To Spite Another God Pt. 07

Mina sat underneath one of those awnings while the other vampires gathered around Dracula, who herself was listening to Antoni, who was saying: "I don't know this city, we didn't pass by it during our movements...but if it's a city, it has factories. I don't know if any of them are munition factories -- but I will be able to recognize those that are once I see them myself." He nodded, slightly, then glanced over at Mina, smiling at her while she moved from the edge of the awning to join in on the vampiric conference. "Before I was...recruited into his Tzar's army, I worked at a munition plant."

The others nodded. Sharon drew her legs underneath herself as she settled next to Mina, then leaned against her, casually. Mina smiled, caressing her long hair, while Sharon said: "Are we really going to try and run a factory? Aren't we vampires? Do we need this kind of thing?"

Sharon had undergone her transformation during their flight, buried in a coffin and carried along their wagons, until she had woken and started to undergo her training. She took to being a vampire as easily as the others -- whatever dietary concerns she had had for being a Jew didn't seem to impact the fact she drank blood. Mina had asked her about it and she had explained that, for a Jew, if you were going to die, the rules could be bent.

So long as I keep as much of the covenant as I can, then what I drink is between me and God, she had said, brusquely, and Mina had not pried further. She couldn't quite blame her for being a touch standoffish, as other than sharing a torrid night of passion, Mina and her didn't know one another very well. Mina realized that, as time went on, she was likely to know other vampires even less...

"Yes," Verona said. "We vampires don't need as many tools as humanity. But to not use them would be foolish. We may not need rifles, but we can use explosives, bombs, other tools. After all, better to use some pounds of gunpowder in the right place than blow all of our vitae smashing a single tripod like you, Murray."

Mina nodded.

"That makes sense," Lucy said, nodding. "But...won't the Martians notice?"

Dracula grinned.

"Oh, they will notice," Dracula said. "I just intend to make sure that they can't do anything about it. Now, Lucy, Mina, you two are the best bats among our newest, and have a very close communication with one another."

"That is so!" Lucy said, reaching over, lacing her fingers through Mina's fingers, squeezing as she smiled at her. Jonathan watched that little gesture -- and Mina felt a confused spurt of excitement and happiness from him. She grinned at him.

Did you expect jealousy? She murmured.

Jonathan blushed, while Dracula nodded, her fingers caressing her chin. "One of you will infiltrate the city -- take a bat form now, and go at once before the dawn ends. Which of you shall-"

"I will!" Mina said, immediately -- cutting off her impressionable friend before Lucy could throw herself into the danger.

Lucy scowled at her, but Dracula had already nodded.

Mina gulped.

Maybe I should have let Lucy go first, she thought as she realized what it was that she was about to do.

Yes. Maybe! Lucy muttered, grumpily.

***

The city of Timisora had once been a prosperous one, as far as Mina could tell. Stone buildings, old castles, new factories, new trains. As she flew above it, looking down at the lifeless rubble, she saw that that had all changed. The fires that the Martians had set had burned ferociously, and the surviving buildings in the city were those that had been lucky enough to be behind firebreaks blown by the desperate population. However, as she swept down, her wings spread wide, she saw that that populace was either dead, or gone. A great many corpses were strewn here and there...not burned, but rather, laying without a mark upon them.

The Black Smoke had been at work here...

She carefully scratched at the ground with her feet, and saw that the fine black powder that was all that was left from the Black Smoke was evenly distributed along the pavement, mixing in with the ash. The only difference between the ash and the powder was a minute change in color that her sensitive eyes could spot on a first glance. She lifted her foot up, then set it down, closing her eyes. She reached out to Lucy.

This place is dead...it looks as if it was burned and hit by the Black Smoke, she thought.

Dracula asks how much Smoke.

Lots. Enough to cover the whole residential district, Mina opened her eyes, then flapped up. She winged around for a few more minutes, her eyes darting around as her tiny shadow dappled its way along the roofs and streets of the city. Nothing but more and more corpses. But then something caught her eye: A chunk of road had been torn up, as if people had been at it with crowbars and steam shovels. She flew down, then landed at the strangeness...

And it was there that she heard the noise.

It was a hissing, clattering sound, backed up by a series of loud clack clack clacks. She flapped back into some shadows and focused, trying to send what she was seeing to Lucy -- and she felt her lover and friend's awareness of her. Peeking around the corner, she could see something with several limbs crawling out from around the corner of the dead city, carelessly stepping on and over the bodies of the humans that had once lived here. Mina's stomach lurched as one of those heavy metal feet came down on a dead woman's head and caused it to burst like a rotten melon.

It looked rather like a Tripod in miniature, with four legs rather than three and a mass of writhing tentacles to either side of its central cockpit, tentacles that reached out to pluck metal debris off the ruin scattered streets. Before her eyes, several those tentacles lashed out and ripped the tracks from the middle of the road, spraying out pebbles and bits of stone. The tentacles deposited them down into the rack on the back of the machine -- which already bulged with other bits of metal and stone.

A resource collector, Dracula calls it, Lucy whispered. This is how the Martians are building new supplies now that they are here. Orders are to follow it...but carefully.

Mina nodded -- even if she had no one around her to see her nod -- and then flapped up into the air while the walking machine had its back turned. From the air, she dogged it, circling above its unsuspecting frame as it worked. As she flew, she saw several other of the machines, and a central area in the city that looked as if it was a kind of large, metallic spider that had clearly walked into the city. She could see the tracks it had left, and she could see the hole it had smashed through the wall. The spider terminated in a long barrel that thrust from its back, set upon a rotating turret.

A gun? To protect the resource collectors?

Mina soared down and landed among some rubble before the walking gun, and saw that while it was clearly slow and ungainly compared to the Tripod walkers, this device was not unarmed: It had a pair of heat rays, mounted onto a pair of broad, thick tentacles that slowly swiveled around its body. There was no sign of a Martian operating it...was it some kind of automaton, like the legendary Mechanical Turk?

Of course, that Turk was a fraud, she thought, and she heard Lucy chuckling. I wonder what fraud the Martians have to replace living minds. They can't have brought enough people to labor in menial tasks.

They are capable of breeding here, Lucy murmured. That's what Dracula says, from his autopsy.

One of the resource collectors came to the side of the walking gun and turned its back on it. The gun's left leg opened up, revealing a chute that accepted the collected scrap iron and steel that the collector had gathered -- and thus, the collector was able to dump it directly into the chute. Mina watched this process repeat five times, as the collectors came and went...and each time, she was aware of the mechanical gun making a whirring, grinding noise. Green smoke rose from its belly, and as she watched it, she swore that she could see the black metal glow with a faint greenish light. She could feel the heat, even from here, as a faint caress on her wet little nose.

The day wheeled by over this long, slow collection -- the machines working quickly, finishing up around noon as the day came.

It is a kind of smelter, I think, she thought.

I thought it was a gun, Lucy said. Dracula asks that you keep-

After the fifth collection was completed, the gun sent up spurts of green smoke, as per usual...but it also began to swivel its gun, slowly. The barrel of it moved inch by slow inch with a grinding, creaking noise that made Mina's teeth ache and caused Lucy's mental voice to lapse. Mina hoped that the painful creaking was not reaching her lover as well...but then the gun finished settling, aiming somewhere to the northwest. The barrel elevated fractionally.

It can't be about to fire, can it? Lucy asked.

Mina ducked low.

The gun bellowed. Flames and smoke exploded from the barrel -- not earthly flames, but the greenish flare of light that Mina immediately recognized as being identical to the flash spotted on Mars, two years hence. That same flash must have been many, many, many times larger on Mars, with a commensurately louder noise...that knowledge didn't help her poor ears as she clapped her wings to her head and ducked low as the buildings around her quivered and shook. Several that had been near to collapse actually crashed inwards with a cascading rumble of rubble. Mina shook herself and stuck her snout -- just in time for the gun to fire again.

This time, she kept her eyes ahead of the barrel. The only reason she saw what she saw was because of her vampiric reflexes: She spotted the compressed bullet of steel and iron and other scrap, fused together into some new, unearthly alloy, shooting upwards towards the heaven, vanishing over the horizon in mere moments. And now that she was looking up, she could see tiny streaks, darting upwards, and tiny green flashes along the edge of the world -- barely visible from her perspective. When the gun roared again, the building she was in began to collapse, forcing her to her wing. She shot upwards -- and from this vaunted altitude, she could see that as far as the eye could see, these bullets were being fired...

Towards London, she thought.

The dish! Jonathan's voice broke into her thoughts, so unexpectedly that she nearly dropped from the air. Her wings beat once and twice, keeping herself stabilized...if only barely. The gun roared again and again below her, while Jonathan started to explain: The dish in London that the Martians were building! That must be related to this! S-Some how! Any army has to have resources. They're claiming the resources of Europe -- but they need to get those resources into a singular place...a safe place, a place that cannot be easily attacked!

Mina bobbed in the air in a little nod.

All right, Mina. There are no tripods within a twenty mile radius. Take that gun out.

That was Dracula's voice -- feeling faintly muted, as if he was pushing his thoughts into Lucy, and through her, into Mina's mind. And Mina grinned. She pushed blood through her veins and felt her body swelling as she simply let herself change and change and change. The end result wasn't what she expected: She had become a fusion of woman and bat, her body rippling with muscles. She preferred her normal look...but there was a kind of heady, raw excitement in the new strength she felt.

She dropped, clasping her hands together and bringing them crashing down onto the top of the gun before the heat rays could even begin to track her.

The Martian metal bent under her blow -- far easier than the Tripod's had. It squealed inwards, then ripped and gave plenty of room for her clawed fingers to hook, then pull the metal open with a screaming of tortured metal. The entire dome of the gun's carriage pulled apart and when her feet smashed into the ground, Mina was able to throw one of the halves of the gun carriage directly into a heat ray's tentacle, slicing it in half. The heat ray, though, had already begun to fire, the invisible beam slicing along the ruined faces of buildings, causing stone to crack and pop as they were exposed to the intense heat. She caught the camera-like device in one of her clawed hands, then dodged to the left as the other heat ray turned to track her, burning the street right behind her.

Mina dropped the first heat ray, then sprang at the last. Her claws slashed and she severed the other heat ray with a spray of pressurized fluid from the tentacle. The heat ray crashed to the ground and she panted, watching as the gun slowly sagged down, green smoke pouring from the torn up roof. As it settled down, she felt noon beginning to slide along -- cutting her off from transforming again. She focused and shifted, becoming her normal form.

...and then, she remembered the other machines in the city.

While in the light of the sun, she only had the strength of whatever form she was in -- taking the form of a bestial fusion of human and bat had given her that strength. But now, in the direct sunlight of the noonday sun, she had the strength of...Mina Murray. And as she turned, she saw that the other collectors were emerging around the corner, drawn by the sound of the gun's destruction. She gulped. Lucy? Help!

The collectors started to clatter forward, their tentacles writhing around them -- and then, dropping from the sky, in the form of three massive wolves, were Aleera, Verona and Miss Elphinstone. They crashed into the backs of the collectors, blowing them over and slashing their claws into their joints and seams. Hissing, bubbling pressure fluid went spurting from the sides of the machines -- gushing out onto the ground as Mina sagged in relief, then shook herself. She ran forward, picking up a chunk of rubble from the ground as one of the machines tried to kick Verona off its back. She ran up to the cockpit, then brought the rock smashing down against the window.

The blackened glass that shielded the Martian within from the outside world cracked.

She smashed again.

It shattered inwards -- the rock and gravity doing what work her own muscles might not have managed on their own. She pushed her arms forward, careless of the sharpened glass, feeling it dragging furrows along her arms. Pain exploded through her as she remembered...when she was exposed to sunlight, she could not simply phase through mortal weapons. Fortunately, even deep cuts quickly healed with a thought, and she was left holding the Martian up against the side of his machine...

Because he was no Martian at all.

She had dragged out of the cockpit a man. He was dressed in a shapeless gray shirt and legging, and his hair had been shaved completely off his head, rendering him oddly shapeless. But what made her release him to the ground and step backwards with a gasp was his eyes. The massive wolves shifted to their human forms -- each of them repeating with more or less grace what Mina had done, pulling open the cockpits and taking the people within out.

Humans, all of them. All shaved, all dressed in gray, shapeless jumpsuit.

All of them with eyes that had been turned entirely black -- midnight orbs that reflected the light of the world, but had no spark of life within.

"What...happened to you?" Mina whispered, as Verona stepped to her side -- whatever she had been about to lecture Mina on having faded.

"There is no you, there is only our god," the bald humans said, in unison. "There is no god but Mars."

"...we need to get Dracula here," Verona growled.

Mina felt a lurch as she realized...death might not be the worst fate the Martians planned to unleash on humanity...

TO BE CONTINUED