by Unknown
He stops the flow of sedatives to rouse her from stasis. When she begins to stir, he brushes aside her auburn hair and sinks his fangs into the vein pulsing just beneath the surface of her neck. Thick, warm blood fills his mouth, mixing with his saliva. He swallows, more invigorated than after any of his blood bank meals. The sensation is electrifying. He feels intimately connected to her. Willows moans and arches her back, pressing her neck against his mouth, as if urging him to take more.
He does.
Then he waits. She lapses back into unconsciousness. Her breathing slows, then halts. The color fades from her body, though she still seems vibrant and alive. When her eyes open again several hours later, they are dark embers burning in the dim light. She turns in confusion until she finds him watching her. Slowly, she rises from her gurney, her features etched with hunger and desire. She moves toward the others, prepared to pounce, but Isaac stops her. “We need them alive,” he says. “Take this instead.” He offers her a small beaker of blood from the bank. She swallows it in a single gulp and holds it out for more. He refills the beaker. The second draught appears to satisfy her.
He explains his plan for their survival, but Willows has doubts. It will work in the short term, she says, but eventually these frail human bodies will fail. What will they do then? There will be other missions to Mars — the Chinese are scheduled to send a ship in a couple of years — but the radio silence from the biosphere may cause NASA to suspend operations.
“We have the Russians,” he says. “They’re scheduled to leave in a few days.”
“Not enough,” she says.
Before the Russian ship leaves, it attempts to establish contact with the biosphere on behalf of Mission Control. Isaac ignores their hails. The cosmonauts don’t have time to send an exploratory expedition, however. Any delay would cause them to miss their Hohmann Transfer Orbit launch window and the next one won’t occur for twenty-six months.
Isaac and Willows have all the time in the world, so long as they can keep their supply of blood going. It’s definitely easier with two. They work in the lab together, and feed and care for their comatose patients the way they might tend a garden. They harvest and stockpile blood in cold storage, and sip beakers of blood in the terrarium like lovers on a date.
After two years, they initiate the second phase of their operation. They activate their rover, Curiosity, a vehicle the size of a car designed for both robotic and manned operation. It looks like a souped-up version of the old Lunar Roving Vehicle from the Apollo missions of the previous century. Willows and Isaac board it after tending to their human garden and set out across the red soil under a butterscotch sky.
The newly arrived Chinese explorers probably won’t be watching for foreign incursions, but Isaac and Willows advance cautiously just in case, leaving the rover behind a rust-colored boulder and covering the last kilometer on foot.
Meant to last only a few months, the Chinese outpost is less extensive than the NASA biosphere. Two taikonauts are gathering samples when Isaac and Willows walk up to them without any protective gear as if they were out for a stroll. The Chinese astronauts are caught off guard, allowing Isaac and Willows to subdue them before they can send out a warning. Then the vampires wait for the others to investigate why their colleagues haven’t returned and don’t respond to their hails.
Within a few hours, Isaac and Willows have all six men bundled up on the back of the Curiosity, ready for transport to the biosphere. They raid the shelter’s sickbay and the Chinese spacecraft for supplies, especially reserves of blood. Every drop counts.
They’ve calculated exactly how much they’ll need for the journey, factoring in two extra mouths. They need four people to handle takeoff and landing so they supplement their crew with an astronaut from the Isabella and the Chinese pilot, who is familiar with their craft and can communicate with their Mission Control. Willows’ eyes gleam when she experiences the sensation of converting a living, breathing human. Isaac, too, basks in the warmth of fresh blood permeating his body.
Isaac shows the Chinese vampire how to jigger his radio so it manifests the same symptoms that plagued the Ferdinand. Over the course of several interrupted transmissions, the pilot tells his supervisors that the mission is proceeding according to plan, except for the persistent communication problems, which will also interfere with telemetry data sent back to Earth from the Chinese ship during their return flight.
Their blood factories continue to produce while they await their launch window. Six of them will go into the ship’s stasis pods in case anything goes wrong with their reserves on the way back. The remaining four will be left behind to perish, the first people to die on another planet. Not that anyone will ever know.
The voyage back to Earth will be brief compared to the eternity they’ll live when they get there. No one will be expecting a ship ‘manned’ by vampires. After being cooped up for months, Isaac knows that they’ll be ready to celebrate, turning the blue planet red with the blood spilled from all those pulsing veins awaiting them.
* * * * *
Bev Vincent’s most recent book, The Stephen King Illustrated Companion, was nominated for both the Bram Stoker Award and Edgar Award. He is the author of over sixty short stories, including appearances in Evolve, Tesseracts Thirteen, When the Night Comes Down, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Cemetery Dance and Thin Ice. He is originally from New Brunswick but has lived fifty miles from Mission Control in the U.S. for the past two decades. A scientific article about a NASA proposal for the Hundred-Year Starship was his inspiration for “Red Planet.”
Beacons Among the Stars
By Anne Mok
Nocturne City, Chao Meng-Fu Crater, Mercury
Joshua strode through the riverside grove in the illusion of daylight, a thousand lanterns hanging from the trees like fruit. His blood still sang with warmth from the woman who had let him drink from her.
Here, the air shimmered like summer, but beyond the crystalline dome ice lay scattered like diamond dust; and high above, the rim of the crater forever shadowed them in darkness.
Nocturne was a city where the sun never rose.
Joshua found Lucas sitting by the artificial river, arms wrapped around his knees. He seemed heedless of the children darting past, or the lovers strolling arm in arm. A faraway smile touched his lips as he gazed across the water.
“What are you looking at?” Joshua said lightly, settling down beside him.
“Earth.” Lucas turned to Joshua like a sunflower. “The first starships will be finished soon.”
His own smile died. “Are you still thinking about that?”
“Aren’t you?”
When Joshua didn’t answer, Lucas said, “You’ve never been afraid to tread new territory. The Far East. The New World. The Great South Land. So why stay here, clinging to the shadows of Mercury?”
Lucas had impossibly romantic notions sometimes. He had no idea what it was really like to launch yourself into the unknown. The terrifying struggle to stay alive and unexposed. “I can tell you now, if you get on that ship, you’re on your own.”
Lucas punched his shoulder. “Come on. You know if you stay behind, you’ll always regret it.”
They were both of them trying to make it light, but there was an edge to it.
Joshua drew him close, as though he could stop Lucas from slipping away. “We have a sanctuary here, for the first time in history. The rest of the universe is not so forgiving.”
Lucas shook his head, eyes undaunted. “Just because we are what we are, does that mean we don’t deserve to go to the stars?”
Two hundred years later
The blare of the emergency alarm shook Joshua awake. Cursing, he pushed open the lid of his sleeper, which clattered onto the steel floor of the cabin. Joshua crawled out and fumbled around in the puddle of yesterday’s uniform until he found his commlink, just as the alarm cut out.
“Shepherd here,” he said. “What the hell’s going on?”
“R
elax, the ship’s fine.” Zheng’s voice buzzed over the commlink, an edge to its normal breezy confidence. “That was the proximity warning. You might want to get down here.”
Joshua shrugged into a clean uniform and hit the switch on the synthesizer. It hummed as it warmed up and started processing. It was still set to the default: one liter, AB, 36.9 degrees. When it beeped to a stop, Joshua poured himself a cup of steaming hot blood. As he drank, his gaze fell across the chart pinned to the wall above the synthesizer: an antique map of the constellations as seen from Earth, faded and frayed at the edges.
The others were already crammed onto the bridge of the Griffith when he got there: Zheng in the pilot’s chair, Arn leaning over her shoulder, Uresha and Kado squeezed in at the sides.
Joshua stopped in the doorway. “Hey, what’s the emergency?”
“We reached the XDE system two hours ago,” Zheng said. “Sent out a probe as usual. But there’s already something out there.” She pointed at the monitor.
The image on the screen resolved into a starfield, the XDE sun a bright glow in the distance, and in the foreground—
In the foreground, a hulking mass loomed, blunt as an ancient battleship, floating adrift in space. Joshua recognized it at once. One of the giant colony ships, slower than light, used in the earliest days of interstellar expansion. He had seen the first of them launch from Earth orbit, gliding out of spacedock like one of the tall ships of old.
“One of the Lost Ships.” If Joshua had still possessed a heartbeat, it would have been accelerating. “Is it safe?”
Zheng nodded. “Phase engines are dead. I made sure to check.”
“Poor bastards,” Arn said, gazing at the wreck. Its hull gaped open, debris floating around the gash. “How many of those ships went out before they learned there was something wrong?”
“Nothing was wrong with phase theory itself—” Uresha began, and she and Arn launched into one of their frequent debates about engineering history.
“At least it would have been painless,” Kado mused. “You go to sleep, dreaming about your new homeworld, and you just never wake up.”
Joshua remained staring at the screen. “Zheng, I want to go over there.”
She furrowed her brow. “What for? We’ll put in a report with the Salvage Corps when we get back.”
“I want to see if I can download the logs.”
Understanding dawned on her face. “You still think his ship could be out there somewhere?”
“It’s not impossible.”
Zheng said nothing, only eyed him with worry. Eventually, she shook her head. “You be careful, okay?”
He flashed her an affectionate salute. “I’ve been crewing starships for longer than the rest of you put together. Besides, there’s not much that can kill me.”
The flitter touched down on the hull of the colony ship with a soft shudder. Joshua had picked a landing spot near the bow, furthest from the giant gash that opened the guts of the ship to space.
He powered down the flitter and swung out of the pilot’s chair. Metal clanked as he moved — twin canisters of blood strapped to his back where oxygen tanks would normally be. These days, he knew better than to go anywhere without emergency supplies.
He waited until he stood inside the airlock to put on his helmet. All standard sanguinaire pressure suits had a titanium shield where a transparent faceplate should be, to protect against sunlight, and even though the helmet optics compensated, he didn’t like having that physical barrier to his vision.
The airlock cycled and the outer hatch swung open. Joshua stepped outside.
The hull of the colony ship curved away beneath him to the horizon, its surface weathered by long exposure to radiation and micrometeroids. Even the letters on the nameplate had been all but obliterated. The sun was a bright yellow ball in the distance; only a few centimeters of polymer separated him from incineration. But space was equally hostile to living humans.
We are all aliens out here.
The outline of a hatch was visible several meters away. Joshua shot a magline towards it; the grapple thudded home and he reeled himself in. He touched the controls beside the hatch, but they were dead. Fortunately, the manual release lever still functioned.
A ladder descended into darkness. He shone his wristlight down. “Heading inside.”
“Roger,” Zheng replied. “Reading you loud and clear.”
Joshua propelled himself down the ladder, bouncing from rung to rung. It dropped him into a wide corridor that followed the long axis of the ship. The lights shining from his helmet and wrists cut circles from the darkness, revealing buckled walls and tangled metal struts. The damage looked bad, but even the most miniscule natural hyperfield could cause havoc if it intersected a ship’s phase drive.
The door at the end of the corridor was stuck fast, frame bent out of alignment. He pulled hard, throwing all his considerable strength into it. It gave. A frozen body spilled through the open doorway. Joshua recoiled.
“Damn!” Zheng said in his earpiece. “That was nasty.”
“Yeah.” Gathering his composure, Joshua drifted forward and examined the body. Adult male, early middle-age, dressed in Expansionist Era clothes. His skin was tinged blue, and his swollen features were evidence of rapid decompression.
The dead were nothing to fear, Joshua reminded himself. He of all people should know better than that.
He pulled himself through the doorway and shone his wristlights across the vast chamber beyond. Row after row of cryocapsules, like glassy pods, lined the walls. Some were smashed; all were dark and lifeless. More bodies hung motionless in the vacuum — a silent, grim tableau.
His heart sank. No chance of any survivors in this wreckage. Not even sanguinaires, who could survive airless tombs, had an answer to hard vacuum. Even if he found who he was looking for, it would be a bitter outcome.
A second chamber lay beyond that one, in similar condition. But as Joshua approached the third door, he was startled to see a faint light emanating from its control panel.
He palmed the door open.
Air rushed out past him. He dragged himself inside and slapped his hand down on the controls and the door slid shut. His body lurched in midair without warning. Joshua realized he was falling a fraction of a second before he hit the ground, bones jarred by the impact.
The artificial gravity was working in here. Not only that, but his readings reported the chamber was pressurized and oxygenated.
Long rows of cryocapsules again dominated the chamber, frost spreading thin fingers across their surfaces. One cryocapsule drew Joshua’s attention. It was open, its lid raised at a neat angle. Cautiously, Joshua peered inside.
Empty.
He swung his gaze down the row: at least a dozen cryocapsules in the same state, lids raised, all empty.
“Zheng,” he said into the commlink. “I think there may be survivors.”
Joshua opened the door to the bridge, his nerves taut with hope. It was irrational — there was slim chance that Lucas would be among the survivors, slim chance that he was even aboard this ship at all. It was a fool’s hope, but better than no hope at all.
“The bridge is pressurized and oxygenated too,” he said to Zheng. “And the artificial gravity is running. Residual power in the life support systems, maybe.”
He went over to the computer, looking for the controls to power it up. The systems were antiquated, but he remembered when they had been state of the art.
“Zheng, can you look up the base codes for the Lateral 60 processors?” he said, hands roving over the control panel. He waited for confirmation, but there was nothing. “Zheng?”
No response.
Uneasiness crawled over Joshua. How long had the comms been down?
He looked up at the monitor again, still cold and black, reflecting behind him another face.
He spun around, and came up against the muzzle of a laser welder.
“Stop right there.”
Joshua
froze, staring at the woman who stood behind the laser welder. She stared back at him, eyes narrowed against the brightness of his wristlights. She wore smudged overalls and her blonde hair was hacked short. She might have been thirty, or older if she’d had rejuv. He couldn’t remember if it had been made widely available before or after the last colony ships had gone out.
Slowly, Joshua raised his hands. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
“Who are you?” she said. “Let me see you.”
Moving slowly, Joshua took off his helmet. The air tasted cold and faintly chemical. “My name is Joshua Shepherd. I’m an astrocartographer.” He watched the end of the laser welder carefully — he might be impervious to many hurts, but he could still die by fire. “I’m here with a survey ship. We found your vessel drifting in space.”
“How do I know you’re not a pirate or a scavenger?”
“I have ID.” Joshua reached for his right wrist and unsnapped the disc fastened there. The woman’s hand tightened on the trigger. Joshua noted that the safety was off. “This is my astrocartographer license.”
He tossed it to her. Just before she caught it, he remembered it listed his year of birth. But her face didn’t change as she read it. Maybe it was all right. She couldn’t know what year it was after all, with the systems down and no contact with the universe.
She tossed it back to him. “How do I know it’s not fake?”
“How can I prove that it’s real?” He jerked his head at the laser welder. “If you shoot me, how will you get off this ship?”
“I guess I would take your ship,” the woman said flatly.
“I came here to help,” Joshua said, in what he hoped was a reassuring voice. “You and the other survivors.”
Her eyes flickered sideways and back. “There are no other survivors.”
Joshua opened his mouth, and then closed it. She obviously didn’t trust him yet, and she might well want to keep a few things back until she did. There were certainly things he wasn’t about to tell her — this colony ship dated from before the Concordance, and she’d probably only heard of sanguinaires as myth or nightmare. In any case, it wouldn’t help their fledgling relationship if he pushed her too hard now.
