina in her white dress. He went to move it out of the way, but it was gone. The darkness seemed to entomb him. He felt Elle take his hand. Ling had a paw on his back. For that insane minute, he appreciated their presence.
While Elle could be evil and crazy, she was also tough and loyal. And nobody could ask for a better, cooler stoned uncle than the Shaolin sloth. The three drifted through the darkness and into the master suite, where a red light glowed through the window. The glow came from the colonizer. The running lights were scarlet. Everything in the master suite looked like it had been dipped in blood. The place was already a mess from the fire. Between the crimson light and all the ash in the air, Blaze could hardly see a thing.
The manual reboot switch for all of Lizzie’s operations was on a panel next to his bed.
Then he saw his bed, badly scorched. A figure lay there under a stained and bloody sheet.
Blaze had his ax and shotgun ready. He floated over to the body. No, there were three figures under the sheet, a large sheet, not one of his. Probably brought in special to scare the hell out of him. It wasn’t working.
Three figures. Bill, Trina, and Fernando?
Ling drifted through the room… Blaze hadn’t seen him despite the glowing length of fusion attached to his nunchaku chain.
Another voice filled his mind. He recognized it as Katrina O’Reilly’s. They’re eating me, Blaze. They’re eating me alive. My blood. Oh, God, oh God, oh God. They’re eating my blood.
Ling whisked off the sheet. Underneath it was Trina, in that white dress he’d seen on her at the top of the staircase. The one before had been whole and shining white. Now it was in tatters, barely covering her. Two children, no more than ten years old each, were on her. A boy in old clothes lay at her throat, nuzzling at a wound there. A girl in a dress sucked on her thigh. Both were dead, both had black ink for blood—he could see their veins through their almost transparent skin.
Trina’s mouth was open in a silent scream.
It had to be silent. For there was no air.
Then again, vampires didn’t need to breathe.
NINETEEN_
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Vampires had powerful telepathy, which was why he’d been seeing things. They were screwing with his senses and dicking with his mind. The minute he’d seen the woman in the cargo bay doors, he should’ve known they were dealing with bloodsuckers.
Elle slashed a katana down and through the girl, severing her legs. The vampiric girl whirled, mouth bubbling with blood. Black fangs filled a mouth that was as black as her eyes. All of her veins were clearly visible under her dead translucent skin. Each one was filled with the dark Onyx energy.
Elle removed the girl’s head, then stuck her sword through the skull. The only way to take out a vampire for good was either a
wooden stake to the heart or a fusion weapon through the brain. They couldn’t heal damage from star energy, and without a mind, they couldn’t function.
One vamp down. One to go.
Blaze seized the boy and threw him off Trina. Ling whirled a nunchaku and sliced off the head before lobotomizing him. Two pieces of skull hung next to the vampire’s cleaved brain, the mess suspended in the zero G.
But the damage was done. Trina had been bitten, and not just a little. Her blood had been drained from her body. Onyx would replace it, turning her into a bloodthirsty creature, telepathically enhanced and viciously evil.
Now that he knew he was dealing with vampires, Blaze’s head cleared. There was no longer smoke in the air, just the typical debris of his burned-up room. The red light from the colonizer, though, that was real.
Now that the telepathic fog had faded, Blaze could see Bill and Fernando crucified to the wall. They had on spacesuits and were very much alive and breathing. Both of their mandibles were clicking horribly at the agony of their wrists and ankles being spiked.
Ling went to Bill, Elle moved to rescue Fernando, and Blaze went to take care of Trina.
He had to put her down.
Elle helped Fernando off the wall, but Ling was struggling to get Bill.
Blaze glanced at the bodies of the vampiric children they’d killed. Those outfits looked like colony gear. What if the colonizer had been hit by a vampire? Even a single vampire could infect a thousand people in just a few hours. Could they fight a thousand vampires and Xerxes?
Well, one less vampire might mean the difference between life and death. He brought up his ax. He was going to have to kill Trina. He had no choice.
Elle caught him before he did it. He looked into her face.
She mouthed the words, I might be able to save her.
Blaze didn’t like the word “might.” He had to end it, while he had the stomach. If Trina turned, she could get into his head, use his feelings against him. He’d forgotten how powerful vampire telepathy could be. Hell, their comms were probably working, yet they couldn’t shake off the psionic interference.