Voyage

by E M Gale

  I sighed. “You are right about that, he is green. If he were trying to kill me, why tell me what he is? Why not pretend to be a smuggler? I could tell he was scared of me, but surely if you’re going to call in an undercover assassin, you pick someone who can act?” I swirled my wine, looking at the lights on the surface. I preferred red, but the white was OK, although surprising. I hadn’t pegged the major as the type of person to enjoy a German Riesling. “Ah!” I exclaimed. “That’s it, he’s not the assassin, he’s the decoy. He is so obviously a vampire hunter assassin that anyone looking for a Tyrian assassin would stop as soon as they saw him.”

  The major nodded.

  “So”–I swirled the wine and this time drank some–“we do the other thing you suggested. We leave him be. We can’t let them know we know.”

  “Sorry, if I’d known, I wouldn’t have let him aboard.”

  “Yeah, I know. A vampire hunt is probably as destructive as an ancient blood feud,” I said, eyeing the major up and grinning as a different thought occurred to me.

  ‘There’s plenty of time to worry about this later. Now, I have better things to do.’

  “But enough about that, how are you today, Hemmingway?”

  He smiled at me.

  * * *

  I woke up, snuck out of the major’s quarters and headed back to mine. I paused outside the door, sniffing for traps or anything. Nothing.

  ‘Well, it seems that even dumb vampire hunters know better than to make a truce with a vampire, then put a trap in her quarters. Still, I wonder what he did when he discovered that I’d nicked his field guide?’

  I made myself some coffee and settled down to read. The book was written in a cute, olde-worlde style, mostly relating superstitions and utterly devoid of reasoned explanations or scientific method. For example, it recommended the good old garlic, crosses, and stake combination.

  ‘Admittedly, I’ve not tried, but crosses don’t hurt me. Do they? Would they? I didn’t feel repelled when the assassin held his fingers in the shape of a cross and aimed it at me. Well, I did feel repelled, but that was because I was disgusted that he thought I was evil, not because some supernatural force did anything.’

  They were all here though. The book contained every bit of misinformation I’d heard. Like vampires needing an invitation to enter a room.

  ‘I wonder what Brannigan will make of the fact that I got into his quarters then? Or would he assume that I got one of my ‘allies’ on the ship to help me?’

  I carried on flicking through the book.

  ‘Ah, and a nice list of ways to kill a vampire. Stake to the heart, chop off the head, garlic in the mouth, poked with hawthorns, set on fire. And if you can, do one after the other, just to be sure. Lovely. Do vampires not get peaceful deaths?’

  ‘I suppose that’s what happens when you decide to live forever. You lose the option to just slip away in your sleep, and instead become prey for some idiot with a stake and a field-spotter’s guide. Urgh.’

  The entirety of the second half of the book seemed to be a description of known vampires.

  ‘Useful to me, anyway. I am supposed to know all these people. Though it’s only useful intel if I can trust the information in this silly book.’

  So I looked myself up.

  ‘Hmm, there’s quite a lot on me. Well, I guess I am famous as a vampire. Let’s see.’

  ‘Incredibly anciente. Rumoured to be anciente Egyptian or Greeke, although her name suggests a Roman connection.’

  ‘What, Clarke? Or do they mean Florentina?’

  ‘Some sources saye she is much older, perhaps even Lillith herselffe.’

  ‘Lillith? Who? Why do they think I’m so old? I know that you can’t really tell with Founders, but still, I have a birth certificate, on record. And then there’s my mother, who would know when I was born. It was two hundred-odd years ago by their time, but they could have troubled to look it up.’

  There was some other stuff about me, less about my history and more vampiric traits, such as: ‘canne turn herselffe into bats.’

  ‘I can?’

  And: ‘scared of mirrors’; ‘oftenne wears black and carries a sword’; ‘friendly with orcs’; ‘sexually promiscuous’;

  ‘Heh.’

  ‘Vainglorious.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t say that, but I guess I have been in more than enough wars for that label.’

  ‘Canne not break her worde once she has givenne it.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. I know that one doesn’t work. Where do they get these ideas? And, apparently, I’m an ‘adept black magick user’.’

  ‘Magic? I don’t think so. Do they think that vampires are magical?’

  I was also described as ‘skilled at bewitching men’.

  ‘Heh, that’s not magic.’

  I spent the rest of my time that morning reading about all the other vampires. There was nothing about Socrates, Alcibiades or any other ancient Greek vampire. I wasn’t sure how much I could take as being true. Some vampires were credited with powers like ‘selffe-immolationne’, and I thought vampires didn’t like fire. There were other weird ones like ‘shape-shifting’, ‘control of the elements’ and ‘causing eclipses’.

  ‘I know that mythologically speaking, vampires have been credited with causing eclipses through witchcraft, but now people have spaceships and they understand celestial mechanics, surely there’s no need for a magical explanation? Plus, how could one vampire move the planets around to cause an eclipse?’

  I hid Brannigan’s book with my weapons stash and tried to turn into bats. I failed, but I got some practice in with misting. Given I’d not really practised that skill, it seemed a good idea to me. I misted and reformed a few times.

  ‘Surely there isn’t that much else to learn about it?’

  I tried to mist only part of my body, but that wasn’t possible. I tried stopping about halfway between solid and misted. That was possible. It felt very strange.

  ‘I wonder what I look like in this state?’ ‘Well, there’s three ways to figure that out: do it in front of Cleckley, and ask him; take a photo; look in the mirror.’

  I drifted over to the mirror.

  ‘Interesting.’

  I looked like a ghost. At least I thought I did. I could see in this state, but only just. Everything looked misty, like I was viewing it through lace curtains, or the veil that separated the corporeal and incorporeal worlds.

  ‘Hmm, that was an unnecessarily melodramatic turn of phrase. That’s what happens when you read silly vampire guides. However, ghost form could be useful, since I can see a bit of what is going on, yet I am probably less noticeable in this state.’

  I tried to turn into bats again. I didn’t think it worked. I couldn’t see any bats. I just saw myself staring at the mirror or myself misted. Maybe the book was wrong. I tried to turn into a dog or a wolf as well–after all, hadn’t Dracula been able to do that? It’s very strange to say that I tried to turn into a bat and tried to turn into a dog, since I didn’t have the slightest idea how. I even tried cat as well, since Anna had said I was like a cat.

  With vampire hunters and spies on the ship, I really needed to know more about my vampire skills. I might need them.

  * * *

  A Credulous Doctor

  Post-shift I arrived at Cleckley’s office, this time containing no beer.

  “Cleckley,” I said, walking in, distracting him from something on the computer screen. It looked like a DNA analysis to me.

  “Clarke!” he exclaimed. Whether that was because I had made him jump or because he was glad to see me, I don’t know. “Have a seat.”

  I sat. I smiled at him.

  “It’s amazing. I’ve been looking at your blood and sequencing the plasmids.”

  “OK, what’s in them?” I asked.

  “Well, interestingly, eukaryotic DNA, as I guessed, but not just human, there’s orc DNA in there as well.”

  ‘Ah.’

  He looked at me here. “May
I ask you, Clarke, have you slept with any orcs?”

  I grinned guiltily. “Maybe. A few.”

  “And did this perhaps involve drinking their blood?”

  I grinned again, almost involuntarily. Still, at least I knew I wouldn’t be told off.

  “It did.”

  “Good. That proves it then. When you drink blood somehow you extract DNA from it, and the DNA ends up floating around loose in your bloodstream.”

  I thought for a moment, then wrinkled up my nose at him. “Can I just say, for the record, that that is really disgusting.”

  He laughed at my comment. “Disgusting? It’s a brand-new way of passing on genetic material! There are no creatures known to man that do this sort of thing.”

  I thought about this. “Firstly, there is nothing new under the sun, right?”

  Cleckley grinned. “Interesting phrase for a vampire to use.”

  I ignored him and continued: “When it was discovered that bats use sonar the biologists who presented this work were questioned by the military, since it sounded just like how their new, shiny submarine detection system worked. But if humans can use it, nature must have used it, right?”

  “Was that your era, then?”

  ‘Eh?’

  “No, Second World War, forty years before I was born.”

  Cleckley nodded.

  “Thus, if there’s nothing new under the sun, there must be another creature that does this, and anyway, I can think of one: bacteria. They exchange plasmid DNA to pass on immunities to penicillin and stuff like that.”

  “Yes, but this isn’t exchange, it’s more like digestion.”

  I wrinkled my nose up at that too.

  “You eat blood, somehow extract DNA from it, and then express it into your blood. It’s just the DNA in your blood that is foreign, you haven’t got any blood cells belonging to anyone else.”

  “OK.”

  “Of course, I don’t know what the plasmids are being used for.”

  “Maybe it’s for exchange between vampires,” I said. “After all, it would be exchange if I let the marines drink my blood, which obviously I don’t.”

  Cleckley shrugged. “We’ll figure it out. Anyway, I’m eager to do the second part of the experiment. I’m presuming that you will have different DNA in your blood this time, vampire DNA or more likely DNA belonging to whoever the vampires you drank had been feeding on.”

  I nodded at that. That was after all why I had come.

  ‘Of course, I don’t like the phrase ‘feeding on’… but if I am digesting the blood, what other phrase can you use for it?’

  “OK, then,” I said, rolling up my sleeve, “do your worst, or rather, please be nice.”

  He smiled at that. He had a syringe prepared already.

  “Oh, hold on, that hasn’t been there since yesterday, has it?”

  He sighed and rolled his eyes. “No, Clarke, it’s a fresh one, from a clean, sealed packet. And don’t worry, vampires aren’t supposed to get diseases.”

  “Huh! What the hell do you think that that whole wooden stake thing is?”

  He froze, the needle poised above my poor, naked arm, and gave me an eureka look.

  “That’s a disease?”

  I shrugged.

  ‘Well, I dunno. I just said that. I didn’t really think it through. However, thinking about it…’

  “It is kinda a design flaw, isn’t it? Why would anyone design in that stupid wood paralysis?”

  “Oh? Is that what it does to you? Paralyses you?”

  I nodded. I felt the blood drain from my face. “It’s terrifying,” I said.

  ‘I hate not being in control of a situation. And being staked is worse, as I’m not just not in control, but utterly reliant on others to get me out of the situation. Just thinking about it makes me go cold.’

  “Is it really that painful?” asked Cleckley, trying to sound sympathetic.

  ‘Eh? Oh, he thinks it hurts; that’s why I didn’t like it.’

  “Well, yeah,” I lied.

  Cleckley nodded to himself. “And you said ‘design in’. Do you think that vampires were designed in a lab, or are you a creationist?”

  ‘Eh? I don’t know why I said ’design in’, actually, it just seemed to make sense. I do think vampires are designed, but why do I think that? By whom?’

  “Um, well, I’m a whateverist.”

  He looked confused.

  “Most things are pretty well adapted for what they do, right? Form follows function, and all that jazz.”

  Cleckley was nodding along, since I was probably telling him what he had learnt aged seven.

  “So, essentially, whether God designed things that way or the continued selective pressures evolved them that way I can’t tell, but to me it looks like things work well. So it comes down to a choice of using the word ‘design’ or ‘selected via evolutionary pressures’ and ‘design’ is the shorter word.”

  “Yes, that makes sense,” said Cleckley.

  ‘Yes, it does, but I don’t think that was why I used the word. I’m not a creationist, but I do think vampires are designed. Why?’

  Cleckley took advantage of my thoughtfulness and pushed the needle into my arm to take a sample. I watched it squeamishly. He let the syringe fill up and my blood flowed into the container. I watched it, imagining for a moment that it would be darker in colour or lumpy from all the DNA floating around in it, but it looked just like normal, red blood.

  “Hmm, vampires have diseases,” he remarked, pulling out the syringe.

  I healed myself, but not before a drop of my blood escaped from my body to sit in the crook of my elbow.

  ‘I can smell my blood, but the smell doesn’t make my teeth want to grow or anything. I suppose it wouldn’t.’

  I wiped the blood off my arm with a tissue.

  “I don’t know, but don’t all living things have diseases?” I said.

  He looked at me. “I know you don’t like the term, Clarke, but vampires are widely considered to be undead.”

  ‘Meh.’

  “I’ve been doing some reading,” he continued. “There are living vampires called Moroii in the Transylvanian myths who turn into true undead revenants–”

  ‘’Revenants’? That’s not a nice term. ’

  “–on death.”

  I stuck my tongue out at him in a fascinating display of maturity. “I don’t feel dead.” Although I had looked it when I’d changed.

  ‘I suppose, given how promiscuous vampires are, if one of them got a blood disease, it would be passed on to all the others very quickly. That’s not good. One bad choice of who to drink from and that’s it, the whole vampire subspecies, gone. Poof! Just like that. Eek!’

  ‘But that can’t be right, surely? I don’t think that vampires are unphysical, so I expect them to obey the normal laws of biology. And they’ve been around for a while, so they must have some mechanism of defending themselves from diseases. Um…’

  I shrugged.

  “So, Cleckley, are you a mystic then? Do you expect us vampires to be all spiritual?”

  Cleckley was giving me a measuring look. “Well, they, and you, I might add, are known to be able to do some pretty odd things.”

  I frowned. “Like what?”

  “Vanishing, for example. I’ve seen you do that.”

  I nodded at that.

  ‘I could freak him out now and show him my ghost trick, but that sort of thing is more useful if people don’t know about it. And it’s kinda hard to argue that you’re not undead if you show that you can turn into a ghost.’

  “That’s not necessarily supernatural,” I said.

  He nodded. “Yes, Rob was talking about it in the bar last night, he said you put it down to quantum mechanics,” said Cleckley.

  ‘I did? Invoking quantum mechanics to explain something we don’t understand is only really one step above superstition. Oh, I remember now, that was when I was waffling on after we saw Alucard’s showy entrance.’
r />   “Ah, that. He told you about Alucard then?”

  Cleckley nodded. “I’m sure that you were amused he wanted to run experiments on Alucard.”

  I nodded at that. “Though rather him than me.” I thought for a second. “Hold on, was that sick and twisted Brannigan guy still there when you were discussing this?”

  Cleckley nodded. “Yes, you did leave me with him. And why do you call him sick and twisted?”

  ‘’Cos he is.’

  “Tell me, Cleckley what’s your impression of him?”

  Cleckley leaned back in his chair, steepled his fingers under his chin and grinned at me.

  “He obviously knew you were a vampire, given his response to my comment about drink.”

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  “And he seemed a little in awe of you, a little frightened, I would say.”

  ‘Huh, he ought to be.’

  He smiled at me. “You’ll be able to work him round, I’m sure, if that is what you are after.”

  ‘What? Me? Sleep with Brannigan?’

  “I am not that bloody stupid!” I said. Cleckley looked stunned.

  ‘Brannigan, the stupid, sick, vampire-murderer, who wants to cut out my… Ugh!’

  Cleckley looked confused at my outburst.

  ‘Cleckley has no taste in men.’

  “Anything else jump out about him?” I asked Cleckley. He thought for a moment.

  “He was polite to your friends, but he didn’t really relax around them; he seemed on edge the whole evening. Though I found out that he is a smuggler, so maybe that’s it.”

  I shook my head.

  “He’s a sick, evil, vampire hunter! A murderer!” I said, jumping out of my seat with the force of my disgust. “Do you know they rip out our teeth to keep them as souvenirs? And hunt us! Like animals!”

  “OK, calm down, Clarke,” said Cleckley, waving me to sit down.

  I glared at him, though it wasn’t him I was annoyed at. “Bloody stupid hunter on the bloody ship, bloody promise to the bloody major,” I mumbled.

  “A hunter,” Cleckley mused. “Is he after you?”