Rescue From Planet Pleasure (21 page)

We three vampires cleared our throats in unison.

“And then?” I asked.

Blossom made a loud
ka-blew-wee
sound, complete with hand choreography, followed by, “Adios,
muchacha
. Phaedra and the Nancharm are history. I won’t need this anymore.” She skinned the foil cap off her head and balled it up, dropping it on the floor. “Pretty good double-cross, don’t you think?”

“All of the Nancharm?” Carmen asked.

“Eventually. Of course they’re scattered all over the galaxy so it’ll take a while to hunt them all down. Statistically, it’s highly improbable that we’ll get each and every one of them.” Blossom heaved her shoulders for a long sigh. “The cost-benefit algorithm will argue against a prolonged campaign of extermination. But no worries, since Nancharm can no longer reproduce, the survivors will eventually die out on their own.”

“Rather cold-blooded,” I said.

Blossom shrugged. “Like I’m going to lose sleep over it. All the planets in the Galactic Union kept a standing military force, ostensibly under the command of the Nancharm. But the union was a simmering keg ready to explode. The moment the Nancharm got distracted, we turned our weapons around and
bang
.”

The back of the couch swung up and Blossom leaned against it, reclining like a smug princess. She crossed her ankles. Her bejeweled anklets and many toe rings sparkled.

“Look,” Carmen exclaimed. She gestured to the hologram. Phaedra’s emerald bubble started to shrink, becoming a pinpoint of light, then disappeared.

Blossom’s bulging eyes searched the miniature landscape. “Where did she go?”

“A portal,” Carmen answered.

“And went where?” Blossom drew close to the display and squinted.

“On her way to Earth, I’m sure,” Jolie replied.

A hearty guffaw exploded from me.

“What the hell is so goddamn funny?” Blossom looked up and groused.

I rubbed my stomach, the laugh cramps ached but I managed to say, “Blossom, Phaedra has forced your hand.”

Blossom curled her trunk and frowned. The wrinkles on her elephantine face deepened into craggy features. “I am not amused. Explain yourself.”

“It means you are fucked unless you cooperate with us.”

***

Chapter Thirty-six

Blossom repeatedly uncurled and curled her trunk as she stalled for time while deciding if I was bluffing.

Which I wasn’t.

“In my culture,” she said, “when one is told they’re about to be fucked, that’s a very good thing. We Wah-zhim spend most of our time anticipating getting fucked. But I know among you humans, that getting fucked is a euphemism for finding yourself in a difficult situation.” She tapped the translator box dangling in front of her throat. “I do not believe I am in a difficult situation. So tell me, little human, how am I about to get fucked unless I cooperate with you?”

I hustled to the hologram and raked my finger through the ghostly image of the destruction on D-Galtha. “See what Phaedra did to the Nancharm? Cracked them wide open so their enemies could attack. What makes you think she can’t do this to you?”

“Why should she?” Blossom asked, sounding worried.

“Because you tried to kill her and now she’s escaped,” I explained. “She learned the Nancharm’s weakness, she’ll learn yours.”

Blossom leaned forward and her trunk groped for the ball of metal foil she had discarded earlier. “You’re exaggerating her abilities.” She scooped the foil from the floor and began to unwad it. “You have no proof that we’re vulnerable.”

I fought back a grin. “Fine, if you want to be the one who brought Phaedra to Wah-zhim, then be prepared to suffer the consequences.”

Worry deepened the already substantial wrinkles that crosshatched Blossom’s face. She smoothed the crinkled foil over her head to reform the aluminum cap. She snapped her fingers, the hologram clicked off, and she wrung her hands. The bangles on her wrists clinked together. “If I take you to Earth, you’ll stop her there?”

“That’s what we intend,” Carmen answered.

“Or we’ll die trying,” Jolie added.

“That goes without saying,” Blossom snapped. “If I return you to Earth, Phaedra won’t follow me to Wah-zhim?”

My thoughts rambled over unpleasant ideas that I decided to keep to myself. The Wah-zhim weren’t completely safe. Phaedra might well raid the Galactic Union to extort help or confiscate weapons. “I can’t promise that. But this fight is between Phaedra and us. Your best bet is to head to Earth and let us fight her there.”

Blossom steepled her fingers. Her trunk swung back and forth like a windsock searching for the prevailing wind. “How will you defeat Phaedra? If the Nancharm didn’t have a chance with their weapons, what can you hope to accomplish with your puny earthling weapons?”

“The difference,” I replied, “is that we know what we’re up against.”

Blossom returned to swinging her trunk, unconvinced.

Carmen said, “We’ll be fighting her on our home turf.”

Blossom caressed her chin with her trunk. “I could drop you guys off, fly into orbit, and when Phaedra shows up, nuke Earth with a volley of thousand-megaton planet wreckers.”

“Wouldn’t work,” I said. “You just nuked D-Galtha and Phaedra got away.”

She stamped one foot on the dais and uttered a string of commands in her language. The two pilots danced their fingers across the forward controls. The saucer swung around. A new panorama of space with constellations and gas formations panned across the view screen.

I asked, “Where are we going?”

“Earth. Via the 3 Kiloparsec Arm Highway.”

The view screen aligned on a cluster of blurry glowing objects.

“Wormholes,” Blossom explained, anticipating our question. “Shortcuts through the galaxy.”

“How long to Earth?” Jolie asked.

“Depends on traffic,” Blossom said. “We haven’t scheduled a trip through the Central Wormhole Transportation Authority, so we’ll have to take our place in the access lane.”

The image on the screen magnified, showing three wormholes. Each were faint clouds of gas pinwheeling into voids that looked like holes punched in the fabric of space. A grid appeared on the screen and dotted flashing lights funneled into and out of the wormholes. An arrow pointed to a light that joined one line arcing toward the wormhole at our upper left. Symbols lit up above the light, and I assumed one of them was our ship joining the queue.

“Seems pretty orderly considering the war against the Nancharm,” Jolie noted.

“Commerce has to keep churning,” Blossom replied. “Cold fusion powers our ships but it’s money that makes everything run.”

Blossom’s eyes followed the symbols scrolling across the screen, left to right. “According to the traffic report, they’ve rerouted the trans-galactic turnpike because of construction in the 47 U Majoris Bypass.”

The screen switched to a forward view of saucers approaching a wormhole, our lane of traffic spiraling toward the black center. I didn’t know much about wormholes or quantum physics. The best I could remember was a show on the Discovery Channel talking about stuff getting zapped to another dimension as sub-sub-atomic particles. My gut lurched in dread. To hold myself steady, my hand grasped the edge of a wall panel and my toes clutched the insides of my shoes.

“We’ll have to detour through the Denebola Sector.” Blossom kept reading. “That will delay our arrival at 43 Zeta Twelve.”

“What’s that?” I asked, trying to sound curious instead of anxious as hell.

“You know it as Earth.”

The ships in line zipped into the wormhole.

“How much of a delay?”

“Considerable. Maybe as long as two minutes.”

The saucer in front of us elongated into the wormhole and disappeared. It was our turn.

Next stop … home.

And Phaedra.

***

Chapter Thirty-seven

The view screen remained fixed on the center of the wormhole, a whirlpool of gray mist that receded into a distant black dot. Symbols flashed staccato-like all over the screen. The two Wah-zhim pilots made final adjustments on their controls, then paused, their bejeweled fingers hovering above the buttons. Blossom sat upright, appearing just a bit tense.

Carmen and Jolie swung their gazes at me, and I tried to act all ghetto-cool behind a taut smile.

Our saucer sped to the wormhole. Points of light streaked past us, like fireflies sucked into a vacuum cleaner. The wormhole filled the view screen and though the saucer made no change in attitude, I felt a
whoa!
top-of-the-roller-coaster moment. My throat clamped tight, my guts somersaulted, all followed by a
whoosh!
And we dropped.

Or so it felt.

The view screen showed us zipping through a tunnel of blurry lights. The pilots toggled buttons and nudged the control levers. The symbols on the screen slowed their flickering. A collective
whew
washed through the bridge. Blossom drummed her fingers on the dais console. Jolie crossed her arms and stared at the screen. Carmen leaned against the bulkhead beside the dais.

The tunnel forked ahead. One of the pilots tripped a short lever and a yellow arrow on the left side of the screen blinked. We followed the left fork and the pilot flicked off the signal. But the ship held rock-steady. The wormhole rushing by made the whole experience seem fake, like we were watching an IMAX movie.

“How fast are we going?” Jolie asked.

“Just a tad over the posted limit,” Blossom answered.

“The galaxy is huge,” I noted. “Getting to Earth will take time even at this speed.”

“We’re in the HOV lane,” she replied.

I thought about the little of my science classes that I remembered. Time should slow inside the ship as we approached the speed of light, though it would continue at its normal rate in the world outside, which should play hell on everyone’s calendars. But that didn’t concern the Wah-zhim. Plus we were hauling ass way past the speed of light. An impossibility according to Einstein. Maybe as smart as Albert was, he hadn’t gotten past remedial extraterrestrial physics.

I watched the Wah-zhim at work and wondered what it would be like to command this saucer. Put that on my business card.
Felix Gomez. Detective vampire. Starship captain.

We blasted through another wormhole interchange. After a while, accelerating to warp factor whatever lost its novelty and the sensation was like standing in the crosstown bus waiting for the next stop.

A new set of symbols lit on the screen. The pilots became more alert and adjusted their controls. Up ahead, the sides of the tunnel unraveled and
Presto
! We were cruising past a planet the color of red dirt.

Blossom said, “Mars.”

Back in the hood, baby.

An orange aura blossomed around my hands and arms. I glanced at my torso, legs and feet. The aura shimmered around me bright as a flame. I looked at Carmen and Jolie, and similar auras sheathed their bodies, head to toe.

They gawked at me, eyes shining red as burning rubies. Our supernatural powers were back. My kundalini noir spiked with joy. I had no clue why we had our powers here and not on D-Galtha. But no matter. We pumped our fists and shouted, “Yes!”

Blossom reacted to our outburst with a bemused smirk, though she had no idea what had just happened to us vampires. A yellow aura only we vampires could see shined around her. The color was typical for an alien, and it sparked with puzzlement.

Jolie clasped her hands like she was holding a pistol and aimed it at me. “Once we corner Phaedra, I got dibs on the last double-tap.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” I said. “Whoever gets the first chance at the killing blow, go for it.”

“How far to Earth?” Jolie asked. It was a simple question but one loaded with anticipation and vengeance.

“Thirty-million miles, give or take,” Blossom answered. “We’ve had to slow to sub-light speed so it should take about five minutes.”

The view screen shifted toward a very bright star. Our sun. The white ball of light looked so friendly, and to be honest, I missed its gaseous smiling face.

The screen shifted again and aligned on a planet surrounded with a faint glow. The screen reset and the planet got bigger in stuttering increments until it appeared as a blue marble bathed in clouds.

Our beautiful Earth. No place like home.

This close to our turf, my thoughts turned to Coyote. I hoped he was okay. What loomed ahead, though, was the upcoming battle with Phaedra. As long as we could avoid her psychic mind grip and dodge whatever tricks she pulled out of her wicked little ass, we should be able to beat her. Somehow.

“Are you going to beam us down?” I asked.

“Say what?” Blossom asked.

I explained what I meant. Blossom tried to keep a straight face, then cracked up. She said something to her pilots and they guffawed out loud.

Blossom wiped her eyes. “No, I’m not going to”—she made air quotes—“‘beam you down.’ We’re going to land.”

“What about the quarantine?” I asked. “You’re not supposed to land on Earth.”

Blossom tossed a dismissive wave. “The Galactic Union is in disarray. At the moment they have bigger
gogzams
to fry than watching what goes on in this corner of the Milky Way.” She pressed buttons on her console and the hologram reappeared in front of the dais.

The hologram projected snapshots of tropical landscapes. I guessed the Amazon, Africa, Southern India. The snapshots disappeared into a fuzz of light and reformed into a hemisphere of the earth’s surface.

Blossom leaned from her couch to study the view. “Where do you live?”

Carmen spun the hologram like a globe. “Take us here.” She centered the 3D image on New Mexico and wagged her fingers to magnify the scene. Necklaces of tiny lights snaked over the darkened landscape, headlamps from lines of cars cruising the night highways.

Blossom touched a button. A filter of bright daylight bathed the landscape. She frowned. “A desert? You live in a desert when you could live in a jungle paradise?” She shook her head in bemusement. The hologram map resumed its nighttime shade and zoomed in until we could see individual cars moving on the roads. They crawled along like roly-polies, cones of light beaming from their heads.

Carmen turned the map until we were above the basin. The spire of Fajada Butte was on the left, the mesa on the right. The trough of Chaco Canyon lay in between. I studied the features to get my bearings and searched the edge of the mesa until I spotted a mobile home the size of a matchbox. Coyote’s casa.

Yellow light flicked through the tiny windows. I leaned close to the hologram for a Peeping Tom glimpse of my ancient undead friend.

The ship rocked beneath us.

“Earth’s atmosphere,” Blossom explained.

“Won’t the saucer glow from the heat?” I asked.

She chuckled. “If you’re worried that we’ll be spotted, forget it. We’ve got our cloaking shield activated. Where do you want to land?”

I spun the hologram and pointed to a spot on the mesa behind Coyote’s mobile home. “How far are we now?”

Blossom pressed a switch. The forward screen showed a map of New Mexico. We were north of Gallup headed east. “Hundred miles.”

My kundalini noir hummed with pleasure. A last-ditch battle with Phaedra notwithstanding, I was eager to plant my feet on terra firma.

A window at the right side of the main screen showed a cartoon depiction of the saucer in overhead view. Rays pulsed over the ship. “Radar,” Blossom noted.

The radar beams converged on us. She jabbed at buttons. “Hmm.”

I didn’t like the sound of that “What’s going on?”

“For such a primitive species,” she answered, “you humans sure catch on quick. Now I understand the need for the quarantine. Your electromagnetic locator technology is now sophisticated enough to detect us up to Level Four mode.” Blossom stroked her chin.

“What does that mean?”

Blossom trumpeted a command. The chief pilot flicked a switch.

“It means we’re going to Level Five jamming.
Duh?
”

A fan of pink sparkles swept over the picture of our saucer.

“What’s that?” Blossom asked, her unease obvious.

Carmen touched her temples. “Psychic energy sweep.”

“Phaedra?” Blossom asked, her anxiety pumping up.

“No,” Carmen replied worriedly. “It’s electronic in origin.”

The two pilots bleated excitedly. The front screen showed the fan collapsing into a line of sparks headed right at us.

“They’ve locked onto us,” Blossom shouted.

“How can that be?” It was my turn to sound as nervous as our captain.

Blossom zoomed in and pinpointed the energy emitter, a tower mounted on a large truck parked at the base of Fajada Butte. A fleet of Humvees surrounded the truck.

“Zoom in,” I ordered.

The hologram magnified until I recognized the markings on the truck. Unfortunately it was the one wild card I’d forgotten in this escapade.

Goons working for the federal government. Cress Tech International.

Our welcoming committee.

***