Allison kept her head facing the tour ship and released bursts of air from the cannisters when her helmet’s HUD told her too. She had to have confidence in the course she’d plotted through the asteroids. She’d had Bit match the velocity of the tour ship, which was matching the velocity of the rings. That meant relative to her the ring and the ship were standing still even if they were all technically orbiting Saturn at about thirty thousand kilometers per hour. The reason she could get away with this and Bit couldn’t, was a matter of volume and of being a sitting duck because evasive maneuverers in a debris field were asking for a collision. She took up far less space than the starfighter. So instead of ramming through the debris she navigated around it. The trick was to maintain her orbital velocity while creating ‘downward’ thrust. Just like linking up with an orbital space station.

The only reason she even knew the math to even attempt to pull this off was her piloting training. In the military she was expected to learn how to plot a docking interception path without fancy computers or auto-pilot systems. She’d despised the training module. She was eating her words right at this very second, because in classic teenage fashion she’d said, ‘What are we even going to use this for?’ She hoped she could avoid running into her training officer because she knew the man would just love to say, ‘I told you so’, if he found out about her doing this.

The ring was only ten meters thick but to maintain her orbital velocity she had to coast. That meant the five meters of icy debris she had to navigate may as well have been fifty. She had truly forgotten how silent space was. She could hear her own breathing, her own heartbeat but there was no other sound. Her heart was pounding in her chest. She shifted her arms when her HUD indicated it was time to decelerate. She was forced to empty the cannisters. Apparently, she had miscalculated or screwed up her timing. She was heading for a hard collision with the tour ship. It had a thick armored hull so it could dip into the rings. She hoped those inside would assume the thud was just a piece of debris hitting the ship.

She slammed into the ship and her panicked attempts to slow her descent had decelerated her orbital velocity enough she was forced to grab on one of the shield projectors as the ship’s orbital velocity threatened to send her careening off into space untethered. She groaned and rolled over on her back. The armor had absorbed most of the blow. Without the armor she would have broken several bones as it was the collision had depleted over seventy percent of her armor’s power reserves. Since she face planted on the ship’s hull her chest which hit at the same time as her faceplate ached. She wrapped her arm over her chest and made a pained groan and thought: Yet another reason it sucks to be a girl. She spoke a prayer to the Dark Mother.

“B-mom, just once, I would love to look cool jumping on a ship, and if its not too much to ask, maybe one of those superhero landings, like you used to do when you were fighting superhumans.”

As she lay there recovering from the collision she realized her mistake. She hadn’t accounted for the ship’s 1G of artificial gravity. Mostly because the artificial gravity was legally not supposed to extend outside a ship for safety reasons, you don’t want two ships attracting each other, or rogue space items. Allison made a mental note to write up a fine for them. She cursed the fact the gravity field extended outside the ship further than it should, she also took it as a blessing, because she landed on top of the ship, she could now just walk across the hull without having to worry about floating off. That was another tool she was missing, magnetized boots. She rolled over on her front and pushed herself up and stood unsteadily on her feet. It took her most of the trip to her infiltration point to fully recover.

It took her only a couple of minutes to find the cargo docking link she’d asked Bit and Zebra to program a new code into with Bit’s cyber-warfare suite. She tapped in the code she’d given them. It flashed red. She glanced at her HUD’s timer. She was three minutes ahead of schedule, so likely they were still working on it. Shooting it out would not be a good option. Then she’d get blocked by emergency doors that every single ship had to avoid catastrophic air loss. Her timer flashed. She tried the code again. She did a fist pump when the interface flashed green. The door slid open, and she hang-dropped to the inner door so she wouldn’t make noise. The outer door slid shut and she was forced to wait while the air cycled in. She put the code in again and the inner door slid open.

Allison found herself in a very cramped and very dark cargo bay. The ship wasn’t meant for long term spaceflight so basically it was just a room where they stored all the snacks, dry food stuffs for the restaurant, and all the backroom stock for the ridiculously overpriced merchandise they sold in the gift shop. Allison climbed down onto the cargo elevator which was only two feet below the air lock she’d used. She rolled off the side and then dropped down quietly. Her armor’s built in night vision, which was in full color and high resolution, in other words far superior to even her high-end contacts.

She drew both of her pistols and squeezed through the thin isles formed by the different stacks of boxes. She heard voices as she neared the edge of the maze of boxes. She silently wondered how the hell the crew found anything in the packed cargo bay while pressing herself against a stack of the recyclable cargo crates. She peaked around the corner. Three open hatchways greeted her from her review of the ship schematics she knew one led to the kitchen and restaurant, one led to the gift shop’s backroom and the last led to a passageway heading towards the upper observation lounge. She couldn’t see anyone.

Allison reached down and pulled a micro-drone from her utility belt. Just one of a number of neat new toys she’d been granted as a member of System’s Alliance Special Operations. Unlike the super-tech envisioned by twenty-first century movies, this one had no wings, just an antigrav, a micro thrustor, a rudimentary scanner and a wide-angle holo-recorder. She saw the video feed come up on her armor’s HUD. The drone would fly around was powered by a relatively simple VI that would navigate the ship and give her a better picture of who was where, she did not trust the intel she had from System’s Alliance.

The drone flitted out of the cargo bay towards the voices. The VI was programmed to prioritize signs of sentient life as a point of interest. Her heart sank when she saw Wes standing over her mother, who was looking pretty beat up and as far as the drone’s rudimentary scanners could tell, unconscious. Beside him was the woman who had pointed the gauss pistol at her. Allison clenched her fists. She wanted to go in there guns blazing. Maybe even have them not set on stun. She hit the back of her helmet against the stack of boxes. She had to be smart about this; Her armor’s defensive energy was severely depleted from the less than perfect landing. Her audio scanners were picking up skittering. They had been since she got into the cargo bay.

Allison started tapping around the armor’s holographic interface for her holo-phone while she pressed herself against the boxes. Allison was looking for the life-sign scanner’s settings. As a rule it ignored insignificant detections such as insects and rodents because it was set to be used as a targeting system rather than an actual scanner. It was cheaper for the manufacturer to slap the same scanner in every device because of bulk discounts and then tailor them for use with software. She was overriding that software’s targeting protocols. When she finished her possible target list jumped from three, her mother, Wes and the woman, all of which were added via the drone. To two hundred plus in her immediate vicinity. Most of the targets were cockroaches but there were several rodents, specifically a species of large rat called dome rats. She threw up a bit in her mouth, I am never eating in a restaurant again. Eew.

Once she recovered from the whole reality check on just how many insects and rodents there were in food storage on ships she followed the targeting system’s guidance. There was a trick she had learned from Eyre over the holidays, a couple actually. Allison had managed the talking part, but the controlling part was a different subset of the vampiric ability and Oozie was too smart to be controlled like an animal might be. Eyre had said it was the first power her mother taught her, their mother… had taught her. That controlling animals was the first step in the path to influencing mortal minds. For an elder like Eyre, it was an insignificant amount of blood. For Allison the cost was steep in her blood vitality as Maria called it. The talking part cost her nothing, it was like Allison had learned a different, if odd language. She dropped her holo-web’s personal cloaking field when she found a pair of rats feasting on an open box of cereal they’d torn open and whispered in… rat speak.

“Psst, hey, you.”

Both rats looked up at her with fear in their beady little eyes. One of the rats was female, or least sounded that way to Allison. Thankfully whatever mystical power of the blood facilitated the communication between vampire, or in this case dhampir and beast smoothed things out so it was like she was talking to a small human.

“You have no face are you one of those pests?”

Allison rolled her eyes under her tinted face plate and willed the helmet to sink into the armor. Allison crouched down.

“Better?”

The female rat inched closer her nose twitching.

“You smell like a hunter.”

Allison pondered just forcing the issue, but then decided to try and negotiate. Enforcing her will on another living creature seemed wrong to her. As much as she wanted to save her mother from further pain, she had to deal with her conscience later. She wasn’t concerned about being found out. The conversation would just sound like two rats squeaking at each other to any outside listeners.

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“I am. I’m hunting people like me. Bad ones.”

The rat got low and bit at the air.

“Like the one in white, always chasing us, always putting the best up high.”

The rat’s eyes darted to an out of place box on top of a pile of gift shop merchandise. Allison raised an eyebrow. It was apparently the individual packets of peanut butter restaurants would give out with breakfast toast.

“Peanut butter? Really?”

The rat inched closer.

“Fun. Tasty.”

Allison reached up and pulled out two containers of peanut butter and ripped the top off them and put them on the floor. Both rats dove in and finished them off in record time. The female rat looked up at Allison.

“More!”

Allison shook her head.

“Okay. I’ll dump it out for you but, if I do, you need to swarm it right away with your… whatever your group calls itself. Then scatter when someone comes out to look. After that you can take as much as you want. No one will bother you for a while.”

The two rats discussed the request between themselves. Most of it was about being frightened she was leading them into a trap. The female rat who was apparently the spokeswoman for the two narrowed her eyes.

“No tricks?”

Allison nodded.

“No tricks. I just need a distraction. Oh, and if you poop in the hair of the two people I’m about to leave on the floor, I would not be opposed to it, especially the man with the face hair.”

The rat rubbed its two front paws together. Allison offered her finger.

“So, is it a deal?”

The rat looked at Allison’s armor covered finger. Finally, she reached out and touched the finger with her paw.

“If you let us climb on you.”

Allison blinked.

“Really?”

The rat stood up on its rear legs.

“We’re slow, you’re fast.”

Allison sighed.

“Fine.”

She formed her helmet, reached up and grabbed the box of peanut butter packets. The two rats vanished and with in thirty seconds Allison had eight large dome rats clinging to various parts of her armor and one on the top of her head. She thought, I feel like an idiot I look like one too.

She put the box up high. This led to a chorus of complaints from her passengers. She spoke in rat.

“Patience. Get down.”

The rats climbed off of her. She reached up on her toes and slid the box off. It fell to the floor with a crash, this sent the peanut butter packets spilling across the floor. The rats swarmed and started tearing into the packets. She realized that they probably would have done it without prompting or an agreement but then she wouldn’t have known they even liked peanut butter. She heard Wes speaking.

“Go check that out. Make sure we didn’t miss a crew member.”

The woman walked out of the passageway to the kitchen and turned the light on for the cargo bay. Her face twisted with disgust and she stomped towards the rats waving her hands.

“Disgusting! Rats!”

The rats scattered. They had made quite a mess. Peanut butter was all over the floor and trails of it led away from the pile of packets in all directions except the direction of Wes’s partner. The woman walked up to the pile and scratched the back of her head. She gave one last look around before turning back towards where she came from. Allison seized the opportunity to pounce. She covered the woman’s mouth and pressed one of her pistols into her lower back. Allison did her best to sound older, and professional when she whispered.

“This is a disintegration pistol it is silent, that armored suit of yours won’t stop it. I would very much appreciate not turning you into a human-sized puff of turquoise smoke, so out of respect for the fact I didn’t kill you outright, don’t make any sudden moves, do not alert your friends. Now kindly remove your translator and holo-phone, then drop them on the ground. Then your gauss pistol, please.”

The woman slowly did as she was asked. Allison dragged her back through the boxes keeping her hand firmly over the woman’s mouth. Allison released the woman and shoved her behind some boxes at the back of the cargo bay. She dropped her cloaking field. The woman stumbled backwards, her eyes focused on the alien pistol and spoke quietly.

“Who the fuck are you?”

Allison slid her finger along the pistol setting it to disintegrate. She pointed at a stack of empty boxes and fired. They evaporated in a puff of turquoise smoke. She’d lied the pistols were not silent but at this distance it would fade into the background noise of the ship. She swept her finger back towards the front of the pistol setting it to stun. She pointed it at the woman.

“Now, I lied about the silent part, but not the disintegration part. Call out to your partner. Tell him you found something back here. If you do, I won’t disintegrate any of your crew. If you warn him… well, I have two of these and at least it will save all of your families on funeral costs.”

The woman hesitated. Allison drew her other pistol and disintegrated an innocent crate of Saturn stuffies.

“I had to interrupt a vacation to deal with this crap. Do not try my patience.”

The woman called out.

“Wes, I found something you need to see!”

Allison activated her cloaking field and stepped back. She set both pistols to stun. Wes called out.

“Tammy, where are you? Why isn’t your comm link working?”

Tammy called out.

“I had to reboot.”

Wes came around the corner. Allison shot him in the back with both pistols. He fell to the ground. Tammy rushed forward to check on him. Allison let her cloak fall away and aimed both pistols at Tammy.

“Sit down please.”

Tammy glared at Allison but sat down against a stack of crates. Allison pulled her triggers. She knelt down and pressed her holo-phone against Wes’s. She started the process of launching the attack daemons but found her HUD was moving on its own. She smiled. Zebra sliced through the security layer on Wes’s holo-phone with ease and Allison could hear their internal comm network. Allison removed Wes’s holo-phone, translator and weapons.

Allison plugged her holo-phone into his data port. All cybernetic enhancements that could effectively shutdown and still leave the owner alive had a kill switch in them. This prevented cybernetic monstrosities from overwhelming police forces. The cybernetic network inside someone’s body was highly encrypted to prevent rogue elements from doing what Allison was doing right now. Her advantage was that as a member of the System’s Alliance Special Operations branch, she was an authorized actor on the government’s part and could do the shutdown. She took great pleasure in locking Wes’s cybernetics down. She did the same to Tammy, though the woman had far less chrome than her partner. Allison yanked the liquid metal cable and made her way to her mother.

Apiyo was in pretty rough shape. Wes had not been gentle with his questioning. Allison felt sick. This was her doing, indirectly. She’d trusted the military. She wasn’t sure she would trust it again. She wanted to blame Major Ghai, he was an easy target, but this happened in Sol Sector, so it came from Special Operations Command in Sol Sector. She gently took her mother’s hands.

“Mom. I’m here.”

Apiyo looked around and one of her eyes was swollen shut. Allison fought the urge to go give Wes a beating it would take him months to recover from with all the dhampir and armor powered strength she had. As it was Allison’s eyes were glowing gold and her fangs were out. There was no hiding her rage at what happened to her mother. Yet tears still formed in her eyes. Her face was the perfect picture of the dichotomy found within a dhampir, and most vampires. A vicious predator with a human conscience. If Apiyo had her daughter’s complexion you’d scarcely be able to tell she wasn’t bruise colored. Apiyo’s words were muffled.

“Allison, what are you doing here? These people are dangerous.”

Allison pulled out her vibro knife and cut her mother’s bindings. The look in her eyes would have reminded Eyre of her mother at that moment. Allison spoke quietly, her fangs added a vicious edge to her voice.

“So am I.”

Allison sheathed her knife. She touched her mother’s forearm.

“Can you walk mom?”

Apiyo struggled to stand. Allison helped her out of the chair. Apiyo took a few steps and nodded.

“Mom, I know you’re in a lot of pain. You just have to find someplace to hide while I deal with the rest of them. I’ll be back for you. I promise.”

She let go of her mother. Apiyo shuffled slowly to the back corner of the kitchen and slid down a wall behind a pair of sinks. Allison took several deep breaths and fought back the animalistic rage rising in her chest. She truly wanted to rip them apart limb by limb. The beast had been pricked and it wanted to be unleashed to show them just who they had made the mistake of crossing. She noticed she had an audience; It was the female rat from before. She almost hissed at the rat but she caught herself as the female rat from before addressed her.

“We was talking. You smell like the bloody one. Is she part of your nest?”

Allison nodded, it took a bit of effort not to sound feral when she responded.

“She is my mother.”

The rat rubbed its nose.

“One of you big ones got my mother too. We will watch her for you hunter, peanut butter giver.”

Allison pondered the effectiveness of rat guards and her rage evaporated. The beast quelled by an innocent question from a random dome rat.

“Just, keep your distance. She’s not a fan of rodents. Thank you.”

The rat scurried off. Allison closed her eyes and let her helmet form over her head again. She had no wish to repeat her vertigo experience by getting shot in the head, in fact, she was pretty sure she’d rather just die than live through that again. She approached her mother’s hiding place.

“So… uh mom. I’m here alone. So, I… uh, recruited some other hostages, they might be by, just uh… don’t kick... hit, or well just ignore the rats, okay?”

Her mother through her haze of pain looked disgusted.

“Rats? I aate here!”

Allison shook her hand palm down.

“If you didn’t eat the peanut butter for the cereal, I’m sure you’re fine.”

She started to move away then paused and leaned back.

“You didn’t notice any extra crunch, did you, I mean in what you ate?”

Apiyo looked up at Allison with her one eye that would open.

“Crunch? What’s that supposed to mean?”

Allison winced.

“You know what, it’s nothing. I’m just going to go… shoot some people now… uh. I love you and I’m glad you’re… well not… I love you. I’m sorry.”

Allison activated her cloaking field. Apiyo watched her daughter seem to vanish into thin air before leaning her head back against the tiled wall of the kitchen and closing her eye. She whispered.

“Lord please preserve us through my daughter’s impulsiveness.”