“Right.” I knew what she was thinking. “They went too far. The Strigoi murdered their makers. And now all they know how to do is multiply and kill.”
“I’ve been trying to crack their language,” she said. “While you were floating in your oil lake, I looked at the little black sphere you found in that monster’s skull. You remember it? The one from the dead planet?”
“Learn anything?”
“A little,” she said. “I wanted to understand, too. I’m no programmer, but I entered the symbols into the Ring’s computer. It’s like the Strigoi want their language to be understood…like they want civilizations to copy their technology. The little sphere was just serial numbers and instructions. If I had more, the Ring could probably read it.”
“Instructions?”
“Yes. It says things like ‘awaken,’ ‘guardian,’ and ‘kill.’ Or at least the Ring’s computer thinks that’s what it says.”
“Ah.” I huffed. “Wake up and kill Joff when he shows up.”
“Exactly,” she said. “It’s pointless, I suppose. It’s not as if they’re going to send me a history book. Once they – I mean once you’re finished there, I’m going to ram the Ring into the sphere. You and I…we’ll die together. It’s the way it should be.”
She was too calm.
I’d never heard her talk in such a way, and I felt sick hearing it.
My fault.
All mine.
I imagined her burning away as the Ring collided with the death-sphere. I dreamed of her eyes, cold and dead as she floated away into the emptiness of space. I thought of a thousand ways she might die. All of them were awful.
“I don’t want to think about it,” I said.
“I know,” she offered. “I’m sorry.”
I stood and ambled to the cockpit window. The smoke cleared, and the darkness beyond turned absolute. Having worn the Vezda suit my entire time on the sphere, I’d forgotten the depths of the Strigoi darkness. They loved no light, nor warmth. Except for the pallid glow from the death-sphere’s heart, they existed in utter blackness.
Always.
Anymore, I lived at exhaustion’s edge. A while longer, and I knew I’d fall into an abyss of bottomless sleep. The Strigoi would close in and bring me to an end. The dark they loved would last forever.
Unless…
Strange though it seemed, being tired had always sharpened my mind.
Ever since I was a little boy wandering in my family’s fields long after sunset, I’d been able to think when tired better than when fully rested.
It might’ve been a trick of my mind, but it had always been so.
“You can see through the Vezda’s helmet?” I asked.
“Already admitted that,” she said.
“And you can read their language?”
“Well…not much. Maybe a little. Why?”
A last wisp of smoke curled just outside the cockpit window. It looked ghostly in the Sabre’s light, and it died just as quickly as it climbed.
“Didn’t think the quantum field would burn up the floor,” I said mostly to myself. “Thought I’d spin out of control. Maybe crash.”
“Joff, you ok? Did they drain you?”
I walked back to the console and sat on the chair’s edge. I felt energized. I felt dangerous.
“I’m going to do something crazy,” I said. “And probably stupid. There’s nothing to lose. Are you with me?”
After a short silence, she answered.
“I’m in.”
Making a Mess
“There’s something I should probably tell you,” Callista said as I flashed my fingers across the console. “It doesn’t look good.”
“Tell me later. Busy now,” I grunted.
Locked once more inside the Vezda suit, I typed in my final commands. The screen flashed blue, and the Sabre’s last question hung in the balance.
Execute?
All the air went out of me. I’d lost my ship once already. Even knowing I didn’t have long to live, it hurt knowing I’d never see it again.
“Was never really mine anyway,” I mumbled.
“What? Can’t hear you.” Cal’s voice crackled in my ear.
I tapped the screen. The console went dark.
“Joff, I need you to—”
I didn’t hear the rest. I ran to the door in the Sabre’s belly, clicked a trigger inside my arm-cannon, and plunged to the cratered floor. I saw the damage the Strigoi machine had done to the airlock. They’d carved the Sabre’s hull away in a smooth ring, burning the dark alloy as if it’d been paper. If I hadn’t flicked the quantum engine on, they’d have boarded and slaughtered me.
I hit the ground and sprinted away from the ship. Fifty meters out, I spun and faced it again. I probably should’ve kept running, but I couldn’t help myself. Deep inside the Sabre, the quantum engine ignited. The ship floated up and out of the crater, hovering in the darkness like a great black scythe.
“I’ve never seen it like this,” I exhaled. “I’ve always been inside it.”
“Joff, please,” Cal begged. “I need to tell you something. There’s a ship. It just popped into orbit around the sphere. It’s not like the others.”
I heard her, but I couldn’t answer. I was already running through the graveyard of ships. In exactly three-hundred seconds, the command I’d entered into the Sabre would activate. If I didn’t make it to the next room, I knew how I’d end.
I’d never run so fast in my life.
I sprinted through empty hulls and bounded over broken wings. Twice, I leapt atop piles of crumbling machinery and propelled myself as high as the Vezda suit allowed. I was a ghost in the dark, moving toward the far door at an exhilarating pace.
I reached it with seconds to spare.
“Tell me if you see anything,” I said to Cal, and the door sucked me through.
In the grand tunnel beyond the graveyard, I knelt and waited for the nausea to pass. I wasn’t tired anymore. In my mind, I’d reached a point of no return.
Can’t sleep again.
My last meal…a protein wafer.
Cal’s voice echoed inside my helmet. She didn’t sound panicked. Whatever horror she’d wanted to tell me about, she’d momentarily forgotten.
“God…” she said. “Will you look at that.”
“Should I run?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Here, I’ll send you a feed. It’ll be delayed by a few seconds. I’ve stopped the Ring. They’re not chasing me.”
I flipped open the panel on the arm-cannon’s side. A tiny screen popped up, and an image almost too blurry to see winked into existence.
A smile blossomed on my lips.
Moments after I’d escaped the graveyard of ships, the Sabre’s quantum engine had powered up to maximum.
And the ship had impacted the graveyard ceiling at what amounted to a few hundred-million kilometers per second.
The impact blew out a wound in the death-sphere’s side. I couldn’t measure it, but the hole looked to be at least twenty Sabres in diameter. Shards of black bone and a hail of powder erupted into space. The sudden vacuum was more than the Strigoi technology was prepared to counter, and so every ship in the graveyard sailed toward space. Ancient spacecraft and monstrous freighters leapt from their beds and soared into the gaping void. Somewhere in the cloud of shattered hardware, the Sabre’s remnants fluttered, no more than a plume of dust.
I knelt on the floor. My eyes were closed. Expecting the entire sphere to buckle and vibrate, I braced myself.
“This will hurt,” I said.
But nothing happened.
After a full twenty seconds of not breathing, I clambered back to my feet. The image on the arm-cannon’s screen went black. I swore I felt the ground tremble beneath me, but I wasn’t sure.
“Joff?”
“Still here,” I said. “I thought it might tear the whole station apart. Guess not. Maybe the pressure wasn’t high enough.”
After a short silence,
Cal came back.
“I’m glad you’re alive,” she said. “That’s quite a mess you made.”
“Thanks.”
“But you’re in trouble now.”
“Trouble?”
“I tried to tell you.” She sounded worried. “There’s a Strigoi ship coming. It just changed direction. It's flying through the hole you made. It looks dangerous, Joff. It’s as big as ten of their usual ships. There must be twenty death-beam cannons on it…or whatever you call them.”
“That’s all?” I didn’t tell her I was smiling.
“Joff,” she said, “I think you should run.”
The Lords of Death
I hadn’t explained my plan to Cal.
I didn’t have time.
And I wasn’t about to remind her that it’d all end the same.
No matter what happened, I would die. If she’d ever doubted it, she had to know when the Sabre crashed and turned to black powder, all hope of escape had been lost. There was no leaving the Strigoi death sphere.
Ever.
She’s probably wondering why I’m still trying, I thought as I sprinted down the Strigoi tunnel. I sped past the black walls, my bones rattling every time my boots skimmed the shadowed floor.
For a moment, all was silent.
Until I heard them.
Far behind me, from the very door I’d used to escape the graveyard of ships, I heard them. Their cries weren’t angry or afraid. Their voices echoed in the vast emptiness the same as thunder in the night. The sounds caught me and shook me. I couldn’t comprehend that anything could speak words so powerful.
I must be a half kilo ahead, I thought.
But I can hear them.
There were three, or so I imagined. They spoke a language I didn’t know, yet felt somehow familiar. The last time I’d heard such voices, I’d been piloting the Sabre as a much younger man, screaming toward the stars I’d destroyed to kill an entire Strigoi planet.
And here I am.
Decades later. Trillions of kilometers removed.
Their voices sound the same.
I ran, leapt, and carved through the shadows. I knew the door I wanted to find, and yet they all looked the same. If I guessed wrong more than a few times, the horrors chasing me would catch up, and I’d never get another quiet moment with Cal.
She must’ve known.
She didn’t cry out or plead with me. She didn’t say a word. Most likely, she heard my heavy breaths and knew they were chasing me.
No distractions. Good Cal.
I landed hard after a long jump and rolled to a stop against the tunnel wall. The nearest door looked like the one I wanted. I climbed to my feet and let the door siphon me through, stumbling into the darkness on its other side.
No.
Wrong room.
Too small.
No windows looking at the heart.
I burst back into the tunnel. My stomach turned and my eyes blurred. I staggered and started running again.
The voices were closer.
They spoke as they pursued me. Their language, at first so foreign, began to make sense. I understood individual words, then half-sentences. It was as if their words were learning me, growing in my mind like poisonous seeds.
“…the light-bringer,” they cursed.
“…should have remained on his world.”
“…of all the species…”
“…is most enjoyable to conquer.”
I pushed myself to the Vezda’s limit. Rocketing through the Strigoi gloom, I passed dozens of doors. I glimpsed the one I needed and hurled myself through it. The horrid thing inhaled me, vomiting me out on the oily floor.
I stood. Lurking at their machines, more than a hundred Strigoi faced me all at once. They weren’t armed, but they were more than enough to tear me to pieces.
Beyond them, I saw the window.
And beyond the window, the monstrous heart thrummed in the death-sphere’s hollow core.
I spared one glance across the ocean of burning white eyes. The Strigoi skulls all smiled the same, and the rotten lumps beneath their ribs matched the rhythm of the death-sphere’s heart. They were dead, but alive.
I smiled right back at them.
I ran for the window. With a flurry of arm-cannon fire, I cleared a path through the skeletal mob. My cannon’s golden spheres cracked the window, but failed to break it. I didn’t slow down. I propelled myself shoulder first, shattering the crystalline glass.
Out I flew into the abyss. Pallid blue light from the distant heart swam across me. An armada of skeletal black ships was already gathering in the great emptiness, walling me off from any hope of attacking the death-sphere’s core. Behind me, the Strigoi massed and watched.
Cal’s voice crackled in my helmet.
“You’re not falling.”
“It’s like I thought.” I spun with my arm-cannon aimed back at the room I’d just invaded. “Localized gravity. Must’ve broke through a grav-bubble when I smashed the window.”
“Oh,” was all she said.
“Remember training back on Earth?” I said. “Inside the mountain? No gravity…just you, me, and a bunch of floating targets?”
“Yes.”
“Time to do it again.”
It had been more than sixty years since I’d used the Vezda suit in zero-g. I’d soared through a mountain’s heart, battling robots in an endless training simulation.
It’s like they knew I’d need it one day.
Inside the arm-cannon, I bounced my fingers against multiple triggers.
This one, I thought.
No.
This one.
I pulled two triggers at once. Pressurized gas hissed out of my armor. My spinning stopped, and I hovered in the dead space several hundred meters from the shattered window. Nearly motionless, I stared into the Strigoi control room.
My pursuers arrived.
I’d been right. There were three Strigoi, and they were unlike any I’d seen. The first was shorter than the others, but broader and with four skeletal arms instead of two. The second skittered on six bone legs, glaring out the broken window with eight white eyes.
The third resembled its ordinary brethren, but stood twice as tall. The light in one of its four sockets was dark, and it had no lower jaw. Half its ribcage was missing.
Their eyes blazed with malice.
I knew what they wanted.
The six-legged horror stepped behind the hole I’d made in the window. I aimed and squeezed off a dozen shots. As the golden energy hurtled toward its head, the creature sank to the floor and rotated its spidery legs.
Crap.
It’s got six guns.
None of my shots hit their mark. Before they could strike the spidery horror, the squat, four-armed fiend beside it raised a device in its seven-fingered hands. The twisted device let out a burst of dark radiance, and my shots spiraled off course, hitting walls, glass, and nothing.
“Joff?” Cal fretted.
“I know. It’s some kind of gravity shield.”
“Get out of there.”
“I will. If they kill me, remember what I said.”
“What did you say?”
“I love you.”
The spidery Strigoi unleashed six beams of dark energy. If I’d been any closer, I’d have been vaporized. In a heartbeat, I tapped two keys inside the arm-cannon and soared backwards and up.
Five death-beams missed me.
The sixth clipped my left foot.
The dark energy tore into the Vezda armor, freezing and burning my skin. I couldn’t see my foot, but I imagined my tissues fusing to the Vezda alloy, my bones bursting into black powder.
I tried not to scream.
“God…” I spun out of control. “Cal, it hurts.”
I supposed I was a dead man. If the Strigoi atmosphere penetrated the suit, I’d breathe it in and suffocate. If my foot was as damaged as I feared, I’d bleed out in a matter of minutes.
Cal whispered h
er next words. I couldn’t make sense of everything, but I knew her meaning. She’d seen everything through the visor.
She loved me.
She was saying goodbye.
Thundering over her voice was the laughter of the three Strigoi. They were thousands of meters away, and yet I heard them gloating.
“…your light will go out.”
“…all lights, in every corner…”
“…fetch him. Make him ashes.”
“…his bones for reprocessing.”
I wasn’t dead, not yet. I found my senses fast enough to slow my spin. I rotated to see the giant heart, its putrid tissues pumping Strigoi oil to every corner of the death-sphere. Then I faced the broken-windowed room and waited for them to come.
I swallowed my fear. The spider-legged Strigoi had already crawled through the window. It soared alone through the emptiness at me, bones popping, eyes colder than white snow. I fired a few shots, but knew as I pulled the trigger none of them would hit. The spider’s legs curled, and more black energy sizzled through the void.
Instead of retreating, I triggered the Vezda suit to propel me almost directly at the Strigoi beast. A black beam and I passed within a few meters, frosting my helmet’s visor and blackening my breastplate. I sprayed a volley of golden shots as I soared over the horror’s head. Two struck it in its eight-eyed skull. They sizzled and smoked, but failed to crack bone.
The moment we passed each other, the horror spun and faced me. I felt no pain any longer. If my foot had burned away and my lungs were filled with Strigoi air, I wouldn’t have known.
Or cared.
As I sailed away, the spider unleashed more black energy. The beams curled through the blue light, smoking and hissing. Inside the arm-cannon, I hammered a quick sequence. Gas erupted from both boots, propelling me at a sickening speed up and away from the spider-Strigoi’s shots.
Something went wrong.
The pressurized gas in my left boot misfired.
The pain in my leg climbed into my bones.
The spider’s death-beams missed me, but only because I spiraled out of control.
“Joff…” I heard Cal’s voice at the edge of my senses. “There’s a ship above you. You’re going to hit—”
Shadow of Forever (Eaters of the Light Book 2) Page 18
