Chapter 56: At The Mercy Of A Vampire

The Wanderer-7 cleared the debris ridge at six kilometers per second and on the screen, its turret moved.

CLANK... WHIRRR!

The twin barrels on its dorsal spine swung forty-five degrees and locked dead center on the Black Kite’s port engine housing.

Lock!

Every single woman tied to that pipe knew exactly what came next since they’d felt it through the deck more than a hundred times by now.

THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP!

Four tungsten penetrators left the muzzles in one continuous deafening blue flash.

KRA-KOOOOOOOOOM!

Two of them punched clean through the Kite’s slate-armor belt and ripped straight through the secondary fuel manifold, tearing a four-meter trench of structural ribs out of the port flank.

...A massive eruption of burning green deuterium plasma blasted out into the void and spun the whole ninety-meter raider thirty degrees off its axis with a bone-jarring shudder!

SCREEEEEEEEEECH!

The bridge buckled.

Overhead pipes burst and showered the deck in hot hydraulic fluid and screaming steam.

The gravity flickered and dropped as red emergency strobes exploded across the ceiling in blinding pulses.

Camila screamed and ducked her head while scalding droplets spattered the bulkhead a meter over her hair.

Aoi felt the impact come up through the deck into her split cheek.

’...That rhythm.’

THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP!

She’d felt it through her own console a hundred times, with his voice calling targets in her ear.

’I’m sorry...’

On the dais, Ren had been thrown sideways into the console rail, and he came up off it with blood running from his eyebrow and his perfect hair hanging in his eyes.

"HOLD ON!" Harper yelled down the row. "Everybody keep your heads DOWN!"

PING! PING! PING!

A flat synthetic female voice started chiming through the raider’s master intercom.

[Warning. Catastrophic structural breach in Port Engine Compartment Three... Secondary propellant lines severed. Maneuvering thrusters degraded by forty-two percent. Hull integrity failing along frame seven—]

"SHUT UP!" Ren screamed at the ceiling, kicking the command console with everything he had with his face twisted into an ugly foaming snarl of pure terror. "SHUT THE FUCK UP!"

"Captain, the port drive’s gone!" Dekker shrieked. "We’re venting! We’re VENTING!"

"Then use the starboard one! Turn us! Turn us broadside and give me the cannons!"

The Kite groaned around under one engine like a wounded animal dragging a broken leg with its whole frame shrieking, and its twin cannons swung to bear.

BOOM-BOOM!

On the screen, the Wanderer-7 just wasn’t there anymore.

It had slid underneath the line of fire like water running under a door, and before the Kite’s capacitors had even started to recharge...

THUMP-THUMP! KRA-KOOM!

The left cannon on the raider’s shoulder blew apart in a shower of molten slag as the barrel spun off into the dark end over end, still glowing.

THUMP-THUMP! KRA-KOOM!

The right one went next.

"He’s taking our teeth out," Voss said as his big hands had gone still on his rifle. "He’s pulling them one at a time."

THUMP!

The missile cells along the belly cracked open like eggshells and spat sparks.

THUMP!

A sensor mast vanished and it was obvious that Leo wasn’t trying to kill the ship at all...

He was skinning it.

Elena watched it happen with her mouth open and the tears drying stiff on her cheeks.

’He came back.’ Her heart was slamming so hard it hurt. ’After everything I said to him. After I called him a coward and spat on his sister. He came back anyway...’

She’d watched a hundred professional pilots fly at her father’s airshows however none of them had ever flown like this.

He was truly special.

At the end of the row, Jin-Ah’s lips were moving silently.

’Port drive, then cannons, then missiles, then sensors.’ Her eyes were flicking across the screen, counting. ’He’s cutting every system that could hurt us and leaving the life support alone... He knows we’re in here and he’s flying around us... Could it be that he knows exactly where we’re sitting?’

"OPEN THE CHANNEL!" Ren was screaming at Dekker. "Open it! I’ll put her on the screen! I’ll put a gun in her mouth and let him WATCH!"

Dekker slapped the broadcast key.

KSSSSSHHHHHHHHHHHH!

There was nothing but static... The last sensor mast had taken the antenna array with it and Ren hurled the handset across the bridge.

CRACK!

It shattered against the wall a meter from Camila’s head, and she flinched so hard the rope tore another strip of skin off her wrists.

Then the Wanderer-7 stopped shooting.

It swung around in a long lazy arc and slid up alongside the Kite’s forward viewport, close enough that its gunmetal flank filled half the glass.

It was close enough to see its canopy and the bridge inside was dark... There were no runners, no consoles and no lights at all.

Only two small points of gold, glowing deep in the shadow where the command throne should be as it was looking at them.

Dekker made a sound like a kicked dog.

"Who..." Ren’s voice cracked straight down the middle. "Who the FUCK is flying that thing...?!"

The corvette held there for three long seconds then it peeled away again, and the turret swung back around.

On the bridge of the Black Kite, nobody was looking at the prisoners anymore.

Ren was screaming orders at Dekker.

Dekker was screaming at his panel while Voss had stepped up behind the flight terminal and was wrestling with the manual weapons alignment, hauling on a lever that didn’t answer to anything anymore with sweat running down into his beard.

Down along the port bulkhead, Harper Bell was moving.

Her eyes, dull with despair ten minutes ago, had gone razor-sharp and deadly focused.

Behind her back her bruised fingers found the rough weave of the polymer rope and wrapped around it.

’Okay, Bell,’ she thought, and her heart was going so hard she could feel it in her teeth. ’Okay... Just like a stuck bolt. Just like tuning a feed. Find the frequency. Find it, find it...’

HUMMMM.

A faint bronze glow, tiny, hidden in the shadow behind her back, crawled up her forearms.

Her Kinetic Tuning woke up and she pushed the high-frequency vibration of her own pulse straight down into the molecular structure of the fibers... and felt for the note.

...There!

SZZZZT.

The tight static tension in the rope started to sing, shivering at forty thousand cycles a second as the dense plastic fibers went soft before coming apart like warm butter.

Her right hand slid free and she almost sobbed out loud.

Two silent seconds later, so did her left however she didn’t stand up.

She stayed low behind the shadow of the beam and slid sideways along the deck until she was crouched right behind Chloe.

At the end of the row, Jin-Ah saw her.

Their eyes met for half a second across the shadows and Jin-Ah’s heart nearly stopped.

’Logic without courage,’ she thought.

She lifted her chin and looked straight at the aft screen, and her voice came out loud, cutting across the bridge like she was back at station three.

"Starboard drive temperature is spiking past nine hundred Kelvin! If you burn it at this load, the coupling will shear in forty seconds!"

All three men’s heads snapped toward the engineering panel.

"She’s right!" Dekker screeched. "Captain, she’s RIGHT, the coupling—"

"Then throttle it, you idiot!"

Not one of them looked back at the pipe however Voss turned his head a moment later anyway.

Harper froze with her hand halfway out.

His dead eyes swept the row... and swept right past her, back to the lever in his fists.

The Kite bucked under another impact and he swore and threw his whole weight against the dead control.

Harper started breathing again as Chloe’s head was down.

Her breath was coming in ragged shallow gasps and her ruined knee was still leaking dark blood onto the floor.

Harper’s calloused fingers found the knots at her wrists.

’Hang on, kid... Hang on... I’ve got you.’

CLIK... SNAP.

One sharp kinetic pulse, and the cord fell apart as Chloe’s wrists dropped loose.

For half a second, she didn’t move then her small head lifted.

Harper was close enough to see her face, and she wished to God she wasn’t.

’N-no... She’s so scary...’

The green was gone.

Her eyes were two pools of glowing abyssal blood-red fire, burning with something demonic and so far past human rage it didn’t have a name.

Her nostrils flared as her head turned toward the screen, toward the gunmetal ship circling outside, and Harper watched the shockwaves of the turret rattling through the hull plates hit her like a drug... flooding her starved cells with pure raw adrenaline.

CRRRRK! CRRRRK!

Something was grinding in her shattered knee.

Harper looked down and saw it... the bone was pulling itself back together under the skin. The torn flesh crawling closed over the top of it like it was being stitched by invisible hands.

Chloe didn’t even look down at it.

Two places down the pipe, Camila saw it too and she pressed herself back against the bulkhead so hard the rope cut into her wrists however she didn’t make a single sound.

’No...’

She was afraid that if she did, those eyes would turn and look at her.

"Chloe..." Harper whispered, and she didn’t even know if it was a warning or a prayer.

Chloe smiled at her.

"Thank you, Harper," she breathed then she moved fast.

BOOM!

The steel floor plates under her feet cratered eight centimeters deep as she launched across the six-meter gap in a blinding instantaneous blur.

Ren was standing at the edge of the dais screaming at Dekker with his pistol hanging loose in his right hand so he never even saw her coming... None of them did.

WHAM!

She hit him in the chest like a freight train at full speed.

The impact tore him clean off his feet, and the two of them smashed straight through the heavy steel command throne...

CRACK... SHATTER!

...snapped its hydraulic stanchion like a dry toothpick, plowed through the main navigation well in an explosion of glass and sparks and slammed into the reinforced titanium bulkhead behind the console.

THUD!

The pistol flew out of his fingers and went skittering away across the wet deck, spinning.

KLAK-KLAK-KLAK!

He didn’t even have time to gasp as she was already on top of him.

Her small slender hands, streaked with dried blood and tipped with fingernails that had grown out into jagged hardened ivory claws, pinned his shoulders flat against the shattered plating so hard the metal dented around them.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"

Chloe screamed.

It was a terrifying ear-splitting apocalyptic shriek that tore through the whole bridge and rattled the shattered screens in their frames... Elena clamped her hands over her ears and curled into a ball, Camila sobbed and pressed her face into the bulkhead and even Voss stumbled back a full step from the flight terminal with the color draining out of his face.

Ren’s eyes bulged.

He stared up into the face of an eighteen-year-old girl, and every scrap of him came apart.

The boyish charm... The condescension... The bored butcher. All of it was gone.

His mouth opened, and a pathetic strangled whimper of animal terror bubbled out past his lips.

His hands came up and clawed weakly at her wrists, it was like clawing at a steel girder with no hope to escape.

Chloe tilted her head and looked down at him with blood dripping off the tip of her nose onto his cheek.

Plip! Plip!

She leaned down until her nose brushed the side of his face and she could breathe him in.

SNIFF!

"Mm," she hummed. "There it is."

She giggled against his ear like a girl who’d just been handed a present.

"There’s no soap anymore, Ren...You just smell like pee and sweat." Her tongue came out and dragged one slow wet line up his cheek through the blood, and he made a high thin sound in his throat that wasn’t a word. "And your heart... Listen to it... Listen... It’s going so FAST."

She pressed her ear flat against his chest like a child listening for the ocean in a shell, and smiled with her eyes closed.

THUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMP!

"Leo’s heart was so loud too," she whispered dreamily. "But his was warm and yours is just scared."

She lifted her head again as the red in her eyes burned brighter than the emergency strobes.

"Wait..." he choked.

His eyes rolled frantically toward the row of bound women by the bulkhead, begging for help.

"Aoi... Nee-san... help me—"