The Decade Worlds

by Patrick McClafferty

  “I think that it might be a vampire.”

  “Damn. Which side is the vampire on?”

  “Furthest from you.”

  Gareth bent to the marines, and whispered quickly before he slowly drew the kukri out of its sheath. It wasn’t a fight so much as it was a slaughter. The two marines tapped the two human raiders sharply on the temples with their pipes, and when the men collapsed in a crash of sound the vampire whirled. Waiting for that very maneuver, Gareth stepped up behind the vampire, and split his skull with the kukri, from crown to chin. Gareth kicked the body off his blade with a booted foot, and wiped the blade on the man’s black cloak. He stared at the face for a long moment, finally deciding that it wasn’t the vampire Zadra, who had almost killed him once before.

  The nose of the crashed combat shuttle sat in the front window of what had once been a delicatessen. Gareth could smell spoiled meats and cheeses in the air, along with the usual war smells of smoke and carrion. To him it was old hat. The young marines with him were slightly green, and that included the Sergeant Major. As they approached the shuttle Gareth could see the charred signs of a heavy weapon strike, probably from an Ecothiax weapon, on the starboard engine nacelle.

  “Is this out of commission?” He asked, staring at the damaged craft.

  “I’m unable to give you a clear answer without connecting to the shuttle computer, but the port engine looks to be serviceable.” Shyrrik replied slowly, floating closer to the wreck. Gareth frowned as he noted the discarded pry bars and heavy sledge hammers. The rear ramp was battered, but still closed.

  “How do I get in?” He asked at last as the marines spread out in a half circle around the back of the shuttle.

  “Place you hand on the rear ramp. If the computer is still active it should recognize you.”

  The small vessel felt dead under Gareth’s hand, and then something trembled. The ramp groaned, opened a crack and stopped. Then, with a scream of tortured metal the ramp fell open with a crash. Gareth felt the world dim around him as a hand seemed to clutch his heart. He stepped on the open ramp and into the small shuttle, studying the scene for several long moments before he turned to the Sergeant Major. “It looks as though someone was trying to pull another back inside the shuttle when he was shot, his body then falling on the first.” His voice was as dead as the bodies lying on the deck before him. “The shuttle sealed automatically.” His hands were shaking. “Shyrrik, check the systems, please.”

  “Yes Captain.” A voice said from a million miles away. “The shuttle appears to be marginally operational.”

  Gareth reluctantly rolled the first body, in a marine uniform, over on its back. There was a bullet hole in the man’s forehead that had dribbled blood down his gray face. He shut his eyes at the horrified expression on the face of Staff Sergeant Lî Xianliang. He heard other feet entering the shuttle and the gasping intakes of breath, but ignored them as he touched Chiu’s still, cold, corpse. As her body rolled over his eyes widened. Her pale, porcelain skin was withered, pulling back her lips to expose her small white teeth. A memory flashed through Gareth’s mind of Chiu nibbling on his neck with those same small white teeth, on a passionate night in the Seven Sisters. Below her jawline on the side of her neck were two small black holes, from which a trickle of now dried blood had run. A vampire killed my wife. He thought in horror, and then A VAMPIRE KILLED MY WIFE!!! A last sane thought pushed its way to the surface of his roiling mind. “Shyrrik,” He said in a barely controlled hiss. “Get both of the shuttles and the marines back to The Yeugate.” He jerked an Ecothiax rifle from the Sergeant Major’s hands and turned blazing eyes on the cringing man. “You will take your men back to the other shuttle and go to The Yeugate. THAT IS AN ORDER!” He shouted.

  “But… what will you do, alone?” The Sergeant Major asked in growing dismay.

  Gareth was shaking so hard he could barely hold the weapon. “I will kill them all.” He said in a deadly voice, devoid of any emotion. Since he knew the adaptive camouflage of the armor and uniform much better than the local marines, Gareth touched a control on his chest and seemed to vanish before their eyes.

  Chapter 12

  END OF THE LINE

  A voice in the darkness hissed in the sibilant speech of the vampires. “Keep a clossse watch.” It said to the humans clustered around the small fire. “There isss sssomething moving in the night. Sssomething deadly. You ssshould…” The rest of the sentence was interrupted by the sound of a meaty chunk, and the head of the vampire rolled into the little circle of firelight. An instant later, before the raiders could do more than rise, an energy bolt tore the darkness and struck the fire, blasting sparks and blistered smoking corpses for a dozen meters.

  The coppery stench of blood, both human and vampire, was strong in the air, and the screams of the dying echoed from shattered buildings. Gareth sat on a pile of rubble watching with dead eyes as the sun slowly touched five vampires nailed spread eagled to the side of a house. His dirty blood-crusted fingernails dug furrows in in his palms, as he recalled that the last vampire had admitted, in a gasping breath, that the leader of the vampires named Zadra, had been piloting the stolen combat shuttle in its attack on the Yuegate. Deprived of his revenge, Gareth gave the dying vampire a rictus smile as he watched the rising sun slowly burn away its face.

  The raider ship Blood sat anchored in Puasheehchester harbor, her thirty-meter length lit fore and aft with torches while four seamen, twice the usual night-watch, paced the desk, their hands never far from the hilts of their swords. The three long lateen yards hung over the deck, matching exactly the angle of the other yards, and the red striped sails were furled neatly. Laughter came faintly from below decks and the smells of roast mutton was thick in the air.

  “I wish we had guns, like the bloody marines we forced off the ship.” A young raider exclaimed fervently as he turned from the fo'c's'le, or forecastle deck as the lubbers called it.

  “We’d also need the ammunition, and the training.” An older sailor rumbled. “I don’t think it’s bloody likely, seein’ as how we sank their bloody ships.” He glanced toward the docks, fifty meters away, where the tops of the funnels of the two steamships could still be seen sticking above the still black water. “We were supposed to make an example of em, the vampires said. Kill all the seamen and all the marines, the vampires said. They snuck us all ashore quiet enough, but they never told us them damned marines would fight like cornered rats. Oh, we sank the ships right enough, and I think it was a waste, but most o the crews and marines got away, and killed half again their number of our lads.”

  “But we sank their gunships!” The younger Raider challenged. “That has to mean sumpthin.” There was no reply. “Earl, did you hear what I said?” There was a dull sound, like a fish jumping in the water nearby. “Earl, did you hear that?” He called, trying to keep the fear out of his voice. “Ear…” The raider stopped suddenly, to stare at the black blade that was sticking out from his chest. He never felt the hands that unceremoniously dumped him over the side. A shadow moved across the silent deck, aimed a rifle down a companionway and pulled the trigger, blowing out the bottom of the small ship with one intense blast of sound and superheated steam. The shadow slipped over the side well before the ship slid beneath the cold surface of the harbor, the men below deck still screaming as the boat sank with all hands.

  He was sitting on a nail keg, on the dock, in the bright sunlight when Gareth finally regained his senses. The Ecothiax based rifle in his hands was bent, battered and covered with gore, more than ample evidence that he had been using it like a club since the charge ran out. At his feet lay the broken and bloody remains of at least one vampire, or perhaps more. He didn’t have the energy to sort pieces. Although his face was still smooth and devoid of hair, thanks to Athena; the length of his hair and nails told him that he’d been out of his mind for the better part of a month. Setting the rifle across his knees, he pulled out his Colt. As he’d expected, the ammunition level read zero and g
iven his state of mind, he was more than a little surprised he still had the unusable weapon. Replacing the Colt, he withdrew and studied the kukri that he’d shoved clumsily through his belt. The scabbard was missing, and the blade of the weapon was nicked, and still covered with dried blood. Replacing the blade, he put his head in his hands and wept; for Lyndra, for Chiu, and for himself.

  “What have I become?” He asked the now empty harbor. What raider ships hadn’t been sunk had pulled up their anchors and beat a hasty retreat from the night demon that sank their ships and killed their men. “I’ve become the monster I thought to overcome.” He looked down on himself, and was amazed to find that he was relatively clean, and then he remembered swimming out to all those anchored ships. The shore parties had already, by that time, succumbed to his weapons, his knife, and sometimes his bare hands and teeth. One or two small trickles of smoke still rose from the ruins of Puasheehchester, dying remnants of burnt buildings. The blue sky was clear and still, and the sun bloody red. Remarkably, the air smelled clean, and held the first chill of winter. He sat for a long while, staring at nothing… thinking of nothing.

  “You have to come home, my Gareth.” She said in a soft voice.

  Anticipating her arrival, Gareth didn’t bother to look up. “I don’t have a home. You and I both saw to that, and why would you even want me close to you? Look at what I’ve done; look at what I’ve become.” He dropped the bent rifle at his feet with a hollow clank that echoed out across the harbor.

  “Your daughter is with me, and she is worried about you.”

  Gareth gave a dry mirthless laugh. “Her last words to me were that she hated me.”

  Athena sighed. “Mairi has since regretted saying those words; so much so that I had to restrain her from following in your footsteps. I believe she said she hated me too, among other more colorful things.” Gareth finally glanced up. “Would you please come home and take that hellion of yours off my hands? I have a job to do and I can’t spend all my time babysitting.”

  Gareth’s chuckle was short lived. “I got Chiu killed, Athena. I could have saved her.”

  The tall statuesque woman took two steps, turned and faced him, her hands on her hips, an angry look on her face. “This is a saying from your own time, and I want you to repeat it after me: ‘Not my circus, not my monkey.’ Can you do that?” Gareth growled. “It means that you were busy doing what you had to do.” Athena went on, relentlessly. “Chiu did what she had to do, and made a mistake; taking only one marine with her instead of all four that you had assigned. That mistake cost her her life. It happens. What could you have done from hundreds of light years away?”

  Gareth’s eyes were blazing. “I could have saved her if you’d told me.”

  “You know I couldn’t do that.” There was real pain in Athena’s voice. “I cared for Chiu too, and her death cuts me to the core.”

  Gareth almost said something snide, but stopped. “How can I live with myself after this? I became an animal, Athena. I… did things that will forever haunt my nightmares.”

  “Remembering what you were and what you did, both the bad and the good, will probably make you a better man, in the end.” She said gently.

  He sat, staring at the dried blood on the dock. “What of the evacuation?”

  Athena let a very small smile creep across her face. “That is going, more or less, as you planned. The last refugees abandoned Shsa-Tirion ten days ago and Thomas, according to your plan, shut down the gateway and the city power systems, and transferred to what will be the new University of Puborg, as soon as it is completed. Both of the transports are out, delivering the last of the alien races trapped on Eldenworld back to their homeworlds. After their overwhelming defeat here, the remnants of the raiders and the vampires are passing through the Brivrelsea gateway unopposed. There are a few thousand more refugees of many different races left to pass through The Yeugate gateway, and then the job will be complete. In total, you will have processed nearly three quarters of a million residents of Eldenworld to safety. Of those, nearly a third went to Trilan.”

  Gareth stood, stretched and winced. He pulled up his ragged uniform top to stare wide-eyed at the barbed shaft that stood out of his side. It had, obviously, hit nothing major. When he went to pull it out, however, the pain shot through his side and dropped him off the keg and to his knees. Athena bent down and placed her hand on the wound.

  “The arrowhead is lodged in a rib, and the barbed edge is tearing away at your insides. We need to get it out NOW.” She said firmly.

  “Fine.” He found that getting to his feet was harder than he’d imagined, and he leaned on the keg with one hand while the world about him spun. “Ahhh, I could use a little hand, please.”

  “All you had to do was ask.” Athena murmured as she reached out and took his arm.

  It’s all the fault of the chickadee. Gareth thought to himself again as he opened his eyes. The sweet cool air held the faint scent of pine trees and fresh rain. The small black and white bird was sitting on a twig outside his window, singing as if its heart would break… or it was hungry. A second little bird settled on the branch beside the first, so close their wings were touching. A ripple seemed to pass through both birds, and they flew off in a rush of wings. There are many different types of hunger. He thought to himself, as the door to his room opened.

  “Hi Daddy.” Mairi offered in small voice. She was looking at the floor, and her face was the color of a beet.

  “Hi Daughter.” Gareth returned with a slow smile. “I am very glad to see you.”

  Her jump almost knocked him out of bed as she wrapped her arms about him. “I’m so sorry I said what I did. Oh God… it was all my fault that you went off like you did. If I hadn’t said I hated you then…”

  “Stop right there, young lady, and repeat after me; ‘Not my circus, not my monkey.’ You are not in any way responsible for my actions.” His grin was crooked. “This monkey gets into enough trouble all by himself without any outside help.”

  She gave him a tentative smile and loosened her grip on him slightly. “What did you do? Athena has been keeping me bottled up here and not telling me a thing.”

  Gareth sighed. “I did what I said I was going to do, Mairi. I killed them all; all the raiders and all the vampires that were in Puasheehchester. The ships I didn’t sink fled back to Brivrelsea, where Athena tells me the raiders are processing through the gateway as fast as they can. They seem to be afraid I’ll catch them on this side.”

  Mairi’s eyes were wide. “But… there were thousands of raiders.” She submitted with a little awe, or maybe fear in her voice.

  “You’re right.” Gareth replied flatly. “And I have to live with what I did.” He took a deep breath. “Did you attend Chiu’s burial?”

  “I did.” Her voice was barely a whisper. “They had the service two weeks after the shuttle arrived back at The Yeugate. Some people thought you were dead, but the reports kept filtering in of the ‘Night Ghost’, and the deaths of the raiders continued. I was about to go looking for you when Athena brought me here and, in effect, sat on me.” They both looked down on Gareth’s thin arm at the same instant. “You haven’t been eating again.” She grumbled, frowning. “What have you been surviving on?”

  Gareth gave his daughter a level look. “We both don’t want the answer to THAT question.” He saw her shudder. “I suppose that we should eat, and go visit Shaw and Kiang to pay our respects.”

  The edge of Mairi’s lips twitched. “I think that you may find things have changed somewhat, Father.”

  He frowned. “How so? Aren’t we welcome there anymore, although I wouldn’t blame them one bit if they shut the door in my face.”

  “You’ll see.” Was all Mairi would say.

  They were wearing the same clothes they had on the previous visit; serviceable leather boots, heavy trousers, flannel shirts and a moderate jacket. As had happened the first time, not many people noticed the LL Bean logo on the jackets. Gareth rapped the
brass knocker again, the same as the last time, and the heavy door creaked open.

  Gareth smiled. “Hello I’alen. It’s good to see you again.”

  The tall Chief Steward and right-hand man for the Sai-Bo family went white, and stumbled back as if he’d been hit. “Prince Gareth and Princess Mairi.” He finally managed to gasp out. “We thought that you were dead.”

  Gareth was glaring at his daughter, who had both of her hands clamped over her mouth in a vain attempt to stifle her laughter. “Prince???” Gareth’s voice was deadly, but Mairi folded in laughter, tears running down her cheeks.

  “Shaw and Kiang are the King and Queen of Puborg.” Mairi finally managed to gasp out. “Since Chiu was their daughter that would make her the Royal Princess. When she died, as is the custom of the land, the title devolved to you… and me.” She added sourly.

  “Scheiße!” Gareth growled. “You have got to be kidding me.”

  Mairi looked apologetic. “Sorry, Daddy. If I’d told you right off you wouldn’t have come.”

  “Damned Skippy I wouldn’t have come.” Gareth rumbled.

  “I’alen!” A woman’s voice called from the top of the stairs. Gareth recognized it immediately as Shaw’s. “Who is that at the door?”

  The Steward drew himself up to his full height, a head taller than Gareth, and gave Gareth and his daughter a devious smile. “I’m sorry madam; it is just a couple of peddlers. I will send them home.”

  “Thank you I’alen.” The voice called down.

  Gareth could see the Steward waiting. Then, with a widening smile he called out. “I’m sorry madam, but the peddler and his daughter say that they have no intention of returning to old Earth, or anywhere else for that matter.”

  “Earth???” The voice upstairs gasped. Shaw bolted down the stairs so fast that Gareth was afraid she would trip in her shoes, until he noticed that she’d kicked them off and was running barefoot.

  “Hello Mother, I…” He was slammed against the wall as Shaw proceeded to kiss him very very thoroughly. When she released him, he just managed to stay standing on trembling legs while Shaw proceeded to greet Mairi in exactly the same manner. When she was finally released Mairi did slide to the floor, a look of shock on her flushed face.