“How can they be so stupid?” sighed a tired looking blonde woman in her mid forties.  She stood there in the warm light of her dressing chambers thinking, with the weight of the world on her shoulders.

“they don’t understand.  They think simply selling the blood out of our veins will stop all this.”  She was referring to the situation that faced the human colony on Australia and New Zealand.  The Americorporation had effective control of the trade routes between New Zealand and the Trade Zone to the north in the Islands controlled by the vampire pirates; what remained of the British Crown controlled the mainland of Australia.

“they don’t understand that the it wont matter if there are ten billion people in here” referring to the controlled regions inside the laser UV fences that kept the vampire infestation at bay, she continued; “it wont matter one bit if those fences go down.  I don’t like my people dying of thirst or hunger but if it comes down to losing a few to save the many, I will make that choice.  The last thing I want to do is condemn anyone to death as a human or worse, to life as a vampire.  But if forced between a few and the many I have to save the many, don’t I?” 

The man she spoke to seemed to nod approval.  He was an older man, he had been her fathers long time friend and councilor, now he helped the new Queen apprise the situation.  “it seems to me m’lady, that you are correct, although I don’t think the nobles will want to hear it.  The riots are getting worse your highness.  We don't have enough fighters, enough trained hunters.  What of the Corporation your majesty?”

“call me Anne dammit! you called me anne yesterday my father just fucking died, charles.”  She was showing the signs of her position.

“you weren’t deciding affairs of state yesterday m’lady” he replied solemnly.  “with your fathers passing you are the Queen now, your highness.”

“then as your Queen I order you…”

Cutting the queen off to make a show of his grasp of her request he replied “I understand anne, we are all in this together.  You are strong just like your father, I know you have what it takes, your father is here with you.” 

Taking in a deep breath and sighing audibly with nearly a whimper and some relief she continued “thank you, you have no idea what you mean to me right now.”

“I believe I have some idea Anne, although that doesn’t help us one bit deal with the situation in front of us, highness.”  He felt horrible pushing on past the recent and still hurting feelings of the little girl he had bounced on his knee so many years ago.

“oh damn man, I know, I know!”  He cringed inside as she was forced to bear a weight so heavy.  “I have to tell the Council that they must continue to deny their people; that they aren’t allowed to sell their blood.  That they must watch their people die, starve, turn into vampires, kill their families.  And I am telling them that the one thing that they can actually do, right now, they cant.  They could feed their families and put water on their tongues but I say NO!  and they don’t understand WHY!  But its THEIR blood! How can I tell them what to do with their own blood?”

“somehow we have to make them understand, highness, you are the Queen.  When the people are ignorant, you must be their wisdom”  he left it at that, being old enough and wise enough to know that she had to make and execute this plan herself, she was the ruler now.  He left the room silent, as much as it pained him not to soothe her nerves.

Her father had passed just two weeks ago and this was her first real action as the new monarch.  People were hungry, thirsty, scared and tired of captivity on little island preserves, no matter how big they may be.  The systems that had been put in place to supply energy for the vital systems for what was often spoken of as “HMS Australia” were robust and efficient, and were also designed for a population half that of the current one.  Times inside the fences had been good these 100 plus years and now as a result of the success of the last remaining human colony, people were dying of lack once again.  The conditions were eerily similar to those that had led to the collapse that had left humanity huddled together on just the few square miles of Australia and New Zealand.  There were more mouths than could be filled and more dreams than could come true; this was either the beginning of humanity’s return, or its one final end.

“how can we make them see that if we allow the blood market in, that will guarantee the end?  It is awful and indeed regrettable to lose even a single one of our number, to thirst! we are all there is!”  she exclaimed nearly choking to tears as she played out the scenarios of very real anguish happening right now, in her mind.  She felt the pain of every thirsty child and every desperate father or mother who prayed sincerely to God that it could ever make sense to sacrifice themselves that their children could live.  She breathed heavily and used the intelligent grey eyes of her listener to guide her intuition through her own despair.

“perhaps we buy them off with a promise that the market will open next spring, highness.  It has been shown that during the spring blood production naturally increases.  They will see this as our attempt to do just what we are doing, buying them off..  I would guess the Americorporation fools and the vampires both, anticpate the move.”

“right, but how and what are we going to do in the meantime to prevent the black market getting any worse? Never mind our own growing fucking internal vampire population?  and how on earth are we going to contain them next spring when they have had their hearts set on the fountain of money flowing in their veins all winter long?”  she paused thinking and looking at the man who now adjusted his feet and looked for something to casually lean against as he listened and waited, allowing the Queen time to hear her own question hoping she would come to what he saw as their only hope, for herself.

 “well highness…”

Here she lit up as he slowly spoke, “I can see now”  and she paused eyeing the now smiling figure sidelong as though checking to see his opinion of each new word she offered.

“What? What do you see anne?  Anne of the End Times!”  he now shouted with a booming roar that sent a shiver up her spine and sent her eyes wide as she felt her destiny snap into place around her.

 “This is the end isn’t it?  Really the end!”  She now seemed alive with her situation.  “We can’t count on tomorrow to set us free when we sold it yesterday.  We simply don’t have enough land, not enough land to harvest enough energy to feed and supply ourselves.  Either we start killing ourselves, selling ourselves to the vampires, or we go on the offensive.”  Far from sounding enthusiastic she rumbled now, like thunder beat in her heart.  She was talking about doing the impossible, retaking the planet, or at least part of it.  Who even knew what they would be taking back?  It had been many long years since free human eyes had seen any place north of the equator.  “they have me cornered”  she said in a low breath to herself.

The bottom line she now grasped was that humanity needed room to grow and couldn’t take any more pain.  Her citizens and nobles thought that adding the drain of blood selling would be a multifaceted gain, not only would it slow population growth but would also raise the standard of living for those alive.  They didn’t understand the situation the way her father had, had made sure she understood it.

“if we let that market in, the market isn’t for blood, its for their souls!  You would think that losing control of the entire planet would have wised them up some but I guess not.  They simply cannot sell their blood.  Blood is most efficient in the veins of a human, that is the fact!.”  Here she spoke of the ancient understandings that had been passed to her by her father.  For thousands of years vampires had been a nuisance, a well understood nuisance by some.  The knowledge had largely been lost, but it still lived on in the Court of her Majesty Queen Anne of Uluru, the name taken by her fathers father, the great Alexander Uluru, and she would be damned if she were to allow the flood gates to open, pouring out the souls of her people onto the tongues of the insidious, spiritually wasteful creatures; vampires. 

The logic was simple although the mathematics became complicated, if more complexity and beauty was generated by an organism per unit of energy it took from the energy cycle, it was deemed, by these ancient maths, a beneficial creature, or species.  Humans while being horribly wasteful also generate tremendous variety and add to the overall complexity and spiritual depth of the system even if the net gain is only at the margin.

In the traditional teachings, plants are the suppliers of most of the energy available and also supply such variety and complexity while themselves removing none, that the entire tree of life has at its roots, plants.  Likewise in the traditional energy cycle the cows that eat the plants add to the landscape more than they take and though they do take, they also add.  So too does the wolf that eats the cow.  At each level the added complexity of predator and prey; the dance, justifies the existence of that level by what has been looked at as The Great Accountant, The God of Energy and Change, The One True God.  According to the ancient maths, we all have to add up.  It had been assumed that the cycle was maximized by human life and that God would naturally leave it so.

It wasn’t in the past, and will never be, possible to predict the future.

In the fringes of a growing human culture and population, in the faces and hearts of the forgotten, the shunned, the starving masses serving opulence, a menace of despair and rage began to simmer and pass on just as any other part of culture would.  The pain of the parent was shared with the child concentrating itself in the souls of the desperate and suffering over the generations.  The first souls to ‘pop’, the common term for the spontaneous conversion process, woke to a second life of bitter everlasting night in the slums of the first human cities, some ten thousand years ago.

Feeding on the already stressed energy cycle, stressed by the same wastefulness that had ultimately led to the anguish of their vampire formation, vampires feed on the growth that is human culture.  Like wolves they prey on humanity but in this case, no beauty is added, complexity and order are reduced.  Solitary vampires hunting humans had long been thought a check, provided by God, on human wastefulness.  Our ugly secret had been the menace in the lonely night.

This had been taught, naïve of the possibilities, as human culture tapped into ever more energy rich resources and technologies for harnessing them, for thousands of years.  Governments and Nations came and went but onward always went human advancement, always dogged by its vampire conscience.  Now in the wake of the failure of humanity to grasp the consequences of dependence on nonrenewable resources, vampires controlled the world and farmed human souls in cages.  A planet that supported 8 billion humans, now housed less than 100 million vampires and only 2 billion human inhabitants.  That included the nearly one billion souls crammed onto the islands still under human control. 

The energy cycle had been redefined, by the minds of a very few, very greedy vampires.  They didn’t care about the whole, only their part.  The Covenant had been stuck in Cassandra’s nightmare and powerless to stop the collapse in the face of the human failure to see its own demise coming.  The weight of humanity, so many people, behind the misunderstanding that God simply wouldn’t allow such a robust and efficient system to fail, led to the collapse.  The system, as described beautifully in the acient maths, was truly majestic, wonderous.  It was a near perfect expression of energy allocation, natural order; “God’s will” it was figured.  As darkness spread, 2041 would forever be remembered by those humans who maintained their languages as “The Great Failure”.

The great energy cycle had been understood for millennia, and she was now the keeper of the flame of understanding.  She and a few others held the knowledge that could save humanity.  Vampires were humans, tortured souls forgotten in pain and left to die by their loved ones mostly, that had undergone the conversion that left their souls no longer centered on the concept of a universe based on something, but one based on nothing, nothingness.  If a human soul were to be likened to a star, a sun, built on the principles of existence and warmth that radiated out into the surrounding space, the vampires soul had collapsed into an insatiable black hole, without bottom and to which time no longer applied.  Vacant souls writhing, colder than deepest space, craving the release of energy only to be had as a blood cell bursts.  She knew that far from being the improvement her nobles and noble people wanted, allowing the sale of blood on the open human market would mark a turning of the tide, humans would begin to accept what would then be undeniably their own vampire nature, as they fed on themselves.  She just couldn’t believe that was the future.

This is what the enemy of all humankind of course wanted.  The Emperor Delitus was very pleased and had for many years patiently been allowing the human colonies to grow and stretch their resources to the breaking poin.  He had allowed them to again cram themselves into an impossible situation that even in his worst case scenarios, would leave him a terrified and blood weary people easily subjugated.  He had time to wait and it was paying off with the current dilemma and panic creeping in on his human ‘pets’.  He watched from his faraway mountain lair, coldly enjoying the show and biding his time.

This was the situation faced by the new Queen.  Her brood was being surrounded, cut off, undermined from within and was now begging her to sell its soul for a glass of water and a plate of food.  Things could go on, a while, but for how long?

If there was any hope at all it would be the will of her and those like her that would save humanity, if it could be saved.  She wasn’t the only one who understood however.  Her father’s father had learned of the ancient spiritual maths that governed the formation of vampires and explained the great energy cycle, from an organization that now had a chance to succeed where it had already failed once; to protect humanity from vampires. 

The Covenant was an organization older than any other, and while it was ancient and there were many wise among their ranks still, many members of the organization, as it was often called by its members, were now pirates.  Failing to find the freedom that had for so long defined the values of the organization and its members within the confines of the rigidly controlled society inside the UV walls, many had opted for the synthetic life; lives ‘enhanced’ by every trick in the book.  Genetic modification, stimulants, steroids, and the now generally available endocrine rejuvenation chemical gonadulin which made long term survival as a “synth” possible, were all used by the generally impressive synthetically ‘improved’ humans.  Those who had once been the champions of human purity and freedom were now to most ‘monsters’, though with their presence still helped keep the vampire overlords at bay and out of the Trade Zone not to mention the islands beyond.

“order conscription”  stated the queen flatly.

The man leaning against a large stone pillar and seeming lost in his thoughts started and stood up looking at the Queen somewhat sleepily at first; “absolutely your highness”  he stretched slightly and smiled a sixty three year old smile; he had been itching for a chance at payback for what he had lost to vampires for nearly three decades.  He was a year or two past his prime but he was in, war was on.  He felt the little girl before him change with the passing of seconds, before his eyes.

He looked her up and down he saw a leader, “what of the Americorporation, majesty?” he asked the now purposeful monarch referring to the leftovers of the American super corporation that formed in the few decades prior to the collapse.  They controlled what had been New Zealand. 

“oh they will love the news that the Royal blood market will open in the spring.  This will buy us a few years, at most.  We must watch carefully the rates of spontaneous conversion though.  If they rise as a result of this news, we are in worse shape than we thought.”  At the moment nearly one person per week within the fences “popped”, under the stress of starvation, fear, and thirst.  “if that increases you know what that means right?”  The intent of her ruling was to alleviate pressure, if the populace took it rightly, as the sign of ultimate defeat it was, it could and probably would lead to a sharp increase in the despair felt by those closest to the pain and could precede a speedy collapse. 

“I never thought I’d be hoping my own people would stay stupid and look forward to selling their souls.  How can we play such games?”  She felt the pain of deciding for others their fate.

“When a bully has their foot on your chest, first secure breath, then vanquish the foe”  stated the less and less elderly seeming man.  The thought of carrying a UV light and some Holy Water into battle and staking vampires to hearth once more delighted him immensely.  He would love to see the Trade Zone once more.

The queen walked away and stopped short, “Childsworth, my mp3 player please?”

Tossing it to her with an underhanded gentleness one would show technology he said to her “Anne, your father would be proud of you, I think you have found the only option left us.  If there is one, we have to pray this is it.”  He had a full head of ideas about what and how to do what should be done, but he understood that if humanity had any hope at all, this Queen had to survive and succeed.

She strode from her enormous dressing area and its stained glass light in the midmorning sun aware that she had her father’s best friend, a highly decorated and respected vampire hunter in his day, on her side.  She secretly prayed for the visit she wondered if would ever happen again.  The vampire that had installed the British Crown rather than claiming Australia as his own, was her only hope.  She knew that with the few hundred thousand fighters she could muster, at most, she had no real chance.  She needed the pirates if only to contain the Americorporation.  Traitors to humanity she felt, the “Americorpse” pushed for the Blood Market and the needles of the Blood Empire itself she and others saw, to be in every home, every vein.  The “corpse” sold its blood to light its lights, to keep the bellies of those living there full, and to keep the vampires out of their homes.   She felt bitter at their lack of appreciation for what her people provided for them.  The Americorporation  provided a buffer from the vampire north to her Australia and loudly so they claimed, while to her it was little more than a leak in her boat.  They could shout what they like; Her Majesty’s Ship Australia, maintained a home for their very souls.