Darkness Between the Stars

by J. Edward Neill

  They were ghastly.

  They were demonic.

  The last thing I remembered was running away from them.

  Forever.

  Binary

  I expected to hurt more when I awoke.

  My first sensations were of a machine pulling the injectors out of my neck. One by one, I felt the plastic tubes worming their way out of my body, which felt both violating and relieving. After sealing the holes with some sort of instant flesh-grafting material, the machines scooped me up out of the hypo-chamber and laid me on a hard, flat table.

  What now? I wondered.

  I flexed my fingers and peered down at my hands. They were as pale as ever, but no weaker than when I’d gone into the chamber. I blinked hard, expecting my vision to be blurry, but everything was crystalline. Not being a hurting, pitiful mess surprised me. I knew where I was – inside the Sabre. I sensed how much time had passed – about four years.

  And I felt fine.

  “I guess the injections worked.” Callista fluttered out of the shadows behind me. Realizing I was naked, I grabbed the towel the machine had left for me and draped it over myself.

  “Always so shy.” Cal pretended to look away.

  I sat up on the table. I looked at my arms and legs, and I knew right away they were more muscular than when I’d gone into stasis.

  “How is that even possible?” I flexed my bicep.

  “Well…” Cal crossed her arms. “They did a little work on you while you were napping. Pulse Therapy, they call it. Periodically, they woke up certain parts of your body and gave them the best workouts you’ve ever had. It’s not exactly hard labor back on the farm, but it seems to have worked.”

  “Four years, right?” I asked.

  “Yes. It’s a few weeks after your twenty-second birthday. Get dressed and we’ll go have cake.”

  “Cake?” I doubted.

  “Ok. Maybe not cake.” She shrugged. “How does reconstituted protein jelly slathered over freshly-thawed bread sound?”

  “Amazing,” I said. I was so hungry I didn’t care.

  “Joff…” She floated right in front of me. “I missed you. Welcome back.”

  “I missed you, too.” I wanted to touch her, but I couldn’t.

  After dressing and following Cal to the kitchen pod, I sat down at the same table I’d eaten a meal at more than four years ago. That’s when it hit me. I’d been gone four years. Even though I’d been in stasis, I felt older, wiser, and the closest to being a man I’d ever experienced. All the dreams I had made the passage of time a tangible thing. The memories of my years in hibernation were sharp and clear. If only in my mind, I’d lived enough to make the journey across the void seem real.

  I gazed out at the spinning stars while chewing on my bread.

  “Wow,” I exhaled.

  “Yes. Wow.” Cal stood on the table and watched with me.

  “I feel different. Grown up, maybe. I don’t know what happened. It’s like those tubes in the hypo-chamber streamed memories into my head. Did I miss anything while I slept?”

  Callista sauntered over and sat on the rim of my coffee cup. “Let’s see,” she said. “We didn’t have any more near-misses with flying debris, which is a good thing. We had one minor power disruption when we sailed through the neutrino field of a recently collapsed star. It wasn’t so bad. I dialed back the power on your hypo-chamber and sang songs to you for fourteen days.”

  “Wait…that was you?”

  “What do you mean?” She smiled.

  “I mean I remember your voice. I heard you.”

  “I know.” Her smile broadened.

  I wanted to hug her. I wanted to kiss her. But knowing I couldn’t really do either, I let my curiosity carry me away.

  “I thought you said I wouldn’t dream.”

  “I know I said that,” she admitted. “But I didn’t lie to you. I didn’t know about the Pulse Therapy or the dreaming software until after you went under. They preprogrammed it into your hypo-chamber.”

  “Oh.”

  “What did you dream about?” she asked.

  It was a grander question than I was prepared to answer.

  “Well…

  “My farm. My parents. My sister. A lot of working. A lot of sunshine. I remember thinking they were all in danger, and that I was the only one who could save them.”

  “You kind of are.” Cal nodded.

  “I guess so. But then all that stuff went away. I wasn’t on Earth anymore. I lived for years and years on some grey field with no sun. I explored it, but I didn’t find much.”

  “Sounds…dull.” She feigned a yawn.

  “Yeah. A little,” I agreed. “But there was one thing.”

  “What?” She must’ve sensed my hesitation.

  “I think maybe it happened just a few weeks before I woke up. I thought I saw people in my dream. I thought they were Exodus traitors. You know, Frost and his army. But when I walked up to them, they weren’t people at all. They were some kind of…demons.”

  “Demons?”

  “You know…like monsters. Tall. Thin. Like burned skeletons. They had weapons. Rifles made out of bones. Swords made of black metal. It was creepy. I ran away from them.”

  “This is why I’m glad I don’t dream.” Cal made a face.

  “Yeah…well…if they were gonna pump dreams into my head, they could’ve picked something nicer.”

  “Like me.” She beamed.

  Normally I would’ve laughed. Instead I just leaned back in my chair and gazed at the ceiling. Four years had passed, and the pressure of what I was about to do rose inside me. I wasn’t afraid, not really. If anything, I was more prepared than ever. Something had changed inside me during my four years of dreaming. If I had a button to push and exterminate Ebes, I’d have pushed it right then and there.

  “We must be almost there.”

  “Just fifteen million miles.” She made it sound like nothing. “The Ring turned off its quantum engines forty-six hours ago. We’re riding on standard propulsion toward Ebes.”

  “How long?”

  “Three weeks.”

  “That’s too damn long.” I grimaced.

  Callista shook her head. “Remember what you said about these maybe being our last few days alive? I do. I remember. So let’s live them. I might be just a small blue girl, but I’m not exactly looking forward to dying.”

  Me neither, I thought.

  * * *

  Later, after a workout, a long run around the Ring, and several hearty meals of tasteless but filling space-soup, I showered and emerged into the bedroom pod. I felt good, all things considered. I’d spent the day pretending I’d never slept four years away, and that I was still eighteen, not twenty-two. Somehow, the drugs the hypo-chamber had administered were still in my system, nullifying almost all the pain and stagnation they’d warned me would follow a long hibernation.

  I’d asked Callista for a few hours alone before sleep. It wasn’t that I wanted rid of her, just that I needed to consult the Ring’s computer to get all my questions answered. If Cal had been with me, we’d have just joked, teased, and flirted the hours away.

  “Ring,” I said to the tablepad, “I need you to pull up some images for me.”

  “Yes, Joff. Welcome back from sleep.” The Ring’s computer still sounded eerily like Mom.

  I cracked my knuckles. “Ok, Ring. You have a long-range scope, right?”

  “Yes.” She sounded almost proud. “My scopes are twice as powerful as those housed in Earth’s far orbital stations.”

  “Good. Can you bring up an image of Ebes? I want to see it.”

  She did as instructed. Within moments, the tablepad’s pale blue surface faded to star-riddled black. The scope zoomed in slowly, peeling away the stars a few thousand at a time.

  And there was Ebes.

  I’d glimpsed it once before on the wallpad in the fortress’s mess hall. The Ring’s image was clearer. Sharp and crisp, she showed me the full planet in a
single frame. Ebes’ atmosphere, almost cloudless, gave me a perfect view of its surface. The terrain was dull orange and sharp crimson, the endless mountains and valleys pocked by inky black oceans. It didn’t look hospitable at all. I couldn’t see any trees or settlements. I struggled to imagine anyone living there.

  “Zoom in closer,” I instructed.

  The image blurred for a moment as the scopes closed in on Ebes’ largest continent. Callista had told me Ebes was only about three-quarters as big as Earth, but due to its oceans being so small, the orange planet had more land mass for humans to live on. Once the image cleared, I saw a vast mountain range with sweeping valleys on either side. Rivers cut through the vales, wending around treacherous, jagged peaks as they made their way to faraway oceans.

  The first thing I noticed: still no trees.

  The second thing: no cities of any kind.

  Are we sure this is the right planet?

  “Ring, are we close enough to scan for life-signs?” I asked.

  “In approximately one-hundred seventy-eight hours, we will arrive within bio-scan range.”

  Great. Almost eight days.

  “Ok. Do we have any archived pictures of where the Exodus settlements are…or were?”

  “One moment please,” she replied.

  And then I noticed something.

  “Wait…cancel that,” I ordered. “Zoom in on this mountain range right here.” I tapped the screen on a ring of mountains that appeared to circle a small lake.

  She zoomed in, way in, until the ring of mountains were so big on the screen I felt like I could jump through them and into the dark circle of water.

  “Ring, is that water?”

  She needed to think before answering.

  “A previous scan indicates the liquid on Ebes’ surface is of a similar quality to Earth water, only with a higher concentration of salt.”

  I stared at the ring of mountains and the pool of deep, dark water. The longer I looked, the more I felt like something was off. Earth’s mountains were formed by the collision of tectonic plates and worn down by centuries of wind and moving water. But Ebes’ mountains were different. They looked like orange and scarlet spikes, jutting in every direction, their peaks like bloodied daggers pointing in random directions. And the water in the center formed too perfect a circle, almost as if—

  A crater.

  I ordered Ring to move her scope around the terrain. In dozens of places, I saw them: circular lakes surrounded by toothy mountains. The mountains looked unnatural, spearing from the lifeless earth like swords from Ebes’ heart. I almost had the feeling they weren’t mountains at all.

  Someone must’ve had a battle.

  Bombs, missiles, or some crazy kind of projectiles hit this place.

  And Abid didn’t bother to tell me.

  I shook my head. Something wasn’t adding up. I wanted to ask the computer, but it was obvious she didn’t know.

  “Ring, zoom out. Way out. I want to see Zeus and Hera.”

  In silence, her scopes tore away from Ebes’ ragged surface and pulled back into space. Out there in the distance, at roughly the same distance from Ebes as Earth was from its lone sun, the binary stars blazed. Zeus was a yellow fireball, hurting my eyes to look at even on the tablepad. Twice as huge, Hera was a deep blue beauty, her light reminding me of the way Callista looked when she floated in a dark room.

  Mesmerized, I observed the stars for several minutes. Seeing Zeus and Hera made me feel almost sad, for the longer I watched them, the more I wanted to stand beneath my own sun just one last time.

  “Ok. Enough,” I said. “I’ve seen enough.”

  The computer drew back her scope from Zeus and Hera. She did it slowly, sweeping across the emptiness between the two great stars and Ebes.

  If I hadn’t glanced at the tablepad at just the right time, I’d never have seen it.

  “Wait. Stop. Ring, what was that?”

  “Please be specific, Joff.” She said.

  “That dark object you just passed. Two seconds ago…just before you got to Ebes again. It looked like a planet.”

  She panned back to the void away from Ebes. I saw it, a tiny black sphere over Ebes’ shoulder. It looked like a crescent moon in Zeus and Hera’s light, only much darker.

  “What planet is that?” I needed to know.

  After a short silence, the computer answered.

  “The planetoid has not been named,” she told me. “It sits at roughly the same distance from Zeus and Hera as Venus does from Earth’s sun. Previous scans have indicated no life signs. It is tidally locked, and no Exodus settlements have been detected.”

  Tidally locked, I remembered something I’d read in one of Aly’s books. It doesn’t spin. One half cooked by the twin suns. The other half frozen.

  Dead.

  The computer drew back her scopes. I saw one last unsettling glimpse of Ebes, and then nothing but darkness broken only by tiny pricks of starlight. On the table, the stars didn’t spin like they did whenever I looked out The Ring’s windows.

  They just sat there, motionless and quiet.

  And when I looked at them, I didn’t know them.

  Ebes

  I stood in the shower long after I was good and clean.

  The water ran in hot ropes down my skin. It had almost burned me when I’d started, but after a while I didn’t feel anything. I closed my eyes and let the water rain from my short, blonde hair. I could’ve stood there forever, a statue in a steaming downpour.

  But as it turned out, I had something I needed to do.

  I walked out and toweled myself dry. Callista watched me in all my naked glory, and I didn’t mind. I felt the same as I had when I’d worked on the farm in years long gone.

  I was focused.

  I knew what was required of me.

  I understood why they’d chosen me.

  “You ok, Joff?” she asked.

  “Yeah.” I nodded.

  “You don’t seem yourself.”

  “I’m sure you know about how people are.” I glanced at her, and saw her worry. “I mean…I’m sure they gave you some basic programming. I’m in my head, Cal. I’m concentrating. That’s all.”

  “Of course they programmed all that,” she admitted. “But I’ve never actually seen it before. You’re not Joff anymore. You’re different.”

  With my towel wrapped around my waist, I faced her. She floated over my bed, blue and beautiful, my only friend in the universe. In that moment, I wished she were human. I wished it for so many reasons, but I didn’t let it show.

  “This is how it is,” I said. “This is what they want. Mom and Dad didn’t stop it. They could have, but they didn’t. They could’ve taught me to be ordinary or stupid. They could’ve protected me. I get it now. This thing is so important to everyone that it’s worth me having no real childhood. It’s worth me being a killer. It’s worth me being alone.”

  “You’re not alone.” Cal crossed her arms.

  “I am and you know it,” I shot back.

  She looked wounded. I was sorry I said it, but again I didn’t let her know.

  “I’m ready,” I said. “Are you?”

  She nodded.

  I dressed in the tight blacks Abid had set aside just for this moment. The skin-hugging shirt and pants would allow maximum freedom of movement inside the Vezda suit, which would be useful if Frost and his minions ambushed me.

  Barefooted, I walked the Ring’s halls. For the first time I could remember, I went ahead of Callista. I glanced back at her just once, and I had the impression her emotions were even more powerful than mine.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked while unsealing the door leading down to the Sabre.

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re not supposed to lie to me, remember?”

  “Ok. Fine,” she mumbled. “It’s just…I don’t want you to die.”

  I smiled, though she couldn’t see it.

  “So help me survive.”

 
The hallway leading to the Sabre wasn’t like the rest of the Ring. It had no windows, and its walls were bare and black. The narrow tunnel felt dark and claustrophobic, as though I was being shot down a pipe into a deep, black sewer.

  I opened two doors at the hall’s end and entered the Sabre.

  “Strange being back in here?” Cal floated in behind me.

  “Yeah,” I admitted. I hadn’t reentered the Sabre since waking up in the hypo-chamber weeks ago. “I’m not here to sleep this time,” I announced. “I’m here to do terrible things.”

  She didn’t have an answer for that.

  I glanced at the Sabre’s console. The list of things I needed to do blinked on the black screen. I didn’t read it. I remembered everything. The only thing I did when I walked by was tap the window shutters. They opened with a hiss, and a billion stars winked into my sights.

  In the middle of them all sat Ebes.

  “It’s an ugly planet,” I remarked. “All orange and scabby. I’m surprised they picked it. It doesn’t look habitable at all.”

  “Well technically it’s not,” Cal reminded me. “Our probes revealed an atmospheric toxicity fatal to human life within minutes. Pressures are too low. Temperatures are too cold. It’s clear Abid’s predictions were probably correct. Our enemies have genetically modified themselves to survive.”

  The monsters in my dream, I thought, but didn’t say.

  To the cockpit’s back wall I went. The Vezda suit was suspended in the same place I’d left it more than four years ago. I worried with my new muscles it would be too tight, too confining, but when I slipped my arms and legs into the carapace, everything felt right.

  “Fits even better than before.” I pulled a trigger in the arm-cannon and felt the chest plates lock against my shirt.

  Cal tried to smile. “They knew exactly how much you’d grow.”

  Of course they did.

  Before lowering the helmet over my face, I held the thing and stared at it. The black matte surface, the short tubes, and the unbreakable glass front weren’t particularly scary. Even so, I dreaded wearing it.