Nanowrimo 2011 - Day 26

The landing shuttle sent the farmer into a flat spin - there was terror in his eyes and tension in the rest of his body suggested he wanted to jump out of the vehicle and begin running.

“No, it cant be. Not now.” he said.

Li smiled, was her hope linked to his downfall? She knew that it wasnt “nice” to gloat in situations like this. How many times had she and her little sister been caught doing exactly the same? She recalled being about thirteen, her sister eleven, and they were both in trouble. Their mother offered her standard invitation - left or right hand, hairbrush or wooden spoon? There was no option on the over-the-knee spanking. Li had stood where her sister could see, but out of her mother’s line of sight. As her sister was being spanked Li made sure to grin at her. At one level she couldnt help it. It came so naturally.

“Five …”

“… and Six.” her mother said, punctuating each number with another slap to her sister’s rear. Tears flowed freely.

“Li Phan, come here.”

Somehow the difference of wooden spoon or hairbrush made no real difference, they stung, Li cried.

“Five … Six … and this is for smirking when your little sister was taking her punishment. I saw you. Seven…”

How had she seen? Did mothers have eyes in the back of their head? She had no clue, but on balance an extra lick from the hairbrush for the evil smirk at her sister, she counted it more than even.

She returned to the present and the farmer was still squirming and uncomfortable. Just as with her sister, Li simply couldnt suppress a smile rooted down in a wellspring of joy that defied the circumstances.

The rest of the journey down the hill to the gate lifted her spirits. Something so terrible that it freaked out the farmer - whatever it was - would be worth working with. “The enemy of my enemy?” she said.

“Dont count on it miss. I’ve heard stories. This isnt like anything we’ve seen before.” the farmer said.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“The chatter, as I’ve heard it, is she cut a bloody swath through them. Not that those aristocratic layabouts didnt have it coming. Hell, the goal was that we come here to establish this colony, not swan around with half the onboard population playing at Lord and Lady. They just got used to the life, refused to change, I guess. That’s all over now though. She is demanding change. Wants tribute. I heard the gossip: she scored first-blood, bested her opponent, but didnt stop. He would have called it at that point but no, she went the distance on him … tortured him for the crowd … before finally killing him. Who would challenge that?”

In through the gate, the second truck peeled off to stop by a storage building. In the rear view mirror Li watched as the prone body of Kat was tossed roughly in through the door, followed by pieces of Shawna that Li hoped added up to a whole body when they were done. The final risky part of the plan - whether James had awoken in time, was he in the grip of a thirst the way that Kat had explained, and had he been drawn like a moth to the flame of the product that had been loaded? Li hoped that he was on-board, but without Kat she didnt know if she would know how to break him out of his presently feral state. She needed him alive and well, and able to lead her to the ship overhead. Still, with two shuttles on the roof their chances (minimal admittedly) were doubled. Equipment that old ought to be something that she could fly. Better still, she guessed that the shuttles were hardcoded to fly automated runs between the generation ship and the colony that had been established on the planets surface.

The truck stopped and the farmer ushered Li from the cab, leading her to the nondescript building to their left. A single grey painted door didnt tell her anything about the purpose of the structure. Was she walking into a slaughterhouse? Was this a store house?

The farmer tried the door. It was locked and he stamped his foot in frustration and knocked on the door. He waited a few seconds and knocked again. The pattern repeated itself - annoying for Li to watch, she had no clue what it was like for those people inside. Finally the door opened and a fat old lady poked her head out.

“Yes?” she said,

“Delivery, to be kept in best conditions, for the Lord. Listen for His summons.” the farmer said, pushing Li forward.

The fat old woman looked Li up and down, “Not much of a wedding gift. Sure it will do though.”

Li was handed off, and ushered inside. The room was dark and it took moments for Li’s eyes to adjust. To her surprise she found herself in an a nightclub - raise stage to her left, tables and chairs around the stage, a bar at the back of the room. Lights were down and a shabby little man was sweeping the floor in the dark between couches at the edge of the space. The ceiling was a jungle of girders with speakers and lighting cans hung from them by chains, and electrical cables going all over the place. Li’s anxious mind kept latching onto a given cable and folowing it to either a light or a speaker. Part of her brain tried to assemble a wiring diagram.

“Come with me. Fifth floor for you.” the large woman said.

Li hesitated, looking around, still caught up in cataloging the lighting rig.

The fat woman took Li firmly by the elbow and propelled her up a nearby staircase that wound around the edge of the enormous space. “I said, 5th floor.”

Up they went and Li heard chatter - female mostly - from rooms along the way. Staff and visitors. Some giggling and being “girly” - hair and makeup, the men they had seen the night before, which perfumes worked best.
On the fifth floor Li was shown into an empty room and the door closed firmly behind her.

[Kat, James and Shawna assault the main farm to get to the shuttle. Both Kat and James are wounded in an initial confrontation - Kat “feeds” like a Vamp and regenerates in time for the final fight with the farmer. In a final bonding step, Kat enters a ‘blood-fasting’ with James, marrying him, and feeding him.]

Kat slept and again Shawna reached out from the implant to the grey matter surrounding it. It was getting easier and she enjoyed the new sensations that were starting to be processed - human touch didnt return simple pressure by area as her android body had. The pressure was simply there and the processing went into why, and what ought to be done about it. Hearing had a far smaller range and couldnt report phase differences, or add frequency filters, but it was functional. She had to suppress a laugh though - the level of hearing on her android body at this point in time was considerably less than a human, and here she was trying to make comparisons.

What comparison is there - vision provided by the video feed out of a pair of obsolete webcams. Audio from the miniature microphones built into them. The unicyle arrangement of locomotion had yet to be proved but the theory was sound and her body could spare the processing power for appropriate balance on it. Battery packs had been added seemingly at random to give her lumpy (middle aged) torso. All in all, not the most flattering of makeovers. It would suffice until they could make it to the generation ship and she could make use of parts from their stores.

With Kat asleep Shawna was able to lift her body into a sitting pose and place a hand on the android’s arm. The localnet connection came into place quickly but The Watcher didnt bother with a VR matix this time.

“What do you want?” he asked.

Shawna was taken aback by his brusqe attitude, “I needed to ask you, where is the shuttle in relation to us?” she asked.

“Dead centre of the farm. Few hudred yards at most, gnerally its in cover. I read two shuttles. That last gap, across the lawn, we will be open and they can pick off who ever they want to.”

Shawna registered disappointment, then spoke, “My base programming restricts my options greatly, I was coded for self-preservation and the preservation of AI in general. I dont believe that I can participate in actions to take the central building if the probability of harm is that high.”

The Watcher laughed, “Then you will need to be dormant in the implant, and allow Kat full access to her faculties. Better still, if we had a third. Do you know if James made it here?”

Shawna shook her head.

“We need him, now … allow Kat to rest fully but leave her the memory of our conversation so she knows what she must do. She’s the only one who can find and bring James back to us if he made it here.”

Kat hunted James the same way she hunted any other feral vampire - with bait - assuming him to be in the grip of the Hunger and not thinking rationally. She remembered the weeks after her quickening and how she had fought to get control on the hunger before it mastered her. They didnt have weeks, so she approached it a different way. The bait came from a store of the purified grey cubes that she liberally sprinkled with blood from a freshly killed rat. The smell almost drove her mad, she was hungry too, but she knew that it would bring James. Once she had him, she had the rest of the box of cubes to keep feeding him until the hunger abated and she could reach to his rational mind. The hunger would return, of course, but they had a window where he would be a useful ally.

After dark, with her trap baited, she simply melted into the shadows and waited. She’d explained to The Watcher over a silent link what the plan was and he was going to join her later in the night for the next phase of the assault; once they had James they didnt plan on waiting.

There! Moving through the shadows. Kat was surprised at his speed and agility. She had teh gifts too but seeing them in James made her suddenly very aware of how special they were. Each time she compared relative speeds, how fast he was moving building to building, she came up short on her own side of things. Was it possible that he was stronger and faster than she? She didnt have time to think - he was on the bait devouring the small pile by the fist full. She tossed a single cube and he pulled it out of the air and into his mouth in a single fluid motion. Another cube aimed at this face was swallowed whole. She threw three and none hit the ground, all were intercepted and in his mouth. She kept them coming, varing speeds, making him leap for them, even tossing whole handfuls. He was magnificent. The supply dwindled and it became a worryin race: would his hunger be sated before the box ran out? Finally he let a cube land in the dead dirt below their feet. Finally! The last couple of cubes from the box were reserved for her, and she ate them gladly, advancing on James. She hoped by allowing him to eat first, then visibly eating second, that dominance would be satisfied. He would see her as lower, and not challenge her. She advanced, head held deferentially low.

“James?” she whispered, “Can you hear me?”

At the mention of his name he looked at her. Yes. She was getting through. She kept talking quietly to him, waiting for the arrival of The Watcher and the next phase of their task.

By the time The Watcher arrived James and Kat were conversing in whispers. He knew the plan, and approved. He just wanted to get home and the means to that end was at the top of the central building. To get to the top they needed to fight, but above all else, The Watcher needed to get there in one piece.

The three worked their way through the outlying buildings of the farm without incident. Once at the staging point to begin the fight for the main building they understood why: security had been pulled to a building near the main one and intensified around the main building itself. Three guards in a row were ambushed in the gardens by a stealthy Kat or James. The Watcher was interested to see both Dhampirs in action: Kat with her years of hunting and honed skills, James so freshly born to it, yet natural in everything he did. Nature and nurture.

Inside the building, guards taken simaltaneously from behind by James and Kat. They stashed the bodies in an empty room and the three headed to a stairwell. Floor 2, floor 3 and floor 4. Another stairwell would be needed to get to the roof. A three man team, on the fourth floor, was almost their undoing as they had not just men but a low-grade of vampire on the team.

Kat went down early in the fight, urging James to redouble his efforts. He concentrated his efforts on the vampire. He was slipery and dangerous. Finally James was in his grasp. Fangs were bared and James went limp. It needed to seem real. The bite came quickly as did the response. James was thrown aside in the death convulsions of the vampire.