Of my first twenty shots, only six hit home. The spheres of golden energy burned bright holes in the creature’s chest and neck. It slowed, grasped at the smoking pits in its body, and opened its bony, mechanical jaw as if to release a silent scream.
My aim is terrible.
It’s been too long.
The horror came for me. Thundering across the rocky plain, it swept its three-meter long arm toward my head. A moment before its black talon could end me, I leapt up and away, firing as I flew. Each shot cratered the dark metal armoring the horror’s body, but failed to kill it.
Up and back I soared, sixty meters into the planet’s permanent night sky. I was an idiot.
I’d forgotten the weak gravity.
My boots struck the abyss’ edge, and I toppled over, flailing at nothing.
Falling into forever.
Do not go gently
As I plunged into darkness, I wondered how long I would fall.
I counted the seconds in my head, and each one felt like an eon. The great abyss swallowed me. The Strigoi machines entombed in its sides were teeth, and the bottom was its belly.
As I fell, I thought only of one thing:
Callista.
And then, just when I thought I might plummet forever, I hit one of the stone shelves.
Even through the Vezda’s powered armor, I felt the impact. I landed feet first, cratering the corrupted stone, cracking the shelf all the way through. I felt no pain, only the sense that I should’ve died. Dizzy, I staggered to my feet and gazed skyward. I’d fallen at least five-hundred meters. If the stone shelf hadn’t stopped me, I’d have fallen more than five-hundred thousand.
Lucky, I thought.
Maybe.
The crack my impact made ran in a jagged line from the Vezda’s boots all the way to the abyss wall. I saw it stretch and widen, and I knew what was about to happen.
The shelf…it’s going to break.
I’ll keep falling.
I didn’t have time to think.
I flexed my left-hand fingers and jumped.
As I leapt, I saw the stone shelf crumble and break away into the abyss. If I’d lingered a moment longer, I’d have fallen with it.
On a toothy ledge forty meters up, I landed. The ledge was tiny, only ten meters across, coated in a fine layer of frozen Strigoi oil.
I skidded across its top and leapt again.
And again.
And again.
Shelf by shelf, I ascended the abyss’s rotten sides. Some shattered the moment I propelled myself away, and others cracked but didn’t break all the way through. Leaping through the darkness, overpowering the dead planet’s pitiful gravity, I was a man possessed.
Cal, I’ll save you.
Stay alive until I get there.
My boots hit the last and highest shelf, the one we’d explored. I landed in a mound of Strigoi gears, scarring the Vezda’s leg armor, scattering black bones and metal. I didn’t care whether or not I’d punctured my armor. Rolling on the ground, I stood and leapt again.
I was a meteor falling up.
But I hit the abyss wall at an awful angle.
And I started to fall again.
With my left-hand fingers, I grasped a ledge on the rock wall. I tried to hook onto the stone with the arm-cannon, but the cannon slid off all surfaces, its barrel too impossibly smooth. I felt my ligaments stretching, my strength waning. My weight was too much for my left arm to bear.
No. Not like this.
With two pulls of the arm-cannon’s middle trigger, I blasted a hole in the rock and stuck the cannon in. I climbed, pulling myself up one hole at a time. I ripped and tore at the rocks, and within seconds scrambled over the abyss’s edge.
I came up firing.
If the Strigoi horror slaughtered me, I didn’t care.
At least I didn’t die falling.
I saw Callista sprint across the shattered stone. Wounded, the insectoid Strigoi horror shambled after her. Cal had gained a fifty meter lead, but the horror was closing.
I charged.
I had no strategy but to fire my arm-cannon as many hundreds of times as I could. Its ammunition was limitless. Doctor Abid had done at least one thing right.
I shouted as I ran. The arm-cannon’s golden energy spheres tore through the shadows, raking the horror’s legs, ribs, and spine.
“Pay attention to me,” I shouted. “Not her. Me.”
And it did.
I regretted it.
Slamming to a halt, hurling ropes of dust into the darkness, the horror reared and faced me. I fired at its legs, destroying two of the eight. My shots hit its chest and cratered its ribs. And yet the thing didn’t die. Knowing the Strigoi nature, it was probably already dead.
Or undead.
The beast rolled its skeletal shoulders. From its spine, two long, twisted bones swung up and forward. Each bone writhed with tubes, black veins, and wires pulsing white in the dead planet’s deep shadow.
Guns.
Shit.
I stopped running. My shots had severed the tubes leading to the horror’s left side weapon, but the other shivered and fired a stream of black particles at me.
I dove onto the broken earth. The swirling, ghastly spray of dark energy swept past me. I saw it hit the ground twenty meters away, burning a hole in the rock. The ground bubbled and smoldered, freezing and melting at the same time. I clambered to my feet only to dive again as a second black energy shot corrupted the ground in front of me.
The second shot’s impact sent me airborne. I soared backward in the low gravity, striking a stone outcropping thirty meters away. I lurched to my feet in a cloud of smoke and dust, which spread slowly in the airless void.
I waited for a third shot. I was sure the horror wouldn’t miss again.
But it did.
Callista had climbed onto its back.
I didn’t think. I didn’t have time. At a speed no man could match, I bolted across the wastes, firing my shots low. The horror flailed its arms. More than once, its cold black claws cut the space right above Cal’s head. She was fast, but not fast enough. If I didn’t destroy the horror in the next few moments, it would surely tear her to pieces.
My focus became narrower than ever in my life. The universe became a single speck in my mind, and the backdrop of stars fell away. I saw nothing more than the horror. I even lost sight of Callista.
I fired the arm-cannon at least thirty times.
The golden spheres streaked across the gloom, pitting the horror’s chest, legs, and sides.
I didn’t miss. Not even once.
By the time the horror understood it hadn’t killed me, I propelled myself at its neck, hitting it helmet-first between the black bones joining its head to its spine. I feared my helmet might split open from the impact, but it was the horror’s bones that broke, a great silent crunch I couldn’t hear, but could feel.
I snared a black collarbone as thick as my arm. Point-blank, I fired a dozen shots into the vile ligaments holding the horror’s skull atop its neck. Its bones melted. Its spine collapsed. The horror writhed, tearing the ground to tatters with its bone-metal feet, firing its energy weapon into the sky.
And Cal hung on for dear life.
With my final shot, one that ruptured the coils carrying black fluid to its head, the horror collapsed in a cataclysm of metal and bones. Its fall was violent in a way I hadn’t ever felt, separating its skull from its body, hurling me far from everything.
I didn’t remember landing.
I couldn’t recall how I didn’t die.
In a cloud of ash, I arose. I flicked a switch inside the arm-cannon, scanning the Vezda suit. Somehow, someway, it was undamaged.
I’d survived.
I wiped the ash away and ran to the fallen horror. Its severed head lay at my feet, the white lights in its eyes extinguished. The rest of it slumped in a heap of bones, metal, and ropes of frigid oil.
“Cal?” I felt my heart pounding. “You in
there?”
With a gulp, I stepped over the horror’s legs and pulled bone after bone out of my way. I felt weaker with each bone I hurled aside. I wondered if the Strigoi’s life-sucking powers were draining my life away. It didn’t matter. I kept digging, certain Callista was buried beneath it all, choking with the fear that my curiosity might’ve killed her.
After a full minute of digging, I looked up. Cal wasn’t trapped beneath the horror at all. I glimpsed her on the ground twenty meters beyond.
She’s not moving.
God, no.
In a stupor, I ran to her. My heart cracked when I saw her on the broken stone, facedown and stiller than death. Gently, I turned her over. I didn’t see any blood, but through her glass helmet her eyes were rolled back and her face ashen.
“Cal.” I shook her. “Cal, wake up.”
And then I glimpsed the tiny puncture in her suit. A sliver of black bone, slick with oil, had penetrated her suit through her upper left arm.
Her suit’s depressurizing.
In all my life, I never moved so fast as then. Cradled in my arms, Callista bounced with my long strides as I bolted to the Sabre. Cold tears streamed from the corners of my eyes, but it didn’t slow me. I came to the ship, signaled the airlock in its belly to open, and leapt up the ladder.
In the deep Sabre shadow, I laid my friend on the same table upon which I’d awoken from hypo-sleep. I tore her suit away until she lay on the cold chrome, naked but for her pale, bloody tunic. The Strigoi bone sliver had gone right through her upper left arm.
I ripped off my Vezda suit and stood above her.
My sweat ran in rivers.
I felt like I was dying.
I touched her skin. Her cheeks felt faintly warm, but her left arm was pallid and frostbitten, stained with ropes of half-frozen blood.
If only for a moment, she’d been exposed to the near-absolute zero temperature.
I wheeled out the machine used to wake me from hypo-sleep. It wasn’t meant for treating serious injuries, but I didn’t dare risk the flight to the Ring without doing something.
She’s still breathing.
She has a chance.
I tapped the hypo-machine’s console. The chrome table heated beneath her body. I flicked two switches, and a cylinder lined with needles spun into position over her chest.
I swallowed my fear.
I spoke a single command to the hypo-machine.
And for more hours than I remembered, I stood beside her and hoped she would wake.
The Edge of Nothing
In the darkness, I sat.
The stars wheeled around me. I saw billions, or so I imagined, reeling through the void beyond the observation pod’s windows. It was the Ring that moved, and yet I’d been awake for so long I dreamed the stars were moving.
And dying.
The pod, barren but for my small chrome chair, felt cavernous. I’d dimmed all the lights and stripped down to my shorts. I tried not to shiver, but the cold clawed its way under my skin. I’d sat there too long, watching the stars.
Waking after seventeen years in hypo-sleep had hurt.
But waking alone had been far more painful.
After a while, I made myself leave. I passed through several pod doors, a ghost gliding in the darkness. I’d programmed the lights to stay off and the Ring’s heating system not to fully engage. I’d slept longer than ever in my life, and so I shambled along, putting one foot before the other as if each step injured me.
I was eighty-four years old.
Though in the mirror, I looked only forty-four.
I’ve slept almost as much as I’ve lived.
In the kitchen pod, I hunkered in the shadows and dined on half-warmed soup and crackling protein wafers. I didn’t mind their tastelessness. If not for the sharp pain in my stomach, I’d have forsaken eating entirely. I hadn’t used Pulse Therapy during the last seventeen years. I figured my body, thirty kilograms lighter than when I’d climbed into the Ring’s hypo-chamber, wouldn’t need nearly the amount of food it’d been used to.
I cleaned my mess, something I’d almost always avoided.
I dressed in a black tunic, and felt it fall loose over my shoulders.
I shaved my face, scissored off most of my hair, and jogged two circuits through the Ring, barely breaking a sweat for lack of speed. I knew exactly what I was doing.
Putting off the inevitable.
Dad would’ve been disappointed.
Can’t believe I remember him.
I wandered through two more pods. Lost in my head, I came to the door leading down into one of the Ring’s spokes. With a shiver, I walked into the long, dim hallway. My palms were clammy, my eyes leaden. I should’ve retreated to bed and tumbled down for a long nap, but I knew I couldn’t sleep.
I had a question that needed answering.
It wouldn’t wait any longer.
The door at the spoke’s end opened with a hiss. I slid through into the deep black of the Sabre’s cockpit. The window was closed, the lights dimmed to nothing. For a time, I stood and considered my aloneness.
I could go back into hypo-sleep and set it for a thousand years.
I could waste away to nothing and never feel again.
I could wake in the vast empty space between galaxies.
Every star in the universe might go out.
I pulled at my face.
Enough.
I faced the Sabre’s hypo-sleep chamber. Its door was sealed and the Vezda suit piled before it. I pushed the pile of armor aside and keyed a quick sequence into the panel beside the door. The string of characters I typed popped into my mind as if I’d only sealed the chamber yesterday.
Rather than seventeen years, three months, and thirteen days ago.
The chamber opened. Cold white gas from leaky pipes pooled on the floor, swirling at my ankles. I stood before the pale glass sleeping cylinder. A coffin, it seemed, shrouded in the same fog gathering on the floor.
I tapped another sequence into another keypad. I did it slower than the previous one, ten characters taking a full minute to finish.
Faster than I’d hoped, a vacuum inside the cylinder siphoned all the fog away.
I saw Cal on the other side. Her skin was whiter than bleached stone, her blue hair frozen in long lashes to her face and neck. Her eyes, buried beneath dark circles, were closed just as I’d left them.
The bandage on her upper left arm had crystallized and fallen off.
I couldn’t tell whether or not her wound had healed.
I tapped the glowing green symbol on the hypo-chamber console. Backing off, I lurked in the doorway between the chamber and the cockpit. I heard liquid pumping through every conduit in the room. More gas, white as Cal’s skin, erupted on the floor.
And I stood there, a pale statue.
The chamber rotated, leveled parallel to the floor, and cracked open. I remembered the acrid scent of the hypo-gas, the feel of the deep, dry cold. I retreated into the cockpit as chrome arms awoke from the chamber’s walls and took hold of the slab Cal slept on.
She didn’t look alive.
On purpose, I hadn’t checked the console for her vital signs.
For what felt like eons, I waited. The cylinder of needles hovered over her motionless body, pricking her in dozens of precise spots. I felt humid warmth flow from her table, spreading into the dark room behind me.
The waking protocol wouldn’t activate if she were dead.
Would it?
Her eyelids fluttered. I feared it was nothing more than a reaction to the needles.
Her finger twitched. I was sure the table warming had made it happen.
But when she sat up with a gasp, blue eyes wide and face flush with new color, I almost died.
* * *
Three days later, I paced the gloom of the bedroom pod while Callista reclined in a cushioned chair. She’d gained a little of her weight back, not that I could see it. Buried in a mound of self-heating blankets, she looked re
ady to fall asleep for another seventeen years. The dark circles beneath her eyes remained, as did her paleness.
I wasn’t sure she’d ever been more beautiful.
“It’s like I said. I really don’t remember.” She tugged her blanket up to her chin. “I was running, and…I think I was scared. I’d never really felt human fear before that. And then you started shooting. I saw the yellow orbs. But that’s it. Nothing else. I see the scar in my arm. I don’t remember any pain.”
I’d already told her most of what had happened:
That after she’d been wounded I’d spent a full day with her on the Sabre, delirious, hoping no more Strigoi behemoths came crawling out of the abyss.
That I’d put her into hypo-sleep two days later, and that I’d stayed awake on the Ring for many months afterward.
That I’d crawled into my own hypo-chamber having convinced myself she was dead.
And that before I’d awoken her, I’d slowed the Ring to a crawl.
“I thought for sure the thing in your arm was poisonous. Or that it’d drain you. Or you’d bleed out. Or worse.”
“Yet here I am.” She managed a weak smile.
“I know.” I sat on the floor. “The thing that attacked us…it wasn’t a real Strigoi. It was like a sentinel. I think they left it behind to kill anyone who happened to drop by. Like us. I bet there are thousands on the planet, waiting for nosy wanderers like me.”
“Don’t worry.” She peeked over her blanket. Despite still being in pain, I could tell she was smiling again.
“You mean you’re not going to say I told you so?” I fidgeted.
“I won’t. I promise.” She pulled the blanket down. Her smile was gone. “But I will ask one thing. You said you killed the creature, whatever it was. And you said we stayed on the dead planet for a full day afterward. Did you learn anything? Was any of it worthwhile?”
“I’m glad you asked,” I said. “When you’re feeling better, I’ll need your help with something.”
“What something?”
“First start walking again. And then I’ll show you.”
Two days later, I held her hand as we ambled into the recreation pod. She didn’t need my help to walk anymore; she’d taken my hand three pods back and hadn’t let go. She held it because she liked it.
Shadow of Forever (Eaters of the Light Book 2) Page 12
