Darkness Between the Stars

by J. Edward Neill

  I mean it.

  I’m not at the farm anymore. I suppose, unless you’re reading this aboard an interstellar ship, I’m even farther away from home than you are. I’m at the Titan far-orbit station, about thirty-five thousand kilometers away from you. Pretty far, right? I guess it’s not as far as you’ll be going, or maybe not nearly as far as you’ve already gone. But the distance feels unimaginable.

  In case you’re wondering, I need to be up here. With you and Aly gone, my only way to cope is to work. They let me take a science post only a few ranks lower than what I used to have. It’s good work. They have me designing tracking devices for distant space debris. I know that sounds pretty boring, but it’s work and it keeps me busy.

  I miss your father. They offered him a position up here with me, but he said he couldn’t bear to do it. He felt like leaving the farm would be a betrayal of everything our family worked for. I still talk to him every night. Well actually it’s night for me, but morning for him. He hired two farmhands to help now that you’re gone. He wanted me to tell you he’s still not using any new tech for harvesting. He thought you might be proud.

  Aly is doing well at school. I know you two had your differences, but you should know your sister is smarter than any of us could’ve guessed. She’s number one in her class, and they’re already considering her for a teaching job once she graduates early. It’s not what any of us expected, but I think we should be proud.

  Look, I know you don’t have much time to read letters from your absent mom. I understand that. But I want you to know I’ll keep writing until the time comes to stop. They haven’t explained the details of your mission to me, nor will they. But even if they ship you out on a faster-than-light ship, I’ll keep sending messages. They’ll just have to catch up to you.

  Love,

  Mom

  PS. Tomorrow they’re letting me use the kitchen to make griddlecakes for everyone. Don’t worry…I won’t use the secret recipe I used to make for you.

  After the fourth time reading it, I folded the letter up and stuck it under my pillow. It felt like something was missing. I’d expected to cry, laugh, or maybe a little of both.

  I couldn’t muster anything.

  All I really thought was that it might be the last time I ever heard from my mother. And I wasn’t sure what to think.

  I sat in bed for a time. With no Callista or sprites in my room, I wasn’t sure what to do with my morning. As the sun rose, my bedroom windows paled and the vast woodland beyond the glass came into focus. I hadn’t really paid attention to the fact that winter had settled over the mountains. The deep greens and dark umbers were gone, replaced by armies of leafless, skeletal trees standing on battlefields of snow.

  It was so unlike our valley outside Donva.

  It didn’t matter.

  I still thought it was beautiful.

  Maybe I suspected I’d never see home again, or maybe I dreamed of escaping into the deep, dark forest, but either way it hurt to look out the windows and know I’d probably never go outside.

  Shirtless and yawning, I clambered out of bed and stood with my face close to one of the windows. My breath fogged the glass, but not enough to block my view.

  My door opened just as I let out a sigh.

  Doctor Abid stood behind me.

  “Morning, Joff,” he announced.

  “It’s time, isn’t it?” I looked out the window.

  I expected him to walk up beside me and give me another of his speeches. But he didn’t.

  “How’d you know?” he asked.

  “I dunno,” I mumbled. “I just did.”

  “You know, Joff,” he said, “you’re as ready as you’re ever going to be.”

  “I’m just a kid.”

  “The smartest, best-trained, deadliest kid on the planet.”

  Still just a kid, I thought.

  And I lied. I didn’t know today was the day.

  I didn’t talk to him as I dressed and followed him out into the hall. I no longer saw him as a teacher, a guide, or a human being. Since the Wendall Wight incident several weeks prior, I viewed him only as one thing:

  Prison warden.

  He didn’t ask me to collect any of my things. The skypad, a few letters and recordings from my parents, and Alpo were all that I had to my name, and none of them were things I needed. Despite the fact the fortress and everything in it appeared to be made for me, I felt anonymous. I’d left no impressions on anything or anyone.

  And I was just fine with it.

  We walked the long halls, him in front, me behind. I stayed as close to the windows as possible, watching over the wintered slopes with a lump in my throat. I had no idea what to expect in the next few moments; they hadn’t told me anything. All I knew was the deep chill inside my body, and the whispers I heard in my head.

  You’ll never see Earth again, Joff.

  This is a one-way trip.

  You knew it the moment you came to this place.

  You knew it when you were a little boy.

  Lost in my thoughts, I hardly realized when Abid stopped and touched his palm to a section of the bare chrome wall. I’d always known they had secret passages throughout the fortress. Abid and Tiana’s private quarters were hidden, as were numerous control rooms and monitoring stations.

  When a panel slid out of the wall and Abid typed in a sequence, I held my breath and glanced out the windows one last time.

  And then I walked through a door into the immense chamber beyond.

  Not five steps in, I stopped in my tracks while Abid walked ahead.

  “It’s ok,” he called back to me. “You’ve got a little while to take it all in.”

  I wasn’t sure a little while would be enough. I stood there, feeling tiny, my mouth hanging open. Abid had brought me to a giant hangar bay, with walls a hundred meters high and a floor that seemed to stretch into infinity. Every surface was smooth, seamless chrome. The giant room was frigid cold because of a huge opening in the far wall, big enough to fit a small mountain through.

  But it wasn’t the size of the room or the gleaming chrome surfaces lining it.

  It was the jet black spacecraft sitting dead in its center.

  The Sabre, I remembered.

  The real life version of the ship they had me pilot during flight sims.

  The Sabre was like nothing I’d ever dreamed of. It sat alone in the great emptiness, dark and terrifying. It wasn’t a clunky, rocket-strapped cylinder like the ships they used to ferry supplies to the orbital stations. It was a sleek, ebon monstrosity, curved like one of my sickles back on the farm, so deadly looking I felt afraid to go near it. Despite all the technology I’d been exposed to since leaving home, the Sabre made me realize my ignorance.

  There were things in the world I hadn’t conceived.

  Humanity had made advancements beyond my reckoning.

  I walked slowly toward it. Its dagger-sharp nose pointed at the gaping hole in the far wall, and I understood why. I didn’t see any rockets built into its belly or propulsion ports on its sides or back. I glimpsed a dark window near its front, but had no idea how I was supposed to get inside.

  When I caught up to Abid, the questions poured out of me.

  “How do I get in?”

  “How does it fly without rockets or ports?”

  “Are there weapons?”

  “It’s a pretty big ship, but it’s not big enough to go interstellar. Is it?”

  Abid stared at the Sabre as he answered.

  “We’ll put out a ladder for you to climb inside. You’ll see. There’s a hidden airlock in the belly.”

  “Oh.”

  “The Sabre doesn’t use liquid propulsion. It has a quantum engine. To explain it to you would take years. Just think of it like this: it has a computer that tells the space around the ship what to do. So it’s not like the ship is moving, not in the standard definition of the word. Technically, the rest of the universe moves around it.”

  “Oh,” I said aga
in.

  “And yes, there are weapons. Lots of them. They’re sealed under the wing and beneath the tip of the nose. If you go up really close, you’ll be able to see the seams, but only barely.”

  “Still…it’s not big enough.” I gestured at it. “You’ll never be able to fit enough supplies for a long, long trip.”

  Abid smirked. “You’ll be docking with an interstellar ring. You’ll live and sleep on the ring until you get within a light-minute of Ebes. And then you’ll detach the Sabre and pilot it in for the kill.”

  The kill.

  I hated the way he said it.

  Somehow, I’d shoved the reality of what they wanted me to do into the deepest corner of my memory.

  Fly alone to a distant planet.

  Bomb every Exodus settlement.

  Land.

  Kill Frost.

  “I have one more question.”

  “Ask.” He didn’t look at me.

  “Am I the only one? I mean, it seems crazy to send one person to do this.”

  Abid shook his head. “One person? That’s funny, Joff. You’ll be the ninety-third person we’ve sent.”

  “Ninety-three?”

  “Over the last few decades, we’ve sent ninety-two others. Some in groups, others alone. All with the same mission as you.”

  I felt my face turn red and my heart bang against my ribs.

  “What happened to them?”

  I already knew the answer.

  “They never came back.” Abid shrugged and left me standing there.

  * * *

  Stuffed in a black polymer grav-suit, wearing a white helmet, gloves, and hardened boots, I hunkered in the Sabre’s cockpit and waited for something to happen. The air inside the ship was cool, but my sweat ran in rivers. I controlled my breathing, sat utterly still, and kept my eyes closed to the world, and yet I still felt myself shaking. Abid and Tiana, who’d retreated behind a glass wall in a faraway control room, had told me it was completely normal to be nervous.

  No kidding, I thought.

  They’d offered me pills to lessen the sensation of tearing through the Earth’s atmosphere.

  I’d declined.

  They’d hugged me and said many things honoring my ‘commitment,’ my ‘bravery,’ and my ‘strength.’

  I’d ignored them.

  In truth, I wanted to slap them both.

  The longer I sat there, the worse I felt. I couldn’t believe it had come to this, to me sitting in the most advanced spacecraft ever made, to me preparing to cross the void and murder a collective of star-killing maniacs.

  To calm myself, I daydreamed of standing on my farm at night.

  This is real, I said to myself beneath an imagined starlit sky.

  I was chosen for this.

  I counted the stars. I saw the darkness between them. The government sent soldiers, scientists, and criminals before me. So now they’re sending farmers.

  Because every other kid on the planet is a sprite loving, vid addicted, dream-maker junkie.

  And I’m the only one who can do this.

  Or so I pretended.

  The Sabre’s cockpit was as sleek and lifeless as its exterior. Every surface was burnished black, soaking up the fragile light whose source I couldn’t find. I’d expected to find consoles loaded with buttons, but the control panel in front of me was even less complex than the flight sim booth. I knew without asking that the only thing I looked forward to – piloting the Sabre during its escape from Earth gravity – would be handled by the men and women sitting in the faraway booth with Abid.

  Why even train me? I thought.

  I’d always guessed there were more people in the fortress. I hadn’t ever seen anyone besides Tiana and Abid, but I knew. When I looked out the Sabre’s window and saw them in a glass-encased room on the far wall, I counted them.

  Ten.

  No. Wait. Twelve.

  All these months, how many people have been watching me?

  They don’t look especially…governmental.

  I took a deep, deep breath. I felt my muscles begin to relax, my mind escape from panic. Although everything felt so sudden, I knew in my heart this moment had been a lifetime in the making.

  They wouldn’t send me if they didn’t believe in me, I told myself.

  I can do this. I will do this.

  Earth will survive…because of me.

  I peered around the Sabre’s cockpit. The Vezda suit was secured in a sealed glass cylinder behind me. A month’s worth of food lay in the locked cabin to my left. A hypo-chamber, used to sleep in during the faster-than-light voyage, sat behind another locked door to my right.

  There was only one thing missing:

  Callista.

  “Doctor Abid,” I said into my helmet’s mouthpiece, “you said Cal was coming with me. Am I missing something?”

  His voice crackled in my helmet. “No.”

  “Well?” I made a face no one could see. “Where is she?”

  “She’s already on the interstellar ring. She’s prepping it for launch. We sent her up last night.”

  “Thanks for telling me,” I huffed.

  “You’ll live,” he shot back.

  Not if I’m like the other ninety-two, I wanted to say.

  After a moment of silence, Abid spoke again.

  “Oh, and Joff, remember what else I said. About the S.R.. Remember what to do if you find one.”

  I remembered.

  “Put it on the Sabre,” I exhaled. “And bring it back to you.”

  I swore I heard him laugh. “If you can, Joff. Only if you can.”

  Why? I almost asked. But then I realized I didn’t want to know.

  I said nothing more. I wanted Abid’s voice out of my helmet. I understood his harshness, his indifference. And I knew the reasons why he’d treated me with increasing hostility.

  At least, I thought I did.

  I’ll be alone in deep space. No one will care about my complaints. By the time I get to Ebes, they want me to be hard, cold, and bitter. My life in the fortress was just the beginning.

  This is all part of the training.

  I leaned back in the cockpit chair. I knew if I let myself linger on all the things that had happened, the knot in my gut would only worsen. So instead of deep, dark thoughts, I dreamed up good things:

  Griddlecakes.

  Alpo.

  Mornings with Mom. Rebuilding engines with Dad. Cracking jokes with Aly.

  And Callista. She’ll be up there. She’ll be waiting.

  They didn’t warn me. In the middle of smacking my lips to taste a mouthful of imagined griddlecakes, I felt the world move around me. It was just like Abid had said.

  The Sabre didn’t punch through the atmosphere. The atmosphere moved to suit the Sabre.

  I opened my eyes just in time to see it. In one moment, I heard Abid and his crew chatter in my ear. In the next, everything went silent. The Sabre made no noise as it was sucked through the hanger’s huge opening, up into the gloomy clouds, and into the great darkness beyond.

  I couldn’t feel anything. Just like Abid had told me to expect, I wasn’t pinned back to my seat by the g-force of my acceleration. I wasn’t sure whether it was due to the Sabre’s gravity manipulators or to the fact I wasn’t really accelerating, but simply gliding through a cavity in space-time felt like nothing.

  It only took three minutes.

  I blinked, and saw the interstellar ring spinning slowly in front of me. Just beyond it lay an orbital station that may or may not have been the one Mom was stationed on.

  And beyond the orbital station, I saw only the stars, endless and serene.

  “Hi there, partner,” Callista’s voice popped into my helmet.

  I couldn’t help but crack a smile.

  Floating

  They called it the Ring.

  It was my new home.

  In the same white tunic I’d worn during two years in the fortress, I walked the Ring’s halls with Callista floating ahead
of me. I’d read about other interstellar rings before, but reading about them and existing inside of one were two entirely different things. At the edge of an always-spinning wheel, I had eight interconnected rooms all to myself. Beneath the rooms were spokes leading to the Ring’s center, where the Sabre was docked. I didn’t fully comprehend the machinery which provided me gravity, fresh air, and protection from the deadly radiation of deep space.

  But as it happened, I didn’t much care.

  “Still no vertigo?” Callista breezed down the curved corridor. The floor and ceiling were chrome, just like they’d been in the fortress, while the walls were a polymer as transparent as glass.

  “No.” I gazed out at the stars. “You say it like it’s a bad thing, like I should have it.”

  “It’s just what Doctor Tiana told me.” Cal shrugged in a way only a tiny blue nano-woman could. “She said I should expect you to be sick for several days. She said it’d be normal.”

  “I’m not normal, remember. For all I know, they genetically modified me to never get vertigo.”

  “Are you serious?” She floated backwards right in front of me.

  “Think about it,” I said. “I’ve never been sick in my entire life. Even though we had less technology on the farm than almost everywhere else in the world, I never, ever got sick. Neither did Aly. Mom and Dad did, but never us kids. I doubt it’s an accident. I bet Abid made me this way.”

  “You’re being paranoid.” Callista smiled.

  “Maybe.” I kept walking.

  After three days in deep space, I’d come to understand why Abid had kept me in the fortress for so long. The Ring’s circular corridors, chrome floors, and windows peering into a place I’d never go were so very similar to the mountainside prison I’d lived in. Even more than the way the Ring looked was the way it felt. I was alone except for Callista and a handful of sprites. I maintained the same schedule of six meals per day. I had the same sense of isolation.