Darkness Between the Stars

by J. Edward Neill

  During the long, slow days, Cal made me use the ship’s health station. It turned out I didn’t have severe radiation exposure, but instead had suffered premature aging of several internal organs. Cal and I didn’t discuss the why or how of it, but I knew.

  The Strigoi draining. They burned years of my life away.

  How nice of them to leave me a gift.

  At a certain point, I realized I could have lived the rest of my life on the Ring. I came to understand I’d always been a solitary creature. The basement at the farmhouse, the hallways of Abid’s fortress, and the cold confines of deep space…they all felt normal to me. I had no ambition to leave, no desire to talk to anyone besides Cal.

  Maybe it should’ve made me feel sad.

  Maybe my solitude should’ve inspired me to change.

  Yet no matter how long I sat in the shadows and dwelled on the person I’d become, the less everything mattered. The idea of hope decayed, and it didn’t bother me. I didn’t know anything about true love or affection. I stopped dreaming of home, of my parents, of meeting another human. I hadn’t yet died, but to the rest of the universe I might as well have perished in the fires of Hera’s death.

  No one knows me, I thought.

  No one has ever known me.

  And then one day, as I sat up in my bed and talked with Callista, the Ring made a strange noise.

  “What’s that?” I asked no one in particular.

  The high-pitched chime of the Ring’s computer hurt my ears. I slid out of bed, jogged over to my bedroom console, and tapped the screen until the volume all but died.

  “Better,” I sighed. “What’s the noise all about? Incoming meteor? Radiation spike? The Strigoi send a ship to carve us up?”

  In joking, I realized I didn’t even care.

  Cal floated over to the screen. I was glad for the computer’s squeal to have stopped, but my little blue girl knew something was up.

  “Joff,” she called to me.

  “What?” I padded back toward my bed. I’d shaved my beard off the previous day, and I couldn’t stop touching my face.

  “Joff, seriously. Come here.”

  I almost went to her, but instead flopped onto the mattress. I must’ve been sleep-drunk. All I could think of was how Abid had done at least one good deed. He’d made my bed comfortable. At the moment, it was all I cared about.

  “Joff, it’s a distress signal.” Even when Cal shouted, her voice wasn’t much stronger than a whisper.

  “Fiiiine,” I complained.

  Peeling myself off the bed, I trudged to her. She hovered a few centimeters above the console, pointing to the screen with a stern look on her face. I grinned at her, admiring how pretty she looked.

  And then my grin fell away.

  She hadn’t been joking. The console’s map was up, and a red dot blinking furiously. The flashing code beside the dot indicated a vessel of Earth origin had come to a sudden stop inside Hera’s nebula. I knew right away the dot’s position couldn’t have been an accident.

  “It’s where Ebes was.” My breath fell out of me. “Who is it? Who’s flying the ship?”

  “Whoever it is, they must not know about the stars being dead,” said Cal. “That’s a dangerous place to park. Heavy debris clouds. Their ship might be disabled.”

  “Should we?” I looked at her.

  “Let’s go.” She nodded.

  Without another thought, I sprinted out of the bedroom pod. Cal fluttered behind me. If she’d been her full size, she could’ve flown at twice my speed, but with her diminished size I reached the door to the Sabre far ahead of her.

  “Come on,” I waved her toward me. “Hurry.”

  Together, we made our way down to the Sabre. I didn’t know why I was so excited. Moments before, I hadn’t cared about anything except lounging in bed.

  But now…

  “Who do you think it is?” I asked Cal as I unsealed the circular hatch in the Sabre’s belly. “Did Abid send a backup plan? In case we failed? Is it someone friendly? Or maybe it’s a trap. Maybe they sent someone to make sure we don’t report back to Earth.”

  All Cal said was, “I think you should wear your armor.”

  Always looking out for me.

  I burst into the Sabre, keyed up the console, and slid into the Vezda suit. It had been almost a year since I’d locked myself in the blue and silver polymer armor, and even longer since I’d fired the cannon, whose color had dulled from shiny chrome to dull grey. When I stood, fully dressed save for the helmet, I realized something.

  “Fits better than ever,” I said.

  “Put the helmet on, too,” Cal said in her most motherly tone.

  I dropped the helmet over my shoulders. Everything felt exactly as I remembered. With a tug on one of the arm-cannon’s triggers, the visor lit up, sharpening my view of reality.

  And it was still there. On the visor’s left side, the mark left by the Strigoi’s touch hung in my peripheral sight. That close to dying, I thought when I saw it. It had a chance to kill me and save its entire planet…

  …and it failed.

  Within minutes, we were soaring away from the Ring. Cal reminded me not to accelerate too fast or turn too hard. I hadn’t done any work to repair the damage the Strigoi had caused. If the gravity controls failed, a tiny change in speed would liquefy me and everything inside the Sabre.

  “I guess we should fix it someday,” I quipped.

  Cal just crossed her arms.

  And so we waited.

  And waited.

  In our rush to reach the Sabre, we hadn’t calculated how long it would take us to reach the other ship. Even Cal, for all her forethought, hadn’t taken into account the Sabre’s limitations or the distance we had to cover. We weren’t worried about Hera’s nebula. The Sabre had blocked out nearly all the radiation from the star’s death, while even the Strigoi death lances had failed to penetrate our hull.

  Our only enemy was time.

  After the first few hours of gliding along at quantum speeds, I peeled the Vezda suit off.

  “No sense in being uncomfortable.” I reclined in the cockpit chair. “I’ll put it back on once we get closer.”

  Callista didn’t answer right away. She was busy scanning the area around our target. The thick gasses and nebulous dust obscured the Sabre’s scopes. We couldn’t see the ship giving off the distress signal.

  “For all we know, it’s cooked,” Cal surmised. “Or if they don’t have shielding like we do, everyone’s dead inside.”

  “Or it’s a bomb.” I shrugged. “Or filled with sprites waiting to kill us.”

  “Joff, it’s not funny.” She narrowed her eyes. “Maybe we should turn back.”

  “No way.” I shook my head.

  I have to know.

  * * *

  Four days, it took us.

  We crossed into Hera’s nebula, our wings carving through her beautiful blue dust. I stood at the cockpit window for hours, rapt at the rivers of light we sailed upon. Worried to no end, Cal floated beside me in silence. She was only a fragment of her former self, and yet she seemed more human than ever.

  Another thing Abid did right, I guess.

  The first day, we were anxious.

  The second and third, we were at peace.

  And on the fourth day, our excitement dwindling, we were tired.

  And then, after one of several long sleeps in my chair, I awoke. We’d started our slowdown forty hours prior, and Cal was at the console, murmuring about the equations she read upon the screen.

  “The Sabre’s quantum field is the only reason we’re alive,” she said without looking at me. “Otherwise...at these speeds…”

  “The dust would carve right through us,” I finished her thought.

  “Look, Joff.” She waved at me. “Look right here. See?”

  I didn’t go to her right away. We were deep inside the nebula, and I was awestruck. Streams of light: violet, blue, and yellow, swam through the space beyond the Sabre’
s window. With my mouth open and my eyes wide, I gazed out at it. I couldn’t think of anything to say. It was beautiful beyond words, and my only thought was to wonder if it resembled what Callista’s body looked like up close.

  “Joff?” she called to me.

  I went to the screen. She’d narrowed the Sabre’s scopes onto an area of space less than a million kilometers away.

  “The ship…” I exhaled. “That’s it?”

  “That’s it,” she confirmed.

  Through the dust and colored light, our scopes somehow reached. The ship we found wasn’t what I expected. With six pods spiraling around a sleek white spacecraft, it was a replica of the Ring, only smaller. The craft in its heart wasn’t a Sabre like ours, but a simpler ship much like the ones used to ferry passengers from Earth to its orbital stations.

  “Life signs?” I asked the only question that mattered.

  “Just one.” Cal looked at me.

  Swiftly, I slid back into the Vezda suit and sealed the helmet over my head. I wasn’t worried about an ambush. I intended to board the little Ring ship and find out who, or what, awaited us.

  “Is its hull breached?” I asked.

  “Two pods breached,” Cal answered. “Both sealed off. The life form is safe…for now.”

  “Any weapons aimed at us?”

  “It doesn’t appear to have any weapons.”

  “Wait…” I made a face. “None? Not even on the little white ship?”

  “That’s just a landing craft,” she explained. “Retrofitted with a quantum engine. It has no visible weapon ports.”

  “Really?” I doubted.

  “Really,” said Cal.

  I went to the cockpit window again. We’d come out of a huge dust cloud and entered the void of space Ebes had once occupied. I saw the little Ring with my own eyes, its six pods wheeling around a craft only half as big as the Sabre. It looked so small and meek. I knew I should’ve been suspicious, but I couldn’t manage it.

  It isn’t here to hurt us, I believed.

  We slowed. Our gravity controls held. I took hold of the Sabre and guided it within a few meters of the little Ring. As we swung around, I saw the damage done to two of the pods. They’d ruptured from the inside, depressurizing with force enough to eject everything that had been inside.

  “Think Hera’s dust did this?” I asked Cal.

  She fluttered toward me and slid into the Vezda suit. Inside, her voice was stronger.

  “No,” she replied. “Probably larger debris left over from Ebes’ destruction. Rocks could’ve done it. At the speed this Ring entered the area, it’s surprising anything is left at all.”

  I allowed myself a moment of silence. I’d tried to forget Ebes and all those who had died. But when I closed my eyes, I could still see Sylpha Frost standing over her fallen child.

  “Lucky,” I murmured.

  “Lucky?” said Cal.

  “Whoever’s on this ship is lucky they weren’t in one of the broken pods. That’s no way to die.”

  “How do we know others weren’t in the pods?” she countered. “How do we know there was only one on board?”

  “I guess we don’t.” I sagged.

  Since the early days of my training, I hadn’t used the Vezda suit to perform a spacewalk. I probably should’ve been nervous. But as I entered the Sabre’s airlock and then floated into the great darkness beyond, I wasn’t afraid. Cal must’ve sensed it. She didn’t even try telling me to be careful.

  With a lone release of pressurized air, I drifted to the underbelly of the white ship locked in the little Ring’s center. Like the Sabre, it had a port and an airlock on its bottom.

  “The moment of truth,” I said to Cal. “Can you open it?”

  In silence, she fluttered out of my suit and floated to the ship’s surface. Like water drying up into sand, she vanished in seconds. How she managed to find her way in, I didn’t know.

  Without her, how many times would I have died?

  In moments, the airlock was open and I was standing in a dark hallway. Cal was safely back inside my suit, and yet strangely silent.

  I opened a door leading to the little Ring’s kitchen pod. The room would’ve been dark if not for Hera’s nebula gleaming through its window. Except for a drinking glass lying broken on the floor beside a chrome table, everything was clean and undisturbed.

  “No power.” I noted the lack of lights. “The doors work, but nothing else. Not much gravity either. It’s not rotating fast enough.”

  I pushed off a wall and floated across the pod to a door. The quiet felt overbearing. The only sounds in the entire universe were my breaths.

  “Going in.” I pushed a panel. The doors to the next pod slid open.

  I floated through a short hall and stopped in a room filled with shadows. The window had been shuttered, meaning without the Vezda suit’s visor I’d have been nearly blind. At a glance, the room was an exact duplicate of my bedchamber aboard the Ring. I looked at the bed, its sheets disheveled, and felt a small sense of relief.

  Only one person lives here.

  “Joff,” Cal whispered, “over there. In the corner.”

  I looked across the room where the shadows were heaviest. There, in the darkness, I saw a figure crouching. A small voice inside my head pleaded with me to aim the arm-cannon.

  No, I thought. I’ve killed enough.

  With my left hand raised, I padded across the room. I was nearly weightless, and in the low gravity my feet made no sound against the floor.

  “Is it alive?” I whispered to Cal.

  “Alive,” she confirmed.

  At five steps away, I stopped. I realized how I must’ve looked. I was two and half meters of fearsome armor. I had a huge gun in place of a right arm. If the crouching figure was human, it must’ve been horrified.

  “How’s the air in here?” I asked Cal.

  “Not good,” she said. “Don’t open your visor. I know you want to.”

  I knelt to the floor. The crouching figure wore a spacesuit, slim and white, nothing like the Vezda’s hard, sharp angles. I sensed its fear. Human, I knew. And awake.

  I held both arms outward as if surrendering.

  “Do you understand me?” I asked.

  The figure had something in its hand. A steel rod, I recognized. Not a threat to me.

  “Hello.” I kept my arms up. “I’m not here to hurt you. If you understand me…or even if you don’t, say something.”

  Its fingers tightened around the rod. I realized in the darkness I could see it, but it probably couldn’t see me.

  “Say something,” I urged. “Anything.”

  After another long silence, its grip loosened on the steel rod.

  “Name?” it managed to ask. The voice belonged to a frightened young woman.

  “Joff,” I answered. “Joff Armstrong. “The W.E.G. sent me. The Western Elite Government. That’s my ship floating outside your window. You know, the scary one?”

  “Joff?” she said.

  “Yes. Joff. Don’t be afraid of my armor. I won’t hurt you. I won’t hurt anyone.”

  “Joff?” she said again.

  She crawled out of her corner and floated closer to me. No light lived in the space between us.

  Something in her voice sounded familiar.

  Through the visor I saw her face.

  With her helmet touching mine, she squinted to see me.

  I already knew who it was.

  Aly.

  Humanity’s End

  Stone-faced and pale as parchment, my sister sat at the table and told me the truth of many things.

  “You don’t know how hard it was.” Her gaze wandered into a faraway place. “Every day, acting as if we didn’t know they were going to take you away. They threatened us with death. They said if we revealed anything, even the slightest bit of information to you or any of the other candidates, they’d kill us. And not just kill. They said they’d make it seem like we never existed. Mom, Dad, the farm…everything.
”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Why?” she said it back to me. “I don’t know why. Does it matter?”

  I had questions, so many questions. Yet all I was able to do was stand there and listen. Aly looked nothing like the petulant girl I remembered. She was tall, perilously thin, and full of sadness. She had become as beautiful as Mom, but her hair was thin and her lip trembling from an anxiety I sensed would never cease. If she’d truly spent our childhood years pretending to be a self-absorbed simpleton, I could only imagine her pain.

  She lived a lie. Our whole family did.

  All for what?

  More than anything, Aly was vastly smarter than I’d ever believed. I could hear it in her words, in the way she strung her thoughts together. She hadn’t suddenly become a genius the moment she’d left the farm for the university. She’d been smart all along.

  Smarter than me. Smarter than everyone.

  Aly hadn’t gone to Boulda to study communications, but instead to fall deep into the fields of engineering and abstract science. She was like Mom, full of ideas, knowledge, and the language to express it all. The more she talked about her childhood and the years of pretending not to know where I was destined to go, the more I grasped her intellect.

  In more ways than one, I was envious.

  She laid it all out for me:

  Her arguments with Dad about the skypad and other technology had been staged. While true my father had hated gadgetry, he’d exaggerated it because he had to. “Although his reasons were not without cause,” Aly told me. “He knew sprites and skypads would play a role in your future. He wanted to give you a technology-free childhood for as long as they’d let him.”