“Do you understand me?” I asked.
She stepped within five meters. Somehow, the way she looked at me made me feel small. She was fearless, her gaze sharp and serene. Behind her armor, I sensed she was a warrior. She was that calm.
“Frost.” I dared to say the name. “I’m looking for a man named Frost.”
She showed a dangerous smile.
“I am Frost,” she told me.
“You?” I felt foolish for being surprised. “You’re Frost? You understand me? You speak my language?”
“Yes. I speak many languages.” She walked close enough to touch the Vezda suit with her fingertip. “You and I have many things to discuss.
“And not much time to discuss them in.”
The Web
I stood in the grand hollow monolith. More than a kilometer of stone hung over my head. Every door was sealed, every one of my captors waiting outside.
Except one.
More than anything, I was impressed Callista managed to keep quiet.
Frost, or so she’d named herself, sidled up to me. She tugged a knife from the back of her belt and sawed the black cables binding my arms and ankles. She knew I could’ve killed her. I saw it in her eyes. But she wasn’t afraid. Not even a little.
“Sylpha,” she said as she tossed the bindings away. “My name is Sylpha. You asked about Frost. He’s been dead for a few thousand years. They say I’m his great, great granddaughter…a few dozen generations down the line.”
“Sylpha,” I said her name. It felt strange talking to her. Abid had taught me how to become a living weapon, but not how to stand before my enemy and have a conversation.
“Do you know why I’m here?” I asked.
I heard a whisper of protest from Cal.
“No.” Sylpha stood and sheathed her knife. “Though if I had to guess…the way you’re dressed up…I’d say you’re here to kill someone.”
“You,” I dared. “They wanted me to kill you.”
I thought I saw her flinch. Hard as she was, she gulped and took a step away. She knew the same as I did. For all their technology, they had nothing to stop me, nothing to kill me as long as I remained inside the Vezda suit.
“Ok. So do it.” She extended her arms. “I’m right here. I’ve seen your weapon work. Turn me to ashes.”
I didn’t even consider it. I think even Callista hesitated.
“No,” I said.
Sylpha gave me her back. Unafraid, she walked to a steel table covered in paper and machined parts, and she sat at the stool beside it.
“Come,” she invited me.
I went to her.
“Will you take your armor off?” she asked. “It’s damn hard to hear you talking through that helmet.”
I touched my left hand to my visor. I could see the scratch the skeletal creature had left. It didn’t obscure my visor, but it made me remember my terror.
“Joff, maybe we shouldn’t—” I heard Cal say.
I keyed a sequence inside the arm-cannon. My visor snapped open, and the underworld air washed over my face.
Cal never finished whatever she was going to say.
I tried not to look surprised. The air felt cool on my skin, wicking away the sweat beaded on my forehead. I felt stupid standing there in a suit of armor made to kill thousands. All the effort, all the technology, and I’d just opened it up at my enemy’s request. It felt better than good. The taste of Ebes’ air, sharp and cool, was as real as anything I’d experienced since my last moments on Earth.
For Sylpha’s part, she didn’t seem impressed.
“Earth technology has come a long way,” she remarked. “We weren’t sure what to expect when we saw your ship.”
I narrowed my eyes. “The Sabre is invisible to all spectrums. There’s no way—”
“Might be invisible when it’s up there in space.” She shrugged. “But not when it’s crashing through rocks. And definitely not when it’s sitting out there in the dust.”
I hadn’t thought of that.
“So you saw that?” I asked.
“All of it,” she said.
“What else did you see?”
That’s when her face darkened again. I’d seen it in the upper passages when they’d first captured me. I’d asked her why her people were killing stars, and she’d lost all her color, all her poise. Perhaps that moment was why I’d decided not to kill them all. With just one glimpse of her fear, I’d sensed something more in her than a mindless Exodus traitor.
“Well?” I pressed.
“We saw you…” Her voice was fragile. “You…hit the tops of the peaks. But you weren’t alone. One of them was after you. It was lucky for you that only one followed. Else, even with your suit, you would be ashes.”
The way she said ‘them’ chilled me. It wasn’t a feeling I’d known before then. None of the fear I’d tasted in my life matched the frozen shiver sliding down my bones.
“It tried to kill me,” I said.
“I know.” She looked me deep in my eyes. “They try to kill everyone. It’s what they do.”
I went limp. I felt Cal move inside my suit, but it only made me feel colder. I had questions, so many questions.
“I need to sit down,” I managed. “If I do, are you going to kill me?”
She shook her head and vacated her stool. I sat where she had sat. The stool creaked under the Vezda suit’s weight, but held.
“One question answered for another,” she declared.
“Ok,” I said.
“I’ll go first.” She leaned against the table.
“Ok.”
“What is your name?”
I’d expected something deeper. “Joff,” I replied. “Joff Armstrong. What are you doing down here?”
“Surviving,” she said. “Are you alone on Ebes? Or are there others?”
“Alone.” I stared hard at her. “Why are you destroying stars?”
She drew back. It was as if I’d stolen all the air from inside her.
“We are not,” she said.
“You’re not what?” I asked.
“The stars…we’re not killing them. Though I’m not surprised you think we are.”
“I don’t think anything,” I shot back. “I know it. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. No one told me about it. I watched the sky and I knew.”
She left me sitting there. On the far monolith wall, near a bank of sad, pallid lights, I saw her walk to her bed. It was a ruin of a thing, a jumble of threadbare blankets stacked atop a crumbling wooden frame. Even my bed back on the farm had been far more comfortable.
They left Earth for this?
She rummaged through a chest at the base of the bed and emerged with a black bag. It looked heavy, the bag. When she returned and set it down, the table’s steel legs shuddered beneath it.
“Go ahead.” She gestured at the lump inside the bag. “Take it out.”
With my left hand, I reached into the bag. My fingers closed around a hard, round object. Even with the Vezda suit’s power, lifting it out was harder than I expected.
I don’t know why, but I closed my eyes when I took the object out.
…and reopened them only after I’d laid it on the table.
A skull.
A huge black skull.
Four eyes.
It’s like the thing I killed.
I pulled my hand away. I’d set the skull right in front of me, and even in death its eyes haunted me.
“I thought—I thought they were you,” I stammered.
“Strigoi,” she said.
“Strigoi?”
“It’s what we call them. Strigoi, stalkers of the night. Ebes was a garden world with oceans of red trees and rivers bluer than any on Earth. But then…the Strigoi.”
“What are they?” I asked.
“I’ll say only this,” she answered. “It’s no less than a miracle you killed one. Or should I say destroyed, since the Strigoi are already dead.”
I must’ve sat th
ere for a full minute. I couldn’t speak. I could hardly breathe. Patiently, Sylpha stood across from me and waited.
“The planet,” I exhaled at last. “The dark one. I saw it when we scanned Zeus, Hera, and Ebes. That’s where they live, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Doctor Abid…he didn’t say anything about them. Surely he knew.”
When I said Abid’s name, Sylpha made a face as though she’d swallowed poison.
“Abid. Doctor Haifa Abid,” she spat.
“You know him?”
She nodded. “We all know him. He must’ve been a much younger man when we received the warnings. Abid, the vengeful. He sent you here? It makes more sense now.”
I glanced down at the Strigoi’s skull and stood up. I didn’t want to be close to it. Even Wendall Wight hadn’t felt as full of malice as the ebon-boned thing staring four holes into my heart.
Change the subject, I thought. Quickly.
“Abid works for the government.” I spoke to Sylpha as if I were a machine. “He sent me here to stop you…to stop it…the S.R.’s, I mean. That’s my only task. If you’re lying to me about those things,” I said while pointing at the black skull, “I’ll kill you. I swear it.”
I expected Sylpha to be angry. She wasn’t. Still placid, she tossed the empty bag over the Strigoi’s black skull and looked at me.
“Abid doesn’t work for the government,” she declared. “And if he sent you here to stop the stars from going dark, he sent you to the wrong planet. If we know Abid as well as we think we do, it’s no accident. He’s old world. He’s a billionaire with nothing better to spend his money on than revenge. He’s an angry man. He blames us for leaving without his ancestors a half-hundred generations ago.”
Absurd, I thought.
I needed to ask Callista questions, but I dared not reveal her. Instead I glared hard at Sylpha. I must’ve looked full of hatred.
“Prove it,” I said.
Sylpha gazed back just as hard.
“I will.”
Dreaming of the Dead
In a grotto far from Sylpha’s monolith, safe from the prying eyes of the Exodus people who wanted me punished for the two I’d killed, I sat on a stone and waited.
I was nervous. But not panicked.
Not yet.
I’d left the safety of the Vezda suit behind, and I’d left Callista inside it. It hadn’t been an easy choice. Sylpha had given me a meal and ushered me out of the Exodus cavern during her people’s sleep cycle.
‘For your safety,’ she’d said. I supposed if she’d wanted me dead, she’d have done it the moment I peeled the Vezda suit off.
As I sat in silence, I thought about what Cal was surely thinking. My sleepless blue friend was no doubt pacing the halls of her analytical mind, enraged that I’d left her, filled with the petulance she’d developed with me as her only companion.
But she was sad, too. I knew it. I felt it inside me. And it was her emotion that kept me sharp.
Sylpha slid into the grotto. She had a cup of something to drink and a cold, hard biscuit. I had many questions for her, but when she gave me the food and drink I forgot myself. While I’d have given anything for the strange-tasting gruel we had stored back on the Sabre, the biscuit would have to do.
She didn’t speak until I finished.
“You know about sprites, of course?” she asked me. “You have an implant?”
“Yes. I mean…my father never liked them, but—”
“This sprite is a little different,” she interrupted. “It’s almost like a dream-maker and a sprite combined. Only instead of dreams, it shows you reality. Things that actually happened.”
“Oh.” I felt foolish.
If Sylpha hated me, I couldn’t tell. I expected her to, and yet everything she did suggested no emotion at all toward me. She should’ve wanted me dead, after all. I’d come to Ebes to slaughter her, and I’d only stopped for a reason I’d yet to understand.
She pulled the tiny silver sprite out of a pouch in her belt. The little thing whirred up to my eye level and danced a slow rhythm in front of me.
“Are you ready?” Sylpha said.
“I don’t know. Am I? You still haven’t said—
”
The sprite shined a sharp light into my eyes, and my consciousness fled.
* * *
There I was on a ship hurtling through the void. I wasn’t a passenger on the Sabre or one of the craft used back on Earth. I was riding in a spherical probe no bigger than Alpo, my ragged little teddy bear.
And I was going fast.
The tiny probe tore away from a planet behind us. I felt it leave the planet’s hard gravity and enter the weightlessness of deep space. The more I looked back at the place we’d escaped from, the more I realized it was Ebes.
Except it’s on fire.
The oceans are boiling.
The trees are turning to ash.
The whole planet is dying.
Something had attacked Ebes. No wonder it was the fragile, broken thing I’d landed on in the Sabre. Whatever cataclysm had struck it had wiped out all the surface life within minutes.
Which meant the Exodus people, some of them at least, had been underground when the horror had struck. It’s the only way they could’ve survived.
I watched. And I ached.
Black fires tore across Ebes’ surface, consuming everything. The mountains turned scarlet as storms flashed sideways across them, pocking them with millions of craters. A plague of all-consuming proportions spread its wings over every tree, every blade of scarlet grass. No matter how fast the probe flew away, I saw Ebes die in perfect clarity.
It felt as if I were the probe, not simply along for the ride.
I opened my mouth to ask Callista or Sylpha a question.
Neither of them was with me.
If I’d have used my brains, I’d have known what Sylpha wanted me to see. The little probe sphere wasn’t just jetting away from Ebes at random. It was bound for the next nearest planet, a small dark world about fifteen million kilometers closer to the binary suns, Zeus and Hera.
The Strigoi world.
After a long, slow sleep which felt like a dream within a dream, we came to it. I’d already forgotten the real world, and everything I saw from within the probe felt like the only reality I’d ever known. If I’d have been in my right mind, I would’ve understood why Dad had always hated the idea of dream-makers.
I was lost in my mind. It felt too real.
And there it was.
It was, without exaggeration, the most horrifying thing I could have imagined. We came to the side of the Strigoi planet upon which night held sway. The probe’s ocular scopes narrowed, allowing me to see everything in sharp detail.
Cities. Endless cities. Towers stretching several kilometers into the night.
Rivers of mechanical waste. Oily, black, and lifeless.
No trees. No mountains. No clouds. Everything flatter than the most barren Earth desert.
Hollow white lights like lanterns. In every tower, thousands of pale windows.
The Strigoi world looked like a tomb.
It was a tomb.
The probe hummed. I recognized the sound somehow. It was scanning for life.
“Origin of attack detected,” it said. “No life signs found.”
No life signs? I still couldn’t believe it. Callista and the Vezda suit’s scanners hadn’t been able to locate the lone Strigoi who’d chased us down on Ebes, but this was different. On the Strigoi world, enough towers crawled out of the blighted rock to house billions of the creatures.
And yet…no life signs. On the entire planet.
The probe raced through the outer orbit of the Strigoi world. I counted no end to the immeasurable darkness. The towers were perfect, graven as if from indestructible charcoal, standing like a sea of black swords to challenge the universe. I saw it and I feared for all living things.
We crossed swiftly to the side of the Stri
goi world touched by the sun.
Where the sunlight touched, the towers and black cities ended.
The suns blazed yellow and cerulean. I saw an endless grey desert, its smoky sands burning. The desert was far from empty. Thousands upon thousands, millions upon millions, an ocean of solar panels faced Zeus and Hera. I’d seen solar panel farms south of Donva before, and I’d glimpsed them on my skypad, but to witness an entire half-world blanketed in them was beyond my comprehension.
There were no Strigoi cities in the sun.
No lanes for vehicles.
Not even small dwellings close to the ground.
Nothing. Just sand and solar panels. Forever.
I tried to force my eyes shut, but in the dream-maker’s grasp, I couldn’t control what I saw. The probe dipped lower into the cloudless desolation and rounded back to the planet’s dark side. I saw satellite clusters floating above the surface, as black and skeletal as their makers. I saw networks of pale lights illuminating the shadows like lanterns hanging between headstones.
The probe’s eye was powerful. It flickered a few more times, and with each small adjustment I saw the surface in greater detail.
I see them.
Walking. Moving. Standing still.
They’re all the same. Skeletons inside black mechanical carapaces.
Not alive. Not truly dead. Not organic. Not fully machine.
What are they? Death?
I saw something streak up from the surface. It reminded me of the dark energy the Strigoi on Ebes had tried to kill me with. It hit the probe and destroyed us.
I thought I was dead.
* * *
I took great gulps of air.
I sat up from the stone, hands sweaty, eyes wet and hurting.
Sylpha was standing exactly as I remembered in the moments before she’d revealed the sprite. The way her arms were crossed reminded me of Callista, though at least she wasn’t rolling her eyes.
“What?” I sputtered. “God…I— how long was I out?”
“About twelve seconds.” Sylpha shrugged.
“Only twelve? It felt like—”
“A month or two?”
Darkness Between the Stars Page 18
