by George R. R.
“Wonderful.” Jainfar grimaced. “So all any of us have been able to contribute so far is that we don’t have a clue who did it, or how, or even why! Assuming, of course, that it wasn’t thehumans...whom we’ve all now agreed don’t have the capability to do it in the first place!”
“I think we’ve wandered about as far afield speculatively as we profitably can,” Thikair said firmly. “I see no point in our helping one another panic from the depths of our current ignorance.”
His subordinates all looked at him, most at least a little sheepishly, and he bared his canines in a frosty smile.
“Don’t misunderstand me. I’m as...anxious about this as anyone else. But let’s look at it. So far, we’ve lost one base and its personnel. All right, we’ve been hurt—badly. But whatever happened, it obviously took Shairez’s entire base completely by surprise, and we know the sensor net didn’t pick anything up. So, I think, the first thing to do is to put all our bases and personnel on maximum alert. Second, we emphasize that whoever was responsible may have some form of advanced stealth technology. Since we apparently can’t rely on our sensors to detect it, we’re going to have to rely on our own physical senses. I want all of our units to establish real-time, free-flow communications nets. All checkpoints will be manned, not left to the automatics, and all detachments will check in regularly with their central HQs. Even if we can’t detect these people—whoever they are—on their way in, we can at least be certain we know when they’ve arrived. And I don’t carehow good their ‘stealth technology’ is. If we know they’re there, we have enough troopers, enough guns, and enough heavy weapons on that planet to killanything.”
* * * *
“Yes, Thairys?” Thikair said.
The ground force commander had lingered as the other senior officers filed out. Now he looked at the fleet commander, his ears half-folded and his eyes somber. “There were two small points I...chose not to mention in front of the others, sir,” he said quietly.
“Oh?” Thikair managed to keep his voice level, despite the sudden cold tingle dancing down his nerves.
“Yes, sir. First, I’m afraid the preliminary medical exams indicate Base Commander Shairez was killed several hours after the rest of her personnel. And there are indications that she was...interrogated before her neck was broken.”
“I see.” Thikair looked at his subordinate for a moment, then cleared his throat. “And the second point?”
“And the second point is that two of the base’s neural education units are missing, sir. Whoever attacked Shairez’s facility must have taken them with him. And if he knows how to operate them . . .”
The ground force commander’s voice trailed off. There was, after all, no need for him to complete the sentence, since each of the education units contained the basic knowledge platform of the entire Hegemony.
* * * *
XVI
“I almost wish something else would happen,” Base Commander Fursa said. He and Base Commander Barak were conferring via communicator, and Barak frowned at him.
“I want to figure out what’s going on as badly as you do, Fursa. And I suppose for us to do that, ‘something else’ is going to have to happen. But while you’re wishing, just remember, you’re the next closest major base.”
“I know.” Fursa grimaced. “That’s my point. We’re feeling just a bit exposed out here. I’m inclined to suspect that the anticipation is at least as bad as beating off an actual attack would be.”
Barak grunted. His own base sat in the middle of a place that had once been called “Kansas,” which put an entire ocean between him and whatever had happened to Shairez. Fursa’s base, on the other hand, was located just outside the ruins of the human city of Moscow.
Still, almost two local weeks had passed. That was a lot of time, when no one in the entire expedition had been able to come up with a workable explanation for what had happened. A lot of time for nerves to tighten, for the ‘anticipation’ Fursa had just mentioned to work on all of them.
And a lot of time for whoever had attacked Shairez’s base to move his operations somewhere else entirely.
“You may have a point,” he said finally, “but I can’t say I’m looking forward to it. In fact, if I had my way”—his voice lowered—”I’d already be cutting my losses. This planet’s been nothing but one enormous pain in the ass. I say take all our people off and level the place.”
The base commanders’ gazes met, and Barak saw the agreement hidden in Fursa’s eyes. Any one of Fleet Commander Thikair’s dreadnoughts was capable of sterilizing any planet. Of course, actually doing that would raise more than a few eyebrows among the Hegemony’s member races. The sort of scrutiny it would draw down upon the Empire might well have disastrous consequences. But even so . . .
“Somehow, I don’t think that particular solution’s going to be very high on the Fleet Commander’s list,” Fursa said carefully.
“No, and it probably shouldn’t be,” Barak agreed. “But I’m willing to bet it’s running through the back of his mind already, and you know it.”
* * * *
“Time check,” Brigade Commander Caranth announced. “Check in.”
“Perimeter One, secure.”
“Perimeter Two, secure.”
“Perimeter Three, secure.”
“Perimeter Four, secure.”
The acknowledgments came in steadily, and Caranth’s ears twitched in satisfaction with each of them...until the sequence paused.
The brigade commander didn’t worry for a moment, but then he stiffened in his chair.
“Perimeter Five, report,” he said.
Only silence answered.
“Perimeter Five!” he snapped...and that was when the firing began.
Caranth lunged upright and raced to the command bunker’s armored observation slit while his staff started going berserk behind him. He stared out into the night, his body rigid in disbelief as the stroboscopic fury of muzzle flashes ripped the darkness apart. He couldn’t see anything but the flickering lightning of automatic weapons...and neither could his sensors. Yet he had infantry out there shooting at something, and as he watched, one of his heavy weapons posts opened fire, as well.
“We’re under attack!” someone screamed over the net. “Perimeter Three— we’re under attack! They’re coming through the—”
The voice chopped off, and then, horribly, Caranth heard other voices yelling in alarm, screaming in panic, chopping off in mid-syllable. It was as if some invisible, unstoppable whirlwind was sweeping through his perimeter, and strain his eyes though he might, he couldn’t even see it!
The voices began to dwindle, fading in a diminuendo that was even more terrifying than the gunfire, the explosion of artillery rounds landing on something no one could see. The firing died. The last scream bubbled into silence, and Caranth felt his heart trying to freeze in his chest.
The only sound was his staff, trying desperately to contact even one of the perimeter security points.
There was no answer, only silence. And then—
“What’s that?” someone blurted, and Caranth turned to see something flowing from the overhead louvers of the bunker’s ventilation system. There was no time even to begin to recognize what it was before the darkness crashed down on him like a hammer.
* * * *
Fleet Commander Thikair felt a thousand years old as he sat in the silence of his stateroom, cursing the day he’d ever had his brilliant idea about using this planet and its eternally damned humans for the Empire’s benefit.
It seemed so simple, he thought almost numbly.Like such a reasonable risk. But then it all went so horribly wrong, from the moment our troopers landed. And now this.
Base Commander Fursa’s entire command was gone, wiped out in a single night. And in the space of less than eight hours, two infantry brigades and an entire armored regiment had been just as utterly destroyed.
And they still had absolutely no idea how it had happened.
&
nbsp; They’d received a single report, from a platoon commander, claiming that he was under attack by humans. Humans who completely ignored the assault rifles firing into them. Humans who registered on no thermal sensor, no motion sensor. Humans who could not be there.
Maybe it isn’t possible. Or maybe it’s just one more lunacy about this entire insane planet. But whatever it is, it’s enough. It’s more than enough.
He punched a button on his communicator.
“Yes, Fleet Commander?” Ahzmer’s voice responded quietly.
“Bring them up,” Thikair said with a terrible, flat emphasis. “I want every single trooper off that planet within twelve hours. And then we’ll let Jainfar’s dreadnoughts use the Dainthar-cursed place for target practice.’’
* * * *
It wasn’t quite that simple, of course.
Organizing the emergency withdrawal of an entire planetary assault force was even more complicated than landing it had been. But at least the required troop lift had been rather drastically reduced, Thikair reflected bitterly. Over half his entire ground force had been wiped out. However small his absolute losses might have been compared with those of the humans, it was still a staggering defeat for the Empire, and it was all his responsibility.
He would already have killed himself, except that no honorable suicide could possibly expunge the stain he’d brought to the honor of his entire clan. No, that would require the atonement of formal execution...and even that might not prove enough.
But before I go home to face His Majesty, there’s one last thing I need to do.
“Are we ready, Ahzmer?”
“We are according to my readouts,” the ship commander replied. But there was something peculiar about his tone, and Thikair looked at him.
“Meaning what?” he asked impatiently.
“Meaning that according to my readouts, all shuttles have returned and docked, but neither Stellar Dawn nor Imperial Sword have confirmed recovery of their small craft. All the other transports have checked in, but they haven’t yet.”
“What?”
Thikair’s one-word question quivered with sudden, ice-cold fury. It was as if all his anxiety, all his fear, guilt, and shame suddenly had someone else to focus upon, and he showed all of his canines in a ferocious snarl.
“Get their commanders on the commnow,” he snapped. “Find out what in Dainthar’s Second Hell they think they’re doing! And then get me Jainfar!”
“At once, sir! I—”
Ahzmer’s voice chopped off, and Thikair’s eyes narrowed.
“Ahzmer?” he said.
“Sir, the plot. . .”
Thikair turned to the master display, and it was his turn to freeze.
Six of the expedition’s seven dreadnoughts were heading steadily away from the planet.
“What are they—?” he began, then gasped as two of the dreadnoughts suddenly opened fire. Not on the planet, but on their own escorts!
Nothing in the galaxy could stand up to the energy-range fire of a dreadnought. Certainly no mere scout ship, destroyer, or cruiser could.
It took less than forty-five seconds for every one of Thikair’s screening warships to die, and three-quarters of his transport ships went with them.
“Get Jainfar!” he shouted at Ahzmer. “Find out what—”
“Sir, there’s no response from Squadron Commander Jainfar’s ship!” Ahzmer’s communications officer blurted. “There’s no response from any of the other dreadnoughts!”
“What?” Thikair stared at him in disbelief, and then alarms began to warble. First one, then another, and another.
He whipped back around to the master control screen, and ice smoked through his veins as crimson lights glared on the readiness boards. Engineering went down, then the Combat Information Center. Master Fire Control went offline, and so did Tracking, Missile Defense, and Astrogation.
And then the flag bridge itself lost power. Main lighting failed, plunging it into darkness, and Thikair heard someone gobbling a prayer as the emergency lighting clicked on.
“Sir?”
Ahzmer’s voice was fragile, and Thikair looked at him. But he couldn’t find his own voice. He could only stand there, paralyzed, unable to cope with the impossible events.
And then the command deck’s armored doors slid open, and Thikair’s eyes went wide as a human walked through them.
Every officer on that bridge was armed, and Thikair’s hearing cringed as a dozen sidearms opened fire at once. Scores of bullets slammed into the human intruder...with absolutely no effect.
No, that wasn’t quite correct, some numb corner of Thikair’s brain insisted. The bullets went straightthrough him, whining and ricocheting off the bulkheads behind him, but he didn’t even seem to notice. There were no wounds, no sprays of blood. It was as if his body were made of smoke, offering no resistance, suffering no damage.
He only stood there, looking at them, and then, suddenly, there were more humans. Four of them. Only four...but it was enough.
Thikair’s mind gibbered, too overwhelmed even to truly panic as the four newcomers seemed to blur. It was as if they were half-transformed into vapor that poured itself through the command deck’s air with impossible speed. They flowed across the bridge, enveloping his officers, and he heard screams. Screams of raw panic that rose in pitch as the Shongari behind them saw the smoke flowing in their direction...and died in hideous, gurgling silence as it engulfed them.
And then Thikair was the only Shongari still standing.
His body insisted that he had to collapse, but somehow his knees refused to unlock. Collapsing would have required him to move...and something reached out from the first human’s green eyes and forbade that.
The green-eyed human walked out into the body-strewn command and stopped, facing Thikair, his hands clasped behind him.
“You have much for which to answer, Fleet Commander Thikair,” he said quietly, softly ... in perfect Shongari.
Thikair only stared at him, unable—not allowed—even to speak, and the human smiled. There was something terrifying about that smile...and something wrong, as well. The teeth, Thikair realized. The ridiculous little human canines had lengthened, sharpened, and in that moment Thikair understood exactly how thousands upon thousands of years of prey animals had looked upon his own people’s smiles.
“You call yourselves ‘predators.’“ The human’s upper lip curled. “Trust me, Fleet Commander—your people know nothing about predators. But they will.”
Something whimpered in Thikair’s throat, and the green eyes glowed with a terrifying internal fire.
“I had forgotten,” the human said. “I had turned away from my own past. Even when you came to my world, even when you murdered billions of humans, I had forgotten. But now, thanks to you, Fleet Commander, I remember. I remember the obligations of honor. I remember a Prince of Wallachia’s responsibilities. And I remember—oh, how I remember—the taste of vengeance. And that is what I find most impossible to forgive, Fleet Commander Thikair. I spent five hundred years learning to forget that taste, and you’ve filled my mouth with it again.”
Thikair would have sold his soul to look away from those blazing emerald eyes, but even that was denied him.
“For an entire century, I hid even from myself, hid under my murdered brother’s name, but now, Fleet Commander, I take back my own name. I am Vlad Drakula—Vlad, Son of the Dragon, Prince of Wallachia—and you have dared to shed the blood of those under my protection.”
The paralysis left Thikair’s voice—released, he was certain, by the human-shaped monster in front of him—and he swallowed hard.
“Wh—What do you—?” he managed to get out, but then his freed voice failed him, and Vlad smiled cruelly.
“I couldn’t have acted when you first came even if I’d been prepared— willing—to go back to what once I was,” he said. “There was only myself and my handful of closest followers. We would have been far too few. But then you showed me I truly ha
d no choice. When you established your base to build the weapon to destroy every living human, you made my options very simple. I could not permit that—I would not. And so I had no alternative but to create more of my own kind. To create an army—not large, as armies go, but an army still—to deal with you.
“I was more cautious than in my...impetuous youth. The vampires I chose to make this time were better men and women than I was when I was yet breathing. I pray for my own sake that they will balance the hunger you’ve awakened in me once again, but do not expect them to feel any kindness where you and your kind are concerned.