How to Kill a Vampire in Outer Space Page 2

  There were three armed officers on the bridge. Two were in our little circle and one was on the upper level, near the exit. She was reacting a little less quickly so I focused on the two men nearest me. I kicked the weapon out of one officer’s hand. Then I spun, grabbed the arm of the other officer, and flipped him up and over my shoulder, dropping him to the nice carpeted deck.

  Commander Kirin reached for me with one hand, her fingers flexed into an odd formation. I figured it would probably be a bad idea to let her touch me, so I shoved Lieutenant Siparo into her, then jumped up onto the arm of the captain’s chair. He made a lunge for my foot but I placed my hands on the control panel behind him and vaulted up and over onto the upper level.

  A beam of blue energy flashed passed me as I landed on the floor in a crouch. The security officer on this level had taken a shot but hadn’t tracked my quick motion. I exploded up from the deck, tackling her back into the wall, then ran for the lift.

  I smacked into the closed doors, which stubbornly refused to open with a whoosh.

  I turned around, smiling sheepishly. Several pistols pointed in my direction.

  I gestured behind me. “This probably only opens for authorized personnel, huh?”

  Captain Diop took a weapon from the officer I had flipped over. He pointed it at me.

  “That’s correct.”

  There was a burst of blue light, then everything went black.

  ***

  I woke up feeling oddly refreshed, like I had just had a nice nap instead of being stunned into unconsciousness. I opened my eyes and stared up at the metal ceiling above me. I was lying on a comfortable cushioned cot attached to a bare white wall. I blinked a few times and sat up, dropping my feet onto the silver floor.

  “Good morning. Or afternoon.”

  To my left, sitting on a cot of her own, was the young woman I had seen stake the vampire earlier. She was leaning back against the wall, her hands folded behind her head, her long black ponytail slung over a shoulder, her red leather jacket hanging open.

  I smiled at her. “Hello. How long was I out?”

  She shrugged. “I only woke up about a half hour ago. Felt like a few hours but I’m not sure. And Mister Smiley over there isn’t talking.”

  Across the bare white room from us was a single control station, behind which a single-chevroned officer stood, stone-faced. There was another cot to my right, but otherwise the room was completely empty.

  I stood and stepped towards him. “Hey, handsome. Could you tell me—”

  My face tingled and I saw a brief blue flicker as I encountered an invisible energy barrier. The initial contact didn’t hurt, but I pressed my hands against it and slowly the tingle turned to a mild shock, which threatened to become a severe burn. I pulled away.

  “There’s one of those between you and me, too,” the woman said. “So don’t be offended if I don’t shake your hand.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Safiya Bhatti. Yours?”

  “Jed. Jed Ryland. Do you know where you are?”

  “Not at a comic book convention?”

  “Correct.”

  She sat forward, resting her elbows on her knees. “The stun rays and force fields were kind of a giveaway. What are you in for, Jed?”

  “Being a mystery they don’t have time to solve, I think. Well, that and assault. Where are you from, Safiya?”

  “Los Angeles.”

  “What year?”

  “Oh, dang, am I in the future? I’m in the future, aren’t I? I traveled into the past once. Time travel is a major bummer.”

  “You’re not just in the future, you’re also in a parallel universe, I’m afraid.”

  She tilted her head at me. “Okay. That’s new.”

  “Can you tell me how you got here?”

  “It involves vampires. Are you going to be able to go along with the whole vampire thing, Jed? Because Ensign Stick-up-his-butt over there thinks I’m crazy.”

  The ensign looked up from his controls, snorted, then looked back down at them.

  “I have an extremely open mind, don’t worry. Tell me the last thing you remember before you found yourself on this ship.”

  “Ship?” She paused again. “Am I really on a space ship? Am I really in space? Oh, wow, that’s awesome. And terrifying. But also awesome.”

  “Safiya, I don’t know how much time we have...”

  “Sure, right. Okay. My friends and I hunt vampires. Other monsters too, but mostly vampires. There’s an ancient prophecy, I am the chosen one, blah blah blah. It’s a whole thing. We tracked a nest of vamps to an abandoned warehouse. Got most of them, but one started a fire. The building filled up with smoke like that.” She snapped her fingers. “I spotted three vamps trying to get out and chased them. They must have gone the wrong way because we got cut off by the fire, no way out. Then this blue portal opened up – I thought somebody was trying to magic them to safety, but the vamps were just as surprised as I was. Since the alternative was me giving them the worst kind of heart attack, they ran through it. I followed.”

  “That’s where the smoke came from,” I said. “The fire on your end. Somehow the wormhole here on the ship opened a portal to your world as well as to the planet we’re orbiting. Your two universes must be close together, in a quantum physical sense. A fault in the ship’s systems could have punched through.”

  “Does that make sense to you? What you just said?”

  “Yeah. I see stuff like that a lot.”

  “All right, good. I’m glad you’re on top of everything.” She stood up and stretched, then came and stood near the end of her cot, closer to me. “Your turn. What’s your story? Mutiny?”

  “Huh?” I looked down, realizing I was still wearing a copy of the crew’s standard uniform. “Oh, no. This is a disguise.”

  “Clever disguise.” She tapped the space between us and blue sparks flickered out from her finger. “They’ll never see through it.”

  “I may have overplayed my hand a little.” I tapped the same spot on the force field that she had just touched. “I feel like there’s some real electricity between us, don’t you?”

  She groaned and sat back down on her cot. “I don’t know if that was bad flirting or a dad joke, but either way, skip it and get to your story.”

  I sat on my own cot and tucked one leg under me. “I’m also from a different universe. I work for an organization that looks for problems like this, and tries to put them right.”

  “You look for vampires in space? Does that happen a lot?”

  “We look for parallel universes mixing in unsafe ways.”

  “Oh. That makes more sense. So are you going to help me bust out of here and ash some vamps, or what?”

  The guard looked up when she mentioned busting out, but he didn’t seem overly worried and returned to his screen.

  “Do we have to kill them?” I asked. “Are they that dangerous?”

  She squinted at me. “Um, yeah? Vampires? Bloodsucking soulless demons? Don’t they have them in your universe?”

  “Not outside fiction, no, but I’ve met a vampire or two in my travels.”

  That was true. I didn’t mention that I had partied extremely hard with a pack of vampires once while on vacation and had a really excellent time with them. Vampires weren’t necessarily evil. It depended on what universe they came from. I liked Safiya so far, but I hadn’t witnessed her prey do anything but run away from her. For all I knew, she had murdered a perfectly friendly vamp.

  The door to the brig slid open, cutting short any reply Safiya might have made. Four security officers entered, struggling with a middle-aged white guy dressed like one of the refugees from the flooded planet below. The officers each held a limb, but he thrashed in the air, bucking wildly. He must have been very strong, as he came close to breaking free.

  Captain Diop followed them in. “The cell, Ensign!”

  The officer at the controls, who had been taken completely by surprise, slapped at
his panel. The four other officers tossed their captive into the cell to my right, then jumped back as their comrade turned on the cell’s force field. The new prisoner didn’t test the energy barrier as I had. Instead he tilted his head back and howled once, long and loud and guttural, then fell quiet. He kept his eyes locked on the captain and began pacing back and forth in his cell.

  “Give us the room, please,” Captain Diop said. “You too, Ensign.”

  The five subordinates filed out of the room. Diop waited until they were gone, then stood in front of my and Safiya’s cells. “We haven’t met,” he said to Safiya. “I’m Captain Diop.”

  Safiya gave him a quick salute. “Looks like you’ve got some trouble on your hands, Captain.”

  “That’s one of the colonists. Shortly after I locked up the two of you, he was found dead, stuffed in a maintenance tube.”

  “Let me guess,” Safiya said. “Nasty bite wound on the neck?”

  Diop nodded. “We took him to the morgue. A few minutes later he sat up. Not dead. No wound.”

  “A few minutes?” I turned to Safiya. “They come back that quickly?”

  She nodded. “How long since we arrived on your ship?”

  “Four hours,” the captain answered.

  Safiya sighed heavily. “That’s a long time. Three vamps came through. I killed one. The other two know they’re outnumbered, and they’re trying to even the odds. Have you found any other bodies?”

  Diop shook his head. “But we have at least a dozen missing colonists and crew members. This is some kind of contagion?”

  “It’s vampirism. You guys have vampires?”

  “There are life forms that live on blood,” he answered. “Sometimes they resemble monsters from a storybook, but they’re just aliens with a different biology than ours.”

  “These aren’t whatever you just said. These are real vampires. Magic vampires.”

  Diop looked into the cell where the creature was being held. He rested his face in one hand for a moment and sighed, then returned his attention to us. “I listened in on your conversation.”

  Safiya sniffed. “Rude.”

  “We’ve encountered parallel universes before. We met an alternate Excellence with gender-swapped versions of ourselves.”

  “Ugh. The gender binary is the worst.” I gestured to Safiya and myself. “But yeah, we’re sort of like that. Think of Safiya’s universe as one with vastly different physical laws, if that helps. One that allows for behavior that would seem like magic to you.”

  He nodded. “I can understand that. All right. I’m going to let you both out. I need your help to get back my missing people.”

  “I’m sorry, Captain,” Safiya said. “The vampires won’t be taking prisoners. Your people will have been murdered and turned by now.”

  “That’s right, Captain!” The harsh voice came from the vampire’s cell. The former colonist was an inch away from the force barrier. His face shifted to its feral vampire form. “You can’t stop us! I can feel the new strength inside me. And the hunger! So hungry!”

  “How do we turn them back to human?” the captain shouted.

  “You can’t!” Safiya yelled back. “They’re already dead! They’ll kill and kill until this whole ship is a graveyard!”

  “Yes!” the vampire shouted. “Kill, kill, kill!”

  The vampire pressed his whole body against the force field. With a loud zap, the field shimmered bright blue. The smell of cooked meat filled the room as smoke rose from the vampire’s body, but he wouldn’t stop pushing against the barrier.

  The captain didn’t move but his eyes narrowed as he watched the creature closely. “You can’t get through. You’re just hurting yourself.”

  The vampire grunted and redoubled his efforts until, with a brilliant blast of blue light, the force field gave. The captain reached for the sun symbol on his chest but he was too slow. The monster was on him.

  I watched helplessly as Diop wrestled with the colonist. The vampire bared his fangs and lunged for the captain’s throat, but Diop got his arm up into his attacker’s neck and kept him at bay. The vampire wrapped his arms around Diop and the two staggered back against the bay of controls.

  I pressed my hands into the force field, ignoring the increasing shock, but it didn’t give. Whatever had allowed the vampire to pass through didn’t work for me.

  Suddenly I fell forward. The field was gone. Diop, with his one flailing free hand, had managed to activate the controls to release us. I charged, but Safiya beat me to it. She took something from around her neck and pressed it against the back of the vampire’s head. His skin sizzled where she touched it and he shrieked. He batted her away and ran for the door, but I tackled him, grabbing his lower legs and dropping us both to the deck. He kicked and bucked and it was all I could do to hang on.

  Safiya ran to me. She had produced a stake from somewhere and plunged it deep into the vampire’s back. He howled once, then evaporated in my arms, leaving only a pile of black dust behind.

  “Thanks,” I said, panting. “So, definitely not sexy emo vampires, then?”

  “Is that a thing where you come from?” she asked. “I think I’d prefer them evil.”

  “Where did you get another stake?” Diop asked. “I’m grateful, but Kirin has the one you brought with you, and we searched you.”

  Safiya winked at him. “Search harder next time.”

  I stuck out my hand and she pulled me to my feet. “What did you use on him? A cross?”

  She sneered. “Cross might work for you, but it wouldn’t do me much good.” She held up the small necklace. On a piece of black string was a silver circle with the word “Allah” engraved in it in Arabic calligraphy. “The crescent and star symbol doesn’t go with any of my outfits, but this does the trick.”

  “Holy symbols hurt them?” I asked.

  “As long as you have faith in the symbol. It won’t kill them, but it hurts and it’ll drive them away. How’s the faith on this bucket, Captain?”

  Diop stared at the necklace. He looked uncomfortable with the topic. “I’m not much for religion, myself. We have two interfaith chapels. Individuals may have their own personal religious symbols. Does it need to be religious faith? I have faith in my ship. My people.” He tapped the sun symbol on his chest. “In what our Galactic Union stands for.”

  She sighed. “I’ve seen people try that. ‘I have faith in physics!’ Those people get eaten first. That’s not faith, it’s just confidence. Faith can’t be proven. It’s strongest when you have doubts but believe anyway. Do you ever doubt your crew?”

  He stiffened. “Never. This is the finest crew in the galaxy.”

  She shrugged. “Sorry. It might work but I wouldn’t rely on it. Tell your people to get to those chapels. Even the atheists will be safe in there.”

  “There isn’t room for the entire crew in the chapels, let alone the colonists.” He slapped at his sun symbol and it bleeped. “Kirin?”

  A tinny voice came through from somewhere above us. “I’ve been listening, Captain. I’ll let everyone know to keep any symbols of faith close at hand.”

  “Captain!” Another voice cut in. “This is Lieutenant Siparo. I’m down with the colonists and...aaaahhh!”

  “Siparo!” Diop shouted. “Kirin, what’s happening?”

  “I’m getting multiple distress calls from the mess hall where the colonists were being tended to, Captain! Sending a security team now!”

  “I’ll meet them there. You two, with me.”

  He strode out the door without waiting. Safiya and I followed him down the hallway and into a lift.

  “Deck eight,” he said.

  “What else works on them?” I asked as the lift began to move. “Vampire rules are different in different universes. You said stakes and faith. Anything else?”

  “Sunlight and running water both kill them.”

  “Running water?” the captain asked, an eyebrow raised.

  “I mean, they can wash their
hands, but they’d prefer a bath to a shower. Complete submersion in moving water would kill them, but that’s hard to pull off. Although it’s a good way to escape them if you happen to have a river handy. Do you have a river handy?”

  “Not on me,” Diop replied.

  She shrugged. “That’s pretty much it. I’d start chopping off chair legs and get to sharpening.”

  “I suspect our laser pistols will suffice.”

  Safiya grinned. “Wouldn’t know, I’ve never had the chance to use one. Can’t wait to find out!”

  The door slid open and we stepped out into another identical metal hallway. Even if the captain hadn’t been leading us, we would have been able to follow the sounds of screaming. Uniformed personnel with laser pistols ran down a connecting corridor and fell in behind the captain without a word.

  We arrived at the mess hall. The double archway was already open, revealing another hangar-sized room dotted with circular tables. Along the walls were numerous sleek black displays set above small cubbyholes, several of which contained abandoned trays of food.

  Many of the colonists huddled at the far end of the room, against a large window. It might have been a display screen made to look like a window, I didn’t know, but through it I could see the blue planet of Aras Alpha floating serenely in space. Between us and the colonists were about ten vampires. I knew they were vampires because they were all sucking greedily at the neck or wrist of either a colonist or an Excellence crewperson. Several dead bodies littered the ground, all with bloody wounds. One was the unfortunate Lieutenant Siparo.

  We ran into the room, the security team coming around to either side of us.

  “Lasers on stun!” the captain shouted. “Fire at will!”

  The security team obeyed, shooting their beams of focused light at the vampires, all hitting their targets. All but two of the creatures recoiled, dropping their victims and shrinking back. The other two, wearing twenty-first century clothing, looked puzzled by the beams of light striking them. These were the two I had spotted in the wormhole room – the two from Safiya’s world. They let their victims fall as well, but only because they had already drained them dry.