by Aaron Crash
The tentacles, however, were a different deal. A metal coil lashed out and gripped a hapless vampire and squeezed them until the bloodsucker popped into pieces. Since it wasn’t star energy, the vampire wasn’t killed, but he was in a world of hurt. How it could pull all of its parts back together in space, Blaze had no idea, and it wasn’t his problem.
The gunny tossed Elle behind him, she sank into the seat, and the nanotech gripped her legs. They roared up through the tentacles, weaving in and out of the growing threat, speeding away from the vampires behind them.
The gunny hit a rearview setting, and a window appeared on his display. Not only was the two-headed fat man with chainsaws and his cronies chasing after them, but Xerxes was as well.
The demon-possessed conglomeration had a blender of fusion finger blades ready to slice them into ribbons. And if Adam or Eve stuck on the shoulders of the P13rce unit nipped their flesh, it meant death from a vampiric infection and then an eternity of undead evil.
Capturing Xerxes, dealing with that unstoppable killing machine, suddenly didn’t seem like an option at all. They had what they needed. If they got to the Lizzie Borden, they could create another spacetime wave and ride it on out of there. Live to fight another day. And if they could get to Granny on Hutchinson Prime, she could tell them where the Onyx Gate was…or would be.
A huge semi-truck-trailer-sized tentacle untwisted. Blaze zoomed past it, but a female vampire behind him got ripped to shit. On his rear display, he watched as the cyborg vampire came back together. Her flesh mended itself as the cables lashed the creature back together. Her arms were pushed to the center of her chest, her blue-fire engine had been rammed down her throat, and her plasma rifles were sent through her feet. She no longer needed to function as a vampire, and since she couldn’t be killed by normal means, Xerxes could mix and match and mutate her all he wanted. She was an undead weapon, bent on Blaze and Elle’s destruction.
The horribly mangled vampire spun about and came at them feet first, her guns firing. The red blasts hit tentacles instead of him and Elle.
Blaze ducked under another massive uncoiling arm so big the sheer size of it defied all reason. Smaller serpentine fingers reached for him, but he dodged them as more room opened above him. It was like escaping a giant space anemone coming alive and searching for food. But was that the case? What did the Etrusca ruin want?
Damned if Blaze knew. He just had to get out of there and fast. The vampires wove in and out of the unfurling forest of living metal, but Blaze was faster, leading the way. Elle clung to him, half there and half gone.
He roared toward the surface, ripping back on the throttle when he could. It had been a long way down, and it was going to be a long way up, especially since he was trying to avoid being grabbed and squeezed to death. And then his sister got chatty.
“I didn’t say those things to you while you were in the colonizer,” she murmured through comms. “I heard Xerxes and the admiral. I wanted to respond but couldn’t. Those guys are such assholes.”
Blaze dipped to the side and squeezed between three coils coming free. “Don’t worry, Elle. The crap you and I have done to each other, I know the score, but I don’t care. You and I will take care of each other. We are the last of the Ramirez blood in this stupid universe.”
“Stupid or not, we’re gonna save it,” Elle whispered. “Xerxes is scared of me. I love that, don’t you?”
“You’ve been scaring the shit out of me for three years,” Blaze said. “But yeah, that demon is going down. He told me where Granny and Arlo are. Roughly. We are free to tear him a new asshole.”
Some kind of missile exploded to Blaze’s right, and he went left, past a collection of fish with Etrusca faces, and then he heard a roar.
Impossible. Space was a vacuum, and sound needed matter for its vibrations to work. But he heard the roar clearly, even through his helmet. What the hell?
The inky darkness inside the tentacle jungle gave way to the murky light of the neutron star. And the flash of fusion torpedoes. He zoomed up and out of the waving fronds of massive coils and reached open space. And into a space battle.
Ten miles of colonizer monster greeted him, made from fifty ships and huge beyond belief. IPC attack ships formed horns, giving the man-shaped colonizer monster a demon’s head. It aimed the multitude of plasma cannons on its arms at them and opened fire, strafing the Etrusca ruin, trying to blow Blaze and Elle to pieces.
Blaze floored it, and the plasma enveloped the first of the vampires to rise from the tentacles. Blaze wasn’t sure how the disintegrated bloodsuckers would reintegrate, but the onslaught of plasma energy pretty much evaporated them.
Then the Lizzie Borden, like a pesky bee, stung the colonizer monster with two fusion torpedoes. Huge gaping holes appeared in the belly of one of the colony ships, revealing the spherical hibernation rooms and the thousands of pods—where Trina was in stasis. How could they save her and fight the colonizer monster at the same time?
Blaze had no idea, but he had bigger problems right then.
The starcycle came undone around him, the exhaust pipes turning into arms, the metal folding into talons. Xerxes was perverting his bike. Blaze took his shotgun and put the starcycle out of its misery. The fusion tore through the bike, sending him and Elle flying.
But there was gravity at work. Neither Blaze nor Elle floated off into space. Instead, they landed on top of the Etrusca ruin’s perfectly flat plane. Not all of the ancient structure had turned into grasping coils. There was a hundred feet of smooth metal between the gravity well sucking in the garbage and the forest of tentacles.
Blaze and Elle had been thrown onto the middle of the plane. Blaze helped his sister to her feet.
To his right, fifty feet away, the tentacles writhed and waved. To his left, also fifty feet away, the gravity well pulled the whirlpool of space trash down through the cone to the center of the neutron star.
Above him, the graveyard of ships spun around in a spiral thousands of miles wide. He watched as a constant stream of metal and trash gushed past them like a waterfall of steel, titanium, nanotech, and iron.
Also above them, The Lizzie Borden was engaging the leviathan.
For the time being, the plane was clear, but Blaze knew Xerxes, the admiral, and the mass of cyborg vampires were racing up from the depths of the ruin.
Ling broke through comms. “Hello, Gunny. It’s good to know you and Elle survived. This is all very exciting. Fernando and I were wondering if you needed any help.”
“Get your fuzzy butt down here, Ling. We’re about to be overwhelmed. And Fernando, Trina is on that colonizer. Not sure if you can bash it up without hurting her, but try, okay?”
Fernando clicked liked he’d lost his mind. “I don’t mean to be an alarmist, but have you seen the size of that fucker, Blaze? We’ve been trying to get to you, but that asshole is huge.”
Blaze grinned. “You’re gonna have to throw a bunch of money into the swear jar, potty mouth. Just do the best you can.”
The admiral’s voice pierced their minds, sowing despair. You cannot escape. You are four against an army of evil. You fight a monster ten miles long. There is no way you can be victorious.
Xerxes, in his Human suit, popped out of the tentacles. He walked toward them on his hooves, dragging a dozen feet behind him. The suit made no tactical sense. Maybe it was meant only to horrify. The six-inch-long fusion blades on each finger glowed.
“I hhhave to agree with the admiral. You’ve given us a merry chase, and my vampires are struggling against the tentacles. Interesting you escaped them. While I knew that the Etrusca ruins drew Onyx energy to them, I’d forgotten how sunlight affects the initiator cubes. Ohhh, the Etrusca are so very mysterious!”
The way he said it, it sounded like Xerxes knew all about the ancient race. What exactly did he know?
Above them, one of the feet of the colonizer was careening down toward them. Since the foot was over a mile long, they couldn’t run out fro
m under it. He and Elle were about to be crushed.
They rushed toward the edge of the gravity well, racing toward the waterfall of garbage.
Near the edge, Elle spun. She grabbed one of the three syringes and plunged it into a port she’d created in her nanofiber armor. “Since you’re here, Blaze, I can power up. And we can get busy with winning…finally. I hate it when we are losing.”
“Uh, hurry up, Elle.”
The foot was coming down. Blaze didn’t bother with his gun or his ax. They wouldn’t even scratch the colonizer. The Lizzie Borden might be a bee in the monster’s bonnet, but Blaze and his sister weren’t even fleas. They were more like harmless bacteria underfoot.
Xerxes sped forward, and Blaze had to meet him in battle, though Blaze couldn’t think of worse odds. Shotgun and ax, he was up against a forest of daggers. And two vampire heads.
Blaze would have to play defense while Elle worked on getting her mojo back online. If the colonizer’s foot didn’t crush them first. The ten-mile-long monster roared again, the sound vibrating the very nature of reality.
Blaze charged forward, about twenty feet away from Elle and the edge of the ruins. Xerxes and Blaze clashed.
Blaze shot a hand, blowing away five of the finger blades, then deflected an attack with his ax. He rolled away, got to his feet, and hacked off two of the arms. The dead flesh flopped onto the plane, the finger blades winking off.
Xerxes swung around and scooped up one of the arms, and the spiked fleas immediately started to reattach it. At the same time, another fistful of glowing death sliced toward him, but he was able to dodge it. But there were four more. Blaze was about to meet his fate by a self-repairing robot demon in a vampire suit.
The blades of star energy slashed through his chest and would’ve ripped through his lungs if Blaze hadn’t gotten his ax between him and the monster. Adam snapped at him. His teeth slid off Blaze’s armor, but Eve’s fangs dug into a nanotech plate on his shoulder and threatened to pierce his skin. The vampiric Onyx infection would end the fight as quickly as if the demon had beheaded the gunny.
Blaze kept his wits about him. He jacked a shell into the shotgun, one-handed, and then aimed the muzzle up. The fusion blast scorched his visor and blistered the skin on his face, but it disintegrated Eve’s head and made Xerxes scream.
Adam shifted, gnashing and gnawing through his armor. Before the vampire’s teeth could get through, Blaze got his legs up, kicked away from the demon, and rolled across the ground.
He’d survived for thirty seconds against Xerxes. Hey, he was doing good.
Too bad the colonizer foot was going to mash him into the Etrusca metal like he was an ant on a Terran sidewalk.
Blaze flung his ax. One of the blades struck the arm the spiked fleas were trying to attach, severing it again and sending fleas clattering. He rolled across the ground and grabbed his ax, then he was up with his shotgun, another hydrogen shell in the chamber, and he blew off more of the hands and their fusion-tipped fingers.
Elle ran up to him. A quick glance and Blaze saw her VHI was at a hundred and ten percent. Impossible. Even at their best, Humans maxed out at a hundred. That was kind of the point. But everything about his sister was just a bit…off.
And thank God that was the case.
The mile-long foot was above them, lower, lower, lower and then she reached into her bandolier and tossed out a pair of handcuffs. At the same time, she growled out her Onyx speak and cast the stasis spell.
The pure power of the spell sent a shock wave across the metal plane and then up into the miles of monster above them. Black energy coalesced around the colonizer, freezing it for a second. The gravity well caught it, and the foot was snatched into the cone.
Blaze felt his mouth gape. Was the thing going to get sucked down? It would kill Trina, but saving her now seemed unlikely, if not impossible. If they could get the colonizer into the cone, it would get pulled into the destroying power of the neutron star below.
The colonizer opened a goat mouth the size of a football field and roared. It leapt up from the Etrusca ruin, freeing itself from the whirling pool of gravity. It smashed through other ships as it fled for the moment, but it was rolling around, somersaulting above them, and coming back for another attack.
Elle’s VHI was at seventy-five percent. Casting a spell on something that big had taken a lot out of her, but she was still ready to fight.
She ignited her fusion katanas as Xerxes charged them, down to three hands. Two new robotic arms, one clutching a scimitar and the other wielding a plasma rifle, erupted from his body.
Behind the robot, on blue-fire engines, twenty cyborg vampires began to emerge from the tentacles, which were growing, stretching out into the space. Some of the vampires were caught in the coils, but others flew free: the admiral, the child cluster, the whipper, the bruiser, and the chainsaw-armed two-headed fat man. As well as a few other of the cybernetic undead.
Things looked bleak.
Then on starcycles, Fernando and Ling flew from the Lizzie Borden and came zooming down, firing fusion blasts at Xerxes and his vampiric henchmen. Xerxes paused to return fire with his plasma rifle, but his vampires sped toward Blaze and Elle.
“Outnumbered,” Elle whispered.
“But not outclassed, sister,” Blaze said with a smile.
TWENTY-SEVEN_
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Blaze and Elle fell back to the edge of the gravity well. The nonstop waterfall of garbage and spaceships streamed behind them as the vampires charged. Xerxes continued to fire at Fernando and Ling while his fleas worked on fixing arms. Yet the demon was doing something else, preparing some new fresh hell for them.
“We can use the torrent of shit behind us,” Blaze said. “The vampires are going to be all full of hate and bloodlust. Use that against them. If we can push them into the waterfall behind us, they’ll be sucked down into the neutron star. Just don’t let yourself get caught up in it.”
“Never,” Elle yelled in determination. “I’m going to exorcise that puta. I’m going to rip him from the robot and then tear him in two!”
“That’s my girl,” Blaze said.
The vampires attacked. Elle engaged the admiral, facing off with him. The six severed heads on the ends of his robot arms chomped at her, but her two katanas flashed, shearing off limbs even as she ducked the .44 magnum bullets shooting out of the admiral’s eyes.
Blaze went up against the fat man. The chainsaws spun silently, but one buzzed into Blaze’s armor, cutting into his arm. Blaze hooked his ax around one of the heads and lopped it off. At the same time, he used his shotgun to blow the heart out of the fat man’s back.
He spun and bashed the shotgun into the child cluster. Plasma bolts erupted from the blob of vampiric children and guns. They sizzled through Blaze’s armor, adding to his many wounds, and Blaze knew his VHI was dropping. One thing at a time.
Blaze lowered a shoulder and rammed himself into the cluster. Cold, malleable flesh enclosed around him. Little hands grabbed at his armor, but Blaze drove his feet, pushing the ball of awful to the edge of the Etrusca platform. A second later, the gravity snatched it away and sucked it down.
The vampire with the blue-fire face and plasma rifle feet dove in, and Blaze ducked. It too was taken away in the waterfall of streaming steel and garbage.
A fireball struck Blaze in his chest, blinding him with fire and pain. It knocked him back to the very edge of the gravity well. Somehow, either by magic or ancient technology, the pull of the gravity was limited to the cone at the center of the structure. He was an inch away from the pull.
Where had the fireball come from? Oh yes, Xerxes could cast spells.
Damn, but the thing was tough.
The four-armed bruiser vampire, one head gone but one head still very much alive, sped over, raising a foot to kick him off.
The one face leered in victory.
Blaze scrambled away from the kick, but he had to be careful, or he’d be suc
ked off the ledge. The vampire teetered on the edge, but didn’t succumb to the gravity.
Ling sprang off his starcycle and took off the bruiser’s other head with a whirl of a nunchaku. The vampire stumbled backward and fell into the waterfall to be sucked away.
The Shaolin sloth alighted on the platform, spinning his nunchakus to deflect oncoming mystical bolts from Xerxes’s rifle.
Then Ling stormed in, launching his own attack against the archduke.
Blaze had to take a moment to watch.
Xerxes was fast, but he was pissed off, scared, and Ling was as calm as ever. He took off several dead hands and the robot arm holding the rifle. He danced across the remaining stitched-on vampire arms, flipping over fusion fingers, dodging, ducking, anticipating attacks. He whipped off Adam’s head with a flourish.
Fernando threw his fusion spear, and it struck through Xerxes’s thorax. The Clicker spun his starcycle around and took out a batch of oncoming vampires with a well-placed aim of the fusion cannon on his bike.
The whipper lashed out cables at Blaze. Blaze was ready and caught the wires around his left arm, which held the shotgun. Once ensnared, Blaze spun and sent the whipper into the cavalcade of falling junk. The cables clung to him, but Blaze easily cut them with his fusion ax.
Another cybernetic vampire zoomed up, and Blaze chopped it in half. Both halves flew past him and into the gravity well.
Blaze glanced to the side. Elle raised both katanas. Her armor was shredded and burned, but the admiral looked far worse. His eye guns clicked on empty chambers, rolling around and around. All his robot arms were gone.
With a final swipe, Elle took his head. The admiral slumped onto the metal platform. No more telepathic nonsense from him.
Ling somersaulted in the air and landed between Blaze and Elle. Most of Xerxes’s Human suit had been removed, and he stood there, wobbling dizzily. Fernando drove his starcycle up close to the robot and deftly plucked his spear out of the P13rce unit’s chest. Xerxes swung at the Clicker with his scimitar but missed. The attack was uncertain and slow.
