Shadow of Forever (Eaters of the Light Book 2)

by J. Edward Neill

  “Why’d you do Pulse Therapy?” I asked when I stopped beside her at the blue-lit console.

  “You weren’t exercising hard enough before we slept.” She smiled. “You were talking, always talking.”

  “Talking?” My memory felt fuzzy.

  “I’ve never seen you like that before. You were so…animated. It’s almost like you were happy.”

  “Happy.” I considered the possibility. “Strange.”

  “Here,” she said. “Look at this.”

  She stepped aside and let me stand above the console. She’d swiped away the blue screen and plugged into a live feed of the Ring’s exterior viewing scopes. I stared at the screen for a full minute. I didn’t understand what I was looking at.

  A planet with thousands of moons?

  An asteroid field?

  The chewed up core of a long dead star?

  I zoomed in to view the image closer. The screen, big enough to show me every detail, sharpened its focus on a brown planet pocked with thousands of holes. Some of the holes went all the way through, revealing pinpricks of starlight on the planet’s far side. A field of rocks spun in its orbit, broken bones detached from a lifeless skeleton.

  “It’s seen better days.” I looked at Cal. She nodded and pointed to the screen. Readings winked below the planet’s image, giving me all the data I needed:

  Planet is roughly sixty-six percent Earth diameter.

  Planet has no liquid water.

  Non-organic construction found in planet’s interior.

  Planet has no life signs.

  “The Ring doesn’t know any better,” I murmured. “It still compares other planets to Earth.”

  “Even though Earth is gone,” Cal finished my thought.

  “Wait…” I interrupted my next thought. “What does ‘non-organic construction’ mean?”

  She knew the answer, but didn’t say. I tapped in a sequence on the console. My fingers remembered their speed, blazing over the screen without error.

  The screen zoomed in to one of the giant holes in the planet’s surface. I expected to see a crater, and yet the damage on the rocky surface looked as if the force that had made the hole had come from within.

  “It blew up from the inside?” I asked.

  Cal pointed to the screen. “Look,” she instructed.

  I ordered the console to zoom even closer. The massive planetary hole, measuring more than three-hundred kilometers, consumed the entire screen.

  When I saw what lurked inside it, I backed away.

  “What are those?”

  “I think you know.” Her eyes were dark.

  I returned to the screen. There, in perfect clarity, I saw what she wanted me to see. Lining the inside of the vast circular hole were the remnants of countless machines. They were broken and black, twisted and burned, and yet unmistakable. Each machine in some way resembled bones. Coiled black tubes snaked between them. The skeletal graveyard stretched toward the world’s core, millions and millions of machines heaped atop one another in cold, dead silence.

  No human had made them.

  The world had been inhabited by Strigoi.

  I zoomed out and panned across a half-dozen other holes in the planet’s surface. Each was at least one-hundred kilometers in diameter, their blackened stone walls corrupted with Strigoi machinery. The machines lined the planet’s underworld. Seeing them made me feel sick.

  “What happened here?” I gazed at the largest of the holes, a wound so deep I glimpsed starlight on its other side.

  “It looks like—” Cal stared.

  “Something killed it.” I finished her thought. “It wasn’t an accident.”

  She swiped the screen. The skeleton planet vanished.

  “The debris is scattered across a few million kilometers.” She steadied me with a hand on my shoulder. “We’ll have to back up, curl around, and re-chart our course. Though of course…if you changed your mind, we could—”

  “I have to go down there,” I blurted.

  “What?” Her hand fell away from me. “Why?”

  “What if there’s something useful?” I said. “Some information we could use against them? Look at it – it’s obvious they destroyed it on purpose. They…or someone else. There must be a reason. And the way the Strigoi build their machines, some might still be operable. What if they have string reprogrammers down there? If we could find one and—”

  “No.” She crossed her arms. “Just...no. Not going to happen.”

  “Will you try to stop me?” I looked her in her beautiful blue eyes.

  She never answered.

  The Dead World

  The Vezda suit fit tighter than I remembered.

  As the Sabre cut through the darkness on its way to the hollow Strigoi planet, I rolled my shoulders and flexed my knees. I hadn’t yet slid the cannon over my right arm or dropped the helmet over my head, but the tension in me was real.

  I’m scared, I thought.

  Don’t let her know.

  “I think maybe you overdid it with the Pulse Therapy,” I said to Cal. “Everything’s too tight.”

  She gave me nothing but a nod.

  In the two days since I’d declared my intent to explore the hollow planet, Cal hadn’t spoken to me. I understood. Her hope remained that I’d awaken from my plots against the Strigoi and flee with her to a world far from everything. Her sadness had deepened by the hour, and though she tried to keep her feelings secret, I saw everything in her eyes.

  She knew it.

  And yet she said nothing.

  “Ok. Fine,” I piloted the Sabre into the cloud of microscopic dust spinning around the planet. The ship’s quantum field annihilated the small stones, ice particles, and abrasive dust. All I had to do was avoid the big rocks. “You think the Strigs did this to their own planet?” I kept talking. “Or maybe we have allies we don’t know about. Maybe someone destroyed this place for us. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

  Cal shook her head.

  She’s right, I thought. They did this themselves.

  But why?

  I had to know.

  I swung the Sabre toward the third largest of the planetary holes. Measurements from the Ring indicated the abyss plunged nearly a thousand kilometers into the planet’s crust. To make Cal feel better, I’d run every scan imaginable, seeking life signs, active machines, or movement of any kind. The Ring had found nothing.

  Not that the Strigoi give off life signs, I thought.

  “The gravity will be strange.” I leveled and slowed the Sabre’s descent. “Blowing up planets makes for some pretty weird physics. This won’t be like walking on the farm back home.”

  I thought I saw Cal look sad. But then again I couldn’t really see her face. She looked rigid and uncomfortable in the simple grey spacesuit she’d found aboard the Ring. The suit was nothing like my Vezda armor. She had no weapons, no plates of indestructible polymer, no infinite air recycler.

  Back when she’d been a cluster of blue nano-bits, she’d been able to fly through space without any limitations.

  But now…as a human…

  “I wish you’d stay on the Ring,” I said. “You could watch everything from up there. But in that suit…even a slight malfunction…”

  I peered at her glass visor, searching for any emotion.

  She wouldn’t budge.

  I flicked off the Sabre’s quantum engine and brought the Sabre to a stop two-hundred meters from the abyss’s edge. Through the Sabre’s vid-screens, I saw the planet’s surface just beneath us. The brown, broken rock had been shattered by forces from the planet’s interior. The desolation stretched to forever in all directions.

  It didn’t make sense.

  And that’s why I had to investigate.

  I rose from the cockpit chair, slid the cannon over my right forearm, and snapped the Vezda’s helmet over my shoulders. I felt the suit energize. Every movement became effortless, and the visor sharpened my sights to perfection. I stood a full thirty cen
timeters taller than Callista.

  “You should stay on the Sabre.” I faced her. “This is my idea. I’m not asking you to come along. If something happens to me, which it won’t, you take the Sabre out of here.”

  She looked at me and tapped the button to open the Sabre’s belly hatch.

  “You first.” I heard her voice crackle in my earpiece.

  It was pointless to resist.

  Together, we climbed down the ladder, sealed the airlock above us, and descended to the dead planet’s surface. I hit the ground first, crushing a rock under my boot. When Cal slid down in her old world spacesuit, I reached up to help her, but she shooed my hand away.

  “I’m fine.” She hit the ground beside me. “I’m not made of glass.”

  “Right,” was all I could think to say.

  We walked out from beneath the Sabre and stood on the ragged plain. Airless, silent, and shrouded in darkness, the dead planet felt little different than a graveyard. Whatever sun had warmed it was long gone, and even though our visors revealed everything, one glance at Cal told me she felt the same as I did.

  It’s spooky here.

  Everything about this place…unnatural.

  I took the lead as we left the Sabre behind and marched across the shattered surface. As we forged ahead, I studied my visor’s blue display:

  Temperature: negative 228.8 Celsius

  No life signs. No machinery in sight.

  No power sources detected within ten kilometers.

  No movement, no sound, no atmosphere. Nothing.

  What am I looking for?

  I’m not sure.

  We arrived at the abyss’s edge. I’d never really been afraid of heights, but as I peered into the empty depths, I suppressed a shudder. Cal crouched beside me and gazed into the blackness. She’d been able to fly most of her life. When she glanced up at me, I saw no fear at all.

  “Now what?” she asked.

  “I climb down there,” I said. “I try to find some of their machines. Maybe I’ll blast one open. If they left anything intact, I’ll bring it back to you. I know you cracked some of their language in Aly’s lab. Maybe you’ll decipher something. Maybe it’ll be useful.”

  “Sounds like a long shot,” she countered.

  “Probably,” I admitted.

  “Either way…” She hopped to her feet. “I’m not staying up here alone.”

  The walls of the abyss didn’t fall straight down. Fractured and uneven, shelves of rock speared out into the darkness, some of them several hundred meters wide. I’d seen the formations from the Ring, and I’d guessed right about being able to use them to reach the Strigoi machinery. I looked over the edge, and I calculated how far the first stone shelf lay beneath me.

  “Thirty meters. In my suit, I can make the jump.”

  Cal blinked at me. “What if it breaks beneath you? You’ll fall a few hundred kilometers. I’ll have to scrape you off the bottom.”

  “It won’t break.” I shot her a look. “But you can’t come with me. Your suit – it won’t absorb the impact.”

  “Oh, I’m coming down,” she said. “And you’re going to carry me.”

  I didn’t let her see my eyes. I regretted allowing her to come, but I couldn’t let her know it. I snared her waist and hugged her close. For the first time in days she cracked a smile, and then we went over the edge.

  Even in the dead planet’s weak gravity, the fall would’ve killed anyone else.

  But in the Vezda suit, I felt almost nothing. My boots hit the stone shelf, and a plume of orange powder arose. I wondered if the dust would keep drifting back to the ground.

  Or whether it’ll float out into space.

  “You ok?” I put Cal down.

  “I’m fine. Thanks for the ride.” She shrugged.

  I let a deep breath fill my lungs.

  And I faced the abyss wall behind us.

  There they are.

  The machines.

  Woven into the ruined stone, I saw what I’d glimpsed from the Ring. Twisted cables and black machines were heaped together like headstones enshrouded in vines. Skeletal gears and dark chassis lay frozen. Some were naked beneath the stars, others half-entombed in the rocks.

  I moved closer.

  “The planet breaks open, and these things survived?” I said. “Dad would’ve said, ‘they don’t make ‘em like they used to.’”

  Before I could kneel and touch one of the machines, Cal put her hand on my left arm. “Wait.” She halted me. “Remember what happens when you get too close to the Strigoi? How do we know these machines won’t have the same effect?”

  I remembered.

  How could I forget?

  Decades ago, each time I’d fought the Strigoi in close proximity, I’d felt the draining. Just being near one of them had been enough to begin breaking my insides down cell by cell. No matter the Vezda suit, no matter that I’d killed every Strigoi I’d ever faced, I remembered the insidious power. It had invaded me, and even though I’d survived, the draining’s effects had lingered.

  Even thinking about it made me weak in the knees.

  I glanced at Callista, recalling the many times she’d rescued me from the draining. She’d entered my body in nano-bit form, jump-starting my cells a few million at a time.

  “I don’t suppose you can pop out of your body and do that thing you did before,” I asked.

  “Nope.” She shook her head. “Not without the Arcadian equipment. This body is what you’re stuck with. If the draining starts, we’re both dead.”

  After a moment’s consideration, I touched the Strigoi machine.

  The thing had been a massive sphere, perhaps a pump of some kind. Split into two and half-buried in rock, its insides were coated with oil sludge, all but frozen by exposure to space. I almost touched the oil, but withdrew my fingers.

  Oil is their blood, I recalled.

  Where were they pumping it?

  And why?

  Callista didn’t offer another warning, and so I roamed from machine to machine, inspecting, touching, and hoping to glean information. Strigoi hardware was everywhere. Some pieces I climbed to reach. Others I pried from the abyss wall using only my left hand. Callista trailed me in silence, and I couldn’t tell whether her disapproval was for my foolishness or the loathsome enemy machinery.

  Or both.

  After an hour’s work, during which I explored most of the stone shelf, I trudged to the abyss’ edge and gazed deeper into its depths. I’d found nothing of value, only skeletal hunks of metal, endless black tubes, and puddles of oil. Closing my eyes, I imagined the ocean of machines beneath me.

  It’d take centuries to check it all.

  “How much air?” I asked Cal.

  “Three hours left in my tank,” she answered. “Are we done here?”

  I knew she wanted to be. In truth, so did I. Curiosity had claimed my better judgment, and I’d become a grave robber, digging for treasures where there were none.

  “I just wanted to know.” I sounded defeated.

  “I understand,” said Cal.

  “I thought maybe we’d find some of their bodies. Or a computer. Or maybe pieces of their language. But these machines…they all look like pumps and pipelines. It’s like this whole planet was a reservoir for oil.”

  “Maybe they drank it all up and moved on.” She was trying to sound sympathetic.

  “Maybe.”

  Actually…

  …that sounds exactly like what they were doing.

  If I’d had the time to explore great swaths of the graveyard planet, I might have. For a short while, I’d forgotten about what I’d seen on Samison’s datapad, about Sumer, about everything. For one single hour, I’d wandered the barren landscape hoping to find something.

  Something new.

  Something that might’ve changed my mind.

  I hadn’t said anything to Callista, but a tiny part of me had hoped we’d discover the awful truth of my plan to fight the Strigoi.

&n
bsp; The truth that it’s hopeless.

  And if I realize it’s hopeless, I can cut this idea out of my head.

  And be with her.

  “Let’s go back to the ship,” I said.

  In the Vezda suit, leaping back up to the planet’s surface was easy. I hugged Callista close with my left arm, bent my knees, and pushed off, soaring skyward in a fifty-meter arc. We landed well clear of the abyss’s edge. I couldn’t admit it to Cal, but I felt better being out of the vast, empty dark.

  Side by side, we ambled toward the Sabre. I daydreamed as I walked. I tried to imagine how many other dead worlds floated in our galaxy. I wondered what the hollow planet had looked like with millions of Strigoi teeming in the darkness, drinking deep from their oily underworld.

  I should’ve paid more attention.

  I didn’t notice the motion tracker flaring on my visor until Callista started shouting.

  “Joff,” she screamed, “look!”

  She tried pushing my shoulder to wake me. Against my powered armor, her strength was nothing. She tumbled to the rocks, and I saw her lying there, eyes wide-open.

  In a heap on the ground, she pointed toward the Sabre.

  And the hulking Strigoi thing crawling atop it.

  The horror atop the Sabre wasn’t anything I’d ever imagined could exist. Pallid white lights leaked from its joints. Black bone splinters and dagger-like shards of metal erupted from its spine. Easily ten times the mass of a lone Strigoi, with a segmented body and eight skeletal legs, it scuttled more than it walked, denting the Sabre’s powered-down hull.

  “No!” I ran toward it.

  If it punctures the hull, we’re done.

  I doubted the horror could hear me. The dead planet had no air. And yet, when the thing leapt off the Sabre and hit the ground with eight legs sprawling, I felt the stones shake beneath me.

  It had eyes, four of them, white and blazing.

  It had arms, two of them, long black bones cabled with oil tubes.

  And it had ribs, countless curving bones lining its chest and spider-like underbelly.

  I aimed my arm-cannon and fired.