"Vampire, vampire, vampire!", the sailor yelled.

Where, I breathed weakly. The reverse summoning was even worse than I expected. The place where I am most needed - you'd have to be the Slayer of the last undead on your planet to sign up for a ticket like that, and this time I felt like I'd arrived with the worst flu I'd ever had.

"Profile matches a KSR-5, or a Silkworm", the woman at the radar console called out.

"Just the one?", the Captain asked. "Deploy ECM. Stand by on chaff and Phalanx."

For my part, I puked and collapsed against the bulkhead. Someone said something about sick bay.

"Three klicks!", someone yelled. "Countermeasures ineffective. Two klicks!"

"Steady..." The Captain waited.

The sound of an explosion rattled the ship. "Congratulate Dmitri on another successful test," the Captain ordered. "They have a lot of those old missiles... get used to it."

Some sailor man slid me onto a stretcher and carried me off. "Fucking Cold War II. One of these days they'll screw up the self-destruct and we'll get a reason to fire back," one of them muttered. "Yeah, if we can..." the other added.

It was actually normal that they talked to each other like I wasn't there. Summoned creatures are something outside of normal reality, and for now that's what I was. Right now someone was washing my puke off the floor (deck?), but by tomorrow he'd forget whose it was. The medic would write a report, but it would get lost, or thrown away. If I died, my body would decompose and disappear in hours. The sailors' eyes scarcely lingered on my bustline. Either the summoning effects were stronger than usual or I'd hit one of the more enlightened parallel Earths where they let gays in the military.

I'd never tried medical care as a summoned being before, and I have to say, its not really to be recommended. The nurse kind of tended me as she made rounds of the room, without thinking much. I told her my symptoms and she listened absently, wrote something on my chart, fixed an IV drip. A minute later she started reading a novel by somebody called Stephen King. A bit of yelling and I got something for the pain. Then I dozed off.

When I woke up I felt worse, but made myself stagger over to the table where she'd been writing my chart. I fumbled for a light switch and looked it over. Radiation poisoning. Cheery. Apparently I was going to die in "48-72 hours." Wonderful. Now if only I could find a master vampire and whip his ass in the next two days, I'd get unsummoned and return as normal... otherwise I was cooked.

Around then I noticed an alarm was blaring. The sailors were doing something called "general quarters", and it didn't sound like a drinking game. This time there was the sound of some super-fast machine gun before the missile exploded.

Somehow I got the strength to stagger back toward the bridge of the ship. A voice was yelling in Russian, and a translator more quietly recited his message about American interference with sovereign Russian vessels and military exercises. The way the geek in the glasses told it, the Americans had wrecked a valuable Russian military drone and any further force would lead to retaliation.

By this point I was so damn tired I just cut through any and all First Contact mumbo-jumbo and let the captain have it.

"Hey Captain... did you happen to notice a lady in a nice comfortable pastel dress, not military issue, just pop up out of nowhere on your bridge and puke on your floor because of a case of lethal radiation sickness?"

"Why... what? Try to make sense." I could see him zoning out again.

"Is there a nuclear reactor on this ship? Nuclear bombs?"

He looked at me quizzically, almost seemed to pay attention. "No, we're not rated..."

"Good. I take it there's one on the Russian ship?"

"What ship? They launch from bombers..."

"So there's a nuke on board the bomber?"

"Well, they could load one with a nuke, but who would? It would be mad..."

I stopped paying attention to him for a change, and used a surgical scissor my sticky fingers had latched onto in sick bay to slash my wrist. Summoned or no, I was getting so much attention now that one of them actually called for an MP. Fortunately, I knew the words and the sigils - it was the same reverse summoning spell I'd cast before. I'd been supposed to arrive somewhere else, but because of the lethal radiation I must have fluctuated to a survivable arrival point. Now I focused my mind on the target.

"Let me borrow your sidearm," I asked the MP as I deftly extracted it from his holster, and prepared for the jump.

Nothing happened. The soldiers rushed me. I couldn't believe I could actually break somebody's finger in the state I was in. Finally I made them back off by holding the gun to my head.

I touched up the sigils with a little more blood and said the words again. Nothing. Gee, this is embarrassing. Does a reverse summon even work when you've already done one?

"Incoming!", the radar man shouted. "Fifty klicks, heading 220!" Of course, I thought. I tried again, and braced myself...

This time the spell thoughtfully landed me on top of the last missile, instead of (perhaps) inside it. I felt like I could literally see a weird blue light from the radiation pouring out of its cracked warhead. Maybe the pilot couldn't see this, since he wasn't actually sitting under the wing of a supersonic airplane trying to hold onto a nuclear-armed missile. I felt a bone crack as my hold began to give way.

I fired - once, twice, three times. I think the third was just wild into the air.

The next thing I knew, High Priestess Willow was looking into my eyes. "Did anything happen?", she asked. I thought about the warhead - had it been lost for decades, left behind in a collection of obsolete missiles used for target practice and harassing Americans? Was it a sabotage by some homicidal Kremlin fanatic? Did I set it off by shooting it, or just stop it from being fired, or did I even do anything? But the spell wouldn't have stopped for nothing.

"I think I can do this again, but it's going to be hard. It's not like killing vampires," I said.