Eaters of the Light

by J. Edward Neill

  “A birthing farm,” I whispered.

  “You mean graveyard,” he replied. “There must be thousands.”

  “Hundreds of thousands,” I said.

  “Eyes dark. Not moving. Not looking at us.” He sounded grateful. “They’re sleeping. Thank Sufi.”

  “Not sleeping,” I said. “Awaiting new occupants.”

  Endless columns of silent Strigoi bodies hung in the void. Strung together by black ligaments, their tanks looked like coffins awaiting the fall of an eternal night.

  I dreamed of destroying them.

  I could burn them down.

  Smash their tanks open.

  Drown this place in light.

  I felt the emotion rise within me. With so much of myself destroyed, my anger swelled inside me. It smoldered in my blood, boiling in my fists, my throat, and my heart.

  “I want to.” I lifted my arm-cannon without thinking.

  “No.” Strope pushed the cannon back to my waist. “Remember what you told me. Remember why we’re here.”

  I swallowed hard, and the wave of emotion crashed and died within me.

  “Follow me,” I grunted. “And don’t wake anything up.”

  We walked into the catacomb’s heart. Oceans of skeletal Strigoi floated above us, their empty, lightless gazes blacker than any night. Their bodies looked dead, their organs cold and sleeping.

  But I understood.

  All they’re waiting for is a spark…a Strigoi soul…if such a thing exists.

  We passed many hundred columns of coffin vats. If the giant Strigoi heart-machine would’ve deafened us to hear, the catacomb would’ve swallowed us in a silence too profound. The skeleton machines inside each birthing cylinder made no noise, while the fluids within were pressurized to perfect stillness.

  Nothing stirred in the dark.

  The quiet felt deeper than death.

  “I hate this place.” Strope slogged beside me. “We had birthing houses back home, but nothing like this. It was all doctors and screaming babies. But this…this is unholy.”

  Life takes many forms, I almost said.

  But it wasn’t true.

  This isn’t life.

  These things will never be alive.

  A full kilometer deep into the catacomb, I came to a sudden stop. Strope lurched and bumped into my arm.

  “You’re not going to like this.” I peered into the dark. The shadows seemed to never begin, to never end.

  “Not going to like what?” he said.

  Closing my eyes, I released several hundred light nodes from my head. I felt dizzy in their absence, ready to collapse into a puddle on the floor.

  “Why?” Strope steadied me.

  “Out there.” I exhaled. “Somewhere…a door. The lights will find it. We’ll break in. And then—”

  “A glorious death.” He managed a smirk. “Are you okay? Can’t we find the door without you hurting yourself? This is madness.”

  “I know.”

  I imagined my eyes dimming as the lights sped away from me. For several breaths, the blue glimmers looked like stars dancing in the night.

  And then they were gone, racing through the corpse-labyrinth to find a way out.

  A door.

  The last door.

  As we waited, I fell away from conscious thought. A daydream took me far and wide of the catacomb, and the darkness collapsed into light. A thousand years of my life bounced through my mind, each moment somehow more powerful than when I’d lived it.

  I saw Joff, a young man, sitting on a white bed in a cold glass fortress. He wanted to cry, to shout, and to rage against the powers that had stripped him away from his peaceful life. But he didn’t cry.

  He never did.

  The fortress evaporated, and I glimpsed the first Strigoi world Joff and I had destroyed. The planet was tidally locked—one side bathed in light, the other buried in permanent shadow. On the light side, two blazing suns fueled an ocean of energy-consuming machines. On the other, towers ten kilometers high scraped the never-ending night.

  If I’d have known it was only the first of many…

  I blinked, and I saw myself striding through a train station on Sumer. The summer air was stifling, the clouds thick and grey, and for one instant the planet’s suns broke through. In my very first human body, I stood in a pool of light and greeted Joff.

  If only he’d have kissed me.

  …told me he wanted to give up his pursuit of the Strigoi.

  …asked me to leave with him.

  “Cal? Cal?” Strope’s voice reached me.

  I pulled myself out of the dream. With so few light-nodes remaining inside me, I was as human as I’d ever been. I tasted the salt from a tear running down my cheek, and I gazed without purpose into the dark.

  “There’s something I need to tell you,” I murmured to Strope.

  He looked at me, not quite as exhausted as moments ago.

  “You might be angry…or not,” I continued. “But it’s important for you to hear.”

  “Say it,” he breathed.

  “The other parts of Hades…they’re already destroyed,” I said. “Three Vark homeworlds…turned to stars. Dozens of moons…tens of thousands of ships…all gone.”

  He stared at me.

  He didn’t believe me.

  “I lied to you.” I looked at him. “The Milky Way fleets…they arrived months ago. But the thing is—they didn’t come here. Nor did I ask them to.”

  “Why?” He managed only one word.

  “Many reasons.” I shivered. “They’d have never stood a chance against the Coffin Engines. Even if they did destroy the world we encountered, they’d have been too crippled to carry on. The other Vark worlds would’ve survived.”

  His face flushed red. I couldn’t tell whether he was angry or distraught.

  “You mean to say you sent the fleets where the Vark were weakest…and us where they’re strongest?”

  “Yes.”

  He wasn’t a fool. I saw his mind race, his eyes lighting up before falling back into shadow.

  He knew.

  He understood.

  “You thought I…you knew…I wouldn’t go.” He shuddered.

  “If you believed this was a suicide mission from the beginning, would you have?” I asked. “If you knew the fleets weren’t coming here, would you have joined me?”

  He hung his head.

  “I…don’t know.”

  “Mina and Babar…they’ve already destroyed the Vark world we saw,” I said. “Babar is dead. Mina’s signal is lost. But the world is gone. Only the Coffin Engines remain.”

  “And the Tombspire,” he said.

  And the Tombspire.

  A long stretch of silence fell upon us.

  I imagined Strope tumbling through every emotion a human could possibly feel.

  “I understand.” He stood tall again. “I know why you lied.”

  “Do you?”

  “I do,” he said. “When we ignite the Engine—when we set it off, you and I will be the only humans lost. We’re giving up our two little lives to destroy billions of Vark.”

  I put my hand on his shoulder.

  I smiled one final time.

  At last, we understood each other.

  * * *

  By the time my light nodes returned to me, we were already on the move. The blue lights slipped back into my skull, revitalizing me. I felt stronger again, even though I knew it was only an illusion.

  Strope pushed through his pain and marched beside me. My lie had injured him, but the truth of Hades’ destruction had settled in his heart.

  And ignited his courage.

  He’d never believed it possible.

  He didn’t know how much it had wounded me.

  Calling for the fleet.

  Planning our sacrifice.

  Keeping it a secret.

  “There.” I pointed into the dark. “See?”

  “No, I see only—”

  “When my light bur
ns through the door,” I interrupted, “you know what to do.”

  “Kill guards first, then any others.” He repeated what I’d told him. “And don’t—under any circumstance—shoot the controls.”

  “One stray hit could end us,” I said with a half-smile. “How’s that feel—humanity’s fate resting on your aim?”

  He grinned. And I remembered him the way he’d been on Hermes.

  Brave.

  And dangerous.

  I led him past many columns of Strigoi vats. Within their tanks, the soulless skeletons watched us advance upon the door. I wondered what they would scream if they knew our plan.

  I wondered if they’d be afraid.

  We arrived at the door. Made of bone and black mortar, it stood twice as tall as me.

  “Why so big?” Strope peered up at the massive gate.

  “Ever seen a Vark dreadnaught?” I asked. “Eight arms, twelve eyes, four giant death-beams strapped to their shoulders…”

  His eyes widened.

  “I’m kidding.” I cracked a quarter-smile. “They only have six arms. Now get ready. I don’t know what awaits us.”

  I heard him suck in his life’s deepest breath.

  As I raised my arm-cannon, I whispered a prayer to Sufi.

  Chasing Death

  A storm of ashes filled the shadows we’d left behind.

  Light from my arm-cannon annihilated ten Strigoi. I left only one for Strope, which he dispatched in a flurry of shots from his rifle.

  In the aftermath, we stood in the Coffin Engine’s command chamber.

  And we breathed.

  “Thought it’d be harder,” Strope panted. “None of them had weapons.”

  I planted myself in the room’s center. Smoke curled from piles of ash all around me. Before me, a giant bank of windows looked out onto a massive Strigoi reactor. The violet radiance expelled from a hundred-chambered heart-machine spread into the room, paling us in a sickly lavender glow.

  “The guards…” I said. “…the distraction worked. They went to fight my ships. They haven’t returned yet.”

  “But they will.” Strope walked up beside me. I knew by the color of his visor he’d turned off his x-ray vision. “I can see again,” he said. “In color.”

  The Coffin Engine’s command chamber wasn’t as huge as I’d expected. At two-hundred meters wide with a low ceiling, it had only two other doors other than the one we’d burned away.

  “We need to seal those.” I pointed.

  “How?”

  I walked in front of him and raised my arm-cannon. With one trigger pull, I fired a micro-bomb into the ceiling just above one door. The bone mortar erupted, fragmented, and collapsed in a giant heap.

  “One door blocked,” I said. “Now the other. Keep your head down.”

  I did the same for the second door. After the smoke and ash cleared, a mound of bones ten Strigoi thick blocked all entry.

  “That should slow them down,” I said.

  Together, we waded through a cloud of floating dust. We reached the bank of windows and looked out at the reactor. Pumping in slow-motion, the giant mechanical heart was many dozens of kilometers in diameter. Neither one of us had ever seen such horror in our lives.

  “It fuels the Coffin Engine,” I said. “Every machine. Every Vark. It’s like everything else in here. Neither dead nor alive.”

  “The most powerful machine ever.” Strope sounded afraid.

  “Second most,” I answered. “After the Tombspire.”

  I swallowed a deep breath.

  And I focused.

  Strange, convoluted devices lay before me. Spread out beneath the windows, the Strigoi computers controlled the entire Coffin Engine—its heart-machines, its oil flow, its weapons. Switches made of bone, screens packed with unknowable symbols, and tubes of oil laced with tiny valves spread out across a dark surface twenty meters wide.

  If I hadn’t already been inside my enemy, I’d have never understood it.

  “This is happening too fast,” Strope stared at the heart-machine.

  I allowed myself a pensive moment. He was right. We’d fought so hard to reach the Coffin Engine’s heart, and yet it all seemed too quick.

  We’ve hurried up to die.

  “Are you...you know…” He glanced down at the Strigoi computers. “…smart enough to make it work?”

  “Barely,” I said. “I need you to stand back. You’re my protector while I concentrate. If they break through, kill as many as you can.”

  He didn’t want to leave me. In the heart-machine’s terrible glow, I saw his face. His fear. His love.

  Not Joff.

  Strope.

  In silence, he backed away. I erected myself before the Strigoi machines and began my work. My mind was weakened, my body exhausted, and yet within a few seconds I translated their symbols.

  Theirs was a language rooted in darkness.

  And in science.

  Valves 10, 38, 186 – open to allow contact, a small screen with an oily film on its surface flashed at me.

  …awaken all switches on central panel to query mass-death engine.

  …compress node 1 to view targeted area.

  I moved like wind across the machines. Pulling switches, opening oil valves, and tapping buttons, I translated their system.

  Opening the valves allows information to flow between machines.

  Awakening switches…like turning them on.

  Targeted area…meaning the space affected by the death-engine. Dozens of light-years in every direction.

  It’s right here.

  I pressed a black button. The largest of the oily screens flickered to life, glowing with the same loathsome hue as the machine-heart pumping beyond the windows.

  And there it was.

  The Tombspire.

  “Strope.” I said his name. “Come here. Look at this.”

  He left his post in the room’s center and came to me. Together, we stared at the screen. The image was hazy, but neither one of us doubted what we saw.

  “It’s real.” His voice sounded ragged.

  “Yes.”

  The Tombspire, mother of death, hung in the Hades void. I’d guessed its location more than a century ago, but to see it on the screen slowed my heart. Like a giant, double-ended needle, it spun in the darkness a few million kilometers away from the Coffin Engine we’d invaded.

  “It looks finished.” Strope shuddered.

  It does, I thought. It’s almost ready.

  “Is it…you know—?” He looked at me.

  “Yes. It’s within range. It…and all the other Coffin Engines.”

  I saw something resembling hope in his eyes.

  And I sent him back to his post.

  Whatever the Strigoi had expected, whatever they’d feared, they’d never dreamed of me standing before their computer, reprogramming their engine of death. I worked at a furious pace, unraveling the hundreds of small steps needed to prepare the weapon for ignition.

  Open this tube…not that one.

  Switch these, which should increase the heart-machine’s output.

  Unclamp this conduit, allowing—

  “Cal,” I heard Strope say. His voice sounded distant.

  What? I thought.

  “Cal,” he said again, far more urgent.

  I spun to face him. He saw the fury in my eyes, and he looked afraid.

  “Look.” His finger quivered as he pointed to the windows.

  I faced the heart-machine. Its rhythm had doubled, its hundred chambers writhing to a grotesque tempo.

  “I know,” I said. “I programmed it to—”

  “No, not the heart.” He came to me and tapped his rifle against the glass. “Look. There. See those tiny ships? See? They’re crashing.”

  In my haste, I hadn’t seen it. The dagger-shaped ships, moving in slow circles around the heart-machine, had eluded me. I’d been too focused.

  Too weak.

  Strope was right again. The ships were cra
shing, fluttering through the vast empty space beyond the window as if their pilots had all gone mad. Several collided with one another, showering the emptiness with oil and broken bones. Others drifted into the heart-machine, whose chambers swallowed the ships whole.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “I didn’t change anything but the heart’s rhythm. I haven’t even begun to ignite—”

  How clumsy we were.

  How foolish.

  We felt the vibrations beneath our boots. The quakes weren’t from the heart-machine, nor from any process I’d initiated.

  The catacomb room, I knew.

  They’re waking up.

  Strope looked to me in a panic. Through the tunnel I’d carved into the command chamber, a sickly grey light shone upon us. The vibrations shook the floor again and again.

  I understood.

  “The ships…they’re crashing because the pilots have left their bodies.”

  “What?” Strope leveled his rifle at the tunnel.

  “Imagine you’re a blob of dark energy,” I said. “You don’t have to stay in one body. You can move to another whenever you want. So long as it’s uninhabited.”

  “You mean—?”

  “Yes. They’re coming.”

  I blinked, and I saw shadows moving beyond the tunnel. I’d sealed the two doors, but I’d left the passage between the catacombs and the command room wide open.

  “Tunnel’s too big.” I shook my head in self-disgust. “I can bring more ceiling down, but it won’t keep them out…not for long.”

  “How many are coming?” Strope’s aim wobbled.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “If I know our enemy, I’d say all of them.”

  I fired three lances of light into the ceiling above the tunnel. The way I sculpted, a giant block of bone mortar came crashing down. Ashes filled the room again, and when they cleared, the tunnel was blocked.

  …mostly.

  I stood beside Strope. He knew as well as I did—the end was near.

  “They’re going to get through,” I said. “It’s only a matter of time. I have to go back to work. Which means you—”

  “Have to hold them back.” He nodded.

  We met each other’s eyes. I had much to say, and no time in which to say it.