The green-eyed human walked out into the body-strewn command deck and stopped, facing Thikair, his hands clasped behind him, and his three fellows gathered at his back, like guards of honor.
The green-eyed human was the shortest of the four. Two of the others were much taller than he—both of them in garments bearing the mottled camouflage patterns the humans’ militaries favored, although the patterns were different. One of them—the taller one, in the pale, almost dusty-looking camouflage pattern—had brown eyes and a skin dark as night. The other could have been designed as his antithesis: clad in a darker, more forestlike pattern, with blue eyes, fair skin, and wheat-colored hair. The third was only a very little taller than their chieftain, and he, too, had green eyes, but terrifying as the hate in those eyes was, they lacked the power and dark fury crackling in the ones which held Thikair motionless.
Silence hovered, twisting Thikair’s nerves like white-hot pincers, and then, finally, the human leader spoke.
“You have much for which to answer, Fleet Commander Thikair,” he said quietly, softly . . . in perfect Shongair.
Thikair only stared at him, unable—not allowed—even to speak, and the human smiled. There was something terrifying about that smile . . . and something wrong, as well. The teeth, Thikair realized. The ridiculous little human canines had lengthened, sharpened, and in that moment Thikair understood exactly how thousands upon thousands of years of prey animals had looked upon his own people’s smiles.
“You call yourselves ‘predators.’” The human’s upper lip curled. “Trust me, Fleet Commander—your people know nothing about predators. But they will.”
Something whimpered in Thikair’s throat, and the green eyes glowed with a terrifying internal fire.
“I had forgotten,” the human said. “I had turned away from my own past. Even when you came to my world, even when you murdered billions of humans, I had forgotten. But now, thanks to you, Fleet Commander, I remember. I remember the obligations of honor. I remember a Prince of Wallachia’s responsibilities. And I remember—oh, how I remember—the taste of vengeance. And that is what I find most impossible to forgive, Fleet Commander Thikair. I have spent five hundred years learning to forget that taste, and you have filled my mouth with it once more.”
Thikair would have sold his soul to look away from those blazing emerald eyes, but even that was denied him.
“For an entire century, I hid even from myself—hid under my murdered brother’s name. But now, Fleet Commander, I take back my own name. I am Vlad Drakulya—Vlad, Son of the Dragon, Prince of Wallachia—and you have dared to shed the blood of those under my protection.”
The paralysis left Thikair’s voice—released, he was certain, by the human-shaped monster in front of him—and he swallowed hard.
“Wh-what do you—?” he managed to get out, but then his freed voice failed him, and Vlad smiled cruelly.
“I could not have acted when you first came, even if I had been prepared to—willing to—go back to what once I was,” he said. “There was only myself and my handful of closest followers, and we would have been far too few. But then you showed me I truly had no choice. When you decided to build a weapon to destroy every living human, when you seized those under my protection upon whom to experiment for that purpose, you made my options very simple. I could not permit that—I would not. And so I had no alternative but to create more of my own kind. To create an army—not large, as armies go, but an army still—to deal with you.
“I was more cautious than in my . . . impetuous youth. The vampires I chose to make this time were better men and women than I was when I was yet breathing. I pray for my own sake that they will balance the hunger you have awakened in me once again, but do not expect them to feel any kindness where you and your kind are concerned.
“They are all much younger than I, new come to their abilities, not yet strong enough to endure the touch of the rising sun. But, like me, they are no longer breathing. Like me, they could ride the exteriors of your shuttles when you were kind enough to recall them from Romania and Russia to North America. When you used them to evacuate all of your surviving personnel to your transports . . . and to your dreadnoughts. And like me, they have used your neural educators, learned how to control your vessels, how to use your technology.”
That terrible voice paused for a moment, and the fire in those eyes turned colder than the space beyond the dreadnought’s hull.
“I learned much in my . . . conversation with your Ground Base Commander Shairez,” Vlad said then. “Oh, yes, she was eager to tell me anything I might possibly wish to know before the end. And I learned still more probing the history in your educators’ data banks. Interrogating your other base commanders one by one as your installations fell. I know your Empire’s plans, Fleet Commander. I know how the Hegemony came to be, how it is organized. And I know how its Council has chosen to regard the human race—how casually it tossed this entire planet into the hands of the murderous vermin who have killed two-thirds of those who lived upon it. Who would have killed all of them out of frustrated ambition and fury at their having dared to defend themselves against unprovoked invasion.
“Oh, yes, Fleet Commander, I have learned a great deal, and I will leave your educators here on Earth, to give every single breathing human a complete Hegemony-level education. And, as you may have noticed, we were very careful not to destroy your industrial ships. What do you think a planet of humans will be able to accomplish over the next few centuries, even after all you have done to them, from that starting point? And how do you think they will respond to what the Hegemony Council allowed—encouraged—you to do to their world and to their people. Do you think the Council will be pleased?”
Thikair swallowed again, choking on a thick bolus of fear, and the human cocked his head to one side.
“For myself, I doubt the Council will be very happy with you, Fleet Commander. But do not concern yourself with that. I promise you their anger will have no effect upon your Empire. After all, each of these dreadnoughts can shatter a planet, can it not? And which of your worlds will dream, even for a moment, that one of your own capital ships might pose any threat to it at all?”
“No,” Thikair managed to whimper, his eyes darting to the plot where the green icons of his other dreadnoughts continued to move away from the planet. “No, please . . .”
“How many human fathers and mothers would have said exactly the same thing to you as their children died before their eyes?” the human replied coldly, and Thikair sobbed.
The human watched him mercilessly, but then he looked away. The deadly green glow left his eyes, and they seemed to soften as they gazed up at the taller human beside him.
“Keep me as human as you can, my Stephen,” he said softly in English. “Keep me sane. Remind me of why I tried so hard to forget.”
The dark-skinned human looked back down at him and nodded, and then the green eyes moved back to Thikair.
“I believe you have unfinished business with this one, my Stephen,” he said, and it was the bigger, taller, darker, and infinitely less terrifying human’s turn to smile.
“Yes, I do,” his deep voice rumbled, and Thikair squealed like a small, trapped animal as the powerful, dark hands reached for him.
“This is for my daughters,” Stephen Buchevsky said.
EPILOGUE
PLANET
EARTH
YEAR 1 OF THE TERRAN EMPIRE
Dave Dvorak stood gazing up into the frosty, moonless night sky with one arm wrapped around his wife’s shoulder. The other arm was still immobilized, but it was getting better. And it looked like Hosea MacMurdo was going to get the opportunity to rebuild his left shoulder, after all.
In fact, a lot of things were going to happen “after all.” His children were going to live and grow up, have children of their own. His country was going to emerge from the wreckage and the carnage once again. Other nations around the globe would live once more, mourning their dead but alive. His
entire world was going to survive.
After all.
“Hard to believe, isn’t it?” Sharon murmured, and he looked down and smiled at her.
“Always believe three impossible things before breakfast every morning,” he told her.
“That’s silly, Daddy,” another voice said, and he turned to look at his son. Malachai Dvorak had a dark mustache of hot chocolate from the supply of instant still tucked away in the cave and broken out for the occasion, and he shook his head, red hair gleaming in the light of the quietly hissing Coleman lantern.
“Impossible things aren’t real,” he informed his father with impeccable six-year-old logic. “And if they aren’t real, you shouldn’t believe in them.”
“You think?”
Malachai nodded firmly, and Dvorak took his arm from around Sharon to ruffle the boy’s hair, then looked across at his daughters. Maighread looked back at him, but Morgana appeared to be bobbing for marshmallows in her huge mug of hot chocolate. She had her face buried in it, anyway.
“What do you think, Maighread?” he asked. “Should you believe in impossible things?”
“Well . . .”
His daughter cocked her head to one side, obviously pondering, then turned to the even smaller, blond-haired girl standing beside her. Zinaida Karpovna was looking down into her own hot chocolate with an almost reverent expression.
“What do you think, Zinaida?” Maighread asked.
“About what?” Zinaida responded, looking up from the mug. “I wasn’t listening.”
The Russian girl spoke flawless English, but that was fair enough. Maighread could have asked the question in equally flawless Russian if she’d wanted to, thanks to the neural educator installed in the cave. They’d pulled a few strings—Dvorak was prepared to admit it, if anyone asked—to get that educator, but there hadn’t been too much argument about it. There were upward of three thousand of them scattered about the world at the moment, and producing more of them would be one of the first priorities of the world’s rebuilt infrastructure. In the meantime, Dave Dvorak had every intention of going ahead and realizing his desire to be a history teacher . . . especially now that he had the history of a whole interstellar civilization (such as it was) at his mental fingertips.
The kids certainly thought it had been a good idea, too. They’d come to think of the neural educator as the biggest and best encyclopedia in the entire known universe, and their craving for knowledge seemed bottomless. In fact, the adults had to be careful about cramming knowledge too quickly into children; there were physiological limitations on how much neurally delivered information a still-maturing brain could absorb without cognitive and psychological damage. Besides, the educators provided only knowledge, not the ability to grasp that knowledge or handle complex concepts. It would be some time before any of the kids were old enough for a complete neurological education, and they didn’t seem to have fully realized—yet, at any rate—that they were still going to have to go to school to develop those cognitive skills, learn to handle those concepts. But they already had a well-developed set of language skills, and since Zinaida and her family were going to be living with them for a while, all of the parents involved had decided it only made sense to make all the children bilingual.
“Daddy was asking if people should believe in impossible things,” Maighread explained now, and Zinaida shrugged.
“Of course they should,” she said simply. “If we didn’t believe in impossible things, we wouldn’t be here. I mean, if anyone had asked if I thought I’d ever drink something like this . . . hot chocolate,” she pronounced the words cautiously, despite her new English fluency, “I would’ve thought that was pretty impossible.”
She shrugged again, and Dvorak nodded.
“Good answer, kid,” he told her, reaching out to tug teasingly on her right earlobe. Then he looked at his son again.
“You know, Malachai, everything’s impossible until somebody believes in it enough to make it real.”
“An excellent observation,” another voice said, and the adult Dvoraks turned just a bit quickly as they realized the night’s guest of honor had arrived.
He smiled at them, and reached out his left hand to Zinaida. She smiled back, then cuddled her cheek into his palm, catching his hand between her face and shoulder in a handless embrace that was somehow unutterably tender.
“And as Zinaida has observed,” Pieter Ushakov continued, looking across her bent head at Dave and Sharon Dvorak, “if we did not believe in impossible things, we would not be here, would we?”
My, oh my, but have you got that one right, Dvorak thought wryly. Legends and myths and monsters, oh my! Count—I’m sorry, Prince—Dracula? Good guy vampires riding to the rescue of all humanity? Who would’ve thunk it?
He looked at the blond-haired, blue-eyed man whose breath wasn’t producing the vapor clouds everyone else seemed to be exhaling. Which had a little something to do with the fact that Pieter Ushakov no longer exhaled. Or inhaled, for that matter, unless he needed the air to speak.
Dvorak glanced back up at the sky. Most of humanity’s heavens were still blacker than black, without the high-tech sky glow which had once been so much a part of its major cities. There were places where those cities were already coming back, though, and whatever human authority had managed to preserve itself through the nightmare of the Shongair invasion was trying desperately to bring some sort of order to a world coping with starvation, disease, and—for the northern hemisphere, at least—the rapid onset of winter.
It was going to be bad, he knew. Not as bad as it could have been, but even with all the goodwill in the world, and with all of the captured Shongair resources which were being converted and applied to the problem as quickly as possible, millions more were still going to die. It couldn’t be any other way with the planetary infrastructure so hammered and battered and broken.
But bad as this winter was going to be, spring would follow, and new growth would emerge from the killed-back winter roots. And perhaps—just perhaps, he thought, following up that metaphor—something newer and stronger and better would grow out of the rich, sustaining soil of the past.
God knows it’s been manured with enough blood, he thought soberly. And we know we’re not alone, anymore. Not only that, I don’t think we’re going to like our neighbors very much. So, since humans seem best at burying their differences in the face of some mutual, outside threat. . . .
He watched the larger of the two bright, shining motes sweeping slowly across the night sky. He thought it actually looked bigger to the naked eye than it had just the night before, although that could be only his imagination. After all, he knew it was getting bigger, even though nobody’s unaided vision should be able to pick that up just yet.
The Shongair industrial vessels didn’t care that they’d changed ownership and management. They just went steadily ahead, completing their automated assembly process, preparing to begin construction of an entire Hegemony-level industrial infrastructure for Earth’s tattered survivors. By the time the various planetary governments got themselves reorganized, that industrial infrastructure would be just about ready to begin rebuilding mankind’s home, and an old line from a not particularly great science-fiction television series ran through the back of Dave Dvorak’s brain.
“We can rebuild it, we can make it better,” he misquoted quietly, and Sharon laughed.
“Thank you, Colonel Austin!” She shook her head at him. “You do realize none of our kids—or our guests—are going to get that one, don’t you?”
“They don’t have to understand the original reference,” he replied, and her smile faded.
“No, they don’t,” she agreed softly. “The question is whether or not we can pull it off this time.”
“We can,” Ushakov said, facing them squarely. “I need my hand, Zinaida,” he said, and she smiled up at him and released it.
He smiled back, then used his liberated hand to stroke the small, sleepy bundle of night-bl
ack fur cradled on his right forearm. The puppy stretched and opened his mouth in a prodigious yawn, showing needle-sharp little white teeth, and Ushakov chuckled. Then he looked back at his hosts.
“We can, and we shall,” he said simply. “I believe the English idiom is ‘Failure is not an option.’” He shrugged, still stroking the back of the puppy’s delicate skull. “Vlad and Stephen will deal with the Shongairi. That will still leave the remainder of the Hegemony, however, and I doubt they will react calmly to the notion that someone far worse—as they see things at any rate—than the Shongairi has burst upon the scene. Worse still, from their perspective, I think with the lesson of the Shongairi before us here on our own world, we will not be quick to accept the Hegemony’s authority. I doubt they will react calmly to that, either.”
He shrugged again.
“One may quibble about the historical forces in play at any single moment—for example, Marx was a dunce, in my own opinion, although I admit that may be prejudice on my part—but the dialectic remains a valid method of analysis, does it not? In this instance, the thesis is the Hegemony’s prejudices and mania for stability, while humanity’s insatiable hunger for change and our fury over what was done to us represent the antithesis. I do not think they can coexist for very long. So the question becomes who will survive in the coming synthesis, and I believe the Hegemony will discover that humanity is very, very good at surviving.”
Yes, we are, Dvorak thought, then looked up quickly as he heard a soft, whooshing sort of sound and Keelan Wilson suddenly squealed with laughter.
Boris Karpov still didn’t talk a lot, but he and Keelan had been almost inseparable ever since his mother and his siblings had arrived to join Ushakov. Now the two of them were “helping” Jessica and Veronica set the table while Rob and Alec lit the bonfire. Normally, that was Dvorak’s job, but with only one good arm, he’d agreed—reluctantly—to delegate it to Wilson.