Shadow of Forever (Eaters of the Light Book 2)

by J. Edward Neill

  No. I sat up. If he knew I was here, I’d already be dead. And hovercars never malfunction. There’s nothing inside to break.

  I stepped outside the car at night. The lights dimmed, leaving me in near total darkness. Clouds, rare on Sumerian eves, scudded across the stars, draping everything in shadow.

  Even so, I recognized where the car had stopped. The narrow white road ran between two fields of dark reeds. To my left, the forest arose. To my right, distant lights illuminated a still-watered pond on whose banks a tiny city sprang up.

  Home.

  I’m already home.

  From the hovercab, I snatched my bag and two empty tins of rations I’d eaten. “New destination,” I instructed the car. “Go to the house of Tabir and Aly Muhami. Stop outside the gate. When the next passenger gets in, give them a message. Say it’s from Joff Armstrong. Tell them, ‘I don’t blame you for what happened. It’s my fault for coming to Sumer.’”

  I shut the door and backed away from the car. It rotated in place, reignited its blue grav-pads, and rocketed down the road.

  I hoped Tabir would be the one to get my message.

  And I hoped to never ride in a hover-anything for the rest of my days.

  With the starlight shrouded and the car gone, the night was all but impenetrable. I stood in the grass for a time, and it seemed to me my eyes didn’t want to adjust to the darkness. I supposed it didn’t matter. I was close to where I needed to be. It being night meant I might get there without dying.

  I left the road.

  I tramped through a field of green stalks and three-meter high grass. Thanks for the repli-skin. I thought of Maura. I’ll need it after this.

  I entered the forest.

  I wasn’t sure if I’d ever stood in a place as devoid of light. I’d once marched through caverns on an alien world, but I’d had the Vezda suit, whose visor cut all darkness. On cloudy, starless nights I’d slept outside on my earthbound farm, and yet somehow my eyes had come around.

  That night in the Sumerian forest, however, I saw nothing. I held up my hands, and they were invisible. I gazed at the ground, and didn’t know whether a tree or a hole to the bottom of the world awaited me.

  I kept moving. I felt roots beneath my feet, writhing in the soft earth. My outstretched fingers met with the sides of trees. More than once, I stepped in water instead of dirt, or in piles of crackling leaves in place of sun-starved grass.

  Methodical, I walked for hours.

  I feared the suns would rise.

  I wanted no one in the world to know I’d returned.

  I came to a clearing. I knew it by the way the breeze touched my face. I wiped away my sweat and looked skyward. A break in the clouds allowed a sliver of starlight to enter.

  It’s still here.

  They probably think it won’t fly.

  The Sabre lay in a pool of starlight. Its ebon hull shined none at all, but the grass and vines clinging to its sides paled with the breaking clouds. I stopped to catch my breath. Most of the vines I’d carved away had started to regrow.

  I had work to do before leaving.

  I walked into the clearing. The grass swayed in the night, the wind cooling me. Twenty steps deep, perhaps two-hundred meters from the Sabre, I heard a snap in the weeds near my ruined house.

  And then a second snap.

  And two men’s voices.

  I couldn’t understand them, but I imagined what they said.

  “He’s over there.”

  “Surround him.”

  I closed my eyes. I’d known Tabir’s men would be waiting. I’d hoped to sneak in behind them in the darkness.

  Close, I thought. I was so close.

  I didn’t have the will to run. I supposed in my head if they wanted to kill the only person willing to save them, they deserved whatever fate the Strigoi would bring.

  If the stars go out, it’s not my fault.

  If this world becomes one giant city of death, so be it.

  I raised my hands in surrender and walked to the clearing’s heart. I saw five of them emerge from my house’s ruined husk. They fanned out before me, their eyes green with night-vision, their long black rifles already aimed.

  “I’m not going with you,” I shouted. “But I think, after you kill me, you should look at the datapad in my bag.”

  They didn’t understand. They weren’t Maura, Aly, or Tabir. I was wasting my words. As they moved closer, I saw them better. They were dressed all in black. Their faces were pale, their fingers white against the Strigoi rifles’ triggers.

  “Guess I should’ve come during the day,” I said to them. “I bet you already hate the sunlight, don’t you?”

  They didn’t answer. They closed within fifty meters, then forty, then thirty. They weren’t about to make the same mistake as their predecessors. The tallest of them, a man with long black hair and glowing green eyes, walked within ten meters and leveled his rifle at my head. His weapon was as long as he was tall. It looked skeletal, not unlike a Strigoi limb, oily black and twisted like a sickly tree branch.

  He aimed, muttered a Sumerian curse…

  …and died.

  In one moment, he was whole. In the next, his skin melted and the sound of his bones breaking split the silent night. The frozen fire stung my eyes, and I ducked into the grass. I felt two shots tear through the darkness right where I’d been standing. They missed, but my breaths afterward frosted the air.

  I heard screams.

  I rolled through the grass and peered over a patch of weeds.

  The shots came from above. I saw one man aim his rifle at the Sabre and fire twice into the night, and then vanish in a cloud of powdered skin and pale ashes.

  It all happened in a matter of seconds. The men fired wildly into the darkness, and one-by-one died awful deaths. I saw their ashes drift in the wind and heard their screams linger in the night. After it was done, after they’d all turned to smoke and shadows, I gathered my wits and stood in the grass.

  “Hello?” I called out. I had no idea who’d fired the killing shots. Whomever it was had used a Strigoi weapon, likely the same as the men had carried. By rising up in the starlight, I knew I might be the next to die.

  “You’re good, whoever you are,” I shouted into the night. “I counted five shots. You didn’t miss.”

  I waited for an answer. It felt like minutes, though only a few seconds slid by. I considered scavenging through the grass to find one of the Strigoi weapons, and then thought better of it.

  I looked skyward. Most of the clouds had cleared. The stars gazed down at me.

  Another shot tore through the night.

  The black beam came from atop the Sabre. I saw it streak through the darkness, a frozen rope of shadow. It hit the man who’d been hiding in my house’s ruin. I hadn’t seen him. When the black energy lance struck his chest, he cried out in pain. I’d never heard a sound as horrible. It lasted only a second, but it hung in my mind for far longer.

  And then he was gone, turned to ashes like the others.

  I raised my hands in surrender. My breath had left me. I tried to speak, but the air in my lungs felt frozen.

  “Joff.”

  I heard her voice. I looked to the Sabre, upon which a woman’s shadow stood tall. I recognized the Strigoi rifle in her hands.

  It didn’t feel real.

  She walked along the Sabre’s sickle-like wing. I’d never seen a profile as perfect as hers. I must’ve looked like a boy again, wide-eyed and foolish, gazing at a beautiful creature I’d never have a chance to know.

  At the wing’s edge, she stopped. I thought she might leap into the grass, but the fall would’ve been fifteen meters, enough to break every bone in her body. My breath came back to me, and I tried to stand as tall and straight as she did.

  “Who are you?” I called to her.

  “You don’t know?” she shouted down.

  “I—”

  Wait. It can’t be.

  I waded through the grass and stood j
ust beneath the wing’s tip. The wind caught in the woman’s hair, and the starlight shined in her eyes.

  I knew her.

  How could I ever doubt her?

  Callista.

  Lighting Fires

  “You stole their car?” Callista sat on the Sabre’s console, blue hair draped across her right eye.

  In the last hour, after we’d pried away the vines and sealed ourselves in the Sabre, she’d explained everything:

  They’d perfected her human body, but denied her access to inhabit it. She’d broken into the lab and inserted herself. Two of Tabir’s guards had tried to stop her. She’d anticipated as much, and when they assaulted her, she fought back, leaving them unconscious in the hallway outside the Arcadian lab.

  She took one of their rifles.

  She dressed in their black fatigues.

  After riding across the countryside much the same as I had, she’d waited atop the Sabre for three days and three nights. She couldn’t get inside. I was the only one allowed to unseal the Sabre’s hatch.

  And then she’d saved my life.

  “You killed six men,” I reminded her. “You stole two hovercars. You broke into the most secure lab on the planet and inhabited the most advanced piece of technology ever made…except maybe for the ship we’re sitting on. You stole yourself, and now you’re scolding me for pushing two drugged up kids out of a car?”

  I said it all with a tired smile.

  Her smile was bigger.

  “Six men?” she huffed. “You mean twenty. Ok, maybe I didn’t kill them all, but Tabir sent twenty to kill you. I knocked two out and sniped another pair before the suns set. The rest had already gone south. They knew you’d go off the grid.”

  “You did all of this…for me?” I asked.

  “Obviously.” She shrugged.

  I sank into the Sabre’s only chair. The leather didn’t feel as soft as it had twenty years ago. The Sabre’s insides felt smaller, darker, and less comfortable. Its curved cockpit window was blacked out, the only light gleaming from a blue lantern Cal had carried inside.

  Tired as I was, I couldn’t help but stare at her. Cal’s new human body was as beautiful as the previous one, but with the sensory adaptations the scientists had made, she looked utterly at home. Her blue hair, even after being rained on, settled on her shoulders like silk. Her skin had tanned in the two suns’ glare, and her eyes glittered with more life than I’d ever seen in her.

  Even so, I could tell she was new to being human.

  When she stood and walked around my chair, the elegance of her movements was too perfect. She didn’t look stiff or robotic, but instead graceful in a way no human could ever match. In her boots, she was nearly as tall as me. In her borrowed black fatigues, she looked deadly…and alluring.

  I shook the thought out of my head.

  “I need to eat,” I said. “I need to sleep. But first, we have to get out of here.”

  “It’s unlikely the Sumerians can do anything to us.” Cal stood beside the chair. “They’ve tried to duplicate the Strigoi weapons, but they’ve a long way to go. Several of Tabir’s men hit the Sabre with their shots, but did no damage.”

  “Even so, we should leave. We’re not wanted here.”

  I sat up and leaned toward the console. After so many years, I had no idea whether or not the Sabre would still fly. Back on Earth, Doctor Abid had said the Sabre’s quantum engine would last a few thousand years, powering all its systems without draining.

  I’d learned not to trust anything he’d told me.

  I reached for the console to flick the control panel on. Callista snared my wrist and stopped me.

  “Joff.” She looked down at me. “I know what you’re doing. I’ve known since Aly’s wedding. This isn’t the only way.”

  I pulled my arm free and swiped the Sabre’s console. Surprising me, it flickered to life, awakening blue lights and vid-screens all over the cockpit.

  “I’m not staying here,” I said without looking at Cal. I knew if I looked, her beauty might melt my resolve. “I’m not needed here. And neither are you.”

  “But—”

  “Be rational, Cal.” I keyed several sequences into the console. I heard the hiss of pressurized air and felt the tingling sensation of the Sabre’s localized gravity field. The curved window cleared, revealing the tops of the forest and the stars above. “That’s what they made you to be, right? Rational? We have to try to help these people. Even if they don’t want it. Otherwise…in a generation or two, we’ll look up and see a planet full of death.”

  I made the mistake of glancing at her. Her eyes were wet with tears.

  “First,” she said, “they made me to be human. Not always rational. Not always anything. And second, what if I told you I don’t care about Sumer. I don’t care about anyone else. I care about you, and I want you to live.”

  A droplet of guilt fell into my hollow gut. I almost wished she hadn’t come, that she’d been consumed by Arcadian life, that she’d found the happiness she’d always sought.

  No, I thought.

  I don’t really wish that.

  I want her here.

  I tapped a final sequence into the console. The screen, not much bigger than a skypad, lit up with a green command prompt.

  ‘Ignite Quantum Engine?’ it asked.

  “We can live in deep space.” Cal sniffled back her tears. “We can search for a planet to make our own. We can—”

  “No. We can’t,” I told her.

  “Why not?”

  I let the ‘Ignite?’ command blink on the screen and looked her straight in her perfect eyes.

  “They’re going to end the galaxy,” I said. “Not just a few thousand stars. Not just the suns near habitable planets. Everything. They’ve done it before. I’ve seen it. If I had to guess, they’ve killed hundreds of galaxies already. Ours is next. I think I know why.”

  She grimaced. I knew she didn’t believe me.

  “Once we’re up there…” I nodded skyward. “Once we’re on the Ring, I’ll show you.”

  “Show me what?”

  “They’re building a weapon,” I said. “By now, it might be complete.”

  “How can you know this? Your skypad was destroyed. I saw it—”

  “I’ve seen it,” I snapped. “It’s huge. As big as Earth’s moon. A dark machine with burning red lights. It’s one big string reprogrammer, and it’s going to darken every star we know. Samison showed me. You know him. He’s probably dead by now. Dead because of me.”

  I’d never really seen her frightened before that moment. She’d always joked her way through everything. She’d been my light in dark places, my strength and wisdom.

  Look at her now, I thought. She believes me.

  I pressed my finger to the ‘Ignite?’ command.

  The Sabre didn’t move in the manner of conventional spacecraft. Soundless, the quantum engine awakened, and all of Sumer fell behind us. I saw the tops of the trees, and then I saw only stars. We didn’t accelerate into orbit. Gravity didn’t rip me back into my seat or knock Callista to her knees. The quantum engine made the universe bend at its whim. We didn’t move through space and time so much as space and time moved around us.

  Within twenty seconds, we were floating in Sumer’s outer orbit.

  I slowed us down and steered the Sabre to face Sumer. But for a crescent of violet light, most of the planet lay in darkness. I stood at the cockpit window.

  “It’s not Earth, but it’s still beautiful,” I said.

  Callista came to my side. In the brief moments it had taken us to leave the planet behind, she’d given up hope of changing my mind. I knew it when I saw the look in her eyes.

  “Can’t help but think we’ll never see it again.” I nodded to the sliver of Sumer upon which dawn’s light shined.

  “Don’t talk like that.” Her shoulder touched mine.

  “I don’t mean it in a suicidal way.” I shrugged. “I just mean there’s nothing for us down the
re anymore. Even if we melt every Strigoi coffin in the galaxy, I’m not sure Sumer will want us back. Face it…we’re outlaws.”

  After a long while of watching the light spread across the planet, I left Cal’s side and plunked back into the cockpit’s chair. The seat crackled beneath my weight. I sat there, losing myself in the console’s blue glow. I had too many things to think about, and too much time.

  “What about the grav-controls?” Cal walked up beside me. “They’re still damaged from your little fight with the Strigoi.”

  “You’re going to fix it,” I said.

  “Oh? How’s that?”

  “We’re going to dock with the Ring.” I started keying away at the console. “I’m going to chart a course, and you’re going to use the Ring’s archives to learn how to repair the controls.”

  She made a sour face. “That could take months. I’m human now, and I still have my learning inhibitors.”

  “I know.” I said as I tapped away at the console. I’d located the Ring, the huge interstellar craft we’d lived on for so many of our years. We’d left it in orbit two decades ago, safe from the prying eyes of Sumer’s government.

  “You know?” said Cal.

  “Yep.” I leaned back in my chair. “It’s not like a few months will make a big difference. The way I see it, the Strigoi station will take decades to finish. That’ll give us enough time to find it and destroy it. But the Sabre needs to be in top condition. We might need it; you never know.”

  The only word Cal heard was ‘destroy.’

  “How?” she asked. “We have no weapons. We don’t even have a string reprogrammer. We have nothing, Joff. Destroying this…thing you’re talking about…how could we ever?”

  I gazed up at her. Her blue hair hung in long strands, framing a face full of worry. Her eyes were the blue of Earth’s water. If I’d loved her when she’d been a tiny collection of floating blue bits, I knew I was in love with her now that she’d become human.

  But I couldn’t let her know.

  “It’s simple really,” I explained. “When we find the Strigoi station, we’re going to accelerate the Ring to a few million kilometers per second, and we’re going to fly it straight into the station’s core. I saw it on Samison’s images. As of a few decades ago, its center was exposed. With any luck, it’ll still be when we get there.”