To Spite Another God Pt. 12

The pain didn't hit Mina Murray for approximately a second. She had time enough to recognize the facts: That she had been struck in the face by water, and that the water had been thrown by a man she recognized as Dr. Abraham Van Helsing, and that everyone was looking at him with shocked expressions: General Schlieffen, General Fosch, Lucy, Jenny, Colonel Roosevelt, a few nearby soldiers, even George, who had come jogging over at the landing of the American flying machines. Though, of course...

Most of them were merely looking put out by how rude Dr. Van Helsing had been.

Most had not noticed the small cruciform engraving upon the bottle, nor the curious clearness and purity of the water.

And, save for Dracula's wives, none of the vampires and none of the humans in Mina's army had ever seen what holy water did to vampires when it struck them.

That changed right now.

"AUUUUUUUUUUUUGH!" Mina screamed, grabbing at her face. Her eyeballs felt as if they had been doused in scorching acid, acid that worked into her every pore, leaving her skin peeling and bubbling between her fingers as she stumbled backwards, into Jenny and Lucy's arms. She choked back a cry -- and heard Jenny's voice, fierce and firm.

"Van Helsing, what the fuck!?"

Dazedly, barely able to think straight through the pain, Mina was able to feel a twinge of comfort -- she had never heard Jenny sound so confident and so in control when she had been Jonathan. It really...was remarkable...

Mina passed out.

***

Mina swam through unconsciousness -- hearing, faintly, as if through the vast echoing tombs of the Earth itself, the sounds of conversation. She struggled to piece together words, to place voices to faces, but it was all so dark and hard to process. She lapsed back into a deeper, darker sleep, and allowed the world to pass her by for longer. Later, who knows how long, she came back to some semblance of awareness -- first, of the faintest pressure against her face. She opened her eyes slowly, then reached up with her palm and pressed it gently against her face...and felt that she was wrapped in bandages. Her tongue darted out and tasted the delicious tang of blood.

Vitae, dripping slowly down her throat, from the bandages...

And more clearly, now, she heard conversation.

"...without a doubt, but as you saw, the weaponry of our vehicles was not equal to the task. I propose we take the heat rays back to the United States, where we can learn how to make them not in the dozens, but by the hundreds, by the thousands!"

"By then, it will be too late. You heard what Lucy saw!" Jenny's voice.

"If we can be being of trusting of the-" A thickly accented voice muttered in.

"Shut up, Van Helsing!" Jenny's voice again, louder this time. "You've done enough damage."

Mina forced her fingers to work properly. She tugged the bandages away from her face and sighed softly as she rubbed her fingers against her cheeks, her forehead. She felt no scar tissue, no signs of burning. She just felt hideously exhausted. She closed her eyes, then sat up as Jenny continued.

"Lucy saw that the colony cylinder has come with thousands more Martians. And they're all laying around, waiting to adapt to our environment -- Dr. Elphinstone himself has laid it out: The gravity of Mars is lower than Earth. They need to breathe our oxygen rich atmosphere, to energize their bodies, to become acclimated. Only then can they work, and God knows what five thousand more Martians can do, with the supplies built into that colony cylinder. More flying machines? More tripods? Something worse?"

"Hurm. So, you're saying, we've let them set up Jamestown, and if we wait, they'll throw up New England and Virginia and we'll be like the Cherokee and the Choctaw?" That voice, Mina was fairly sure, was Roosevelt's.

"The only colonial defeats we've ever seen on Earth are the Zulu, and they beat the British by hitting hard, fast, and taking advantage of any upsets that they could," Jenny said, confidently. "And that's why Mina has a great plan. And she was going to put it into practice before you threw holy water in her face, Abraham!"

"I will not be being apologizing-"

Mina forced herself to her feet. She was in a small brown tent, and as she walked to the exit and thrust it open, she saw that the sun was out and shining. The heavily altered city of Dunkirk was bustling with activity. American flying machines were being rigged out with harnesses and carrying systems, while tests were being done before her very eyes -- several machines were lifting up, then lowering down, while being tied to massive sacks, or large wolves who sat patiently as they were lifted, then set down again. Mina blinked. "How long was I out?" she asked, looking down from the amazing sight of a wolf the size of an elephant being used as a weight measure, to see that there was a table with a map of the British Isles laid out upon it, her various war council members and Roosevelt and Dr. Van Helsing.

Van Helsing nodded to her, curtly. "As I said. Not being apologizing-"

"You blackguard!" Jenny exclaimed, while Lucy simply growled and extended her claws.

"Stop!" Mina said, letting the tent flap drop behind her. She was dressed in the same white shift she had worn for the battle, and it was looking increasingly threadbare and tattered. She did, somewhat, miss the thicker dress that she had worn before she had been turned into a vampire -- but for the moment, she didn't have any better choices. She brushed her fingers through her hair, shaking her head. "Before we move on, let us settle things: Abraham Van Helsing..." She fixed her eyes on his -- and he looked back at her. She...felt a curious slipperiness in her mind, as if the fingers of her thoughts weren't quite able to grip onto the smooth stone of his mind. It kept slipping free.

And she wasn't even trying to grab hold tightly, simply looking.

He had some kind of talisman? Or training?

No matter.

This didn't take magic.

"Why?" she asked, flatly. "Why did you throw holy water in my face?"

"I was being required to," Van Helsing snapped. "The Americans are being of entirely unaware, like unto children, about the threat of vampirism, and I knew you would be concealing yourselves, if you were acting openly in Europe, to take advantage of the men of Mars and their conquest and invasion. Thus, before my good comrade, Colonel Theodore Teddy Roosevelt would be needing to see with his own two eyes, precisely, what it is he is dealing with." He nodded. "I will not be being apologizing for doing what was needed to keep my comrades and I safe from your perfidy."

Mina closed her eyes.

She counted to ten.

And she took the very real, blood curdling anger she felt at the hideous harm that Van Helsing had done to her, and she placed it into a box. Now was not a time for recriminations and conflict. They had scant days -- maybe scant hours -- to act and while a big part of her wanted to place her thumbs into the officious doctor's eyeballs and see how much pressure it would take to reach the brain...and...she shook herself.

Mina wasn't sure what part of her wanted that. It would be easy to blame the blood curdling violence she felt capable of on being a vampire.

...but then again...

She shook her head again, scowling. "I was planning to introduce myself to Colonel Roosevelt as Mina Murray, vampiress," she said, her voice flat.

Van Helsing blinked. "What?"

"I was then going to explain to him the capacity and logistics of our army, so that we could work together to save the world," Mina Murray said. "Then, we would have gone on to defeat the Martians. As it currently stands, I plan to do the same thing. Afterwards, and only afterwards, will we discuss what is to happen to Europe and the...vampire population." She clicked her tongue, her arms crossing over her chest. "Now. Will. You. Apologize?"

Her eyes met Dr. Van Helsing's.

Then something happened which shocked Mina Murray to her core.

Abraham Van Helsing glanced aside. And looked chagrined.

"I...was...not aware..." he said, slowly. "I was...thinking that is, that...vampires are being parasitic creatures. It is your nature, to control others, to make human beings into slaves. You cannot be being helping of it -- you are stronger than we are, you have powers we are lacking. You drink of the blood, and give of the vitae, which makes slaves in truth." He shakes his head. "That is why I are being of the order of Hunters. Not to destroy all vampires, but to..." he paused. "Curtail imperial ambitions."

Mina blinked, then chuckled, softly. It was a sad, sad little sound.

"Well, then," Roosevelt said, chuckling, his palms resting on his hips as he looked down his nose at the two of them -- even if he wasn't much taller than Van Helsing himself. "I suppose we can put these bygones behind us, then?" He frowned, shaking his head. "I would have called you an absolute lunatic, Mrs. Murray, until Miss Westenra here transformed herself into a wolf the size of a buffalo and let me ride about on her back." He chuckled. "But when you accept men from Mars and death rays, I suppose what are a vampire or two between old friends?" He frowned. "But now, we have the issue: What do we do about the colony cylinder and the port in Britain?"

Mina licked her lips, looking down at the map.

And she nodded to herself.

"We go big," she says, simply, lifting her head up. "We, as Jenny say, are like the Zulu. We need to give them an..." She blinked, finding the name of the battle springing into her head, despite the fact she had only read it once or twice in a newspaper, and never thought much of it since: "We'll give them an Isandlwana."

Teddy Roosevelt nodded.

"...a what?" Van Helsing asked.

***

The night was dark.

And London was noisy.

The sun had set some hours before, but London herself was illuminated by a brilliant green light, interrupted only by fierce, sharp puffs of equally green smoke. The Martians that had arrived were drinking deeply of human blood, offered by the mute faced, black eyed servants that they had created. They left hundreds of corpses behind them to ensure their desiccated bodies were flush with crimson life, and they were now working furiously. Lifting and carrying machines were employed to bring out the supplies from the Colony Cylinder. Those supplies were then constructed. New tripods were put together, and as each was prepared, it would go to the pile of supplies to begin building more.

Flying machines.

Tripods.

Atomic bombs.

But there was something else, something new.

It looked, from Lucy's observations, like the kind of vast, over sized frying pans that the Chinese visitors to London called 'woks', turned on its end, and given four handles rather than merely one. Those handles were each made of a huge transparent cylinder, which was filled with...well, from what Lucy could tell, a kind of transparent gas. When asked how she had determined that, she had shrugged and said that she had, remembering what Dr. Elphinstone had told her about chemicals and the way they interact with light, shifted her eyes so that they could see as many kinds of light as possible, and using one of those kinds of eyes, the cylinders had become opaque to her vision, roiling with a grayish smoke.

The colony cylinder, once emptied, was put into the air again.

But, even from a distance, it looked different. The firing slits and the tentacles that emerged from them to hold aloft heat rays had been swapped out for armored traverses, like those of a battleship's turret. Recessed within those turrets were the faint glint of heat-ray mirrors, racked in rows of three, so that it could rake the surrounding landscape with a truly terrifying amount of fire. The top of the cylinder had been further modified by attaching several of the upper halves of the tripods they had been building to it -- giving it further fields of fire and tentactular defenses.

Those additions, in all honesty, looked as if they were nothing more than jurry rigged attempts to make the cylinder more impressive.

They worked.

Mina saw all of this from her position, which was paradoxically, the least and most comfortable of the entire vampire army. On the one hand, she could see precisely what was ahead of her. But on the other hand, she was being blasted by waves of cold air, blowing against her face -- the cold was nothing much, but the discomfort to her tiny eyes and to her large ears was intense. They were flattened back against her skull, while her body was compacted against the others behind her -- two or three dozen vampires, each of them in the form of a small bat, each of them contained within a makeshift box attached to the wing of one of the American flying machines.

They were soaring towards London at top speed.

And any second now, the part of the battle she had absolutely no control in would kick off.

I don't want to be a general my whole life, Mina thought to herself as, out of the corner of her eye, she saw a light winking from the lead flying machine.

That was Roosevelt, signaling his wing.

They were going in.

All right, everyone, she thought. This is where things get...fun.

Whee, Lucy's voice spoke from somewhere in that pile of bats. I'm just...loving this, Gregori, now is NOT the time to lick me there!

The Cylinder seemed to have realize that something was about to go down. The heat rays began to wink and flicker, and then the whole world went into a wild twirling as the flying machine that she was on started to tumble in a corkscrewing circle. The vampire bats carried on started to squeak in unison -- creating an elongated eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee that squealed through the air as the cylinder swelled upwards, then banked away as the flying machine broke off. Mina closed her eyes, trying to keep herself from vomiting -- not that she was sure that she even could vomit anymore. But human instincts didn't vanish overnight, especially not those as buried as deeply as those.

Human minds were not made for this kind of travel!

What kind of lunatics did Roosevelt have flying these things?

When she opened her eyes again, the Cylinder was peppered with smoke and smoldering debris. She could see fragments of a flying machine, skidding along the roof of the massive device. One of the Americans had been shot down -- but then...

Then the entire world shook again. The cage around them exploded open and Mina found herself tumbling into the air, her wings fanning outwards as the swarm of vampires around her spread outwards. For a moment, she thought that they had been dropped inadvertently...but no!

The Colony Cylinder had a glowing hole in her side, bubbling and hissing, carved open by repeated passes by nose mounted heat rays. The Americans swept away, then darted down over the Martian camp, firing their beams in scything arcs along the field. Martians, scrambling for their tripods and for cover both, burst into wet flames and sent up their hideous howls -- but now, for once, they were tinged with fear and pain.

Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuula!

Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuula!

Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuula!

And Mina?

Mina flew towards the hole. Her wings beat furiously, and the other vampires formed up behind her, a vast swarm of midnight black, russet red, and brilliant white vampire bats. They constricted, and flew through in a long column, rushing into the narrow corridors within the cylinder, towards the stunned Martian damage control team. The hideous, tentacular beings had enough time to open their beaks before Mina plunged, claws first, into the eye of one of them. Once again, Mars had a reason to scream -- the bats swept past the damage control team and began to fan throughout the Cylinder's corridors.

Some Martians had armed themselves, after a fashion. Hand held heat rays crackled and flashed, but without the sun-rays to weaken the vampires, their beams simply struck the walls behind the vampire bats. Sometimes, in the confusion, Mars would end up shooting himself -- directing his subordinate bodies to blast, and the beams intersecting unfortunately. One by one, the vampires silenced the Martians, with claws and biting teeth and supernatural strength, focused into single, narrow points. Disgusting, brackish blood flowed in gallons along the floor of the Cylinder. Within moments, the entire interior had been occupied and Mina transformed from her bat to her human self in what appeared to be the central command and control nexus of the entire floating battleship.

The controls were...at first glance, quite similar to the controls of the flying machines, albeit on a far larger scale and with significantly more dials and switches. But with every second that Mina spent looking them over, she realized that this might be more complex than she had expected and hoped for: Rather than having a mere two sphere mounted handles that would control the Airesite, there were five large handles that were locked into cylindrical rotations. So, she could grip a handle and twist it, but there was no forward or backward or side to side angling. Each one of the handles had a curved chunk of red indicators along them -- creating an incomplete circle around the cylinder itself.

"What on Earth?" Mina whispered, then shook her head. "Focus, Mina, you don't have time to get confused, think fast."

She thought.

The flying machines worked by having the controls tied directly into Airesite plates. By tilting those, the flying machine's interaction with gravity changed, allowing for all the maneuvering and flying that the machines were capable of. If this cylinder could fly, which it clearly could, the weight of it was being reduced, or negated, by chunks of Airesite. But if the plates were solid chunks, as they were on flying machines, then the cylinder would not merely hang in the air. It would be flung into the heavens. Ergo, the plates had to be spaced...such that...

She looked over to the wall, frowning. Lucy, I have a theory. Are you near the firing ports?

Yes, Mina Dearest, Lucy said, her voice cheerful. We've captured some indoctrinated humans, we're snapping them out of it as fast as we can. What do you want?

Carefully rip into the wall. Tell me...are there... she paused. Interleaved Airesite chunks? She tried to visualize what she was imagining: A screw, but rather than a single continual groove, they were all separate grooves, with space in between for the Martian gravity insulator to slot within. There was a squeal of metal, audible over her telepathic connection, while another voice budged into her head. It was George.

Mina, we have a lot of flying machines coming towards London. I think they were attacking Scotland or Ireland -- they're going to make our Americans have a rather hard day.

Signal them to make ready to fall back. We'll buy them time, and lead them into the guns! Mina thought, then thrust her fist up into the air as Lucy's report came.

Precisely so, Mina! She says. What does this mean?

The Cylinder has interlocking bars of Airesite, and the controls here adjust where they are located within the inner skin! By interlocking more of them under one part of the Cylinder, different parts can be insulated from gravity! By having half above, half below, the Cylinder is equally insulated from gravitational pulls from the moon and the Earth equally and- She stopped. Make ready to open fire and give me a v- no, nevermind!

She had found the control that activated the forward scopes. Literally, it was a periscope that lowered from the ceiling and when she pressed her eyes to it, she could see clearly outside, through an ingenious collection of mirrors and lenses. She could see, with her vampire sharp eyes, the chevrons of flying machines soaring towards London. She could also see the tripods that were hurriedly striding towards the starport -- carrying between them the immense dome that Lucy had spotted, heading for the vast port that they had constructed.