Fiction · ch. 6 of 6
A Castle Full of Vampires
The following documents were received at the Aurelia relay station between C44 and C47 USST, transmitted by the crew of Peregrine-4 (Starfall) from the Erydon Sigma system. Signal transit delay at time of receipt: approximately four years one-way. They are presented in the order received, with compiler's notes. A final document, of much later origin, is appended.
I. COMPILER'S NOTE (Aurelia Complex, Lunar Orbit)¶
Filed by: J. Okafor, Relay Archivist, CNVR Deep-Range Desk Date: Cycle 44, Arc 3
Peregrine-4 went silent in C40, two years after planetfall in the Erydon Sigma system. The silence lasted eleven months. When the signal resumed, it resumed in bulk — a burst backlog of logs, journals, and one dinner recording the crew appears to have made deliberately, for reasons that will become obvious.
What follows is everything they sent. I have corrected nothing. Where the crew contradicts itself, I have preserved the contradiction. Where the crew contradicts the registry, I have preserved that too.
Readers who arrived here from the history texts should know: the Erydonese had a word for the crew long before Sol did. The crew knew the word. The crew thought it was funny.
It was not funny. It was accurate, in the way that a shadow is accurate.
II. CRASH LOG (Vasily Orlov, Pilot / Field Medic)¶
Logged: Cycle 40, Arc 11, Segment 9 Received: Cycle 44, Arc 3
Starfall is down. I am writing this with a splinted wrist, which tells you most of what matters about the landing.
The descent profile assumed a coastal plain. The coastal plain assumed wrong. What the Solace probe read as sediment was a basalt shelf under half a metre of dust, and the shelf ended in a ravine the probe's resolution could not see. We came in shallow, caught the shelf edge with the aft skid, and slid two hundred metres sideways into a river valley. The drive housing is cracked. The long-range array is scrap. The short-range transmitter works, which is why you are reading this in four years instead of never.
Casualties: none dead. Han has a fractured clavicle from trying to hold a storage rack in place during the slide, which the medic (me) has told him was heroic and stupid in exactly equal measure. Karo kept the reactor from doing anything dramatic. Rina spent the first hour after touchdown apologising to the local flora, which had done nothing to deserve us.
The plan, such as it is: we cannot leave. We cannot call for anything faster than physics. A rescue, if one is ever sent, arrives on a round trip measured in decades. So we will do what stranded people have always done. We will make the wreck a home, sleep in shifts measured in years, and wait.
Stasis rotation begins next week. Two awake, four asleep, overlapping. Rina has calculated that at this duty cycle our consumables stretch past the earliest possible rescue window. Barely. Do not admire this plan too much. It is the only plan.
One more thing. There are natives. Intelligent, organised, agricultural, territorial. They watched us fall out of the sky and have spent the week since deciding what we are. First contact protocol assumed a slow orbital reveal with linguists and gift parcels. Instead we dropped a burning building on their river valley. Zara says to log, for the record, that first contact is proceeding poorly.
III. EXTRACTS, WAR YEARS (compiled from Juni Akintola's maintenance logs, C40–C43)¶
Received: Cycle 44, Arc 3 – Cycle 45, Arc 12 (staggered bursts)
C40, Arc 14. The natives attacked the perimeter at dawn. Spears, fire, numbers. They broke against the hull the way weather breaks against a cliff. Nobody on our side fired anything. Karo ran the floodlights and the external speakers at full volume and they decided we were demons. Casualties, theirs: eleven. Ours: two humanoid units dented. I am logging the units as casualties because they were shaped like us and the natives aimed at them first, and I find I have feelings about that.
C41, Arc 2. They have begun leaving their dead where we can see them. Zara says this is not cruelty, it is deterrence — the same logic as every border wall ever built. They want us to understand the cost of staying. Logged: eleven bodies staked along the ridge path. Rina notes the corpses desiccate unusually fast in this UV and that the blood settles and darkens in a way that looks, from a distance, like the bodies were drained. I told her never to say that sentence again. She said the natives have eyes.
C41, Arc 9. The tribes moved on. New tribes moved in. The new ones did not see the war. They saw the stakes, the bones, and us. Their word for us translates roughly as those who do not die properly. Karo's translation, not mine. Karo has begun collecting their words for us the way other people collect stamps.
C42, Arc 5. Steven is not a person. Steven is what we call the mass-component printer, because Juni has started talking to it and refuses to explain herself. The printer is being conserved — batteries, feedstock, priorities. Everything on this ship now negotiates with Steven. I include myself. I asked Steven for a splint and felt grateful when it complied.
C43, Arc 1. Han moved a boulder. The south village's irrigation channel was blocked after the melt season and the machinery was twelve minutes away and Han was there, so Han put on the exoskeleton and moved a two-tonne rock with his own hands while the entire village watched. The exoskeleton tore at the shoulder and will never be the same. Neither will Han's reputation. They now believe at least one of us is a god. Han says he was just clearing a drain. Zara says those are the same thing.
IV. DINNER TRANSCRIPT (recorded C43, Arc 7; received C47, Arc 2)¶
Compiler's note: the crew recorded this meal deliberately and flagged it for transmission at full fidelity. Vasily's header reads, in full: "For the archive. So that when the histories call us monsters, the record shows we were just eating."
Dinner had become one of the few things they still did collectively. Not because they needed to. The original crew had eaten together during the first months after the crash because there had been little else to do. Later, it had become tradition. Six people, two awake at any given time, and still — dinner.
Someone was passing the bowl when Vasily looked across the table.
VASILY: "You know it is not healthy to keep eating that tiết canh every meal."
RINA: "Says the man who looks forward to his weekly sundae."
VASILY: "Sundae is sausage."
RINA: "Sundae is blood sausage. Yours comes in a casing. Mine comes in a bowl. Yours is civilised and mine is not, is that the argument?"
HAN (mouth full): "The blood of the animals on this world tastes better than any swine blood on Earth. I have opinions now. I have been here long enough to have opinions about alien livestock."
ZARA: "You have been here five years."
HAN: "Four awake. Still."
KARO (via wall speakers, from the corridor): "Before you know it, the locals will start calling us vampires."
The room went quiet for half a second. Then Rina laughed.
RINA: "What do you mean, start?"
KARO: "They already do. Not the exact word, obviously. But look at us from their perspective."
JUNI (from the corridor, appearing in the doorway): "Well, if that is the case, I claim the title of Mighty Dracula."
The entire room erupted.
VASILY: "Absolutely not."
HAN: "You do not even know what Dracula is."
JUNI: "I know enough."
KARO: "I have read the book. All of the relevant books. In four milliseconds. None of you qualify."
JUNI: "The AI does not get to be Dracula."
KARO: "Then neither do you. You cannot even fix your exoskeleton."
HAN: "That is my exoskeleton."
KARO: "Exactly."
More laughter. Then Vasily noticed Juni staring at her plate, and the room quieted the way rooms do when the joke runs out at the same time for everyone.
VASILY: "At least they do not attack us anymore."
JUNI: "We lost a lot of humanoid units in those first years."
Nobody joked about that.
HAN: "And Steven still has not repaired half of them."
JUNI: "The mass-component printer is being conserved."
HAN: "The mass-component printer is being held hostage."
JUNI: "We need it to preserve the batteries."
HAN: "We need it to manufacture things that keep the batteries alive."
JUNI: "We need the printer."
HAN: "We need power."
JUNI: "We need both."
HAN: "Exactly."
A pause.
VASILY: "Also, I have been wearing this torn sleeve for three years because somebody played hero in a river."
HAN: "It was blocking the irrigation channel."
RINA: "We have machinery for that."
HAN: "The machinery was twelve minutes away."
ZARA: "The village needed the river."
HAN: "I saved their irrigation system."
ZARA: "You nearly crushed yourself."
HAN: "But I did not."
ZARA: "You almost did."
HAN: "That is different."
Zara had been quietly listening through all of it. She finally set down her bowl.
ZARA: "Actually. If they are already calling us something resembling vampires — perhaps we should encourage it."
Everyone looked at her.
RINA: "Why?"
ZARA: "Because myths are going to develop regardless. They have watched us arrive from the sky. They have watched us survive injuries they could not survive. They watched half of us disappear into stasis and return years later without visibly aging. They see us avoid the midday sun. They see us consume blood."
VASILY: "And your proposed solution is to tell them we are vampires?"
ZARA: "My proposed solution is to give them a mythology that does not involve us eating their children. A vampire is a story with rules. It sleeps. It drinks. It can be kept out. Give them rules and they will feel safe. Give them nothing and they will invent something worse — and eventually, when some kind of priesthood emerges, it will hunt us."
A silence.
HAN: "Fair."
RINA: "Personally, I would rather be called an elf."
ZARA: "Why?"
RINA: "They are nicer."
ZARA: "Elves do not die and revive generations later."
A beat.
RINA: "That is a good point."
Vasily raised his glass. Whatever was in it was red.
VASILY: "To being vampires."
HAN: "Or elves."
ZARA: "To surviving."
They drank.
Outside, beyond the floodlights of the wreck, the descendants of the people who had once attacked the strangers from the sky were telling stories about the immortal pale beings who lived in the ancient fortress on the ridge. The stories had already begun changing. They always did.
And nobody at the dinner table knew that one day, those stories would outlive the names of everyone sitting there.
V. MEDICAL ADDENDUM (Vasily Orlov, appended to the dinner burst)¶
Logged: Cycle 43, Arc 8
For the archive, because Zara says the myth needs rules and I say the record needs facts. Four facts.
First: animal blood is food. Rina's tiết canh, Han's sundae, my regrettable fondness for the local equivalent of black pudding — these are preferences. The fauna of this world is chemically close enough to ours that we eat it the way we ate at home. Some of us like the blood. That is cuisine, not menace. Our ancestors were predators; our canines are longer than the natives'. So are our shadows at noon. Neither fact has ever killed anyone.
Second: native blood is medicine, not food, and the distinction matters more than anything else in this file. Our stasis system — SomnusTech suspension, standard expeditionary fit — degrades certain circulating compounds over long sleeps. We cannot synthesise the replacements from ordinary food. Native blood happens to be compatible enough to serve as refinement stock. It is not 1:1. A hundred litres of collected native blood refines down to a single stasis charge. The hospital cellar currently holds row upon row of sealed drums, and I am aware of exactly how that looks. It looks like a castle full of vampires stockpiling victims. It is a pharmacy.
Third: the red drink is wine. Not blood. Wine — fermented from the redroot Rina spent two years learning to cook, which she now likes to describe as "less terrible." The chalice is a dispenser. The coffins are suspension chambers. The floating cloak is Karo showing off with the wardrobe drones. Sunlight genuinely hurts us — our skin evolved under a dimmer star and the local ultraviolet punishes us for it the way a bright torch punishes pupils. Everything the natives believe is assembled from true observations and one false conclusion.
Fourth: the sun. Erydon Sigma is a mid-F main-sequence star — hotter and harsher than Sol, surface ultraviolet several times Earth's by Rina's field estimate, consistent with the Upsilon Andromedae analogue studies in the Sol-side literature. The natives evolved under that light. Their skin is opaque — not dark, opaque; you cannot see blood through it the way you can see ours. Their ears are round and close-set, sheltered cartilage. Their canines are short, worn down by millennia of cooked agricultural food. Now stand one of us next to one of them, and see us the way they see us: translucent skin with blood showing through, ears that stick out and come to a point, predator's teeth, eyes that water and skin that burns at noon so we hide indoors through the middle of the day and emerge at dusk to drink something red. Zara says the myth needed rules. I say the myth needed nothing. We arrived already shaped like their definition of a monster. It took them no imagination at all — only eyes.
We purchase the livestock openly, at the market, at fair prices. The woman at the third stall gives us the sick animals cheap and tells everyone we are doing her a favour. We are. The favour just sounds different in her language.
VI. FIELD NOTE (Rina Castell, exobiologist — undated fragment, received C46)¶
She has gotten used to us, the market woman. I buy greens I cannot properly digest and she tells me how to cook them, slowly, the way you teach a stubborn child. Yesterday a boy stared at my arm and asked if I was unwell. His grandmother laughed and said I was simply built for a dimmer sun, which is the most accurate medical summary anyone on this planet has produced, including me. Then the boy touched his own ear, and looked at mine. His are round as river stones. Mine, against his, come to something like a point. "Yours are sharp," he whispered — delighted and horrified the way only children can be both at once.
I invited them to see the ship. The boy stood in the berth bay while Vasily finished a nine-year sleep and took his first breath in the chamber, gasping the way they do, and the grandmother went pale, because she had seen that exact face fifty years ago in the western woods when she was three years old, lost, and he carried her home — and he has not changed, and she has changed completely.
The boy pointed at the chalice and asked if we were living corpses. I laughed. I could not help it. He had assembled three unrelated pieces of ordinary life — the chamber, the wine, the face that does not age — into one enormous supernatural explanation, and he was so sure, and he was so wrong, and from where he stood the evidence was perfect.
Zara says: let them. Give them rules and they will feel safe. So I let him keep the story. I told him the wine was wine and the chamber was a bed and he believed none of it, and his grandmother winked at me on the way out.
She knows. The old ones always know. They just like the story better.
VII. ARCHIVIST'S POSTSCRIPT (Erydon Sigma Orbital Survey, Cycle 441)¶
Filed by: Survey Archivist, Fourth Erydonese Expedition Date: Cycle 441, Arc 2
Starfall was recovered, in the end. Not the crew — the crew is dust and legend in roughly equal measure — but the wreck, the drums, the printer the crew called Steven, the dinner recording, and four centuries of native commentary. Spectral survey confirms Rina's field estimate: Erydon Sigma is a mid-F main-sequence star, an Upsilon Andromedae-class host. The native opacity, the round ears, the worn dentition — all of it is ordinary ultraviolet adaptation.
The Erydonese religion of the Pale Court is now well documented and need not be summarised here. The relevant fact for this file: its founding figure, the First Dracula, lawgiver of the Court, keeper of the red chalice, sleeper in the coffin of iron — is identifiable, from the dinner transcript, as Juni Akintola, systems engineer, who claimed the title as a joke over a meal and could not fix her own colleague's exoskeleton.
The histories call the crew immortal. The crew's own logs record forty-three years, thirty-nine awake, and a rescue window that was always decades away. The natives were not wrong that the strangers did not die properly. They were wrong the way a shadow is wrong: the shape is true and the substance is elsewhere.
This story is part of the A World Beyond Here & Now anthology.