The Vampire-Alien Chronicles (28 page)

“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 rec
eived 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.

T
he 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.

Palag facial features were bland and, through the evolutionary use of telepathy, not readily designed to show emotion, like a Human or Vampire, yet her feelings were still instantly obvious without having to read her mind.
Shock! Abhorrence! Fear! "No!" She hissed, her voice strange to hear, it never meant to form Human words, as if the words were pushed out rather than formed.

"Yes!"
Sonafi said. "Go now before we change our minds."

Azavar looked from one face to another, her enigmatic eyes impossible to read, but her thoughts were clear enough.
She sought the tiniest sliver of compassion, but there was none to be found here, on any of the faces looking her way. She knew what we expected. Though she would soon be one of us, in physiology if not appearance, she also knew that we would not accept her until she had earned that acceptance. Until she took our blood back to the rest of the Palag and infected them the same way that she had been infected. She fled.

"What will she do?"
Samon Du Bon asked, pushing through the ring of Vampires. He had just arrived. Though he had been unwilling to trust the Feds, he had obviously been keeping a perceptive awareness turned in our direction. He had come, when it mattered.  I saw Drye Ahmed on the outskirts of the group, as well.

"I don't know what she will do," I said honestly, "because she doesn't know yet herself!"

CHAPTER 29

The mood within the Federal Building, among the Human agents who were coming and going, was a buoyant one.
The consensus was that we had struck a powerful blow in the war between our species, but I was far from sure. I was not so sure that we had not drilled the pilot holes for the nails in the hardwood of our own coffins.

I did not have a lot of time to ponder the complexities of what we had done, however.
I was very busy on a new project.  The largest project upon which I have ever embarked and one of unmitigated value.  That of reproducing the star-map I had stolen from Azavar's mind. The map of the Palag Empire!

I had the best software that money could buy.
Though astronomy has always been one of my chief loves, I was really unaware to what levels Human astronomy had progressed. They had a variety of telescopes in space, the old Hubble, but also thermal, electromagnetic and other wave particle receivers.  Their knowledge of the visible, as well as the invisible Universe was far beyond what I had expected. The interactive software they provided made my task possible by inputting the number of planets and the type of star in the systems I was searching for- systems I had seen in Azavar's mind- and then when I found systems that matched labeling it with its Palag name. The only drawback to the process was the fact that Azavar's knowledge was incomplete. What I had gotten from her mind was the result of the minutest scrutiny she had one day given their star maps, but forever indelibly burned into her mind. Memories were permanent things. That was how a brain worked. It was access to those memories that sometimes became the problem. Though her knowledge was entirely incomplete, what she had seen equated to thousands of points of reference in the skies above us.

Some of th
e stars I indicated on the star-mapping software had already been indicated as possibly possessing Earth-like worlds, but most had not. I was sharing this file with the FBI as I worked on it from the computers in our suite which were networked to the entire FBI server-system and shared out to everyone who was in the know. There was a lot of excitement within the building. It was very much a palpable force. The federal building had been turned into a veritable fortress with new agents and armament arriving on a constant basis.  Their job was to protect us at all costs.