Shadow of Forever (Eaters of the Light Book 2)

by J. Edward Neill

  She wasn’t weeping.

  A few hundred-million kilometers away, she stretched out on the bed we’d shared and told every story she had to tell. Her memory was perfect. Hearing her words sent me right back into the places she described.

  “Remember the time you called me a hologram girl?” she recalled with a laugh. “I wasn’t angry, though I probably looked like it. I was sad. Because you were right. Until I found my new body, I wasn’t really alive, was I?”

  “…and when we found your sister floating in the dead star debris, I worried. It was selfish, I know. I thought you’d love her more than me. I didn’t even have a heart, but I think it was broken for a long, long while.”

  “…I saw you by the river that night. You probably didn’t know I’d followed you the whole time. And when I sat on top the Sabre with the rifle, I was sure they’d killed you already. I was there for almost two days, grieving all the while. I hated to hurt those men, but I couldn’t let them kill you. I just couldn’t.”

  “Joff?”

  I couldn’t recall how many stories she whispered her way through. It seemed like she talked for days, stopping only to sip her protein drink or take the briefest nap. A thousand times, I tried to answer her, but my mouth wouldn’t move. I began to believe I was dead, that her voice followed me into the afterlife.

  I opened my eyes after a profoundly deep sleep.

  Although I expected blindness, slivers of light slipped in.

  The blue letters on my visor winked at me:

  Atmospheric pressure – 1.2 mean Earth pressure

  Air quality – toxins present/unsafe to remove suit

  Temperature – 5.7 Celsius

  Gravity – 1.113 Earth gravity

  Alive.

  I’m alive.

  And still on the Strigoi station.

  I felt no excitement. If I’d have been able to move, I wouldn’t have leapt for joy. As it was, I floated atop the same inky lake I’d fallen into. Being awake yet immobile only meant I’d suffer a long, painful death by starvation.

  Cal returned from wherever she’d gone. Her voice sounded clearer in my helmet than before. I wondered just how long I’d been out, how much time she’d spent fine-tuning the Ring’s signal.

  “Joff, I’m back.” I heard the sound of her sitting down. I was sure she’d nested in the bedroom pod, likely in the chair with the wobbly leg.

  I tried to answer. I felt my mouth tremble, but my tongue wouldn’t move.

  “I’m still out here,” she said. “I’m roughly three-hundred million kilometers from the dark planet. I named it Alpo, after your ridiculous teddy bear. I figure he deserves his own planet.”

  I wanted to laugh.

  “If the Strigoi are able to trace my signal, they show no signs of chasing me,” she continued. “I’m still moving at about ten-thousand k’s per second. It’s like I’m orbiting big blue Alpo. If you’re able to hear me, it’s because I’m tight-lining the signal at a quantum rate. Meaning, everyone will be able to hear it, but no one can stop it. I suppose eventually the Strigs will find me. When they do, maybe I’ll just max the quantum engine and ram the sphere. It’s what you’d do, I figure.”

  She’s right, I knew. Exactly what I’d do.

  “I’m better now,” she said after a short quiet. “Talking like this, pretending you’re still alive…it’s good for me. And I know you said I should go back to Sumer. But if it’s true, if they’ve really all caught the Strigoi virus, I might arrive and be killed the moment I landed.”

  Land where no one lives, I wanted to tell her. Stay in the forest. You’ll be lonely, but you’ll survive.

  “I’ve been researching, you know.” She sounded serious. “I think the draining is how they spread the disease. It affects only the mind, makes people want to be Strigoi. After they start wanting it, they do the rest for themselves. It explains Tabir’s science experiments, the guns his men used, and the new bio-machine lab he funded. I figure it’ll take a few generations for everyone to change. It’s a genius virus, really. I wonder who engineered it…and whether they thought it’d have this effect.”

  I would’ve felt sick, but I couldn’t feel much of anything.

  “You’re right. I’m glamorizing it,” she said. “It’s a plague, and it’s disgusting. What’s strange is – I think I know how to cure it. When I was a blue nano-girl, your robot girl…” she sighed, “I was able to reboot your cells after they drained you. It made you immune. Now if only I could make a few thousand nano-Callistas. I could sprinkle myself all over Sumer and save the world.”

  Not that it matters, I thought. They’ll just annihilate Sumer’s suns.

  I closed my eyes and lost consciousness again.

  * * *

  Hours later, or perhaps days, I awoke to a thunderous splash. My eyes worked better than before, and so I watched as torrents of grey oil collapsed into the lake from far above. Seven pipes, I counted, all of them pouring rivers of dark liquid into the lake.

  When the flooding stopped, I blinked. And I realized I’d moved my neck to see the oil falling.

  I squeezed my left hand into a fist. My fingers were weak, but no longer numb.

  I moved my feet, and I saw the oil ripple.

  I opened my mouth and let out a groan.

  “Cal?” My voice was weak. “You there?”

  The silence swallowed me.

  “Cal?”

  It took all my strength to rotate the Vezda suit upright.

  And all of it again to wade through the lake to a shore of bones.

  Gasping, I crawled onto the embankment. Half-grown Strigoi bones snapped beneath my knees. My heart pounded against my ribs, while my stomach bellowed its emptiness. I slumped against a bone-metal wall whose sides wept a nameless pale fluid.

  I couldn’t fathom how I’d survived.

  Only a touch of draining? Not enough to kill?

  Or maybe I’m immune to it. Three drainings…not enough to kill me.

  I sat up and gazed across the lake. The grey effluence stretched across a vast cavern, vanishing in a gloom so far and deep even my powered visor couldn’t see the opposite side. The ceiling was at least a half-kilometer high. Dark shores trailed the cavern’s undulating walls, all of it heaped with discarded Strigoi carrion.

  Not exactly like waking on the farm at sunrise. I managed a smirk.

  I’d made no plans to survive so deep in the Strigoi sphere. I’d hoped only to disrupt them, to destroy as many as I could. They must’ve thought me dead or trapped, I imagined, else they’d have come to finish me as I laid in my coma. With a feeble smile, I wondered if the lake were too disgusting even for them.

  I clambered to my feet and leaned against the wall. Every movement made me gulp down great breaths.

  “What now?” I hoped Cal would hear me. “Starve to death? Pop my helmet off and end it all?”

  Or maybe…

  I looked to the pipes. One, the nearest to me, jutted from the wall some sixty meters above. A slender stream of oil trickled from its mouth, pattering in the shallows.

  I wondered if I could climb to it.

  I tried to imagine the point of trying.

  And I decided.

  Do it.

  Get up there.

  Break enough stuff to buy the galaxy a few more minutes of life.

  I gathered my wits. The Vezda suit provided me recirculated water, but my body needed food. It didn’t much matter. Even if I’d had a banquet, I couldn’t have taken off my helmet to eat it.

  I staggered along the cavern’s outer wall, crunching bones beneath my boots. I stopped directly beneath the pipe, whose mouth looked wide enough to swallow several of me.

  Not a great angle for a jump, I realized. But the wall...its texture. Maybe I can climb.

  Just as I reached up with my left hand to snare a bony crevice in the wall, I heard a sound inside my helmet.

  Sheets rustling.

  A yawn.

  Cal.

  “It’
s me.” Her voice crackled in my ear. The signal was sharp, and the crackle a result of her just waking. I wanted to answer, but I couldn’t. My heart beat harder than it had since I’d fallen into darkness.

  “It’s been ninety-two hours, give or take,” she said while sipping something. “Either your suit is broken and giving false readings or the Strigoi have done something awful. Either way, it says here you’re still alive. I know it’s not really true. I mean…ninety-two hours. For all I know, they’ve assimilated you and the readings are—”

  “Cal.” I found the courage to speak.

  She finished saying something. I couldn’t have said what it was. Seconds later, when my voice reached her, everything went quiet.

  “Cal, you there?” I said. “If so, I’m standing beneath an ugly black pipe. There’s this hideous lake I fell into. It’s full of oil. I think it’s their blood. Anyway, the trouble with this damn suit is the arm-cannon. It means I can’t grab anything with my right hand. It’s annoying. Send a signal to Doctor Abid if you can. I know he’s been dead for sixty years, but if you could tell him his suit has this one little design flaw, I’d love you for it.”

  All I wanted was to hear her laugh.

  And she did.

  Heart of Darkness

  By the time I reached the top, I had nothing left.

  “…stupid pipe.” I gasped for breath as I clawed my way out of the dank, oily darkness. My muscles smoldered with pain. My lungs were full of fire. The Vezda suit was slick with grey fluid, and my visor beaded with hundreds of droplets.

  In a chamber far above the lake, I collapsed on the floor. I’d ascended through the pipe, crawling for hours, climbing to a nameless place.

  “What? What is it? Where are you?” Cal begged for an answer.

  I didn’t care where I’d climbed to. If the entire Strigoi race had been waiting for me with white eyes blazing and rifles primed, I wouldn’t have minded.

  Hurts too much.

  Can’t breathe.

  So hungry.

  I lay on my back in the darkness.

  The grate I’d blasted open smoked behind me.

  I teetered on the edge of fading into a sleep from which I knew I’d never escape.

  “A room,” I grunted. “It’s a big room. I don’t know where. Give me a minute…maybe an hour. Can’t focus right now.”

  I thought I might be finished.

  But not quite.

  Rising in the gloom, I swiped the oil from my visor and consumed the sights surrounding me. I expected another pit full of glass cylinders and floating bones. Instead, the room was empty. With a low ceiling and walls too far away to see, it felt at once vast and claustrophobic. I could reach up and almost touch the webs of black cables above me, and yet I sensed I could walk a kilometer in any direction without finding anything.

  “Dark in here,” I murmured. “Ceiling’s on top of me. Walls are…nowhere. Without the suit, I’d be lost...blind. No sounds. I’ve never been in a quieter place. I don’t know where I am. It’s scary.”

  “Can you walk?” she asked after a short silence.

  “Yes.”

  I shambled into the hollow chamber. No machines thrummed in the deep, and no Strigoi lurked. I’d told the truth above how quiet it was. I heard nothing, and in the extreme absence of sound I worried I’d died and everything was a dream.

  “Joff?” Cal’s voice followed me.

  “Yeah. Still alive, still walking. It’s so empty in here.”

  “I want to say something.”

  “Say it.”

  “You know you shouldn’t have gone there,” she sighed. “Either you didn’t think it through or you’re throwing your life away on purpose. I’m angry with you. But…I’m glad you’re not dead.”

  “You mean not dead yet,” I added.

  “Right,” she conceded. “Not yet.”

  “I don’t know what I’m looking for.” I moved deeper into the room. The darkness seemed never-ending, the absence of sound oppressive. “I mean, I guess I never knew. When we left Sumer, I worried it’d be like this. We had no weapons. We were just two people. It was stupid, I know. But how could I just sit there and watch another planet die? I had to do something.”

  She let out another sigh.

  “What was that?” I asked.

  “You called me a person,” she said. “You’ve never done that before.”

  “Why didn’t you leave?” I asked. “Ninety-two hours, and you waited. I don’t understand.”

  “Would you have waited for me?” she countered.

  “Yes.”

  “There’s your answer.”

  I didn’t have anything to add. I kept striding into the dark, aimless as a dreaming child.

  In the distance, I swore I saw a sliver of light.

  And I felt a vibration growing beneath my boots.

  I quickened my pace. My muscles felt ready to unravel. The faster I walked, the brighter the sliver of light became. I expected red, but the glimmer was pallid blue, the same corpse-like color as the bottom of the crack I’d landed in.

  “A light,” I murmured as I marched. “Blue. Not a pretty blue – a dead blue. Something’s shaking beneath me. It’s rhythmic. Sounds like…a giant beating heart.”

  I walked for many minutes, slogging ahead until I found the chamber’s end. The far wall was cracked, a break in the bone-metal just one meter tall and several hundred wide. The blue light crept in, carving a bleak line across my face, throwing the Vezda suit’s shadow behind me. The closer I came, the harder the floor vibrated. The rhythm matched the sound I’d heard in the Strigoi tubes.

  A heartbeat, I imagined.

  One giant organ shaking the whole sphere.

  I stopped at the wall and caught my breath. The long and narrow break stretched hundreds of meters to both sides. I craned my neck into the crack and saw what awaited on the other side.

  A vast hollow space lay in the Strigoi sphere’s heart.

  The hollow must’ve been a thousand kilometers in diameter, enough to swallow every city on Sumer.

  In its center, a twisted column spiraled, joining one half of the Strigoi death-sphere to the other.

  God…

  I gazed with wide eyes into the void. Cal asked questions; I couldn’t think of any answers. The Strigoi hollow was too huge for words, and the things inside it made me shudder. The column, part ligament and part black metal carapace, looked alive, yet not. In its center a dead light throbbed, ejecting a malevolent glow in a sickly radius around it. Other lights gleamed ashen and blue, filling the great void like lanterns swaying in a grave-keeper’s grasp.

  “What am I looking at?” I whispered aloud.

  Seconds of silence passed.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Cal.

  I told her what I saw. I described the death-sphere’s heart, which thrummed in the void, rattling everything. I tried to count the Strigoi ships circling it. Some moved in strange patterns, surrounding the tissues holding the giant heart in place. Other ships floated without apparent life, black scythes drifting lifeless and null.

  “…whole thing’s hollow.” I let out my breath. “So many ships. And the heart, it’s too big. I could blast it a thousand times. It wouldn’t matter.”

  Cal stopped talking.

  Standing in the dead blue light, I described my enemy’s work:

  “Holes,” I gazed into the hollow. “Holes in the wall. Thousands of them. All shaped the same. Some are full of blue light. Others are dark. A few of the ships…they’re drifting toward the lights. I can’t see what they’re carrying. I think…maybe…long black needles? My eyes hurt. I just want to sleep.”

  “Don’t,” she said.

  “Wait...” I saw one of the Strigoi ships floating nearer. In its claws, it held a bundle of black needles, each one at least three meters long. “The needles, they’re spiky,” I said. “They all look identical. They’re sharp, covered in tubes. They look like…”

  “String reprogram
mers?” Cal said a few seconds later.

  “Yes.”

  I remembered.

  I’d sat in a metal-walled room with Doctor Abid, and he’d explained S.R.’s – string reprogrammers – to me.

  ‘…change any one element to another,’ he’d explained. ‘Used for simple things like soil enhancement, water purification, or terraforming.’

  ‘Or…turn all a star’s hydrogen into oxygen, lead, or something worse, utterly destroying it.’

  “Cal?” I felt light-headed.

  “I know,” she answered. “I’ve been watching.”

  “What do you mean, watching?”

  “They’ve been launching them in waves,” she said. “A few thousand at a time. The bundles come out of the red cracks every four hours. They’re quantum energized, but they don’t accelerate to faster-than-light until they’re a few hundred kilometers away from the Strigoi sphere.”

  “Wait…what?” I stammered. “You didn’t tell me.”

  After a long silence, she answered.

  “I did. It’s just that you were dead. You were lying in an oil lake. You couldn’t hear me. Remember?”

  Right.

  I considered what I was looking at.

  Every four hours…

  …a few thousand stars annihilated.

  Two hundred-billion stars in our galaxy.

  In a few hundred-thousand years, every star will be extinguished.

  “We probably could’ve stayed home,” I let out a morbid laugh. “At this rate, Sumer will last thousands of years.”

  I could imagine Callista shaking her head.

  “No,” she replied. “It’s obvious there’s a pattern. They’re not just slaughtering random stars. They’re not mindless; we know this. They haven’t pointed any in Sumer’s direction yet, but…”

  “But what?”

  “The red crack, the big one.” She sounded breathless. “It’s where most of the S.R.’s come out. At the rate the station is rotating, it’ll be facing Sumer in about sixty hours. If they know we’re here, and if they’ve figured out where we came from…”

  “Two S.R.’s for Sumer.” I finished her thought. “One for Atreya, one for Kokab.”