Shadow of Forever (Eaters of the Light Book 2)

by J. Edward Neill

“Right.”

  I braced my back against the wall and slid down. The blue light cut through the darkness over my head, vanishing somewhere in the emptiness.

  “I’ve killed humanity,” I murmured. “If we hadn’t come, Sumer might’ve survived thousands of years, maybe longer.”

  “You don’t know that,” said Cal.

  “Yes I do,” I argued. “If we’d never gone there, if we’d never come out here, they wouldn’t have caught the contagion and they wouldn’t be a prime Strigoi target. But now they’re dead. One way or another. All of them.”

  With empty eyes, I gazed at the line of blue light. I wanted to follow it to its end. I wanted to strip off the Vezda’s helmet and curl up on the floor. I’d reached my end, and found not fear, but sorrow.

  Wouldn’t take long, I figured.

  A few breaths of Strigoi air.

  And this…all of it…done.

  “They’re not even coming for me.” I broke a long quiet. “They know I’m here, and they haven’t sent more to kill me.”

  “They probably think you’re already dead,” Cal sounded miserable.

  “Yeah. That’s true.” I raised my hand to touch the deathly blue light.

  “They’re right. I’m already dead.”

  The Coffin

  Across an ocean of shadows, I swam.

  The part of me who remembered Sumer, the stars, and Earth was lost.

  I’d turned off the sound in my helmet. In its absence, I felt at peace. If Cal talked, which she surely did, her words fell into nothing. Leaving her in silence was cruel, but to make her listen to my death was something I wasn’t willing to do.

  Not again.

  I’d walked for hours. I was sure I’d never find a door, and yet there it was. Far from the broken wall and the pulsing Strigoi heart, I found it. It looked like all the others, a fleshy round disc in a black-bone wall.

  I blinked hard, pressed my palm against its center, and let it consume me.

  I emerged in the longest hall I’d ever seen.

  The tunnel stretched into forever, fifty meters wide and twice at tall. Strands of ligament hung from the ceiling, while slabs of bone shaped its walls and floor. I glimpsed doors up and down its sides, all closed, none guarded. Somehow, I knew none of them were for me.

  Walk, I commanded myself.

  And walk I did.

  I knew why the Strigoi hadn’t come for me again. It wasn’t that they believed me dead. I was but one lonely speck on a giant killing machine, one flea nibbling on a monster’s hide. Insignificant, I had nothing with which to harm them, and they knew it.

  I no longer cared to destroy and disrupt.

  I decided I had a new goal:

  Understand.

  I slowed somewhere in the darkness. I’d gone far enough to lose all sense of direction. Even if the Sabre was still intact, I never could’ve found it. For all I knew, I’d fallen a thousand kilometers deep into the sphere.

  Oops.

  Of all the doors I’d passed, I chose one. It lay to my left, shut the same as the others. I didn’t care what lurked behind it. I only wanted to enter.

  To learn.

  To know why.

  I walked to the door and let it suck me through to its other side. After a moment of nausea, I staggered a few steps ahead into a place I never could’ve dreamed.

  Across a flat bone floor, beneath a ceiling of oily vines and elaborate black piping, more than a hundred Strigoi toiled. They stood at a vast window overlooking the sphere’s heart. Their skeleton hands moved over banks of black machinery. Unaware or uninterested in my presence, they tapped screens, gazed at monitors, and uttered words in their dreadful language. The machines appeared crude, but I didn’t doubt their power. I sensed the vibration, and I felt the death-sphere’s heartbeat in my bones.

  Computers, I thought. That’s what they’re working on. Strigoi computers.

  The window…they’re watching ships move string reprogrammers into firing position.

  I stood in silence, watching the hundred Strigoi at their machines. Their cold white eyes reflected against the window, and their bodies popped and hissed as they moved. So engrossed in their work, they ignored me. I considered killing them, or trying to.

  No, I ordered myself.

  Just watch.

  In the gloom and bitter cold, I hid behind them. They couldn’t have been alive, not in any way I understood. Twisted machines pumped between their ribs, animating their dark ligaments. They didn’t breathe, interact, or move in any way suggesting they enjoyed their work. For any creature to desire such an existence was beyond my reasoning.

  They’re undead.

  Who made them this way?

  And why?

  I backed out of the room. The door sucked me into the empty tunnel, and silence reigned once more.

  I expected a garrison of Strigoi to come for me.

  I waited for death in dozens of dreamed-of ways.

  When nothing happened, I continued down the tunnel in the same direction I’d been going. I entered other rooms at random. In one, I found a control room like the first, but with no Strigoi manning the machines. In others, I found pools of oil, bundles of liquid-filled tubes, and chambers so dark and cold I swore I felt it through the Vezda suit.

  But I found no more Strigoi.

  I guessed that in a place as massive as the death-sphere, they were all occupied with star-killing. They had no lives to return to, after all. They were dead, and their only business was the making of more death.

  Many kilometers deep, I came to the tunnel’s end. The black walls terminated in a giant disc made of bone-metal in which a single door lay closed. Aching, hungry, and tired, I shambled to the door. I’d entered more than twenty chambers before it, and learned only what I’d already expected:

  They want to kill the light.

  They want everything to be like them.

  The door took me in and spat me out on its other side. I knelt on the ground, which felt rockier than the smooth-walled tunnel. I tried not to vomit inside my helmet.

  After swallowing my nausea, I rose to my feet.

  And laid eyes upon a graveyard.

  Everywhere, the ships were laid out. Hundreds upon hundreds, the ocean of ruined spacecraft had been spread through the vast hollow chamber. Corpses of long-dead vessels mingled with shapeless piles of metal. The boneyard was bigger than any city.

  I wandered away from the door. Several craft lay close. To my left, a hulking cylinder gutted by Strigoi energy weapons stretched toward the ceiling like a tombstone. To my right, three identical ships lay stacked atop one another. They were white, their wings angelic, and their hulls pitted and burned. Farther out, I glimpsed a craft not unlike the Ring, but with pods and interior halls too small to accommodate humans.

  None of these are Strigoi ships, I knew.

  Stoic, I walked among them.

  I saw winged war-craft, bulky passenger ships, and fragments of tiny, one-man vessels. I counted piles of machinery blanketed in dust, twisted wreckage of once-elegant cruisers, and pieces of a giant sphere whose insides could’ve housed thousands.

  Most of the craft, I didn’t recognize. My father had never allowed me to know about Earth’s ancient spacefarers, and I’d never bothered to learn once I’d settled on Sumer. The ships felt alien, dropped together into the same coffin.

  But some looked familiar.

  I came to a small husk of metal. Solar panels, burned and black, extended from its sides. On its ashen flank, I saw lettering that seemed human.

  A name, perhaps. Though I couldn’t read it.

  I climbed atop the nose of another vessel. Its sides were white and its wings snapped off. Through the cockpit window I glimpsed five chairs.

  Humans could’ve sat there, I imagined.

  Unlikely. Earth…it was too far away.

  Wasn’t it?

  I moved through the wreckage. The ships were too many to count, their designs a stark contrast to the Strigoi scyt
hes. I tried to imagine all the lives extinguished, the civilizations snuffed when their stars had died or their minds enslaved by the Strigoi contagion.

  If any sadness remained in me, I couldn’t feel it.

  Somewhere in the graveyard’s heart, I came upon the largest of all the ships. The metallic sphere, thousands of meters in diameter, lay fractured on the floor. Though cracked like an egg, its shell showed none of the Strigoi burns. Whatever had been inside was long gone.

  And yet, as I stood within I felt I’d seen the ship before.

  Chrome sphere. Big enough for thousands of people to hypo-sleep.

  Cratered bottom. Ports where the engines would’ve sat.

  This ship…it was an Exodus ship.

  …built on Earth.

  I circled the monstrous vessel. Though hollow, I remembered seeing images of it. I’d been in a tiny room in Doctor Abid’s fortress. He’d showed me the spheres leaving Earth, the plumes of fire and ash in their wake.

  As I ran my left-hand fingers across its chrome exterior, I heard something strange. Tiny glass particulates rained down from where I touched, sprinkling on the cold Strigoi floor. The glass looked red and orange, the dust of a planet I’d once visited.

  Ebes, I knew.

  They turned Ebes to glass.

  And took this ship away.

  I stood in reverent stillness, though only for a moment. Ebes and Earth were gone. Sumer was the only humanized planet remaining, and one way or another, it would perish like all the others.

  I rounded the Exodus sphere and pressed on into the graveyard. Nothing else interested me. I passed alien satellites, ships as long and narrow as swords, and boneyards of nameless dead vessels. I didn’t care any longer. Seeing the Exodus sphere had reminded me of my pointlessness.

  I came to a place where the ships were fewer.

  I looked up and saw ashen blue lights. I knew what they meant. The Strigoi were near.

  And when I leveled my gaze to the brittle floor, my breath caught in my throat.

  The Sabre lay before me.

  Impact

  “Get away from the ship,” I rumbled.

  “It’s mine.”

  Twenty Strigoi smothered the Sabre’s body. Seven crawled atop it, prying with tools and skeletal fingers at its hull. Six hunkered beneath it, surrounding a nameless piece of Strigoi machinery. Three lurked beneath its wing.

  And four stood guard with skeletal rifles.

  When I spoke, all twenty looked at me. Their white eyes blazed the same as stars, their black jaws betraying neither fear nor surprise. If I had never seen a Strigoi before then, I’d have crumbled to the ground in terror.

  Instead I started firing.

  Before the guards were able to hoist their weapons, I sprayed the nearest two with shots from the Vezda’s arm-cannon. Even with my hunger and weakness, I couldn’t miss. One of the horrors, I blasted thrice in its skull. I struck the other in its ribs, beneath which its organs caught fire.

  The other two aimed their rifles. I leapt high into the air, shouting as ropes of dark energy streamed beneath my boots. At the apex of my jump, I triggered a switch inside the arm-cannon.

  Can’t kill them all, I knew.

  Have to get inside the Sabre.

  I descended, and I heard the Sabre’s belly slide open. If the Strigoi noticed, they didn’t show it. The horrors skittered beneath the wings, crouching as if ready to pounce. The two with weapons steadied their aims.

  I came down hard. The floor cracked beneath my boots, and the impact sang through my bones. I counted to a half-second in my head.

  And then threw myself flat on the ground.

  I’d landed between the two Strigoi warriors, and I’d timed it perfectly.

  Black energy streams tore through the dead space above me.

  The streams missed, washing over the Strigoi warriors instead.

  I didn’t stop to savor their end. As their bones crumbled and their insides melted, I sprang up, sprinted to the Sabre’s open airlock, and leapt inside. I saw a Strigoi face appear beneath me. An instant before the airlock snapped shut, I shot the horror between its four gleaming eyes.

  I wasn’t sure why I fought.

  I’d seen them crawling on my ship, and something had changed inside me.

  Standing in the cockpit, I heard them moving against the hull. Above, their skeleton feet clattered. Below, I heard their machine ignite and tear into the outer airlock door.

  I hunched over the Sabre’s console. The Strigoi hadn’t been inside, and yet I worried.

  If they disabled anything, this won’t work.

  But if they didn’t…

  A flick of my armored fingers brought the console to life. I tapped at a furious pace, blazing through the Sabre’s ignition process. The hull shook. With their machine, they’d cut through the outer airlock. A few moments more, and they’d have been on me.

  The button blinked just once before I hammered my finger down:

  Ignite quantum engine?

  Yes.

  Soundless, the Sabre’s quantum engine awoke. In doing so, it birthed a field around the entire ship, a dividing sphere between me and the rest of reality.

  Nothing in the space between the ship and the field’s edge could survive.

  I seized the control stick and pulled it in a tight circle. The Sabre lifted a few meters off the ground and spun. I felt nothing, not when the ship rotated, not when the quantum field burned every last Strigoi off the hull and the bone-black floor.

  I slowed the spin and brought the Sabre down. The ship clattered to a hard landing, grinding to a stop in the cratered floor. Expecting to see clouds of Strigoi ash, I gazed out the cockpit window, but saw nothing. The quantum field had disintegrated the horrors.

  All twenty were gone.

  I sank into the cockpit chair.

  They’ll send an army after me now, I knew.

  Good. I don’t care.

  With a yawn, I glanced at the blue letters hovering inside my visor:

  Atmospheric pressure – normal

  Air quality – normal

  Temperature –9.7 Celsius

  Gravity – normal

  The Strigoi hadn’t compromised the Sabre.

  Which meant I could remove the Vezda suit.

  Piece by piece, I stripped the armor off. Plates of powered-down Vezda piled up beside me, clattering on the floor. The air inside the Sabre chilled me, but I relished it. I sat down, pulled off my boots, and collapsed on the cold, hard floor.

  “God, that feels good,” I said aloud.

  And then I remembered.

  The Sabre had food.

  I clambered to my feet and walked to the supply door at the cockpit’s rear. I pulled it open, flicked on a pallid light, and pried open a sealed crate lying on the floor.

  Protein wafers.

  A sealed jar of amino juice.

  A brick of desiccated carbohydrates. Cal used to call it space-bread.

  I sat there in the shadows and swallowed it all down. I’d heard stories of prisoners back on Earth receiving last meals before their executions. I wondered if they’d savored it half as much as I did.

  Satisfied, I propped myself up on the floor with my back against the wall. I was exhausted and delirious. And though I knew the worst was yet to come, I felt at peace.

  * * *

  Hours might’ve passed, or perhaps only minutes. When I opened my eyes and peeled my face off the floor, I had no idea how much time had slid by.

  All I knew was the voice echoing in the Sabre.

  Cal.

  “I know you’re in there,” I heard her say. “Joff? Joff? Answer me if you can.”

  With red eyes and hurting bones, I wandered back into the cockpit. I approached the Vezda suit in its ugly heap, and I noticed black burns I hadn’t seen before. The Strigoi energy weapons had come within millimeters of killing me.

  I supposed I should’ve been frightened.

  “I’m here,” I murmured to Cal.
Her voice had come across the Sabre’s systems. I knew she was listening.

  “You’re still alive.” She didn’t sound surprised.

  “Still alive,” I said. “Took a nap. Tired from walking, from fighting.”

  “That thing you did – using the Sabre like that. It was genius.”

  “Wait…” My brain caught up to the conversation. “How do you know about that? And how’d you know I was in the Sabre?”

  “You turned my voice off,” she said. “So I hacked your visor. I watched everything.”

  “You’re probably angry—”

  “No,” she said. “Not even a little. I understand. I can imagine what it’s like.”

  I sighed with relief and slumped in the cockpit chair. I still needed sleep. I knew then I’d only been unconscious for a few minutes. I worried the Strigoi might’ve drained me.

  No.

  Not drained. Just tired.

  “You’re calm.” I said to Cal. “Too calm. Aren’t you supposed to be angry? Don’t you have a thousand plans for my escape?”

  “No,” she said. “I know how this ends. I’ve accepted it. I wouldn’t be a very good friend if I spent our last moments chastising you.”

  “We’re more than friends,” I reminded her.

  “I know.”

  The quiet settled between us. Savoring it, I stared out the cockpit window, watching as smoke drifted up. The crater carved by the Sabre’s quantum field smoldered beneath the ship. Without the Vezda’s helmet, all I could see were grey fumes roiling.

  “The graveyard of ships…you saw it?” I asked.

  “Yes. Seems we’re only one of many they’ve decided to snuff.”

  “And the heart?”

  “That, too. Hated it. Made me sick.”

  “You know what I was thinking?” I said. “As I was walking down the tunnel and sneaking into all those rooms, I knew I wasn’t going to fight. I didn’t have it in me. I just…I wanted to know. Who made the Strigoi, and why? Something like them doesn’t just happen. Maybe there’s an alien civilization out there. Maybe they engineered the Strigoi to get rid of everyone else.”

  “If they did—” She shuddered.