The Vampire-Alien Chronicles (27 page)

Sonafi and I walked right up to Brid’s front door and went in.
Once inside I took the hated device from my head and cast it aside, but Sonafi retrieved it and together with her own found a place in the bottom of the closet to hide it.

“We can’t afford for this technology to fall into Palag hands!”  She said by way of explanation.

“Our incremental technological advantage!”  I said cynically.

“So how do we draw attention to ourselves without cuing them in that it’s a trap?”  Sonafi asked as she went around turning on all the lights.
The house soon blazed like a beacon in a field of black.

“I had kind of thought that our presence here alone might be sufficient, but I suppose we could go up on the roof and watch the stars.”
The one thing about me that had rubbed off on my son was his love of stargazing and I knew he had a powerful scope mounted on his roof.

The Palag had already been here once.
We had seldom ever returned, at least not openly, to a place where we had already had a confrontation with the Others and I hoped this wouldn't cue them, but if they meant to come in force it might be that they would not care that they were walking into a trap because they would see this as their chance to finish us.

“They may welcome it.”
Sonafi agreed, finishing my thought. “This may be exactly what they're looking for.”

We went to the roof but not before I loosened my Cumosachi in its sheath and removed my walking cane from its belt clip.
It was a beautiful cloudless night. A half-moon shone down from on high and visibility was excellent. The breeze was cool on my skin and I was very much a part of the community consciousness around me. The subconscious community of Human minds, all communicating with one another at the cellular level, about whatever it was cells had to say to one another, my own very much a part of it all, I just able to feel that interaction in a way Humans were unable. Sonafi pulled the hood off the telescope while I sniffed the breeze, I very much the wild animal freed from its cage, and looking it.

“They will have to know it is a trap.”
Sonafi said, now scenting the breeze also, taking in the night and its multitude of sensory stimulus.

“They'll come anyway. They have to.” I said, and they did, but it was not until the early hours of the morning and we long returned inside.

They came through the roof. There were a lot of them, and they came quickly. They used some kind of unknown weapon to breach the roof, tearing a gaping hole through which they entered. There was a strange crunching, tearing and twisting noise and the Palag were inside, upstairs, and rushing down to meet us.

I felt them dying even before Sonafi killed the first of them rushing down the landing.
Even inside the house I heard the crack of bullets whining over the house. The Humans had opened fire prematurely. Or maybe not, I thought as I felt the sheer weight of the Palag numbers pressing down on my consciousness. The Humans must have been shocked at the numbers of the Palag and had done the only thing they could think to do.  Open fire and thin the ranks before they could all get into the house with us.

Sonafi and I are old but not febrile. We had time to glance
at one another before they came swarming down the stairs, down the walls, and even out across the ceiling. A monstrous horde of ill-begotten hell-spawn, were a man of the cloth to attempt to describe their coming. My own estimation only fell slightly short of that. Enraged and maniacal, they might well have come direct from hell itself, if that place truly existed. Their fury was something to behold.

T
he FBI's machinists had been able to fabricate a new type of throwing weapon based on Sonafi's specifications, similar to a throwing star but reduced to wafer thinness and tapered to only the thickness of an atom at the edge.  So sharp that so much as to brush against one of the star's edges was to lose the offending member, Sonafi handled the paper thin carbon disks like a professional card player and loosed a stack of them, bringing down the entire first wave as they swarmed into the room. They fell like flies, heads split, great black eyes ruptured and pouring gore, one an arm hanging by a piece of meat alone and clinging tenaciously to the ceiling with its three remaining appendages while it stared in incomprehension at its dangling arm. More than a dozen fell as Sonafi expended her stack of stars, all the FBI machinists had been able to produce in such a short time, the process extremely time consuming, apparently.  Stacking atoms with alternating positive and negative charges- a process reverse engineered from the Roswell
aluminum foil
appearing hull debris- a material that was both light and flexible but stronger than steel. 

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 reasons, 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.