by Aaron Crash
Blaze didn’t answer. He was using every bit of his will to not hit Arlo, calico cat or not.
“Naming a thing like her is tricky. It’s an all or nothing game, like the messiah game, and Raziel knows all about that, don’t you?” Arlo turned soft and scratched the cat under her chin. “What do you call a forest fire that cleanses? What do you call a long sleepless night of pain and misery, either because of a birth or a death? What do you call a day where everything in your life changes? Words fail. At the infinity of it. The eternity of it.”
Raziel let herself get distracted from protecting the old man, closed her eyes, and purred again.
Blaze growled, “I have no idea what you and Granny are, and I could give two squirts of shit, but you both love to hear yourselves talk. I got what I need from you both. So you both can go fuck yourselves. As for the cat, she’s done more to fight evil than you ever did, you pinche pendejo.” Blaze wheeled and stomped out of the cargo bay.
Arlo chuckled. “If he only knew, Raziel. About you, the Etrusca, the All-Pig, the whole dumb deal. Ha.”
It was a hook to get Blaze to stay, to ask more questions, to try and pry more info out of Arlo. Wasn’t going to happen.
Blaze stomped through the halls. He needed to hit something, or blow something up, or hack something to pieces. But he wasn’t going to hurt his ship. No, he was kind of coming around to liking the new Lizzie. She’d replaced Ugly Betty, rest in peace, with his awesome arm gun, and if she could transform into a giant robot, that could really come in handy.
But if they did succeed in closing the Onyx Gate, what would happen to Lizzie? The Xerxes part of her wouldn’t be able to feed off the Onyx energy. Most likely, she’d become once again the simple AI of a starship’s main computer.
What would happen to him after the demon hunting was done?
Blaze had a route he’d run through the ship, to keep in shape, so he started jogging. Up the stairs, through the main hallway to the BBQed ruins of his room, back through the upper corridor, down the steps to the main deck, into the bridge, and then back to the stairs. He ran through the lower deck, even going as far as running to the cellar door, before running back up to the top. As he ran he thought about what kind of possible future he might have.
And he didn’t like what he saw. How easy would it be to lapse into Arlo’s drunken cynicism and self-pity? Too easy. Yes, he’d probably continue to hunt, collecting bounties for the IPC, the Union, whoever would pay his bills. But catching people, even psychopaths like the Goreback family, would not be nearly as satisfying as capturing ancient evils and locking them away for good.
He realized what had troubled Elle. Ridding the galaxy of Onyx energy meant losing their powers and losing their meaning. They’d be simple Humans again, working, living, dying.
Blaze ran faster and faster, until he was left gasping on the bottom deck, next to the library, where Trina was.
He thought about going to talk to Ling, to tell him about his fears, but after running, after the constant battles and running, exhaustion took over. He needed to sleep. In a bed. And rest.
He had the fight of his life to prepare for. And it might end up being his last.
He checked Trina’s Onyx levels, and they were near one hundred percent, which was good. She wouldn’t want to dine on a little gunny…at least not in the vampiric sense.
He knocked on the door.
Trina answered. She was wearing a silky black nightgown. The contrast between her pale freckled skin and the dark material was striking. Her gorgeous red hair was perfection and her face, beautiful.
“Sorry to bother you,” Blaze said. “But I need a bed. We don’t need to do anything other than sleep next to each other, but damn, I’m tired.”
Trina took his hands in hers and led him inside. Her gaze was steady and hot, and though she wasn’t talking, Blaze knew that she might be thinking of giving him a little something, something that might get him to sleep extra quick.
She sat him on the bed. And then kissed him softly.
“What’s going on?” Blaze asked, wondering if she was seducing him to later snack on him. It was quite the change from how she’d been before. Then again, they’d all been under the influence of Nauzea’s insane magic tempting them into suffering for no good reason.
Trina took his hand and placed it on her full breast. Her nipple hardened under the silky fabric. “Blaze, if we close the Onyx Gate, I’ll lose the energy keeping me alive. Cali will die as well. It’s easy for us all to forget, but Cali and I are monsters. We won’t survive.”
A cold sorrow struck Blaze’s heart. He tried to talk himself out of it. “We don’t know that, Trina. I mean, there might’ve been vampires and werewolves before the Onyx Gate, but the whole thing will change. I’d be more worried about you losing Elle’s magic that keeps you sane.”
“Not sure I need her anymore,” Trina said. “As long as I keep my Onyx levels up, I have full control over my vampirism. Without the Onyx flooding the galaxy, though, that’ll end. Either way, I’m betting that Cali and I will die. Which is why I want us to be together, one last time.”
“You’re not still jealous of Cali?” Blaze asked.
“I’ll never like her,” Trina said. She licked his jawline. “But I’m an evil creature of the night, now. I don’t have to like her to have sex with her. I’ve been fantasizing about a threesome.”
Blaze went to call the werewolf in to join them, but he stopped himself. Fantasies were fantasies, and reality was its own thing altogether. They were in for the fight of their lives, and he needed his hunters thinking clearly. And he’d already hurt Cali enough. He’d let her be.
“Let’s just you and I do this thing.” Blaze took Trina and threw her on the bed.
She laughed. “Ha, let’s do this thing, like it’s a mission. Come and get me, Blaze. Love me like it’s my last night alive.”
Blaze felt sadness for a second, before other, more primal emotions took over.
Most likely, it would be the last night for most if not all of them.
So, he dove into the moment. For those glorious hours with Trina, he forgot about his fears of the future and the final battle ahead.
He forgot about Arlo, smoking in the cargo bay, petting an impossible calico. He even forgot to worry about his sister.
All were lost in the sweat and glow of the Irish vampire.
Damn, but his life was good.
He was sound asleep when Lizzie woke him. Trina was naked, totally gone from the world, and even snoring a bit. A vampire snoring.
Damn, but his life was weird.
“Gunny,” Lizzie said, “I think you should come up to the bridge. It’s Elle. She’s in the asteroid belt, and she’s using some kind of magic we’ve not seen before.”
Blaze scooped up his woodland cammies, threw them on, and bolted through the corridors and up the steps. He raced down the hallway to the bridge.
Fernando and Ling were there, both sitting in front of the blue science station hologram controls. Fernando worked his four arms and sent a video feed of Elle standing on the dusty plane of an asteroid.
She had her hands raised. She still had twenty fingers, ten of her own, Mexican dark, and ten pale infected digits she’d pulled off Nauzea. Her hands and all those fingers glowed with Onyx. Around her, pouring through round holes in space, was ectoplasm. It gushed around her, but some kind of magic kept it away from her and away from the asteroid where she stood.
The chunk of rock was about a mile in diameter, so not very big, but big enough. Around her skulked Ian and his Astral Corps werewolves, around and around.
Fernando clicked, and he let his translator work. “Elle has created several stable wormholes through space, and they are draining the ectoplasm from the Hutchinson Prime system into the asteroid belt. The asteroid belt in the Terran system is roughly 150 million kilometers thick, or one of your Human astronomical units. The belt contains two million asteroids larger than half a Human mile in diameter as well as millions of
smaller ones. Already, half of the asteroids are submerged in the liquid Onyx.”
Blaze shook his head. “Damn, so basically, Elle is replacing the asteroid belt with an ocean of ectoplasm. But why?”
“It really is ingenious!” Ling belted out happily. “I must credit either Elle or the All-Pig, or perhaps both. Don’t you see? She is using the ectoplasm as a shield. Due to the nature of the Onyx energy, we can’t generate a spacetime wave to fly through it. And if we use our blue-fire engines, the liquid Onyx will eat through our shields, then our hull, and destroy us. Notice how I said All-Pig and not Panashoat? I didn’t want to listen to…”
Too late. Fernando shivered and chanted out the name of the All-Pig three times.
“Panashoat! Panashoat! Panashoat!”
Blaze sighed.
Fernando excused himself. “I’m very sorry. Such lack of self-control is very disconcerting.”
“Where is the Etrusca ruin?” Blaze asked.
“There are five Etrusca ruins moving toward Elle’s position,” Ling said. “And yes, I know the rhyme. And yes, this doesn’t bode well for our cause.”
“And let me guess,” Blaze said. “The Onyx Gate is going to appear in the eye of the storm, the space in the middle of the ectoplasm ocean that we can’t get to.”
Ling laughed. “Like I said, the foes we face are not stupid. It will make our eventual victory all the sweeter. My, oh my, isn’t this the very essence of exciting! It would seem today, that I will get to—”
Blaze cut the Shaolin sloth off before he could finish. “No, Ling, no one is going to explore death today, except for Panashoat.”
Fernando clicked, buzzed, and then shouted out the one word three times.
It wasn’t a very good omen.
Blaze sat in a plush, comfortable chair on the bridge, connected his display to the blue holographic controls of the science station, and then analyzed the data. By the time they reached Elle, she’d be surrounded by an ocean of liquid Onyx, millions of miles wide and millions of miles deep.
They had to find a way through, get to Elle and convince her to change or put her down, stop the Etrusca ruin from doing whatever it was going to do, and then close the Onyx Gate.
All with five unstoppable werewolves on her side.
And there was a very real possibility that Elle wasn’t Elle anymore, but a vessel for Nauzea to inhabit. Or maybe they’d merged like how Xerxes had merged with Lizzie to become a new entity. If that were the case, Lizzie had joined the good guys through her love for Bill.
But did Elle love any of them enough to fight Nauzea’s influence? It was a long shot. Cali, maybe Cali, but how could they get to the Onyx goddess in the middle of all that pinche ectoplasm?
TWENTY-EIGHT_
╠═╦╬╧╪
Hours later, Blaze stood on the bridge of the Lizzie Borden with the rest of his crew. Everyone was there, and they stood in front of the big front window to watch the shimmering ectoplasm dissolve an asteroid a mile wide. Well, it had been a mile wide. Now it was smaller. And getting even smaller still.
Blaze kept thinking of the Jell-O salads he’d eat growing up at picnics, when Arlo would find some woman who thought she could have a normal life with the drunk, and they’d try to do normal things. The shimmer of the ectoplasm was the Jell-O. The asteroids inside were the marshmallows.
Water in space freezes. Liquids, in a vacuum, normally would form spheres because of the lack of gravity and the surface tension between the molecules.
But the ectoplasm wasn’t water; its compounds were completely supernatural. It could form tentacles, dissolve rocks, and wasn’t like anything any scientist had ever studied. Blaze had always thought the ectoplasm was the byproduct of spiritual creatures interacting with the material plane, and that might be, but the stuff that had rivered off Hutchinson Prime was something else altogether. Onyx in liquid form created by diabolical magic.
“Looks like the goddamn blob from that one movie we watched, Blaze,” Arlo gruffed.
Except this blob filled up a good portion of Earth’s solar system, the entire stretch of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
The ocean of ectoplasm stretched out beyond the line of sight in all directions. Up, down, left, right, it was all the shimmering liquid Onyx, a pale yellow-green color. The Lizzie Borden was tiny compared to it. And in less than ninety minutes, the Onyx Gate would open.
Arlo couldn’t smoke, Lizzie wouldn’t let him, so he stood there grumbling, swishing around the swallow left in his bottle. His tremors continued to get worse.
The old man was fidgety and quiet, so quiet it unnerved Blaze.
It seemed like the end of the line. “We could try another location, another time,” Trina said. “I mean, didn’t the prophecy say you would close the gate on March sixteenth?”
“I think that’s right,” Cali murmured.
“Fuck prophecies,” Arlo cursed.
Ling sighed. “Humans and their expletives.”
Fernando responded. “We could. But there are several things against us. For one, the All-Pig is coming, and I believe he will appear at this location. There is a reason Elle is fortifying this position and not any other. From our previous experiences with the royalty of hell, it would be better if we didn’t have to face this great evil while trying to close the Onyx Gate.”
“And there’s Elle,” Blaze said. “It seems to me, the longer she’s evil, the less of a chance there is to bring her back. And if she can magic up wormholes in space and move this ectoplasmic ocean wherever she wants, at some point, we’re going to have to figure out a way through it.”
Bill clicked, and his brother translated. “First of all, Bill says he hates you. Secondly, he would like to reiterate that the Lizzie’s shields cannot be modified to keep the ectoplasm from eating through the shields and the hull. Bill will not let you hurt Lizzie in any way. He loves her. He doesn’t love you.”
Blaze sighed. “Every time. Every time. Bill hates us. Yeah, we get it. We’ve gotten it for the past three years. Read you, loud and clear. Dammit.”
Fernando didn’t pause to comment. He continued even as Bill continued to click. “My brother would like to point out that the IPC were able to free their Paladin with the drones and the nuclear warheads they triggered before being disintegrated by the liquid Onyx. If we could somehow blast our way through the ectoplasm, a continual explosion, we could reach the other side.”
“What about plasma guns and fusion torpedoes?” Blaze asked.
The Clickers discussed the idea. “Bill says we’d run out of ammunition and would eventually overheat our weapons and they would explode. However, if we had a fleet of Clicker warships, they could use their more advanced and better weapons to cut a path through.”
“If we had a fleet,” Blaze said, rubbing his chin.
He checked his watch. Eighty-five minutes left. Dammit.
Blaze went to contact Ambassador Randi when the first of the Clicker ships surfed down a spacetime wave to appear in front of the ocean of ectoplasm. Following it were a dozen Union ships, all beaten-up hulks of metal with blue-fire engines firing to keep them steady as their spacetime wave dissipated.
“Both General Russell and Ambassador Randi are hailing us,” Ling said.
“Put them on,” Blaze said.
Two holographic figures appeared in the room, Ambassador Randi, in formal red robes, as well as a Clicker with a scar across one eye and missing his left lower arm. The Clicker limped up to Blaze, clicking, and then the translator kicked in. “Human, I have analyzed the Hutchinson Prime data. We will use our superior weapons to create a bubble in the strange liquid. While in that bubble, your vessel should be safe. We do not have much time. The queen…”
At the mention of the Clicker queen, both Bill and Fernando joined in finishing the litany, “…the queen, my mother, the source of all life, the one goddess eternal…”
General Russell didn’t blink, not even his one good eye. “…has decided t
hat it would hurt Galactic trade and the Clicker bottom line if we let the Humans be destroyed by the demonic energies in the universe. So, we have been ordered to help. We will lose many of our ships and people, but we live and die for the queen…
“…the queen, my mother, the source of all life, the one goddess eternal!”
General Russell disappeared without another word.
Ambassador Randi stayed. “Sorry, Blaze, but you know how the Phasmida can be short on etiquette. However, we’re ready. I’m on board the Harriett, and while the Union ships are old, we’re here to help with the rear of the bubble.”
The Harriett was the flagship of the ragged, decaying fleet of Union ships. Some didn’t have plasma weapons, but were outfitted with shrapnel weapons, projectile weapons, and torpedoes.
“Any word from Denning?” Blaze asked.
Randi shook her head. “I don’t think we can count on him. Denning might push for the IPC to help us, but you and I both know they won’t change until the demons start hurting their profits.”
“Unlike the Phasmida,” Blaze mused. “They can see if shit goes down, having a ton of money isn’t going to do much. Fucking IPC. Maybe Denning lost his courage.”
“I don’t think so,” Randi said. “But we’re here. We’ll follow you in.”
“Roger that,” Blaze said.
The hologram of Randi winked off.
“She is super-hot,” Cali whispered.
“Super-hot,” Trina agreed.
Blaze glanced at his vampire girlfriend. Hmmm…threesome with Randi? Damn, but if that didn’t make him want to save the universe and stop the bad guys.
The Clicker warships, of various shapes, designs, and sizes, moved in and opened fire into the ectoplasm. The plasma bolts cut into the liquid Onyx, blasting a space in the strange liquid with a barrage of blinding firepower.
The eclectic collection of golden Phasmida ships entered the space they’d created in the ectoplasm and started the long journey toward the asteroid where Elle and the werewolves waited.
Ectoplasm undulated and rippled around them, and tendrils tried to grasp the ships, but the Clickers were relentless. The tentacles would strike. Clicker gunners would blast them away. The swelling surface of the liquid Onyx would pull back, wait, and then another series of tendrils would reach for them. But all the ships were ready to destroy those grasping coils.
