Eaters of the Light

by J. Edward Neill

  “Mine?” I felt dizzy.

  “Pilot Haseen—he died in the battle with the others. Xiphos ship Four,” she explained. “He won’t need his bunk anymore. We’ll sync up to Commander Strope on his console. You’ll have some privacy.”

  I let them guide me into the bunk.

  I sat in silence on the edge of a dead man’s bed.

  And I watched them summon Strope on the console.

  After a few moments, I saw Strope’s face floating in the air above the console’s screen. The pair of young attendants left me, clicking the bunk door shut behind them. I wished they’d stayed. I wanted them to bring food.

  Slumping, I looked up at Strope’s face. His pixelated head floated in the dark space just above me. I couldn’t see his surroundings, but I knew where he was.

  The Ring.

  My Ring.

  Seeing Strope’s smile put me at ease.

  I opened my mouth, but before a word came out, he interrupted.

  “I know, Cal. You have questions, lots of questions. You want answers. Just sit and be calm. Ok? Oh, and welcome back.”

  He called me Cal, I thought.

  And then he told me everything:

  Mahtim was dead, just as the young science attendants had told me. Mina had killed him with a blade she’d hidden in her robes. The results of Mahtim’s post-mortem scan had been conclusive. He’d never taken his anti-Strigoi vaccinations. He’d deliberately infected himself with their virus.

  “Likely with Doctor Zephayus’ aid,” Strope added.

  I should’ve known, I thought.

  I could’ve stopped it.

  Kira, Big Woman, was also dead. Mahtim’s hypo-rifle had killed my body and rendered my nano-cells comatose, but at the same time had struck poor Kira, permanently severing every neural connection in her brain. The young pilot man who’d entered the room with Mina had also died from the effect.

  Mina had avoided death, though no one was sure how.

  As for me, I’d been sealed inside my cortical plug, scrambled yet intact, for sixteen days. Mahtim had wanted to destroy the plug after killing my body, but Mina had stopped him.

  And saved me.

  Also dead was Rami, Strope’s little brother.

  Strope hid his sorrow well, but as my waking stupor wore off, I saw shadows in his eyes.

  His last sibling…murdered.

  Mahtim had killed Rami in his bunk. In the moments before we’d all entered hypo-sleep for the long voyage to Grave B-7 Black, the young man had discovered Mahtim’s secret quantum signal bound for the Strigoi world. But foolish Rami had gone to Mahtim alone with his discovery, and paid the price for it.

  The crew of Ring One had found the boy’s skeleton locked in his bunk just fourteen days ago.

  His death isn’t Mahtim’s fault, I thought, but didn’t dare say.

  It belongs to the Strigoi.

  The longer he talked, the more serious Strope grew.

  “We couldn’t go home,” he said. “It didn’t matter how many of us died—we’d only finished half the mission. We had to hit Grave DD-9 Ebon, and we had to hope Mahtim lied about signaling them ahead of us. Destroying Vark worlds…it’s important, but our real mission…our true task—”

  “To capture one,” I said. “To interrogate it. To learn about Hades Galaxy.”

  “Exactly.”

  I expected him to explain the plan of attack upon Grave DD-9.

  No.

  The attack had already taken place.

  Grave DD-9 Ebon and its moon were destroyed.

  And a Strigoi had been captured.

  “Just two days ago,” said Strope.

  “Tell me everything,” I replied.

  So he did.

  A battle had raged in the orbits between Grave DD-9 and its mechanical satellite moon.

  During the battle, and while wearing my Gamma Suit, Mina had used the Sabre’s light lances to disable a lone Strigoi scythe.

  Afterward, she’d ejected herself into space. She’d carried the hypo-rifle into the darkness, blasted her way into the Strigoi craft with the Gamma Suit’s arm-cannon, and rendered the monster comatose with a single hypo-rifle shot.

  Alone in the abyss, she’d carried the Strigoi into her ship.

  And then she’d flown the Sabre underneath the raging battle, ejected a star-maker into Grave DD-9’s ocean of oil, and escaped with her life…and my ship…intact.

  Mina had become the hero Hermes needed.

  “She’s alive? Even now?” I asked.

  “Alive and well.” Strope managed one of his smiles. “Only two pilots survived. Her…and me.”

  “You mean you weren’t directing the battle from the Ring?”

  “Never,” he explained. “Had you not run off to destroy Grave B-7 alone, I’d have done it.”

  “And the captured Strigoi?”

  A smirk lit up his face. “I’ll come to you, Cal. And I’ll show you.”

  * * *

  In the darkness, I sat alone.

  I’d slept, eaten, and meditated in the shadows of my little bunk. I’d tuned out the world beyond myself, closed my mind to all the emotion circulating throughout Ring One.

  I felt rested, ready to renew my war against the Strigoi.

  But first, something needed doing.

  Haseen’s little console didn’t look like much. Like most private computers, it included only basic access to its parent Ring’s functions. But its small, simple link was all I needed.

  I didn’t know what would happen to me in the moments to come.

  Will I become something other than myself?

  Will Cal cease to exist?

  Will I remember Joff?

  And then I recalled the promise I’d made while wandering the deep black of Mahtim’s hypo-sleep.

  ‘Become something more,’ I’d said.

  ‘Limit myself no longer.’

  I closed my eyes, murmured a few sentimental farewells to Joff, and loosed several thousand light-nodes from my cortical plug. The blue motes drifted out and into the dark space between Haseen’s bed and the tiny port in the console’s side.

  It felt strange watching pieces of myself separate from my body.

  My human eyes beheld my light-nodes, while the part of me inside the light looked back at my body.

  Like a mirror, I thought.

  Both sides can see.

  The bundle of light, only a small fragment of me, formed a line and marched into the console’s port. I gave the light-nodes their instructions, and they listened well. As I sat without moving, they worked quickly, sweeping past Ring One’s guardian firewalls with all the ease of sand falling through a sieve.

  Will this hurt? I wondered.

  I let myself see through the nano-light.

  And I continued.

  Inside Ring One’s massive electrical framework, I hovered. The cables connecting the console to the Ring’s hardware were like superhighways, and the streaming data like hover-cars racing in infinite directions.

  I saw everything:

  Maps

  Schematics

  Communications

  Journals

  Plans

  I let myself be swept into the highway. Everything I touched became a part of me, consumed by my light the same as darkness broken by a star’s birth. I learned the location of everything in Andromeda the people of Hermes had found. I learned about Hermes’ ships, the evolution of their weapons, and the roots of their religion more than a thousand years back. I read every message that had ever bounced between Strope’s crew. I saw the shapeless become real, the details of every battle between Hermes and the Strigoi.

  And there was more.

  I saw light – the hope of Hermes’ people sprinkled throughout their communications. They truly believed Goddess Sufi would deliver them from evil.

  And I saw darkness – the Coffin Engine’s march revealed in a three-dimensional map as millions of stars vanished in clouds of nothing.

  Sufi coul
d never save humanity, I knew, and not because she didn’t exist. Even if she did exist, she couldn’t ever be powerful enough to stop the shadow’s march across the galaxy.

  And there was still more.

  Using Ring One’s sensors, I became aware of my own Ring floating just a few hundred kilometers away. I reached out to her with a ping, and in seconds I downloaded her data directly into myself.

  The flood of information swept me away. I almost drowned in it, gasping as the sheer volume of data washed into me:

  Science

  Philosophy

  History

  Weaponry

  The Ring’s data archives included all the knowledge of Earth compiled into an ocean of cold, deep data. It hadn’t ever been accessed, not by me or anyone else. It had only been meant to be a failsafe should every human settlement be lost.

  In ten seconds, I soaked up three-thousand years of Earth’s history. Every battle fell into place in a timeline made of light. Every tactic, political scheme, technological advancement, and cultural achievement fit into a few hundred of my light-nodes, profoundly deep yet utterly weightless as it all became a part of me.

  It didn’t hurt.

  But it changed me.

  I should’ve done this a thousand years ago, I thought.

  I see everything.

  For a few seconds, I floated in the void between Rings, consoles, and the body I inhabited. I considered myself, what I’d been and I’d become.

  If my light-nodes could’ve wept, they would surely have done so. Not in sadness, but in the sheer bliss of enlightenment.

  I knew I had to withdraw. Tiny pockets of data remained, but I’d found what I needed. I could’ve hunted every last cache of information, every recorded interaction stored within both Rings’ massive data-spheres.

  No.

  Get back into your body.

  You have work to do.

  I soared from the depths of Ring One’s computers and back to the mundane world of my waiting body.

  And as I did, I swept up one last piece of information.

  The final morsel?

  A Strigoi…

  Trapped in hypo-sleep on this very ship.

  They haven’t tried to wake it yet.

  I must be the one.

  The Forever Evil

  The black plates of my Gamma Suit felt ever so slightly loose against my body.

  I needed to eat, to exercise, to remember my strength.

  Later, I thought.

  Now isn’t for bodies.

  It’s for minds.

  I marched down through Ring One’s pods. People stood to watch me pass, seeming small in the shadows I made. I saw the two young attendants who’d been there when I’d awoke, and I tried to smile for them. I saw crew whose names I hadn’t learned, but who now trusted me with their lives. I nodded to white-robed Mina, who tilted her head in a gesture of respect. She was the last person I saw before reaching the end of the final pod.

  For all her bravery, she wanted no part of what I was about to do.

  Strope had protested my doing this, of course. He wanted to be present, as did a few sparse members of his depleted crew.

  But I’d convinced them otherwise:

  “Only I must speak to the enemy.”

  “Only I will fully comprehend what it says.”

  The final airlock slid open and clapped shut behind my back. Ring One’s blue lights fell away, and I stepped into the darkness of a pod half-destroyed. Black burns marked the spots where Strigoi death-beams had carved the pod open. Stars wheeled through gaping holes in the ceiling and walls.

  Although the floor beneath me remained mostly intact, the rest of the pod was a skeleton of polymer beams and cauterized electric cables. I walked in the vacuum of space, the airless void surrounding me as the dead pod spun with the rest of Ring One.

  And there it lay – welded into the pod’s skeleton frame, a white sphere with a single round window.

  Ring One’s crew had wanted no part of harboring a live Varkolak inside their ship, and so they’d fastened its prison to the ship’s outsides.

  For all their courage…

  …they’re still afraid.

  I crossed a partially-intact section of floor and reached the white sphere’s front. Through the circular window, I saw it sleeping. The pale, sickly lights in its four eyes were feeble, its black skull motionless, and its organic heart frozen beneath a web of oily tubes and black-metal ribs.

  Sleeping.

  If such a thing is possible.

  Strope had given me detailed instructions for the interrogation. But of course, I’d only half listened. I’d already made my guesses as to the nature and location of Hades’ Galaxy. I felt certain I knew what the evil creature would say.

  Strope’s words had been for his comfort, not mine.

  I tapped a sequence into the white sphere’s control panel:

  Initiate waking protocol, I programmed.

  Release nano-inhibitors

  Sync Gamma Suit audio to sphere

  Open kill-switch panel

  I needed to wake the monster, but keep it intoxicated with a nano-drug unique to the hypo-sphere’s machinery.

  I needed it to hear me through the airless void between us.

  And I needed a kill-switch, which would bathe the Strigoi in killing light should it somehow turn the tables on me.

  The white sphere had everything.

  I waited.

  And I waited.

  The stars moved behind me. I imagined they were watching me, curious to know whether or not I could save them.

  Between long, meditative breaths, I glanced to the airlock door. Through the tiny slits of two windows, I saw two sets of eyes. I couldn’t see their faces, but I knew their eyes.

  Strope.

  Mina.

  He was the father of both her children, I’d realized. I’d seen the secret way they looked at one another. It wasn’t love, not quite.

  It’s heartbreak.

  For their children.

  For what they sacrificed to be here.

  I allowed myself a moment’s feeling. And then I returned my focus to the window between me…

  …and it.

  The creature stirred. Held fast by powered rods, it couldn’t move more than a few centimeters. But I knew it would try.

  It would know me the moment it saw me.

  They all know me.

  The white lights in its four eye-sockets flickered. Its skull lolled, and then steadied. It raised its fleshless face, jaw clacking at it gazed through the white sphere’s window.

  It sees me.

  It understands.

  “The first words are yours,” I said to it. “Choose them carefully.”

  The horror looked at the insides of its prison. Behind its eyes’ blazing lights moved a dark intellect beyond all understanding. It glimpsed the light emitters, which would cause it pain if it resisted. It sensed its arms and legs pinned beneath the powered tungsten rods.

  It spoke.

  For all my confidence, I shivered.

  “Lightbringer.” Its jaw creaked open, and the booming of its voice made the white sphere rattle. “We knew it would be you.”

  “Do you have a name?” I asked it.

  The monster couldn’t truly smile. But I felt its amusement all the same.

  It didn’t fear me.

  …at all.

  “Such things as names do not exist,” it thundered. “There is only light…and darkness.”

  “You’re trying to drain me.” I shot it a grin through the Gamma’s visor. “You must know I’m immune.”

  The lights in its eyes turned a cold, cold white. In the cannon fastened to my right arm, I flicked a tiny switch, subtly darkening my visor to reduce the glare.

  “If I released you from your prison, you would murder everyone aboard this ship in a matter of minutes,” I said. “But I wonder – I’ve always wondered—would you enjoy it? Do you relish what you do?”

&
nbsp; “These words…” Its voice made the floor beneath me shudder. “…they have no meaning. There is no prison. There is no murder. Even you, half-machine, will feel entropy’s pull. For all things must die—life, stars, universes…all must return to darkness. That we hasten the night is of no consequence.”

  I let the echoes of its voice pass through me. And I blinked away the pain.

  “You speak of no meaning,” I countered, “and yet you were once alive. Your bones – they resemble a human’s. You have a heart pumping inside you. You have language, which you’ve assimilated from those you’ve destroyed. You are machine and organic matter twisted into one singular thing. And yet—though you’re neither dead nor alive—you strive to do the same as all other life. You expand. You make war. You want to survive.”

  Its black ribs rose and fell. Its dark ligaments strained against its skeletal shoulders. It was fully awake now, having resisted the nano-inhibitors.

  Even if it breaks free, I have my arm-cannon, I thought.

  With which I’ve killed thousands.

  I met its blazing eyes with a hard stare.

  Deceiving it wouldn’t be easy.

  “The night you dream of will never come.” I began my lie. “Very soon, we will invade your home galaxy. Your worlds will fall. In place of darkness, stars will awaken by the million. And you…you will fall back into the shadows.”

  It felt no emotion, I knew, and therefore it couldn’t be fooled by igniting its hatred.

  But its intellect smoldered beneath its bones.

  And with such grand intelligence, the monster was capable of the worst sin of all.

  Arrogance.

  “Lightbringer, they call you.” Its voice made my bones sing with pain. “Your name is false. For every star you birth, we lay millions in their graves. You know this, and yet you resist. The engines of your destruction are already moving.”

  Engines. He’s speaking of the Coffin Engines.

  “One.” I raised my chin, feigning pride. “You have only one such engine in all of Andromeda. Even with its vast power, it will take thousands of years to hunt every star. By then, we will have destroyed Hades. Our fleets move even now.”

  I saw it processing my words. Like fuel, my every syllable churned through its mechanical mind.

  Burning.