Eaters of the Light

by J. Edward Neill

No one has ever talked to them like this.

  No one except—

  “One…for now,” it boomed, and I almost blinked from the pain. “But soon…hundreds. The Tombspire, Mother of Darkness, she will rip the space open between us. This creation you call light will wither. This concept you call gravity…it will cease. Nothing will survive, and nothing will ever grow again.”

  Tombspire…

  Something new. Something terrible.

  If I’d been the Cal of two days ago, I might’ve given away my fear.

  Instead, I focused.

  “You cannot destroy gravity,” I said, knowing full well they could. “Not forever. It’s a fundamental law of our universe.”

  The monster paused as if aware of my lie. I saw it thinking, calculating, desiring to inflict me with fatal panic. It saw my eyes widen at its mention of the Tombspire.

  It believed it had gained the upper hand.

  And that’s when I counterattacked.

  In silence, and while allowing myself to tremble, I released several hundred motes of nano-light from inside me. The glowing spots floated out of the Gamma Suit and slipped into the Strigoi’s prison through a microscopic port in its bottom.

  I’d found the white sphere’s schematics during my invasion of Ring One’s computer.

  I knew everything.

  A tear rolled down my cheek. The monster saw it.

  It stared at me, believing my terror.

  At no other time would its mind be as centered on the Tombspire, the Coffin Engines, and the place from whence it had come to destroy me.

  Now.

  Do it now.

  My motes of light slid up into the sphere. If the Strigoi was aware, it showed no reaction. It gazed into my eyes almost as if curious, at the same time searching the darkness of its mind to understand how an artificial thing like me could feel emotion.

  As the terrible lights in its four eyes burned ever colder, my motes slipped into a microscopic crack in the base of its skull.

  “You’ll never tell me,” I said. “This Tombspire of yours…the location of Hades. You’d never betray your secrets. Weakness isn’t in you.”

  It raised its skeleton chin. I took the gesture to mean it was smiling.

  “But…” I continued. “I’ll get the answers all the same.”

  My motes moved in utter silence. Through bone, metal, and darkness, they burrowed into the dead space within the Strigoi’s mind.

  It wasn’t a brain inside the monster’s skull.

  Not exactly.

  My motes found it—a black sphere pulsing with unknowable energy, hovering in the skull’s center. Whatever power held it afloat, my motes couldn’t tell me. No fluids, ligaments, or connective tissue existed, and yet the sphere hovered.

  Small.

  Simple.

  But immensely powerful.

  My motes crossed the span of darkness and searched for a way inside.

  In the shallow lines marking the black sphere’s surface, they found it.

  It happened so quickly, the Strigoi barely moved.

  My motes glided in. A few, lost in the immense darkness, flickered and went out. The Strigoi’s draining power found them, and like white blood cells chasing a virus, annihilated them.

  But a few found their way to the sphere’s heart. Following the creases in the sphere’s eternal dark, they found purchase.

  No machines moved in the Strigoi’s mind.

  No life existed.

  My motes found something else, something older, a power beyond my reckoning.

  In what should have been a space only a few centimeters across, an entire universe lay open. Thoughts moved like black winds between galaxies of information. Cold data, taking shape even as the creature stared at me, crossed oceans of shadow in fractions of a second.

  I saw how the Strigoi were created.

  * * *

  Alone, lost in a place too cold to harbor ordinary life, they awoke.

  Millions of years ago.

  They had no shape. No bodies. Nothing humanity could ever have perceived. But in the frozen desolation of a world without a sun, their formless energy stirred.

  They were an infant race.

  But already malevolent.

  Rather than face the darkness alone, the ancient Strigoi energy organized into colonies, hives, islands of shadow in which only they could survive. Once joined, their colonies grew stronger, larger, and more intelligent. In ghostly form, they thrived. And for the next million years, they spread into every possible corner of their planet, which moved in the void far from any knowable galaxy.

  And then, in a move most human, their black energy came together all as one.

  It held counsel.

  It decided to spread.

  Unbound by the limits of ordinary physics, the fledgling Strigoi stretched out toward the nearest galaxy. Thousands of years, the journey took, but unlike any life form humanity could conceive, not one of them perished.

  For they, contrary to all other things in the universe, could not die.

  …unless touched by sunlight.

  In spheres of shadow, they reached their new home—a small spiral galaxy in a nameless corner of the universe. One planet, then another, they claimed for their own. Without bodies, they needed none of the conditions required by ordinary life. They built invisible kingdoms on frozen, sterile planets. They thrived in oceans thousands of kilometers deep and founded empires atop mountains never once warmed by the light.

  Many millions of years slid by.

  And many hundreds of cold, empty planets, they inhabited.

  But their expansion, effortless though it seemed, finally came to an end. For as they neared their new galaxy’s heart, so too did they encounter their mortal enemy.

  Starlight.

  Whenever a new star exploded into life, entire dark empires perished.

  Whenever a nearby supernova spread radiation across the abyss, billions of ghostly Strigoi screamed out in the moments before annihilation.

  Still, they survived.

  Still, they spread.

  Like a whisper passed from ear to ear, they moved from system to system, seeking rogue planets, frozen moons, and worlds far removed from the light. Until, for the first time ever in their existence, they encountered something they hadn’t dreamed possible.

  Life.

  On a world of storms, vast oceans, and fields smothered in eternal fog, they came in the night. The creatures they discovered were simple, but alive.

  The Strigoi watched this life.

  They studied it.

  They learned.

  And when the moment struck, they made a choice:

  Leave life to evolve as it may?

  Or steal it for themselves?

  They chose the latter.

  In the deepest of nights, on a singular eve separate from all the millions of nights before, the dark Strigoi energy swarmed the garden planet and stole away the lives of many thousands of animals. Even then, they were vampiric. Their presence was enough to drain the lives of mortal things.

  It seemed a small matter.

  Having consumed the DNA of thousands, the Strigoi began to learn.

  About bones. Hearts. Muscles. Blood.

  About breathing.

  About death.

  And more than anything else, they learned how the living could shape the environment in ways unheard of.

  So it began.

  The Strigoi evolved.

  No longer imprisoned as pure dark energy, they realized their power. With millions of years of raw intelligence ready to be freed, their future became inevitable:

  Build bodies.

  Inhabit new worlds.

  Create new empires.

  Conquer the light.

  In a matter of seconds, I learned all I needed to know.

  The monster behind the glass strained against its bonds.

  I flicked the kill-switch.

  No Home but the Stars

  The Gamma S
uit lay in a heap on the floor.

  Quaking, I slumped on the bed’s corner.

  My mind might’ve been far more powerful than before, but my human body, still so new, felt the pressure of what I’d seen. Sweat crawled in cold lines down my chest. I looked down at my hands, and saw them full of shivers.

  Outside my tiny bunk, the crowd gathered. Strope, Mina, and twenty other crew poured into the pod, a wave of white robes waiting to crash over me.

  “Dismissed,” Strope shouted at them. “Back to your posts.”

  “But Sir,” a woman argued, “we need to know what happened. It’s our right.”

  “And you will. Very soon.” He raised his palm as if to block them from seeing me. “But you’ll wait. Just look at her.” He pointed at me. “She’s traumatized. Go back to your stations. Be prepared for anything.”

  Their respect for him must’ve been powerful.

  I heard no groans as they departed.

  When I looked up, only two remained.

  Strope. And Mina.

  Strope knelt in the doorway to my bunk. Mina hovered behind him, stoic as stone. They said nothing. They knew I needed to breathe.

  I closed my eyes to consider what I’d endured. My light motes had perished within the Strigoi’s mind, but not before they’d shown me everything. I understood more of the darkness than I’d intended.

  And now I can’t forget.

  “I used the kill-switch.” My voice was a whisper. “The Vark… it was stronger than we knew. It would’ve broken out.”

  “You’d have killed it,” said Mina.

  “Of course,” I murmured. “Didn’t want to let it get that far.”

  Again they let me breathe. I gulped the air and willed myself to stop shivering.

  And I faced them anew, my strength returned.

  “They have a new weapon,” I said.

  “The Coffin Engine,” Strope cut in. “It’s—”

  I shook my head. “No. Not that. It’s something else. They’re building it now. It’s many thousands of kilometers long, like a giant black needle. In their language, it’s known as the Qabra Sabir – the Tombspire.”

  Strope gave me a blank look. He wasn’t stupid, just stunned.

  “It’s the culmination of millions of years of Strigoi evolution,” I explained. “Before encountering humanity, they had no reason to build such a thing. They had unlimited time to conquer the light. But then we came along. No civilization before us ever managed to do as much damage.”

  “Tombspire.” Mina stared. “What’s it do?”

  “It rips holes in space and delivers Strigoi weapons across the universe instantaneously,” I said. “They’ll be able to send ships, String Reprogrammers, Coffin Engines…possibly even entire worlds. It also eats light and destroys gravity. Once they finish building it, humanity will be wiped out in a matter of minutes.”

  Strope looked up at Mina. Somehow, he managed one of his smirks.

  “Not if we blow it up.” He shrugged.

  I rubbed my forehead. I snapped my eyelids open and shut. My calculations were complete.

  “One-hundred eighty-seven years,” I said. “By my estimate.”

  Strope didn’t understand.

  Mina did.

  “That’s how long we have until it’s built?” she said. “My next question is—”

  “Hades Galaxy,” I said. “Yes, it exists. It’s the first galaxy they colonized. Every single star in Hades is dead. The Vark used their technology to steal the gravity from everything else. All that remains are three giant planets, a few thousand lesser moons, and an army of Coffin Engines.”

  “…waiting for the Tombspire to be finished,” said Mina.

  “How?” In the blue light, Strope looked exhausted. “How can you know all this? You were only in there for three minutes.”

  I couldn’t explain it all.

  He’d never understand.

  How I broke my promise. How I dreamed for a thousand years in hypo-sleep. How I still remember Joff…and all the things he taught me.

  How I wanted to end the Strigoi.

  “I cheated,” I said.

  “Cheated?”

  “I’ve always suspected the Varkolak share a mental connection. When I talked to it…when I invaded its mind, I knew for sure. Each one of them has been alive for millions of years. Do you understand? They don’t die…ever…unless they get too close to starlight. And so each one of them knows everything. The bodies we fight, they’re not the real Vark. They’re just shells. Their black bones and oily hearts…it’s just their way of making bodies with which to interact with the physical world.”

  Strope looked baffled. Mina didn’t flinch.

  “What I’m saying is…each Vark is the same. It knows everything every other Vark knows. There’s almost no need for communication. And so this Vark…the one Mina captured…it knows the same things as every other Vark, including its brethren in the Hades Galaxy.”

  “It told you this?” Strope made a face.

  “No. It’s like I said. I cheated. I made it think about Hades and the Tombspire, and then I read the imprints on the little black sphere inside its skull. Every Vark has the same mind. We’ve always known they don’t talk to each other. They don’t even really think to each other. But when they installed themselves into physical bodies, they made a mistake. They put their minds into something tangible. It’s like leaving a map to Hades lying around in the kitchen.”

  “So you know where it is?” he asked. “You know how to find Hades?”

  “I do.”

  “Can we get there in a hundred eighty-seven years?” Mina looked worried.

  “Much faster than that.”

  Strope stood and looked at Mina. I saw a glimmer of affection pass between them, but then only shadow.

  The realization of what was next hit them both at once.

  “We’ll go home,” said Strope. “We’ll assemble the fleet. We’ll attack Hades with our full might. It’s time to end this, once and for all. It’s time to—”

  “No.” The way I said it darkened his and Mina’s faces. “There’s no going home.”

  “You said we had time,” Strope countered. “And plenty of it.”

  Be gentle, I thought.

  Remember your humanity.

  I hung my head. My emotions felt manufactured.

  But in this one instance, my feelings were true.

  “You have no home.” I let it out.

  “What?” Strope just stared.

  “While inside the Vark’s mind, I saw something.” I shook my head. “Captain Mahtim…his betrayal is complete. The Coffin Engine arrived at Hermes a few years after we left. It’s gone now. The planet. Sufi. Everything.”

  The truth stole the air from Strope and stripped the light out of Mina’s eyes. They looked at me as if I’d just plunged knives into their hearts.

  And perhaps I had.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know how to tell you.”

  Strope took it hardest. He staggered and said a name. “Latika,” I was sure he whispered.

  Latika.

  His daughter. His and Mina’s child.

  “She…she would’ve only been a little girl.” His face paled.

  Mina took his hand and led him away.

  The last look she gave me spoke volumes.

  She’d always known she’d never see her daughter again.

  She knew even before we left.

  Message in a Bottle

  I barely recognized the cluttered pods of my Ring.

  After the battle beyond Grave B-7 Black and the destruction of DD-9 Ebon, little remained of the fleet. My Sabre and Ring were intact, but only two of the Xiphos warships were left, while Ring One was the last of the seven grand Hermes ships.

  Survivors of the destroyed fleet had boarded my Ring and made it their home. As I walked among them, wandering through each of eight pods, I allowed myself to reminisce of what my ship had been before they came.

  Those cha
irs…where Joff and I used to sit.

  My bed…now taken by others.

  The observation pod…my sanctuary…its floor now littered with sleeping mats and discarded food containers.

  As I walked among the scattered crew and their makeshift bunks, I felt the same as a ghost. The stars wheeled through windows vast and clear, yet nothing seemed to move. No one said anything to me…or to each other.

  The Ring was a graveyard.

  Whatever hope had been instilled by the destruction of two Strigoi worlds had withered. I saw the crew’s faces, and I understood.

  They’d lost their home.

  They’d never have another.

  With the Coffin Engine’s location unknown, we couldn’t return to watch over Hermes’ dust or utter a final prayer to Sufi.

  My Ring had food enough for many years, but only one hypo-sleep chamber.

  We were flying through the abyss in a tomb.

  In the deep quiet, I returned to the bedroom pod. Four young crew, the sole survivors of Ring Three’s destruction, sat whispering on my bed.

  “Leave,” I told them.

  “But—” One of them rose to challenge me.

  “Leave now.” I stared him down. “Return in an hour. It’s all the time I need.”

  Sullen, the four young crew shuffled out the door and into the adjacent pod. I stood in the empty starlight remaining, and I considered myself.

  Not a matter of if…

  …but when they’ll turn on me.

  And on each other.

  Only forty-two hypo-chambers between two Rings, two Xiphos ships, and the Sabre.

  But seventy-seven crew remaining.

  Maybe Joff was onto something.

  He liked to do everything by himself.

  I went to the bedroom pod’s console. I flicked aside the floating characters on the blue front-screen, and I brought up the Mapper’s quantum signal program.

  I closed my eyes.

  I could almost feel the light-nodes bouncing in my head.

  I’d had an idea. The calculations would’ve been impossible for a human to manage, but I waded through the math in a matter of seconds. Everything would need to line up in perfect fashion. One mistake, one tiny error, and nothing else would matter.

  As I composed the message detailing my plan, I chose every word with utmost care. I tapped into speeches given by great generals of war, and I borrowed famous appeals for help written long ago. Reaching into the knowledge I’d gleaned from the Ring’s most ancient archives, I summoned words spoken on Earth fifteen-hundred years ago and made them my own.