The Alien Agenda (32 page)

In her heart she felt as though she were a better being now.
That it would not be a detriment to spread what she had been given to the other Palag. Her eyes were now opened to the wrongness of what they had been doing to the Human race. With that thought uppermost in her mind, she pocketed the Auto Injector and left the medical ward.

She immediately ran into another Palag as she walked through the doorway into the corridor.
Valin, Explorer Clone Group 726,457, the clone group immediately before her own, stopped as he saw her exit and stared at her, trying to read her thoughts, silently demanding an answer to her unauthorized presence in the medical ward. She opened her mind that he might see and, stepping close to him as she did so, he was unprepared when she whipped out the Auto Injector and slapped it against his shoulder, injecting him through the thin material of his clothing.

His reaction was instantaneous and severe.
He snarled and sprang away, ripping the Injector free of his skin, but she had heard the whine of the device operating and knew it was too late for him. Her blood, her half Human Vampire blood, was now within his body. It could not be gotten out

'What have you
done!' Valin's thoughts whip-cracked across her consciousness, but her mind was still open to him, not far enough open that her thoughts might be detected any farther than the distance separating herself and Valin, but enough that he might see all that she wished him to know. She was sure that once he had seen what was in her mind, once he understood that there was no escaping his fate, he would have no choice but to embrace it.

He went through her mind, angrily at first, but then with a kind of resigned fatalism as he realized how limited her options had been.
How limited his own were now. Once injected, there could be no stopping the spread. The Vampire blood was invasive and overwhelming. It could not now be halted. Now Valin had two options. Survive or perish.

'I have no choice.' 
Valin said.  'You have left me none. I will help you.'

Chapter 32

We stood amid the hissing, bubbling mess in a state of near shock. There were dozens of dead FBI Agents interspersed throughout the long corridor, hacked into pieces, their blood now intermingling with that of the bubbling, hissing blood and flesh of the Palag Elders who had made their last stand here on a lonely world at the end of the Spiral Arm of the Galaxy we here on Earth called the Milky Way. They had come a long way just to die, but their journey was now at an end.

"Their self-righteous superiority would not allow them to move on without resolving this one way or the other."
Sonafi said tiredly. Her wound had already sealed, the bones beginning to knit, but the energy to do so, stolen from other parts of her body, had left her drained and in need of sustenance. "They are so very much like us, in their own way, but it makes me wonder what kind of a future we might hope for. The futility of it all."

I did not say anything.
  Exhausted, standing in the middle of yet another of our battle grounds, I could understand her despondency. Once again, somehow, we had pulled victory from the sure fires of defeat, but we had no idea what was in store for us next. I did not want to think about all of those tachyon signals the Humans had sent out and what kind of response there would be once they are received… as well as wondering what response there would be from the Explorer ship above when their Elders did not return.

"We were
very lucky!" Sonafi said as we were surrounded by Vampires, Brid among them.

"They underestimated us." I said as I leaned over to retrieve the two swords the Palag Master had thrown down at the last moment.
  "We are all very lucky!"

……….

"I saw how you fought for me!" Sonafi purred as she curled up next to me. "You fought like the demented. You literally threw yourself at him!"

"I thought he was going to kill me."
I said.

"You don't have the helmet on anymore."
She reminded me. "I know when you're lying!" But if she had been a cat her
purrs
would have been very loud indeed.

"I did at first."
I admitted. "I did not think there was any way I could defeat him, but then that changed. I began to see where he was flawed. I began to see the weaknesses in his forms. It was the eons of training. He was faster than me, but not a better swordsman."

"Nor was he as far beyond you as he must have thought he would be.
Even though he was so very much Elder." Sonafi said.

"He got a surprise."
I agreed. "I wonder what that means for us?"

"It means there may be a finite level at which we might plateau."
She postulated. "I have expected as much. Wondering when you might reach it. The glass ceiling! You may be close to it now. One day there may be a great many of us all on an equal stature."

"I think
this changes things!" I said. "I shall probably want to eliminate my competition before they grow too old, as the old Palag Master had done. Which Vampire is the closest to me in age. I'll start with
her
!"

"I wouldn't think along those lines," Sonafi said, giving me a poke in the ribs.
A poke in the ribs with the tip of the little weapon I had acquired from the Palag Master, "or I might decide that
I
would like to be the Master!"

"You are already, aren't
you!"  I chided her amused.

"Don't push your luck!"
She said, putting the weapon back where she had found it. In her own pocket.

"I hope you know what you are doing with that thing."
I said. "It might be small, but somehow I do not think it is a toy."

"It's rather simple.
It won't go off unless I desire for it to go off. And yes, I have no doubt it has a very real wallop." Sonafi chided me back, but before we could continue our banter, my cell phone rang. I answered it. It was Irving.

"You may want to come up to the roof."
He said when I put it to my ear, not even waiting for my hello.

"Talk to me."
I said.

"You wouldn't believe it if I told you.
Just come up to the roof."

"It's Azavar."
Sonafi said.

"I feel her now too."
I said. "She has changed."

"I think a lot of things have changed."
Sonafi said.

We hastened to the roof with the rest of the Vampires who had s
urvived and stood in near shell-shocked silence at the sight which greeted us. It wasn't just Azavar. We had felt the others who were with her as we ascended. There were seven of them in all, standing in a semicircle in front of a ramp which had been lowered from a type of flying vehicle I had never expected to see this close up ever again. It had been thousands and thousands of years since I last gotten this close to one of their ships, and that when they had first become aware of me, and never since. Though I now knew that the saucer ship sitting on the roof in front of me was only a lander, that the Explorer Mother Ship from whence it had come carried dozens of these and was so large as to defy imagining, yet the ship sitting in front of me still stunned with its dimensions. It was huge! The size of a large house. Azavar stood at the forefront of the half circle of Palag. Her eyes, those fathomless, teardrop shaped sensory organs that I now knew as a fact only functioned within the thermal level, immediately sought my own.

'We are come as emissaries.'
Azavar spoke in my mind.  'To represent all of the Palag genres.'

'All?'
I replied telepathically.

'Your communications were received.'

We stood in silence, both mental and audible, while this was digested. Meanwhile the roof behind us filled with the Vampires and Humans who had made this possible in the first place, and I felt the unease of the Palag who were standing behind Azavar.

"None of you have reason to fear."
I told them, and with Sonafi we walked up to stand before Azavar, who somehow managed not to fall back before us. The Palag who were with her did not do as well.

"Things have changed."
Azavar managed, her Palag vocal cords struggling with vocalizing the words. "We are now all Vampires. You are the Master Vampire." She bowed her head slightly, the Palag behind her more deeply. An interesting development. She was Elder to them. By one day.

"Our communications were received?"
Sonafi asked.

"Yes."
Azavar answered simply. "If the issue had not already been determined, the communications we received would have resolved it."

"Do you think they would have been obeyed?"
I asked, remembering the hate-filled face of the Explorer Palag Master.

'No!'
Azavar replied mentally, her throat already sore and reverting to what was, after all, their normal mode of communication.  'In which case they would have been dealt with and we would have all perished along with them. By killing them you have actually saved our lives!' Then she added;

'We have an offer to make you!
We have need of a Ship's Master. The Explorer Ship would be yours, and we and the others your crew. To continue with a form of our earlier mission.'

"A form of it?"
I asked aloud.

"To continue stealing life forms!"
Sonafi snapped angrily.

'No!' Azavar sent.  'To form barren, lifeless worlds to accept us the way we are.
For all three of our species!' Here Azavar paused for a moment to let this sink in.  'You may have as much time to think about it as you wish. You are the Master.'

"What's there to think
about!" Brid demanded of us, stepping up with a grin on his face. "We'll be here whenever you decide to come back!" His eyes strayed to the heavens and I found that Sonafi's and my own followed.

"I would never have imagined such a thing was possible!"
I said, pulling my gaze back and to Sonafi's face. "Peace."

"It is all I have ever dreamed of."
Sonafi said, and this I knew to be true. So what choice did I really have!

"We can come back to Earth later?"
I asked.

'You are the Master.'
Azavar replied.  'The ship will go wherever you wish for us to go. We will do whatever you tell us to. That is how the Vampire Community functions, is it not?'

Sonafi took my
hand and pulled me unresisting towards the ramp leading up into the disc ship…

                  …a
nd that was just the beginning of the story.