Eaters of the Light

by J. Edward Neill

  “To buy us some time,” I explained.

  We walked another twenty meters and stopped where the tunnel floor began its curve up into the rib-like wall. I pressed my left palm against a protruding bone, and I glanced back at Strope.

  “Step away,” I said.

  He retreated five steps.

  I raised my arm-cannon and pulled the trigger.

  The light pouring out of the cannon carved a gaping wound in the wall. The black Strigoi material sloughed away in a cloud of ashes, which drifted into the darkness beyond the hole I’d blasted. We both stood there for many seconds, stunned by the light’s power.

  The hole was perfect, the circle I’d carved into the bones smooth as water-worn rock.

  I wondered if the Coffin Engine were alive.

  Does it hurt?

  Can it feel the light when I injure it?

  “Come here,” I said to Strope.

  He walked right up to me. He looked so small and vulnerable in his suit. I felt far less than human towering above him in my armor.

  With my left arm, I tugged him close and held him firm against my breastplate. His visor bounced against mine, and for a moment we were eye-to-eye. I was sure I caught him smirking.

  “Don’t get any ideas,” I said. “There’s no kissing in space.”

  He opened his mouth to say something, but no sound came out. Holding him tight, I jumped into the hole I’d made. Down, we plummeted, through layers of bone, webs of oily tubes, and nameless black machinery.

  After nearly a hundred meters, my feet hit a new floor.

  The impact shook our bones.

  I went to a knee, but held Strope fast.

  We’d found a new place.

  Deeper.

  Darker.

  And more dangerous than before.

  A Girl Divided

  “Tell me again why it doesn’t matter,” he said.

  The pain in his eyes betrayed his emotion. Despite all his smirks, all the suffering he’d endured, he still cared.

  He cared about his brother, murdered by a traitor.

  He cared about Mina, whom we both believed was dead.

  And he cared about me.

  “It’s the only way,” I answered. “The oldest military tactic in existence. It doesn’t matter because it all ends the same. We die.”

  He hung his head. He wasn’t just afraid. He was tired, hungry, and hurting. I felt the same, but I couldn’t let him see it.

  “I won’t ask you to stay behind,” I told him. “This time I need you.”

  “Good.” He raised his chin. “I wouldn’t have stayed behind even if you’d shot me.”

  That’s the spirit, I thought.

  In a lightless arterial corridor, we walked. The passage into which we’d fallen was narrow, its walls and ceiling buried behind webs of tubes, pipes, and silent black machinery. The masses of Strigoi plumbing made no sound in the vacuum, but I imagined it all the same.

  Pumping oil.

  Pumping blood.

  I glimpsed the tunnel’s end some two-hundred meters ahead. The closer we came, the more I realized the worming corridor opened up into a vast chamber. The space beyond the tunnel had walls that were thousands of meters apart, and a ceiling almost too high to see.

  The hangar.

  We’ve found it.

  We came to the tunnel’s end.

  And we stared into the emptiness.

  “Out there.” I gestured with the arm-cannon. “Twenty-two scythe ships.”

  “It’s like the Calipha’ mountain back home,” he said. “Only bigger.”

  “Yes. Like that.” I nodded. “Even now, the Vark pilots are gathering. They think we’re still in the other ship. We have to hurry.”

  “How many?” He looked up at me. “How many Vark out there?”

  “At least fifty,” I said.

  I knew his fear. I saw it in the sweat beading on his forehead, in the microscopic movements of his pupils. But to his credit, he took the first step out of the tunnel.

  “What’s the plan?” he asked.

  “Follow me,” I said. “Shoot anything that moves.”

  I sucked in a deep breath.

  I touched his shoulder with my left hand.

  And I sprinted into the open darkness.

  In the giant hangar, twenty-two ships sat cold and silent. The Strigoi, for all their fearsome technology, didn’t see me arrive. As they clattered toward their separate ships, I waded into their midst at speeds no human could match, and I fired a weapon even they must’ve trembled to behold.

  I pulled one trigger, and a stream of semi-nuclear explosives leapt out into the dead space between the ships. The mini-bombs arced through the void and hit the black bone floor with such fury I felt the vibration through the Gamma Suit’s armored shoes.

  I damaged none of the ships.

  I needed them intact.

  In the airless vacuum, the flames erupting from my explosives collapsed in only a half-second, but not before consuming the four nearest Strigoi. I saw their bones crackle and burn, their ligaments snap, and their organs fuse to their metal carapaces.

  I felt no shockwave. All the same, the giant orange flash gave me all the diversion I needed. The Strigoi gazed at the burst of light, their attention momentarily stolen.

  I never stopped running.

  I passed the first two empty scythe ships, and I lanced three Strigoi with the arm-cannon’s light beam.

  Five…six…seven… I counted them as they melted. I never missed, not once. I glanced at each horror only long enough to see the light cut through its ribs and tear apart the vulnerable machinery within.

  Finally they saw me.

  Their white eyes, blazing cold and bright, turned on me all at once. The first one that saw me raised a black rifle with its sinuous, skeletal arms, but two blasts from Strope’s weapon hit it in the shoulders, and it tumbled to the ground.

  Shoot it again, I thought, but didn’t say.

  In the brain.

  Or heart.

  I leapt high into the shadows. I saw black carapaces moving in the dark beneath, the long skeletal legs carrying the Strigoi after me.

  Some had death-beam rifles.

  Others had no weapons at all, and meant to catch me and pull me apart with their powerful arms.

  Twelve…thirteen…fourteen… Bursts of sunlight from my cannon swept across the gathering horrors. Not one of them had managed to squeeze off a death-beam shot at me.

  Not yet.

  “Fifteen.” I grinned when I saw Strope run up to the one he’d downed and finish it with a half-dozen shots to its skull.

  Ropes of black energy began screaming toward me. The Strigoi had regrouped, and were gathering in the dark to kill me. I stayed airborne, hitting the ground only to leap again, reaching heights of nearly one-hundred meters with each jump. To slow down would be to die, I knew.

  I kept moving.

  And I never stopped firing.

  Twenty…twenty-one…twenty-two.

  I destroyed the ones with weapons first. And then I focused on those nearest their ships. I saw a hailstorm of golden orbs sail through the dark, and I knew Strope hadn’t yet died. He was too slow and too far away to hit much, but still his shots gave the Strigoi pause.

  They didn’t know how many of us had come.

  They didn’t expect to be attacked here, in the belly of their most fearsome creation.

  I felt my sweat pour down my skin. My concentration made my eyes hurt, but still I didn’t miss. Each lance of white light made ash and black ribbons of its target, and the cold fires in each Strigoi’s eyes went satisfyingly dark.

  “…another one…two more over there.” I heard Strope’s voice crackle inside my helmet. “…you’re killing them too fast. I can’t catch up.”

  Between shots of arm-cannon sunlight, I admitted to myself.

  I’m protecting him.

  I don’t want him to die.

  A death-beam clipped my suit’s s
houlder armor. A few hundred years ago, the shot would’ve fatally cracked the dark polymers and opened my suit to the vacuum of space.

  But scientists on Sumer had made near-impossible advancements. They’d added reactive chemicals mere millimeters below the Gamma’s surface. Unless a death-beam hit me dead-on, I had a reasonable chance of surviving.

  I hit the ground and rolled forty meters. My impact pulverized a long line of bones, and left a shallow rut in the black hangar’s floor.

  I stopped, and a pair death-beams blackened the space just above my head. I stood and incinerated the two Strigoi who’d fired them.

  One of the scythe ships lifted off. Angry at myself for allowing it, I fired three shots. The ship’s wings fell off and crashed to the ground. The cockpit, filled with a burst of white radiance, hung in the black as if suspended.

  …before turning to ash.

  Forty…forty-one…fire mini-nuke…forty-six.

  In the midst of the battlefield, I thought somehow to hear explosions, to feel the terrible heat and dreadful cold of death-beams, and to listen to the bones clatter to the ground for every monster I annihilated.

  But in the end, silence reigned.

  I stood, panting and exhausted, the arm-cannon’s insides slick with my sweat.

  Clouds of ash drifted atop burned lumps of metal, bone, and tissue. I’d destroyed them all. And I hadn’t made a sound.

  I waited many moments. I didn’t want to turn around for fear of seeing Strope dead and mutilated.

  But then I saw him. He stood over a not-quite-fully-melted Strigoi, fired a trio of shots, and shambled away. He saw me go to a knee in the middle of the carnage, and he ran to me.

  “Cal, you okay?” In his ash-stained spacesuit with his smoking rifle in hand, he looked at last like a warrior.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “It’s just…I didn’t expect to survive.”

  “What do you mean?” His eyes flashed. “If you expected to die, why’d you attack?”

  I gestured at the scythe ships. Twenty-one of the deadly black vessels sat quiet in the shadows, untouched by the light I’d brought to the dark.

  “Much must be risked in war,” I said. “And now…our fleet awaits us.”

  He gazed at the line of ships as if surprised. Somehow, for as much violence as I’d inflicted, I’d only annihilated one of the Strigoi craft.

  We stood in silence for a time, catching our breaths, remembering our calm. If an army of Strigoi had fallen upon us, we might’ve died right then.

  Strope knew what I was planning.

  And he wasn’t happy.

  “I don’t know how your body works,” he said. “Or how this will affect you. But I know this much—I don’t want you to do it. There has to be another way. Something. Anything.”

  No other way, I thought.

  I closed my eyes. I felt Strope’s hands on the Gamma Suit’s shoulders, but he couldn’t move me. Already, tiny clouds of blue light were escaping my skull through the cortical plug. Their separation from me hurt just as much as I expected.

  I wobbled on my feet. My body felt weak, my divided mind damaged.

  I opened my eyes. Strope shouted something at me. I looked beyond him, where twenty-one clouds of blue Callista light hovered in the darkness. Each cloud contained many thousands of light-nodes. Each one was a fragment of me.

  Go, I whispered to them. One to a ship. Get in. Install yourselves. And we will make our way.

  In little glowing bundles, the blue lights fled into the black. I saw them flutter away like candles receding into a dark, dark room. I’d partitioned my mind to control each one separately, but their loss made me shudder.

  “It hurts.” I wobbled again.

  “Call them back.” Strope’s hands were still on me. “You don’t have to control every single ship. Maybe just ten.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “I’m taking them all.”

  I felt his hands leave me, and I admitted I missed them. Perhaps losing so much of myself made me vulnerable. But in that moment, I wished Strope could hold me. Reassure me. Strip my hidden fear away.

  Forgive me. I thought of Joff.

  I feel almost human now.

  The tiny clouds of Callista light moved into the scythe ships. Through microscopic holes, through death-beam barrels, and through quantum engine ventilation ports, they invaded the enemy craft and slipped like knives into the Strigoi machinery.

  I knew the enemy’s language.

  I understood their controls.

  I found my focus and gave Strope a grim smile.

  “Watch.” I pointed my arm-cannon. “Their ships are mine.”

  All at once, the twenty-one scythe ships lifted into the shadows. I couldn’t feel their engines’ vibrations with my body, but rather with my mind. The fragments of myself spoke to me the same as children. They knew my mind, and I knew theirs.

  I should’ve thought of this sooner.

  Could’ve ended the war a thousand years ago.

  Together, the twenty-one ships took flight. They cut slowly through the darkness at first, and then sped away into the abyssal black. Strope watched in awe as they soared over his head and down into the vast corridor beyond.

  I didn’t need to see them.

  I felt them.

  “This was a mistake.” Strope looked up at me. “You should’ve left one ship behind. Now we have to walk—what is it—a few thousand kilometers?”

  I allowed myself a smile.

  “No,” I said. “We’re going another way.”

  “What other way?”

  “Down.” I pointed my arm-cannon at the floor. “Through there.”

  I saw his fear.

  And he said nothing.

  Sacrifice

  Through the scythe ships’ eyes, I saw the enemy.

  The Strigoi didn’t yet comprehend.

  With twenty-one ships at my bidding, my fleet soared into the Coffin Engine’s inner domain. Black wings drifted past twisted habitats, the walls pocked with the tiny chambers in which the Strigoi kept their bodies. The chambers pulsed with dead white lights, the opposite of the stars’ radiance.

  The horrors within weren’t sleeping, but merely waiting.

  For a thousand years.

  Or a million.

  Through webs of hanging machinery, my fleet moved. I felt the pings of data all around me, the Strigoi reaching out to me. They didn’t understand why their ships were moving without pilots. They couldn’t see my light-nodes dancing in dark places within each ship.

  Away from the ships, hidden in the Coffin Engine’s blackest corridors, I walked with Strope at my side.

  He talked to me, and I said words back to him, but none of it registered. I wasn’t present. I supposed I was much like a Strigoi—energy moving within a shell, marching along to a command as ancient as the universe.

  But my ships moved with purpose.

  Wending their way through caverns near the Coffin Engine’s core, they delved into places I’d not yet imagined. I’d seen Strigoi planets, outposts, and mines, but I’d never witnessed the enemy in any state other than war.

  These Strigoi were at peace, if such a thing were possible.

  I saw them gathered in great circles, their bodies connected to writhing tubes of black oil. Dark fluids pumped into their black hearts, fueling them to continue their dread existence.

  I saw lines striding into skeletal towers. In houses of bones stretched across the darkness, they moved with a calm I’d never seen. I wondered if they sought each other’s company, whether they came together for some dark communal purpose or to converse in great number about the end of all light.

  But I believed in my heart no such purpose existed.

  Their bodies moved only for practical purposes.

  To work.

  To build.

  To destroy.

  Many times, I could’ve instructed the scythe ships to wreak terrible damage. The Strigoi weren’t immune to death-beams, and I could’ve m
ade my ships unleash torrents of dark energy. To slaughter thousands of Strigoi as they moved through the shadows below would have been easy.

  Almost, in my compromised state, I considered it.

  Vengeance for Hermes.

  For myself.

  For Joff.

  No.

  As I walked, Strope asked many questions:

  “Are you okay?”

  “You’re walking funny. You’re too quiet. Can you bring some of yourself back?”

  “What is this place you’ve brought us to? Where are the Vark?”

  I never answered. I beckoned for him to follow, and I dared not stop.

  Deep within the Coffin Engine, the Strigoi grew suspicious of my borrowed fleet. They saw the tunnels into which my ships delved, and the strange, slow patterns my scythes took as they soared into places subterranean and black.

  They must know.

  They’ll see the threat, and they’ll move to counter it.

  And so they did.

  Through a giant cavern and down into a vast tunnel, I sent my fleet. Other ships moved in the void, smaller vessels than mine, but none seemed troubled by my appearance. It was a dread place I came to. The walls in the Coffin Engine’s heart were buried in cables and endless tubes, and were made of pulsing flesh instead of bone.

  The Engine’s insides weren’t alive or dead, but some awful, in-between state.

  ‘Undead,’ Joff had once told me.

  ‘Vampiric.’

  Still deeper, I descended. Strigoi voices boomed inside my ships. I expected the pain to be lesser given the many hundreds of kilometers between the ships and my physical body.

  But it hurt all the same.

  “We know,” they said. “You dream of destroying this place.”

  Wrong, I thought.

  “You will fail. You will die,” said another, the vibration of its voice shaking my ships’ insides.

  It won’t save you. I smiled in secret.

  “Even if you succeed, one Engine is not all,” boomed still another. Its voice was most powerful of all, rattling my hidden light-nodes. “This device is one of many. You are too late.”

  “You will die,” all three voices said at once.

  The pain washed over me. For all my intelligence, I didn’t understand how I heard their voices or how their power shook me so.