The Vampire-Alien Chronicles (31 page)

The Palag
brushed my Cumosachi aside negligently with his Palag weapon, his parry a blur of speed even while his Cumosachi stove off Sonafi, who had gained his opposite side.  He wove through her thrusts and slices like so much smoke through the slow moving blades of a fan. She was in instant peril for her life. Even one-handed and half his attention drawn to me she was still so far out of her league that it was purely only a matter of time. I had to draw more than half his attention, but even with only half of his attention, I was already beginning to struggle myself.

Our blades came together again and again as I began to attempt to turn the tide of his aggression and allow myself even the
opportunity for one counterattack. If I could just get him on the defensive for one moment, I thought that I could change the tone of the entire fight, but I could do nothing to him, not even wound him. If I could not find enough of an opening for one single attack, when every iota of my energies seemed to be devoted to parrying the one blurring blade that danced around me, and
that
when I knew that my precious Sonafi faced a fight untold degrees more difficult than my own. She was only half my age, possessing half my abilities, yet fighting the same fight I now found so daunting. It could only be a matter of time if I did not do something and do it quickly.

I threw caution to the wind and forced myself to st
ep closer, letting my training- how many thousands of years have I spent practicing, sword in hand, repeating the same motions over and over and over again until the sweat poured from my brow and those motions became instincts- take over for cognizant thought. Letting the patterns which had been ingrained into my cells by the millions of hours of practice, which were now as strong and powerful as instincts, direct my hands.

It was still all defense.
  He had not given me the time for one counter, but I was beginning to get a feel for the rhythm of his movements, to recognize before the move from where his blade would come, which way it would twist, turn or writhe. This school of attack wasn't an art I have ever before seen, and I have seen them all. All that this world had developed.

As I forced myself forward again, I began to feel rather than see the weakness in his forms.
Only slight, miniscule things, but there, I could sense them- a significant pause here, the ever-so smallest opening there, things so small that they almost went undetected.

I tried to force myself forward once again, these increments so small they might not have been noticed under other circumstances but
noticeable when cold steel barred the way. As I stepped forward, the Palag stepped back, towards Sonafi, and she fell away. It was with horror then that I realized she had been run through. It happened so quickly and my concentration had been so fully on the Palag that I had not seen the thrust which had done it. As she fell away, blood blossomed on her shoulder, above her heart! I only had the barest flicker of a moment to glance her way, because now the Master turned his full attention upon me!

I retreated under the new fierceness of his attack and now there could be no doubt.
The curl of lip and sneer returned to his face.

             
I had never been forced to fight with such abandon in my entire life. Each blade fought with an essence each its own, each contest to be won or lost on its own merit. He pushed me back relentlessly, and I felt the nearness of the end of the corridor like a living, breathing thing, because the end of the corridor was a beast I could not overcome. He was better than I, faster, stronger, and the weaknesses I had sensed within his art were now more like illusions than ever, now that I faced both his blades, a surreal deception fed to me to trick me, but even as he pushed me back, even as I fought for my life, I began to anticipate his attacks. My blades began to rise to the expectation of his attacks rather than to barely fend them off, barely to stagger into their courses to deflect them only at the last moment. My backward flight slowed and I finally, consciously, took my last step backward, his furious momentum slowed by dint of my sheer willpower alone.

The look of surprise on his face could not be masked as I counterattacked for the very first time.
He parried it easily but the mold had been shattered. I was able to strike three times while crowding him, looking for those weaknesses I had noted.  They were there but even a flaw in his form could not easily be translated to an effective attack when the reflexes he possessed more than made up for those lapses.

A desperation suddenly seemed to come over him and the scene behind him explained why as he attacked me with a renewed vigor, but something had changed.
I was no longer off-balance. I was meeting each attack squarely. Blade to blade and even pushing back. I realized then that I no longer feared him and knew that I would eventually wear him down and best him.

The Palag Master had other ideas than to be eventually worn down and bested.
Leaving our contest he dropped both his weapons and sprang away from me to leap upon the wall to my right. He reached into his clothing and pulled out what I knew could only be a weapon. An energy weapon not of Earthly origin.

His leap had been only a fraction of a moment faster than the blade that Sonafi, undauntedly back to the attack, swung through the space the Palag had just occupied.
Her left arm hung useless from the shoulder, the collarbone severed. A Vampire's accelerated ability to heal did not mean a broken or severed bone would knit as quickly as a flesh wound. She spun halfway around as the blades she had anticipated would strike the Palag actually met no resistance at all, and she finished the spin facing the snarling visage of the Eldest and the strange small weapon he held pointed now directly in her face.

Then, as if I were the Elder and the Palag no more than a newborn
Juvenile I slowly, in a detached sort of way, watched the monster's finger settle towards the little actuator on the small weapon. It looked like something you might expect to find on the shelf of a toy store, but I never doubted for a moment that I was looking at a weapon which held the potential to completely obliterate its victim and probably the entire corridor beyond.

I was too far away to stop what was about to happen but I had to try.
I spun the hilt of my Cumosachi Katana within the fingers of my right hand and raising it like a spear I cast it through the air. Even as I cast it, the Palag's finger settled on the actuator of the little weapon. Too late my Cumosachi flew through the air… then the entire side of the Palag Master exploded outwards in a black spray of blood and gore and bullets as a dozen agents who had followed the rest of the Vampires into the corridor suddenly found a clear, stationary target. The roar of those weapons rolled over me only a millisecond later, as the sound of the compressed combustion of those rounds caught up with the bullets they had propelled.

In an instant the Palag was struck hundreds of times, and it tore the old Master apart, ripping him from his perch on the wall and throwing him to the floor at my feet.
The little weapon had not been discharged and I caught it in midair as it flew from the Palag's nerveless dead fingers. I slipped the weapon into my pocket as I turned to Sonafi.

"I think that went well!"
I said to her wide-eyed, open mouthed visage. She nodded. Shell shocked but recovering quickly.

"It could've been worse."
She agreed. She looked surprised to be alive. I think we all were. Those of us who were alive.

CHAPTER 31

Azavar knew that her thoughts were going to give her away the moment that she stepped foot back aboard the Explorer Mother ship. She was the only member of the foray team to return but the pilot was at first busy at his controls and did not have the time to seek answers. She closed her mind to him and he did not press her. As the lone survivor it could be expected that she had suffered a traumatizing experience and was not readily willing to share it. Her people were not particularly social in the first place so it was no great surprise that she made it back to the Mother Ship without any questions being asked.

The larger shock came when she was allowed back aboard the Explorer Ship and no one either questioned her about the events which had led to the destruction of almost the entire party or even surprised that she was keeping her mind closed.
The arrogance of the Elders was such that they did not deem anything she might have to say worth hearing, and it was soon to be understood that the Elders would do themselves what the Juveniles had failed to do.

Azavar could hardly believe that no one noticed the difference within her.
That the other Palag- those few who still survived- could walk right past her and not know that within her an alien tide was surging, transforming her, remaking her into a new form. A day later, when its effects were completely manifested, she waited with bated breath every time one of the others came near to her, as infrequently as it occurred, but never once did one of the Elders approach her. They enjoyed the seclusion of the privileged upper decks and, knowing the effects they had on the Juveniles, the Elders seldom came down to bother them.             

The ship seemed barren and empty as Azavar tried to come to grips with what she had become.
Those few Juveniles of her clone group whom she had been able to bond with were now all dead, but that in itself was probably a good thing; they would have seen right through her, she felt, and the game would've been up.

But wasn't any kind of life better than no life at all?
Though the change was now complete, she felt hardly any difference. The biggest obstacle, she had felt, would be in finding sustenance, but the food paste the Explorer Ship’s galley produced had not affected her as adversely as she had expected. There had been a little indigestion but afterward she had felt strangely strong. Stronger than she had ever felt before, and she knew it was the mixture of genetics. She had become half-Human and that Human side had opened up myriads of new potentialities within her. Not only did she feel stronger, but she seemed to be able to think with a clarity she had never known before.

Her thoughts were a jumbled mess.
She questioned the morality of using a sentient species to re-create their own. She even now questioned the morality of using non-sentient species. Didn't that species have as much right to life, to its chance to survive, even one day possibly becoming sentient itself? Weren't the individual cells in all of these beings as sentient as the cells within her body? She looked anew, as if her eyes had just been opened for the first time, at the Explorer branch of the Palag as a sub-species, or even an entirely different species, from the original Palag who had sent them out, so different had they become. The original Palag had succeeded beyond their wildest dreams when they had created the genetically enhanced Explorers to cast their seed throughout the firmament which had been denied the majority of them, but in the creating they had lost something as well. It was a word the Explorers no longer used. The closest Human analogy was the term
humanity
. The Explorer branch of the Palag race had lost the knowledge of right and wrong.             

Azavar did not believe any longer that this was what the original Palag would have wanted.
This rapine and theft of entire worlds from their original species' dominion! Yet, once again, as a new Juvenile, there was very little she could hope to accomplish against the might of the Explorer Elders. She had found a new strength in her Human half, but it was as nothing compared to the strength of the Explorer Elders, the eldest of which was purported to have been among the first clones created over eleven million years ago!

Then the Explorer Elders left the ship to go down and finish the upstart Vampires, once and for all.
Azavar had little doubt they would succeed. The Eldest Vampire Marcel, he who had captured her mind, had been little more than a Juvenile compared to the Palag Elders aboard the ship, and yet, he had possessed a strength which could not be measured in the same way as the Explorer Elders. A strength she began to understand more now that she recognized it within herself. It was a different kind of strength and left her wondering if it would be as easy for the Palag Elders as they had anticipated.

The ship was so empty that she did not see anyone at all as she made her way to the large medical facility.
After a short search she found what she was looking for and held it up to examine it. She knew she did not have much time, maybe several hours, before the Elders would return victorious. She had to accomplish her goal quickly and efficiently and thoroughly, if she wanted to have any chance at all to survive. The Explorer Elders would kill the Human-strain Vampires and she would be alone in the Universe. She had to make more of her own kind. Explorer-strain Vampires!

The Auto Injector was a simple device to use and could be used for both sampling as well as injecting.
Azavar set the electronic indicator and then held the device against her own arm. It made a small whining noise and then the clear tube within the holder filled up with her blood. The blood, mixing with the oxygen already within the tube, turned a deep red as it filled. That was so shocking she almost lost her grip on the Auto Injector! Her blood was no longer black!

Azavar did not have time for shock.
The clock was ticking and there were several dozen Palag remaining aboard the ship who had to be inoculated before the Elders returned. What she hoped to accomplish beyond not being alone she could not really say. Even all of the remaining Explorer Juveniles left would stand no chance against the five Elders when they returned, if all five returned; but she did not know what else to do. All she knew was that she no longer wanted to be alone.  To be the only one of her kind.