How to Kill a Vampire in Outer Space Read online

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ve got plenty of flirting for everyone.”

  “I was talking about the captain.”

  Diop laughed, then sat down next to me on the bed. “The wormhole terminal isn’t connected to your universe anymore, Ms. Bhatti. Whatever anomaly caused our universes to link has passed. I’m afraid I’ve no way to get you home.”

  “Oh.” Her smiled vanished. “That’s lousy. What’s a supernatural-monster slayer supposed to do in a world without any supernatural monsters?”

  I turned to Diop. “Did your computer record any coordinates from Safiya’s world? Any readings at all?”

  He nodded. “We’ve got a lot of data, not that we can make much sense of any of it.”

  “If I can get a copy of that, my people can get Safiya home. No problem.”

  “Yay!” Safiya stood, then wobbled a bit. “Whoa. Still dizzy from the bleeding and the drowning.” She quickly sat down next to me. “Thanks, Jed. One thing I’m still confused about. How did you get free of the vampires long enough to bring the flood? I lost track of you after I sealed the door, but it looked like you were vampire chow.”

  “I was. I tried to find some faith to draw on, but it didn’t work. I thought the Crossroads would be my strength, but all I could focus on were my past failures. And I’ve had some big failures.” I remembered the vampires drawing away from me in pain. “But those failures were where I found my faith.”

  Diop frowned. “That sounds more like doubt.”

  “Faith is stronger when you have doubt, but believe anyway. That’s what Safiya said.” I shook my head. “I fail all the time. I come into every mission, finding people, cities, worlds, whole universes in danger, and every time I promise myself that I will save everyone. That the people I come to care about will survive whatever crisis they face. But inevitably, some don’t. I always lose someone. Always.”

  Safiya rubbed my back. “I know what that’s like. So...?”

  “So, despite the evidence, I still believe that I can do it. Every time, I believe that I can save the day, save the world, save every single life, and have fun doing it. And then hook up with the hottest person or people in that universe. And I still believed it, even when the vampires were sucking me dry. That was why they recoiled. Because I have faith in myself.” I looked back and forth between Diop and Safiya, grinning. “And why shouldn’t I? I’m really, really good at what I do.”

  Diop put his hands over his eyes and shook his head, but I could see him smiling. Safiya’s jaw hung open.

  “You’re telling me,” she said slowly, “that you saved all our lives by being a cocky bastard?”

  “I prefer ‘confident rogue.’”

  She laughed. I put an arm around each of their shoulders.

  “Now,” I said. “I believe I said something about hooking up with the hottest people in the universe?”

  Thank you for reading How to Kill a Vampire in Outer Space. If you enjoyed Jed’s adventure aboard the Excellence, check out the rest of the Multiverse Mashup series.

  In The Dystopia Spell, Jed visits a teenage sci-fi dystopia invaded by monsters from a sword-and-sorcery roll-playing adventure.

  In Night of the Living Date, a world of light romantic comedy is thoroughly unprepared for an attack by zombie hordes.

  And in The Case of the Empty Throne, a pair of kid detectives investigate the treachery and political intrigue of an epic fantasy realm.

  If you’re a fan of more contemporary science-fiction adventures, try Alan Lennox and the Temp Job of Doom, the first in The Future Next Door series. Four twenty-something NYC roommates get embroiled in the murderous machinations of a sinister megacorporation, drawing them into a world of danger they never knew existed. The first book in the series is free from all ebook vendors!

  If you’re not already on my mailing list, you can sign up at www.brianolsenbooks.com. I send out updates about current projects and special treats at the start of each month, and alert you right away to any new releases.

  Can’t wait? Want more of Jed and his multiversal mashup adventures right now? Turn the page to read the first three chapters from The Dystopia Spell!

  One

  The sea wind blew a salty spray in my face, causing me to wobble slightly. Despite the ropes binding my wrists and ankles, I managed to keep my balance. I hopped out towards the edge of the pirate ship’s narrow wooden plank, but paused at the halfway mark.

  The tip of a blade poked me in the back, just above my bound hands. “Forward, ye bilge rat!” came a reverberating voice from behind. “Into the briny deep with ye!”

  I jumped up and spun around to face the ship. Rivetbeard, the robot pirate captain of the good ship Quantum of Salt, stood at the edge of the deck, cutlass outstretched towards me. He was outfitted with all the standard piratical accoutrements – long heavy crimson coat, frilly white shirt, swoopy black hat with a skull and crossbones on the front, and an eye patch. His body, though, was made entirely of metal. His peg-leg was just a long iron bar and his hooked hand flexed and moved as freely as his fingered one. His uncovered eye was just a metallic mesh screen, emanating a fiery red glow like a burning coal. His lower jaw was entirely covered in rivets, pressed together in the rough outline of a beard – hence the name.

  “Jed Ryland!” the pirate bellowed at me. “Ye be guilty of bein’ a foul thief and a rotten landlubber to boot! The sentence be death!”

  “You are the single most sophisticated piece of technology in this entire universe,” I shouted back, “and you can’t conjugate a verb? Come on, say it with me now. I am, you are, he, she, or it is...”

  “Squawk!”

  I flinched as a hunk of green metal flew by, an inch from my head. Rivetbeard’s pet parrot circled behind me, then zoomed past again before settling on the captain’s shoulder.

  “Squawk!” it said again. It wasn’t squawking, it was literally just saying the word ‘squawk.’ “Run him through, Captain!”

  “Nay, Ironbeak,” Rivetbeard replied. “There be a way of doin’ these things. Pirate prisoners walk the plank, that’s the way it be.”

  He fished a small metal bolt out of one of his pockets and fed it to the garishly painted robot bird, who snapped the trinket up in its razor-sharp beak and swallowed it down. The bird nuzzled its master’s cheek affectionately.

  “What say ye, lads?” Rivetbeard yelled. “Be ye ready for this traitor to die?”

  “Aye!” The affirmative cheer rang out in perfect unison from Rivetbeard’s robot crew. Each was dressed as if to meet twenty-first century expectations of what a pirate crew member should look like. Lots of leather, bright colors, bandannas, and hoop earrings, but underneath it all the same gray metal, screws, nails, and rivets.

  There was a squeak of twisting metal as Rivetbeard grinned. “Ye heard the men! Time for ye to meet Davy Jones!”

  “I’ve always been more of a Nesmith guy.”

  “Enough chatter, scum!” Rivetbeard roared. “Into Neptune’s cold embrace ye go!”

  With his hooked hand he drew his flintlock pistol from its holster and leveled it at me. Threatened by both sword and gun, I felt like it might be time to stop bantering and move things along. I inched backwards along the plank, keeping my face towards the ship.

  “Faster!” He waved the pistol. “Faster, curse your bones!”

  I moved a little quicker. My bound feet lent my gait a useful bounciness, giving me a sense of exactly how much spring the wooden plank was capable of. I reached the end and stood, my toes on the wood, my heels sticking out into the open air.

  “Have ye any last words, ye swab?”

  I shot a quick glance down to the water below.

  I did not know there were sharks in the Adriatic Sea. Learn something new every day.

  I looked back up. All the pirates’ electronic eyes were on me. They murmured excitedly to one another as they waited for me to fall to my death.

  I took a deep breath. “You’re not real pirates.”
>
  Silence fell instantly. The crew looked to their captain.

  Rivetbeard’s mechanical voice deepened dangerously. “What did ye say?”

  “I said, you’re not real pirates. You’re just machines, playing dress up.”

  The captain’s one red eye glowed brighter. “How dare ye! How dare ye!” He raised his cutlass into the air. “Rivetbeard be the fiercest pirate captain this world has e’er seen!”

  “Rivetbeard,” I said, “is an overrated laptop with a god complex, and a terrible pirate accent to boot. You sound like a speech-to-text program where the ‘r’ got stuck.”

  “Not one more word,” he growled. “Not one more word, or you’ll be wishin’ I left you to the sharks!”

  I cleared my throat. “On second thought, you sound more like that annoying guy in the office who insists on celebrating ‘Talk Like a Pirate Day’ for longer than the thirty seconds it takes for everyone to get the joke,” I continued. “And you look like somebody threw the costumes from a grammar school production of The Pirates of Penzance into a junkyard full of old furnaces.”

  Actual steam was escaping from behind his eye patch. His weapons shook in his hands.

  I rolled my eyes. “And don’t get me started on that stupid parakeet...”

  “Arrrrr!” he screamed. He fired his flintlock pistol into the air, then jumped up onto the plank. He charged at me, cutlass raised.

  I jumped off the plank.

  I should probably back up a little and explain exactly who and what Rivetbeard was. He wasn’t originally named Rivetbeard – I don’t know what he would have been called back where he came from, if he even had a name. Point of fact, the robot pirate wasn’t him, exactly – his consciousness, such as it was, resided in a small control disk about the size of a quarter lodged in the back of the pirate captain’s head.

  As far as I’d been able to figure out, he was a sophisticated piece of technology from a universe where science was extremely advanced. His creators probably designed him to be highly adaptive, for a broad array of uses. He could manipulate local materials to build and control whatever tools were needed for almost any job. Drop the little button on a giant asteroid, for example, and he’d turn the rock itself into mining equipment to extract any valuable ore. I’m speculating, but that seems like a plausible enough example.

  Problem is, this astounding little device fell through a hole into another universe. (These things happen.) Instead of an asteroid, it landed on a pirate ship. It analyzed its surroundings, adapted to its environment, and decided its function was to be the very best pirate it could be. So it sucked up some materials from the ship, built itself what it considered to be the platonic ideal of a pirate captain’s body to animate, then slaughtered the human crew. It built a robot crew to replace them and began terrorizing the entire Adriatic coast.

  My job was to take that little disk out of this universe entirely and get it somewhere it couldn’t do any harm. Earlier that day I swam up to the Quantum of Salt pretending to be a shipwreck survivor. I was halfway to convincing Rivetbeard to take me on as a cabin boy when he caught me making a grab for the slot in the back of his head. That had led to a rapid trial and my plank-walking sentence.

  As Rivetbeard charged and I jumped up, I tucked my knees to my chest and swung my bound wrists below my feet and around to my front. Then, as I fell, I extended my arms and hooked the rope around the end of the plank, leaving me dangling below.

  Rivetbeard didn’t stop charging. He swung his cutlass but adjusted the angle to bring it down onto my hands instead of into my head. I pulled my wrists apart as far as the rope would allow, stretching the binding taut. The cutlass dug into the wood and split the rope neatly in two.

  I caught the plank with my fingers, preventing a fall into the shark-infested waters below. Rivetbeard brought his peg leg down hard on the fingers of my left hand. I howled and let go, holding on to the plank only with my right hand.

  I shook out my left hand and brought my knees up to my chest again. I pulled at the rope around my ankles but it was too tight to loosen in my incredibly awkward and precarious position. Before the pirate could crush my other hand I swung myself back towards the ship. I grabbed the side of the plank with my aching left hand, then swung myself forward again. The plank shook as Rivetbeard stomped after me, trying to catch my fingers like he was playing Whack-a-Mole, with his feet as the mallet.

  I reached the side of the ship and stopped. My plan depended on untying my feet while hanging from the underside of the plank, and I was still thinking of a backup option when robot hands reached down and grabbed me.

  I didn’t bother fighting. I was trying to remember any shark-fighting tips I might have picked up in my travels when I realized the crew was pulling me up, not dropping me.

  “Hold him, boys!” Rivetbeard yelled. “He’s too foul for chum! I’ll put an end to him meself!”

  The crew hauled me over the side of the ship and threw me to the deck. Two pirates yanked me to my feet and held me by my arms.

  Rivetbeard jumped off the plank and landed in front of me. The crew, apart from the two holding me, cleared back, giving him space.

  “Make a fool out o’ Rivetbeard, will ye?” he said. His eye was burning red. He scraped the tip of his cutlass slowly across my white shirt. He twisted the blade and popped off my top button, then did the same for the second. He pushed the cutlass against my bare chest, drawing a single bead of blood.

  “Not a real pirate, am I?” He nodded. “Aye. Perhaps. Perhaps. But I’m real enough, boy. Real enough for ye.”

  He tossed his discharged pistol to one of his men, who tossed him back a freshly-loaded replacement. He pointed the gun at my face.

  “If ye be a church-goin’ man, say your prayers, and say ‘em fast!”

  He cocked the gun and grinned.

  There was a single gunshot. I flinched, but found to my relief that my face, of which I and many others are extremely fond, was still intact. Rivetbeard was standing before me, his hook outstretched but empty. A small wisp of smoke rose from where the shot had struck it.

  One of the pirates holding me let go in surprise, while the other spun around to see where the shot had come from. Standing above us on the far side of the upper deck, perched nimbly on the ship’s railing, was my savior. In one hand she held a pistol, in the other a rope, which wound its way up into the ship’s rigging.

  “Release that lad, ye scoundrels,” she shouted in her strong Irish lilt, “or face the wrath of Bleachbeard, Pirate Queen of the Adriatic!”

  Bleachbeard cut quite an impressive figure, in her emerald-green blouse and thigh-high black boots. Her long hair was tied back out of her way, and its vivid red color made a stark contrast with her thick beard, bleached a pale yellow.

  She winked at me, then stuck her pistol into its holster, twined the rope once around her wrist, and jumped. She swung off the high deck, swooped down, wrapped her arm around my waist and plucked me out of the grasp of the pirate crewman. On the upswing she kicked Rivetbeard hard in the chest, sending him crashing into the railing. We swung back together, landing neatly on the upper deck. She released the rope, dipped me in her arms, and kissed me.

  I should probably go back a little further.

  Like Rivetbeard, I’m not native to the pirate universe, but I don’t come from his world, either. My world is honestly a little dull – I’m from a version of New York City, in the early twenty-first century. We don’t have technology anywhere near as advanced as artificially intelligent self-replicating robots, and our pirates are a lot less colorful.

  I’m a Field Agent for an organization called the Crossroads. We monitor and protect the multiverse – every single one of the infinite number of parallel realities. That sounds like a big task – protecting everything, everywhere – but our remit is narrower than it sounds. Our mission is to keep universes that shouldn’t interact from interacting.

  Most cross-universal traffic is just fine. Some genius invents a way to
jump to another world and finds a universe where Hitler won World War II, or fairy tales are real, or everybody has an evil double with a goatee? No problem. Most of the time, we leave those alone. But occasionally an object, or a person, or an energy field, or a magic spell, something, travels from one universe into another where it really doesn’t belong. The wrong cross-universal contamination can have devastating consequences – literally infinite lives could be lost. That’s when we step in.

  The trouble is we usually don’t know exactly what it is we’re looking for. We know something has crossed from one universe to another, but not much more than that. I often won’t even have any information about the world I’m landing in. I’ll arrive in the general vicinity of the source of contamination and do my best.

  In this instance, I was sent to the Pirateverse when some unknown object fell into it from another universe. I arrived on Bleachbeard’s ship in a world that was roughly equivalent, in technology and culture, to the early seventeenth century of mine. She and her crew acted like characters out of an old swashbuckler movie, but it didn’t take long to ascertain that their style of fun and friendly piracy was normal for this particular world. It turns out the local pirates were pretty tame, relatively speaking. The governments along the Adriatic were all corrupt, so the pirates had a Robin Hood thing going on – they’d raid official trade ships and share the wealth with small villages up and down the coast. Plenty of adventure, not a lot of bloodshed.

  Bleachbeard’s real name was Faline O’Malley. She had come down from Ireland when she was a teenager to seek a life of adventure. Forty years later, she was the most successful, the most famous and (if you were a corrupt government official) the most feared pirate in the area.

  She had taken a liking to me, thankfully, and, after I explained to her as best I could the potential danger of the unknown menace from another world, she agreed to help me look for it. We sailed the sea for a time, and I helped her with the occasional raid while we asked the locals if they had seen or heard of anything unusual.