Shadow of Forever (Eaters of the Light Book 2)

by J. Edward Neill

  But as soon as she saw what I’d laid on the floor, she untangled her fingers from mine.

  “You brought it here?” Her eyes widened.

  “I couldn’t just leave it,” I explained.

  “How’d you get it on the Sabre? And into the Ring?”

  “The Vezda suit.” I shrugged. “A thousand kilos is nothing. I carried it.”

  After shooting me a dangerous look, she sidled up to the oily mass of bone, metal, and cold black tubes. During the battle on the dead planet, the Strigoi monster’s skull had broken off and rolled several meters away from the rest of its body. Most of its oil had leaked out, and though I’d feared the lights in its four eyes would rekindle, they never had.

  I’d left its skull on the Ring for seventeen years.

  And I’d tried to forget it.

  “How do you know it’s not contagious?” She touched one finger to its forehead, into which the Vezda’s arm-cannon had cratered a hole.

  “It’s not a real Strigoi,” I reminded her. “Besides, we already carry their disease. Both of us. Hasn’t killed us yet…or turned us vampiric. We’re both immune, I think.”

  “You think.” She glanced over her shoulder.

  I joined her at the severed skull. It looked strange sitting there, jaws open and hollow eyes gazing at the window. The thing weighed more than both of us combined. I couldn’t help but imagine it returning from un-life to eat us.

  But it only gazed at the stars, a dead machine.

  “It’s not the skull that’s important,” I told Cal as she circled it. “It’s what I pried out of it.”

  Blue eyes narrowed, she gave me a look only she could give.

  “What did you find?”

  “I’ll show you,” I said.

  I retreated to a nearby table.

  I snared a small, steely black orb from its resting place on the table’s center.

  I showed her the smooth, perfect sphere, which seemed to soak up half the room’s light.

  And I dropped it into her hands.

  “It’s ok. It’s not dirty,” I said. “I cleaned the oil off. I even ran some tests on it before I hypo-slept. None of the scans told me anything.”

  She regarded the orb as though I’d just handed her a bomb. I could tell I’d surprised her, which I couldn’t remember ever doing before.

  “It’s the thing’s brain?” she asked.

  “I think so.”

  “It’s so light.” She rolled it in her palm. “And so small.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t think the beast was very smart. That’s probably just its computer. ‘Kill Joff and Cal’ is probably the only instruction it knew.”

  “Not funny.”

  “Sorry.”

  “What am I supposed to do with it?” she asked.

  “Read it.”

  “Read it?”

  “Here.” I took the orb back. “I’ll show you.”

  * * *

  I never expected her to find so much.

  I assumed she’d refuse to look at it or give up after a few hours in.

  I was wrong.

  Sixty hours after showing the black orb to Callista, she invited me to sit with her in the observation pod. We hunkered in chrome chairs. The starlight shined on the table between us, atop which we’d laid a viewing pad.

  “You’ve been hard to reach lately, you know?” I said as she keyed the pad on. “Hard to talk to, too. Did you find something, or—”

  “Shhhh.” She didn’t look up. She was too busy tapping away. I peered over the pad’s rim and saw a jumble of strange symbols in a language I didn’t recognize.

  After a few silent moments, she ceased tapping and smiled at me. I knew her look. I’d yearned for it every moment before I’d crawled into hypo-sleep.

  She’s learned something.

  She rotated the pad for me to see. In one corner, it showed a super-resolution image of the black Strigoi orb. I saw the same symbols I’d seen beneath the magnifier days earlier.

  “Yeah? So?” I shrugged. “I saw those already, remember? I showed you.”

  She bounced out of her chair and knelt on the floor beside me. I felt her warmth so close to me. I tried not to be distracted.

  “I’ve copied all the symbols from the orb.” She pointed to the jumble of characters gleaming on the pad’s surface. “There are twenty-eight in total.”

  “Twenty-eight,” I repeated. “Does that mean something?”

  She looked at me as though I were a child. “Twenty-eight characters on the orb,” she said. “Twenty-eight characters in the alphabet most people use in Arcadia.”

  “Wait—”

  “That’s right.” She saw the light dawning in my eyes. “The language on this orb is derived from humans. It has to be. The symbols…they’re similar in a way that couldn’t be coincidence.”

  She let me think about it.

  I sat there, and I understood.

  The dead planet had been like Sumer. Full of humans. Full of life.

  They’d been infected. They’d all turned into Strigoi.

  “That would mean—”

  “Exactly,” she said. “The dead planet was settled by the Exodus people. They left Earth hundreds of years ago. Somehow, they got infected. But they retained some of their knowledge. Most importantly, their language.”

  “…to use against us,” I guessed.

  “To use against us,” she agreed.

  “Does that mean all Strigoi everywhere were once something else?”

  “What do you think?” she said.

  Yes.

  Two of Us

  “No point in going back to sleep. We’re only two weeks away.”

  Callista was right, of course. After two hypo-sleeps and more than twenty-one years, we’d reached the outskirts of one of the farthest systems in the galaxy. At the Ring’s current pace, roughly five-million kilometers per hour, we were near the edge of everything.

  Near Nosfera.

  I had to admit; I’d never considered how I’d feel upon arriving.

  I never thought we’d make it this far.

  I sat up in bed. In a translucent blue dress, Callista stood at the pod’s console, beyond which innumerable stars blazed. Most times before then, I’d shuttered the bed-pod windows. I figured I’d sleep better without the spinning stars always in sight.

  But the last time I’d sank into bed, I’d opened the cold chrome shutters.

  I’d wanted to see Cal when she snuck in during my sleep.

  “Two weeks.” I rubbed my eyes. “To Nosfera.”

  Opposite my oversized bed, she faced me. She’d slipped away while I slept again. I could tell by the way she’d fixed her hair, the way her dress was unwrinkled. I wondered where she went while I dreamed.

  I wondered whether she knew.

  Whether she knows I feel her in my bed every night.

  I shook the thought from my mind and crawled out from beneath the sheets. She watched while I dressed, but said nothing. Decades ago, while living in Abid’s fortress, I’d been shy about being naked in front of her. The feeling had long ago passed.

  “I’d better get to training,” I yawned. “If my plan isn’t possible, I’ll have to board the…thing. I’ll need to be in the Vezda suit. I’d better be ready.”

  I glimpsed the sadness in her eyes.

  “I’m not going to try to talk you out of it,” she sighed. “Not anymore.”

  “I know,” I said.

  We stood just ten meters apart. The ocean between us felt infinite.

  “Did you know?” She sucked in a shallow breath. “How many times I’ve thought about changing the Ring’s course? I considered drugging you while you slept and putting you into hypo-sleep. We’d wake up a few trillion kilometers away.”

  “I’m surprised you haven’t done it,” I admitted.

  She shrugged. “I’ve even thought about taking us to a habitable planet and smashing the sleep chambers after we arrived. You know…so we couldn’t travel fa
r away again. So we’d never be able to reach the Strigoi.”

  “Why didn’t you?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer my question.

  “I wonder if you’ve considered everything.” She sat on the bed.

  “Everything?” I said. “Impossible to consider everything. There’s no telling what the Strigoi machine will look like after all these years. It might even be gone. There’s no way to know until we—”

  “I’m not talking about them.” She cut me off. “I’m talking about me. About us.”

  “Oh.” I felt foolish.

  “For example, do you know what I had to do? To find you? To save your life on Sumer?”

  “Yes. I think so.”

  “Oh?” she said.

  Yes, I thought.

  You put yourself into a body that wasn’t yours.

  You gave up a perfect form to be human.

  You shortened your life by hundreds…maybe thousands of years.

  And you did it for me.

  I’d considered her sacrifice many times, though I’d never admitted it. I couldn’t bear to dwell on what she’d given up. In my heart I believed no one was less deserving than me.

  “I’m sorry,” was all I could muster.

  “Don’t be.” She looked up at me. “I’m not worried about it. I just have one question.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “If we arrive in this evil system…this Nosfera, and if we find our enemy has abandoned it or built something we have no hope of destroying, what then? What will you do? You know I’ll follow you anywhere, but if there’s no hope, I wonder if you’ll reconsider.”

  “Is that what you want to happen?” I asked.

  “I can’t say.” She shook her head. “I just want you to think about it. We have time. Nothing is decided.”

  Nothing is decided.

  I hadn’t considered the possibility.

  * * *

  I spent the next seven days preparing for the end of everything.

  After waking, I sweated away hours in the recreation pod. I ran on the tread-track, lifted iron weights, and practiced Sabre flight sims. My body responded well, and my mind even better. No matter that I’d gone decades without any true test of my deep space flying skills, I handled the most challenging flight scenarios as if I’d never taken a day off.

  Lost in the flight sim programs, I fought swarms of faster-than-light aliens. I skimmed targets with the Sabre’s quantum field, which annihilated everything it touched. I logged hundreds of millions of kilometers, all within a few hours.

  And I ate.

  Having lost so many kilos to grief and hypo-sleep, I forced myself into the kitchen pod six times per cycle. I gorged on protein wafers and amino soup, and I downed more water than ever in my life. I supposed I could’ve used Pulse Therapy to rebuild my lost muscle, but I preferred the old way.

  Hard work and a full belly.

  Mostly in silence, Callista followed me every step of the way. She was my motivator, even when she said nothing.

  And although I slept even deeper than normal, I sensed her in my bed for many hours each time I rested. Always, I pretended to be asleep. And always she left without saying a word.

  She has to know, I told myself again and again.

  But she’ll never say.

  And so it went. The Ring hurtled toward Nosfera, and dread flooded me. Before each sleep, I requested time alone to sit in the observation pod and gaze at the images on the Ring’s console.

  Wish I hadn’t looked at Samison’s datapad.

  Wish I could forget what I’ve seen.

  I tried hard to focus the Ring’s scope on the Nosfera system. But even I, who prided himself on fixing any problem, couldn’t make it work. We were going too fast, and without precise coordinates of the ghastly Strigoi planetoid, I might as well have searched for a stone at the bottom of the ocean.

  I wanted to see it.

  I wanted to glimpse the giant, star-killing sphere.

  I needed to know my enemy.

  My memory of the thing, black and void with a burning red surface, smoldered in my chest. I couldn’t admit my fear, not to Cal, not to myself. And yet it grew, prodding me to the edge of my most dangerous thoughts.

  Nothing is decided, she says.

  I want to turn back. I want to disbelieve.

  No. It’s too late.

  Isn’t it?

  I lay in bed, unable to sleep for the first time in forever. I’d worked myself to exhaustion, but my mind rebelled against the idea of dreaming. In complete darkness, I roamed through countless scenarios of what Nosfera might have in store. It wasn’t like me to feel such doubt.

  But when Cal slipped through the far door, I forgot everything.

  As always I did.

  I’d left the shutters open. Fields of stars moved beyond the windows, illuminating the floor with pale, pale light. I pretended to be asleep, but kept my eyelids cracked open. Cal floated to the bed. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen her as beautiful as then.

  She was naked, the starlight shining on her perfect body.

  Close your eyes, I told myself. Like always, close your eyes.

  Soundless, she slithered into bed. She laid on her left side, the sheet clinging to her hip and shoulder. I couldn’t have moved without touching her.

  We lay there for an eternity.

  I barely breathed. A thousand times, I tried to speak. My courage fled. All I wanted was for her to break the silence.

  And she did.

  “You left the shutters open again,” she whispered.

  “I know.” My breath abandoned me.

  “Why?”

  “I wanted to see you.”

  “You’ve seen me a thousand times.”

  “Not in your new body.” I shivered. “Not without clothes.”

  She squirmed closer. I felt her chin against my arm, her leg touching mine. I couldn’t help but begin to thaw.

  “Why’d you do it?” I asked. My voice felt so small I wasn’t sure she’d hear me.

  “Why’d I want to be in this body?” she asked. “I think you know. Would saying it help?”

  “Yes.”

  I felt her lips flutter in the shape of a smile.

  “They made me with a human mind.” Her breath moved against my skin. “And trapped me in a tiny blue body. I liked it for a while. Flying, reshaping myself, total freedom…it was fun. But it wasn’t enough. Like anyone else, I wanted to feel. Really feel. Couldn’t really do it in my blue body. Your sister and her lab-mates made me what I’ve always been meant to be. They made me alive.”

  “They did it for other reasons.” I shuddered at the thought. “They wanted what was inside you. Your data. Your Strigoi knowledge.”

  “I know.” She moved closer. “I don’t care.”

  In the starlight, I faced her. We laid beneath the covers, nose to nose, gazing at each other. She’d healed from her wounds, but I caught the new wisdom in her eyes, hidden within the deep, dark blues.

  I kissed her.

  It was accidental, but not.

  I’d never kissed anyone before. I didn’t even know how. When our mouths met, the last wall between us crumbled. It didn’t matter that neither of us understood what we were doing. We’d wanted to do it for decades.

  Harder, we kissed.

  When I thought to stop, she didn’t let me.

  We tore off our sheet. Her warmth washed over my body. I felt vulnerable, as if I’d stepped out of the Vezda suit and onto a strange new world. And yet nothing could’ve been more natural. We were clumsy, yet utterly in sync. I reached for her hands, and she locked her fingers into mine.

  “You know what I’m doing before I do it,” I said.

  “Shhhhhh,” she whispered.

  In the shadows, I climbed atop her. A part of me thought I was dreaming, and yet her hands, her smell, and her heels bumping my back stripped my fears away. When she pulled me down inside her, I lost myself. There were no such things as Strigoi, d
ying stars, or planets entombed by machines. It was just us, nothing else in the universe.

  All too soon, our lovemaking ended.

  We were new to it, and had no idea what we’d fallen into.

  Yet as we lay beside each other, our bodies cooling, we kissed again.

  And again.

  And for hours uncounted made love.

  * * *

  “Just think, a few hours ago we were the oldest virgins ever to exist.”

  In a pile of crumpled, starlit sheets, many hours after we’d first touched, Cal propped herself up on her elbow. She was naked still, and her hair slicked to her neck. “What’s a virgin?” She wrinkled her nose.

  “Um…well…” I stammered. “It’s something I remember my sister saying when we were young. It means we hadn’t…you know.”

  “…had sex?”

  “Yeah. That.”

  Even in the dark, I saw the smile on her lips.

  “Technically, you were the oldest virgin ever,” she said. “I’ve only been human for twenty-something years, and only awake for a few weeks.”

  I flopped onto my side of the bed. I’d lost track of time, and I wasn’t sure I cared anymore. I had loved Callista from the moment I’d met her. Not touching her for so many years felt almost like being cheated.

  “You should’ve been human forty years ago,” I sighed.

  “I know.” She sounded glum.

  “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “I know you didn’t,” she reassured me. “What I mean is…if I’d been human when we landed on Sumer, we wouldn’t have left. We’d be there now. We’d have children, a house beside the river, a life. No one would have any reason to hurt us.”

  I lay there, stunned to silence.

  I’d never known the things she’d dreamed of having.

  “Children? A house?” I said.

  “Don’t say it like that.” She pretended to pout. “Remember when you used to call me a robot girl? Well…it hurt a little. Imagine knowing what you wanted and who you wanted it with, but not being able to chase it. There I was, aching for a real life. And just now, now that we’re out here in the stars, now that we’ve touched, am I able to admit it’s what I’ve always wanted. But it’s too late.”