As the victim's heart stuttered and stopped, the vampire brushed hair from her forehead, as if she were a sleeping child. Then, with a cluck and a glance toward its audience of one, it brandished delicate scalpel-tipped fingernails. Cutting away the victim's uniform, it slit her abdominal cavity, working a hand inside to extract the cooling organs. Slick and red, one by one, it eased them out ... and swallowed them.

Helpless and despairing, Helsing Seventeen could only watch as the creature brought its bloody performance to a close. He was fresh from the Order's assembly manger, and this vampire should have been his first kill. Armed with confidence and an array of offensive upgrades, he'd confronted the damned and tattered creature.

He'd lost that fight, in spectacular fashion.

Now he was trapped, all but buried under molten metal--heavy pieces of debris the vampire had torn from the spaceship's upper bulkhead. The beams had Seventeen pinned so that only his head and one shoulder poked above the pile. Even had he wished to, he could not turn his face from the slaughter.

As the beams had fallen toward him, Seventeen had hardened his skin, encasing himself in thick layers of fingernail-hardy-tissue. Thus armored, he had weathered the impact of the debris. The heat was another question: coolant fizzed frantically about his body cavities, protecting the bioccultured tissues of his systems.

He ran his diagnostic catechism, stumbling on the useless preliminaries (I am a made thing, lacking in spirit or holy essence, and yet you have given me purpose, oh Lord ... ) The feedback was instant and unsurprising: cells were burning by the hundreds of thousands. There was no recommended escape from this predicament, and his online confessor, Mina, was inexplicably unreachable. He could sense her presence in the ether, but something was frazzing his uplink.

The vampire retracted its fangs, wiping its mouth on the corpse's sleeve. Reaching back to the hydroflorium, it cut free a rose and fixed it in the buttonhole of its ratty jacket. Then it closed the dead woman's eyes and, giving a bow to its helpless foe, sauntered out of the artificial park. It would vanish down one of the ship's endless corridors, losing itself among the crew. Concealing itself among the sheep, until it was hungry again.

"Mina?" Seventeen sent a subvocalized message into the ether, trying to reach his confessor. He could smell his tissues burning; the coolant in his rosary was almost exhausted.

Between imminent death and the fading hope of a helpdesk rescue, a single text packet fluttered, like a dust wraith caught in the breeze of a shipboard ventilation duct. Its label was nonsensical, just a name. "Annie?" Seventeen read it aloud, confused.