by J. R. Rain
The video goes black.
“Whoa…” I sink into the chair by that terminal. “They wiped themselves out…”
Another video plays, this one showing a golden-haired woman with brilliant amber eyes. She’s wearing a similar jumpsuit, only darker silver, and her hair’s straight… not in some weird 60s mess. Like the prince, she, too, speaks Latin.
“This is Commander Ilya Tsaritsyn of the IVM Ambition. In light of the present circumstances of our homeworld, we have aborted our planned return and set down once again on SOL-3, a planet with such remarkable similarities to Elysar that at first, we did not believe it. This world which had once offered us such promise for a brighter future, now offers us our only hope for any future. It is unlikely that we will have any need for the Ambition ever again. A starship is of no use without a destination, and this primitive world lacks the infrastructure to maintain space travel. We will soon exhaust our supplies of nutrient gel and will be forced to rely exclusively on live prey. As such, I have ordered all useful materials removed and transported to a nearby location where we will establish a permanent colony. With luck, the remoteness of our location will protect our cattle from whatever madness has afflicted them elsewhere on this planet. We are no longer able to flee the uprising and must, at all costs, survive here. For as long as we are able, we shall make use of the amplifier. If we are unable to devise an alternate means of control, I fear the smallest lapse will cause our fate to match the others. The stock is growing smarter with each new breeding cycle. Vanya thinks they will soon be as intelligent as us.” She laughs, but it turns sad and becomes a sigh.
The woman chokes up and turns away from the screen a few seconds before the video stops.
I’m both awestruck and annoyed. My irritation comes mostly from the complete lack of any time or date information. I can’t tell if those recordings happened tens of thousands of years ago, or a thousand, or five years ago. Well, considering the glacier covering this ship, five years is pretty silly. She called Earth primitive which could mean many thousands of years ago. Or… it could mean the 1800s. People with spaceships would think horse-drawn carriages are primitive.
Grr.
So much mind-blowing information and still no idea when this happened.
The bridge doors open with a soft hiss.
It can’t be the Russians since only a vampire could open the outer door. It must be an Orig—
I sigh. “Hello, Ayla.”
My sister laughs. “You didn’t even look.”
“This place has a tricky doorbell. Who else would’ve walked right in?”
“It always baffled me how you could be simultaneously so smart yet so dumb.”
“The word is impulsive, not dumb.” I nudge the chair around in a spin to look at her.
She’s wearing a white parka and leggings as well as snow boots, and a big ‘I win’ type smile. At least she’s not pointing a weapon at me. “The difference between impulsiveness and stupidity is only whether you’re the one doing the stupid thing or watching someone else do the stupid thing.”
“When did you become such a cynic? You used to be so happy.”
She shrugs. “What can I say? I’ve seen shit. And I got old.”
“You’re not old, you’re what, 178?”
“177, dear.”
“So… let me guess. You set this whole thing up didn’t you? The Dominion didn’t want to take on the Russian military with those telepathy blockers, so you needed someone—me—with actual training to make it in here and open the door for you.”
“Wow, you are smarter than you look.”
I smirk. “I’m the brunette in the family. It’s blondes who don’t ‘look’ smart.”
Ayla pulls a gun from her pocket. “Regardless. I need you to take a nap for a while now.”
“Hold on a sec.” I raise a hand, then point at the monitor. “I need you to see something.”
“You’re playing for time, aren’t you?”
I shake my head. “Nope. Can you set aside the Dominion bullshit for just a few minutes and be my sister? You need to see this video. It’s only a few minutes long.”
She folds her arms. “Fine, but I’m not moving any closer.”
“No hug?”
“Are you messing with me?”
“Yes and no. I did like you a lot better before you decided to join those wingnuts and get all evil and murdery. Just… don’t shoot me in the head until you watch this.”
She taps her foot. “Fine.”
I fiddle with the system until finally hitting the key that starts playback.
The message from the prince plays. Ayla’s expression shifts from bored suspicion to curiosity, then awe. By the time the former captain—or whatever—of this ship walks away at the verge of tears, Ayla looks ready to cry, too.
“They were right all along,” I say, turning in my seat again. “We did come from another planet. Elysar or something like that. And… our ancestors blew themselves to hell. Burned the atmosphere right off their homeworld. Killed every living thing.”
Ayla glances at me. “Are you sure this is real?”
“We’re in a massive starship buried under glacial ice in the butt crack of Russia. What do you think?”
She blinks.
“If someone set this up as a fake, they’re a serious overachiever.”
“So what are you saying?” She steps over to stand beside me, still holding a gun but not pointed at me.
“I’m saying Origin—wow it makes so much more sense why they call us that now—anyway, Origin vampires shouldn’t kill each other. The Dominion waging war with any vampire who doesn’t agree with them is really damn stupid. We’re the last survivors of a dead civilization, stranded on a world we tried to colonize who knows how long ago. Each one of us who dies is like a significant percent chance our whole species goes extinct.”
“You really do like being smart, don’t you?”
“Sometimes it comes in handy.” I flash a cheesy smile. “We, and I mean Origins, shouldn’t kill each other… at least until there are more of us. Not when we’re barely a blip of the global population.”
“I accept that there is validity to that idea.”
“Somewhere in this ship is that psychic amplifier.” I point at the console. “If any vampire starts using it to try and make humans into mindless farm animals again, it’s going to turn the rest of the world against us. It’s basically a ‘please annihilate us’ button. You heard what that commander said. One little slip up and they’d lose control and die. Considering we aren’t standing within a grand city of vampires ruling over their human pets, I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume one of our ancestors fucked up and lost control of the humans.”
Ayla fidgets.
“Think about it,” I say. “The Dominion wants to return to the ways our ancestors lived by, where humans were treated like livestock. Look how that ended for them. Even if you want to believe that humans who are many times smarter than the humans of that day will somehow decide not to revolt and overthrow us, there are two big problems with the amplifier that make it a threat even to the Dominion.”
“Oh? I’d love to hear where you’re going with this.” She smirks.
“One: if vampires activate this thing and instantly mind control all humans within its range, they’re going to realize they’ve been enslaved. The humans of antiquity knew they were controlled, and rebelled. And this thing’s range is only a few thousand miles. Some other humans will eventually notice a mass number of people standing around staring into space. Two: as what we just watched proved, it only takes one little error and a rebellion will wipe us out. Three: there’s a shitload more of them than us.”
Her smirk dies.
“I’m going to regret saying this because it’s basically helping the Dominion… but if you really want to ‘put humans back in their place,’ it needs to be a long and subtle process. Look at the nine-to-five day job society has invented. The best way to make so
meone a slave is not to let them realize they’re a slave. If you flip that switch and use the amplifier, you’ll be touching off a war that could very likely wipe out all of vampire kind.”
“It’s our right to treat humans like the farm animals they are.”
I stand, slow enough not to spook her, and grasp her arms by the elbows. “True… they might have been little more than animals 40,000 years ago, but they’re no longer mindless apes. They have evolved.”
“They’re inferior.”
“In some ways. Others, not so much.”
She stuffs her gun back in her pocket and waves her arms around while rambling on about immortality, how fast we heal, night vision, and so on. “You can’t tell me they’re our equals.”
“We have obvious advantages over them, yes. But from an intellectual standpoint, they are equal. Sure they can’t move as fast, accelerate their perception of time so the world seems to stand still, live forever… but they are still a fully intelligent species. Look at tigers.”
“What?” She blinks at me. “Where did that come from?”
“Tigers are faster and stronger than humans with built in weapons, much better senses.”
She raises an eyebrow. “True.”
“Would you say a tiger is superior to a human?”
“Of course not.”
I smile. “So a physical advantage—being stronger and faster—isn’t the only mark of one species’ superiority. And, if the humans get their hands on it, you just know they are going to try and exploit this tech. That amplifier in the hands of the Dominion is going to result in us being wiped out. And in the hands of humans… well, it’s just a generally awful idea. What if mortals reverse engineer our tech and find a way to mind control us?”
Ayla shifts her weight from leg to leg, and spends a minute or two making faces at me while she thinks. “Ugh. Fine. So what should we do here?”
“I’ve got a demolition charge that should turn the amplifier to scrap. We find it, and make sure no vampires can use it and no humans can study it and do something shitty with it.”
“But they’re not psychic.”
“Humans are smart, Ay. They could find some way to alter the mechanism that amplifies psychic energy and cause it to generate that energy. They’ve already figured out how to make telepathy-blocking hats.”
She bites her lip. “Okay. You’re right. It’s too damn cold here anyway.”
“Cool. Give me a sec to see if there’s any sort of schematics up here. I have no idea where in the ship the damn thing even is.”
“Then what? Just walk away like old friends and go home?”
“Yeah, kinda what I was thinking. You used to be my favorite sister.”
She smirks. “I’m your only sister.”
“Exactly why you’re my favorite.” I grin. “When you’re not being an evil bitch.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Civilization
Ayla hovers over me while I poke around the computer system.
Unfortunately, all the text is in that strange font that I can’t make sense of. Since both videos spoke Latin—or at least a language similar enough to Earth Latin to be more or less interchangeable—it’s probably safe to assume that this is the written form in the original character set. Without being able to comprehend it, my search consists primarily of randomly tapping icons and folders via the touchscreen monitor. I do replay the videos and record them via my armband. The charge I’m carrying to kill the amplifier shouldn’t be a threat to this enormous ship. Also, I doubt anyone but Russians are going to be visiting it for a long time. These videos need to come with me.
My sister gets bored pretty fast and proceeds to roam around the bridge searching cabinets and drawers. A few times, pop up boxes appear on the screen before me that have the unmistakable look of ‘do you really want to do this, yes or no?’ to them. Every one of those confirmation boxes I’ve ever seen has always put ‘no’ as the left option, so I click that. As nothing lit up, powered on, or exploded, I’m fairly confident one particular indecipherable mark is their written form of ‘no.’
“Got something,” says Ayla.
I look back over my shoulder. She’s holding a tablet-sized sheet of clear plastic up to the ceiling as if the lights that aren’t on would help a vampire who can see perfectly in the dark study it better. I try not to stereotype, but sometimes blonde is blonde.
“Trying to figure out how to turn it on?” I ask, no sarcasm in my voice.
“It’s just a drawing on plastic. Not sure why they’d do that. But it looks like a diagram of a space ship.”
I get up and walk over. The plastic ‘page’ has a black-line drawing that’s got to be a schematic of the ship we’re on. Electronic components in a silver strip on one side don’t appear to do anything, but I have a feeling it’s been sitting here a while so the batteries are likely long dead.
“Oh.” Ayla grins. “I got a read off it. A dot’s supposed to appear to tell you where you are. The lines look like some kind of active display, but it’s stuck on what it showed when the battery crapped out.”
“Looks like the front half of the bridge.” I point at a room that has a shape in it like a Van-de-Graaf machine. “Bet that’s it.”
Ayla traces her finger over the drawing. “Sixth door on the left from the bridge, straight down the hall outside. That’s easy.”
“Yeah.” I take a deep breath in my nose. My sister isn’t giving off any vibes that she’s up to something. Her going from wanting to shoot me in the head and drag me back to the Dominion to just hanging out like we’re still kids is even stranger than finding an ancient starship under a glacier.
Before she can change her mind about destroying the amplifier, I exit the bridge and jog down the hall. It’s probably not the wisest move to turn my back on her, but my psychic intuition isn’t going off. Maybe witnessing the end of a whole planet vicariously convinced her about the amplifier. Even a Dominion loyalist has to realize that such an easy-sounding ‘win’ as the amplifier is too good to be true.
The door to the sixth room on the left lays on the floor, the thin metal slab warped by dozens of gouges and dents. I step over it into a large, cube-shaped room containing a giant machine. A donut-shaped ring as big as a small table sits at the top of a ten-foot column, perched inside a dome extension in the ceiling that probably rises above the ship’s hull. Hundreds of thin tubes, some clear and packed with violet crystals, some metal, comprise the main column… which has a narrow wooden pole rammed into it, the end pointing straight at the door.
I approach, climbing over two of the six cushioned seats surrounding the machine. The five red ones are deeply reclined with the head close to the column. The last seat looks like the ones from the bridge and has a control console. I’m guessing the red chairs held whoever funneled their psychic energy into the device while an operator or some such person kept an eye on things from the black chair.
It soon becomes apparent that the pole jutting out of the machine is actually a spear, its stone head having smashed the—evidently delicate—tubes in the amplifier’s central column. Purple crystalline dust coats the top of the shaft nearest the device.
My sister reaches for the spear, but I hold up a hand. “Wait. Let me get a picture first.”
She nods.
Using my armband, I take a few photos of the amplifier with several close-ups of the spear strike. “Guess the destroy it or claim it for our respective team question is a moot point. The thing is already smashed. And that also proves that the humans once controlled by this thing understood the effect it had on them.”
“Oh, wow.” Ayla grasps the spear once I’m done taking pictures, and pulls it out. Well, mostly. More like she grasps the spear and snaps the handle off the head. “This is really old. Stone-headed spears? This wood is falling apart without much effort.”
“I’m almost tempted to laugh at finding a caveman spear jammed into a component on a starship. This is like an epic fail while p
laying Civilization.” I fold my arms.
“Shouldn’t you use ‘cave-person’?” asks Ayla in a taunting tone.
“Political correctness from the woman who thinks humans are talking cucumbers?”
“Tomatoes. I called them tomatoes.” She puffs at a strand of hair over her face.
I grasp the end of the spear head in two fingers and pull it free. Both of us cringe at the painful squeak of metal on stone. Not having the slightest clue what I’m looking at—other than it being a spear—I can’t tell by the relatively plain design how old the thing is. Whoever made it clearly didn’t have access to modern tools, or even metal ones.
Ayla laughs when I start taking photos of the spear head. “Are you a CIA agent or an archaeologist?”
“This goes beyond the US Government, Ay. This information is for our kind.”
“Ooh, someone’s being disloyal to the Man,” singsongs Ayla.
“There’s no intelligence value to an ancient spear. No way I’m handing this over to my bosses.” I stuff the spear head in my supply pack and pull out the C4 charge.
“Oh, now we’re talking. They let you play with the fun toys.”
“Should I point out to you that this can kill us both?”
She raises an eyebrow.
“If we’re within, oh, fifty feet of this charge when it goes off, it’ll vaporize us. Total destruction of our bodies is the big sleep.”
