Truck’in.
By
Colin D. Grimes
Copyright 2015 Colin D. Grimes
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Keep On Truck’in.
He sat in his customized moulded chair and rubbed his hand over his face. He was not meant to get tired, but he felt exhausted. Time, he thought, was finally catching up with him. For more years then he cared to count he had made this same journey, but this was to be his final one. No more travelling these unchanging fright routes, retirement comes to everybody eventually. But Elvis Lanza was not just an ‘everybody’; Elvis was a pilot, a deep space pilot to be precise, it also meant that Elvis Lanza was a vampire.
Since the dawn of time vampires have been the scourge of mankind, hunted and killed throughout the ages, until their numbers became so few that their very existence became myth. The few surviving vampire clans secreted themselves in to the shadows far from the prying eyes of the world and melted away in to the mists of time. There they waited and waited, knowing that eventually their time would come again.
And eventually their time did come, and from a most unlikely source; science and technology. The space race came upon the world and awoke the imagination of man to the possibilities of life far beyond that of mother Earth, but this was not the catalyst to stir the dormant clans, it was with the breakthrough of nuclear pulse propulsion that finally prompted them to open their eager eyes and step forward from out of the shadows.
Up until nuclear pulse propulsion space travel was confined to the planets and moons within our own solar system, but with the new propulsion system craft could travel the vast distances to the stars. Suddenly a journey that would have taken thousands of years could now be achieved within a few hundred years. This was still too long for mortal men, but a vampire with their eternal lifespan the journey would be a blink of an eye.
A blink of an eye; Elvis shook his head. An hour was still an hour even to a vampire, so a hundred years was still a hundred years. He looked at his display console to check on his cargo. The refrigeration unit attached to his craft showed as on-line, he sneered at the status. The unit had shown as on-line every hour of every day for the past ten years and he still had another ninety to go. Elvis let his finger hover over the off-line option on the console and a wry smile flicked across his face. He licked his dry lips and let his finger touch the key, but then the door to the command module opened and in walked his co-pilot carrying two paper cups of synthetic blood. With a darting motion Elvis took his finger off the key and returned it to rubbing his face.
The co-pilot passed Elvis one of the cups and he took a sip of the artificial blood, it tasted fowl, but it always did to Elvis, as Elvis was one of the few vampires that had tasted real blood in his youth the artificial sludge that was used as a replacement just did not match up in his opinion. The co-pilot laughed at the face that Elvis had pulled at the taste of the blood. He then proceeded to drain his own cup in one shot; he loved the taste of it, but then again, he had never tasted the real thing.
Elvis glanced over to his co-driver, who was now making his way to his own command seat after disposing of his paper cup, the man was a fraction of his Elvis’s age, but was still old compared to a normal man at two hundred and fifty six. Elvis wondered what strings he had pulled to be given this job. He let out a sigh and shook his head then went back to looking at the flashing lights on his console.
The job was the most prestigious job that Elvis had ever been given. He was used to being given the more general freight transport jobs from Earth to Ceti F, they usually consisted of a cargo of ten thousand citizens held in the cryogenic sleep chamber otherwise known as the fridge and several thousand tonnes of other cargo held in the storage bays along the hull of the craft. This was all carried on your standard Commercial Fright Transporter; a massive space hulk with dual nuclear pulse propulsion drives attached to it. These ships were never going to win any beauty contests, but they were the reliable and stable workhorses for the CFT fleet.
That was the usual job, but for this run, Elvis’s last before his enforced retirement, he had been given the CFT Swiftsure, the fastest ship in the fleet. The Swiftsure was also the most luxurious ship, more used to cruising around the holiday resort moons of Saturn and Neptune than pounding through the eternal void of interstellar space. Elvis had wondered if there was an error on his roster when he was given the Swiftsure for this run; that was until he noted who it was that he would be transporting.
CFT Swiftsure’s refrigeration units contained the single most precious cargo that Elvis had ever hauled. For his final run Elvis had been granted the honour of transporting the whole of the Pranteenie family and their belongings to the newly colonised planet of Ceti F.
The Pranteenie’s were the pioneers of space travel and the owners of the CFT fleet. They were the single most powerful family in the universe; more powerful than the President of Earth or the Secretary General of the Federation of Colonised Planets. Without the Pranteenie’s nothing in the whole of explored space would move. They controlled every space lane and everything that moved on them; but Elvis would disagree with that statement.
To Elvis the Pranteenie’s were slavers, nothing more and nothing less. They would be an unknown entity without him and his kin. To Elvis it was the vampire pilots that controlled the space lanes, but the pilots had no voice on the CFT board of directors and therefore accounted for nothing. The Pranteenie family ruled over all vampire clans by virtue of the result of a bitter war fought between the vampires and the Pranteenie’s back in the dark ages when the Pranteenie family was the foremost vampire hunters in the known world.
The Pranteenie’s hunted down and killed so many of Elvis’s kin during that time that they were pushed to the very edge of extinction; it was at this point that the remaining clan leaders were forced in to servitude by the Pranteenie’s in a blood oath that would tie them to the family for evermore. Not too high a price to pay thought the clan leaders, when they compared a vampire’s lifespan against that of a mortal mans. Their reasoning went that they would soon out live this insolent family and then they would be free from their blood oath, but the Pranteenie’s family had turned out to be made of a sterner substance then they had ever bargained for. The family had survived the bubonic plague that swept across Europe in the late 1340’s and both world wars by splitting the family in to two and fighting on both sides at once. The Pranteenie’s were masters of the art of survival. But it now looked like the family had finally lowered their collective guard. After a millennium of obedience Elvis had the whole of the family at his mercy on board his ship. With one click of a key he could set his kin free from their blood oath.
But Elvis struggled with his conscience, he was not a member of the VLA, vampire liberation army, so the thought of killing off a thousand family members whose only crime was to be born into the Pranteenie family weighed heavy on his mind. Even though his actions would free his kin from the shackles that have blinded them to the self-same family for what seemed to be eons. There was also the small matter of his co-pilot. If Elvis was to switch the fridge off-line then he would have to deal with his co-pilot as well.
It had been a month now since the CTF Swiftsure had passed the Tati waypoint, the final Federation marker before the void of deep space and it was also the sign for Elvis to decide on which course of action he was to take.
Up until the waypoint if Elvis was to have switched off the refrigeration unit a signal could have been sent to the waypoint and the Swiftsure intercepted by a Federation patrol vessel, but now a month beyond the waypoint even if a signal were to be sent nothing would be able to catch the Swiftsure until it reach the Tive waypoint - ten years from Ceti F. This would leave the Pranteenie family defrosted in their cryogenic chambers for eighty years. Elvis loved the irony of the thought that the family that had once preyed on coffin dwelling vampires were to spend their final few, starvation fuelled days, trapped within their own ultra-modern coffins.
Damn it, thought Elvis, he will have to do it. There would not be a better opportunity to rid the clans of their blood oath; Elvis thumped the control console with his fist, startling his co-pilot with his action. Elvis made the excuse that he had pins and needles in his hand which had caused him to thump the desk and provoke some circulation back to his fingers. The co-pilot gave Elvis a stern look before returning to his own console.
Elvis felt a little remorseful for his co-pilot, but for his plan to work the co-pilot would have