Shadow of Forever (Eaters of the Light Book 2)

by J. Edward Neill

  Yes. I know.

  I’m going to hit it.

  I saw the Strigoi dreadnaught floating far above. The giant ship moved slowly, lurching toward a massive hole in the wall. Cal wanted me to avoid the ship. She wanted me to live a few moments more.

  She didn’t know my plan.

  Faster, I flew toward the massive ship. On its sides, clusters of string reprogrammers hung in sickle-shaped claws. The ship’s exoskeleton writhed with black tubes, the oily things worming their way across its entire body.

  If I can grab one…

  I looked down and saw the spider. Its shape made it unwieldy in zero-g, and yet it came for me, ejecting streams of black smoke in its wake. I knew why it stopped firing. Any errant shots it fired would’ve hit the clusters of reprogrammers stuck to the ship above me.

  Dead stars…worth more than one little Joff.

  Cal squealed in my ear. I hurtled toward the dreadnaught, arms extended. I felt the pain coursing in my foot, my leg, and my entire body. I hoped only to live a few seconds more.

  An instant before I would’ve slammed into the dreadnaught, I tapped two switches inside the arm-cannon. One slowed me down to a less maddening speed. The other tweaked my direction ever so slightly.

  I soared alongside the dreadnaught.

  And I snared a snaking oil tube with both arms.

  Hugging the tube, my body spun around and impacted the ship’s other side. I felt the bones in my left leg buckle and pop. I lost consciousness for a half-second, then awoke. I was still holding on, still grasping the thick tube for dear life.

  Cal’s voice echoed in my head. She’d abandoned her calm, and wept for me.

  Not dead yet, I wanted to tell her. Watch this.

  I felt the spider impact the dreadnaught’s bottom.

  I heard its bony feet skittering on the ship’s surface. It came for me, no doubt to impale me.

  When it crawled into view beside me, I pressed the arm-cannon’s tip to the oil tube’s side and fired three shots. The tube broke in half. Oil spewed out in a great black blob. I fired two shots into the oil blob, igniting it just as it washed over the spider.

  Look at that, I thought.

  Didn’t think it would work.

  I watched with a broken smile as flaming oil rolled over the spider’s body, burying the screaming Strigoi in a floating fireball. Consumed in a burning orb, it died in a matter of seconds. I saw its bones melting and heard its skull crack. The soft tissues beneath smoldered away, leaving only its empty black shell.

  As the fiend expired, the last of the oil slid out of the tube. Some of it ignited. As the ship moved on, the oil spheres drifted away in the zero-g, burning like tiny stars.

  Stars, I thought.

  How ironic.

  Shallow Grave

  I’m dreaming.

  I must be.

  In a hole, at the bottom of a pit, I opened my eyes. I couldn’t remember where I’d fallen or what I’d intended to do. The world and everything in it looked unreal.

  I hadn’t died, and yet I was already a ghost.

  Worming Strigoi tubes made a bed for me to lie on. Blue light leaked into the gaps between black ligaments. A web of dark needles adhered to the walls, their bodies covered in dagger-like spines.

  Bleary, I let my head loll left and right. I was still locked inside the Vezda suit, but I couldn’t read the faint blue letters inside my helmet. Either they were blurred by the damage the suit had suffered or I’d gone half blind.

  “Cal?” My voice was fragile.

  When she didn’t answer, I assumed the worst. I imagined her inside the Ring as the Strigoi fell upon it. Every time I closed my eyes, I swore I heard her screaming.

  I tried to sit up. The blue light from the Strigoi heart penetrated the darkness. I wasn’t in zero-g anymore. I had to prop my body up using the arm-cannon.

  And my pain came alive.

  I hadn’t looked at my left foot before that moment. When the light caught it, I saw the blackened Vezda boot, the wrinkled alloy sheath around my lower leg, and the ashen frost glistening in every seam.

  I had no words to describe how much it hurt. Clenching my teeth, I let the tears stream in silence down my cheeks.

  And I blinked them back.

  Walk through it, I told myself. Remember what happened.

  Floated in the death-sphere’s core. Fought the spider. Burned it away.

  The others called out for me. Said I was them and they were me.

  Can’t be right. Makes no sense.

  Held on as the dreadnaught ship put its cargo into the pit. Let go of the ship. Fell into the tubes.

  The needles in the wall…string reprogrammers.

  I’m right where I wanted to be.

  I supposed my damaged memory didn’t matter. Knowing my name or where I’d come from weren’t important anymore. All I needed to do was find Callista. Without her, I might as well have died fighting the spider.

  “Cal?” I tried again. My voice sounded different than I remembered. “Did they kill you? Are you there?”

  I waited a long while. I heard no sounds in the pit. Beyond the needles and black ligaments, I glimpsed the monstrous Strigoi heart, but I couldn’t feel its thrum anymore. I felt only my own heart, beating so slow I wasn’t sure how I still lived.

  “You’re there.” Cal’s voice startled me. It sounded like the first thing I’d ever heard.

  “I think my foot’s melted,” I blurted.

  “I know,” she said. “I’m sorry. It hurts, I’m sure. Where are you? I can’t see much through your visor.”

  “In a hole. Right where I’m supposed to be.”

  “Don’t talk like that,” she scolded.

  “No. I mean it. I let myself hit the ship. I wanted it to drop me in here. I don’t think the Strigoi know where I went. I guess that’s strange. You’d think…with all their technology…they could detect my life-signs.”

  “Well that’s just it,” Cal fretted. “I’m not able to pick up your life signs either. Your suit’s damaged. That’s why…it’s the reason I stopped talking. I thought you were dead.”

  “But you came back,” I said.

  “Wouldn’t you? Just to be sure?”

  “Yes.”

  She went quiet for a moment. I used the silence to check my visor’s display. The blue letters were hazy. The crack I’d earned decades earlier beneath a Strigoi’s claws was wider than I remembered.

  The floating blue letters told me everything:

  Atmospheric pressure – 1.2 mean Earth pressure

  Air quality – Toxins present inside suit – composition unknown

  Temperature – negative 3.2 Celsius – suit temperature disrupted – temperature reading internal

  Negative Celsius. I fixated on the final reading. Inside and outside the suit.

  Well below freezing.

  Yet I don’t feel cold.

  Below the first three lines, a fourth group of blue letters hung in the display. They were corrupted by the cracked helmet, but I knew what they said:

  L1fe s!gns__ zEr0 – su1t un0ccu__pied

  The suit thinks it’s empty.

  Or I’m dead.

  I can’t tell her.

  “Still there?” I asked Cal.

  “Still here.”

  “I need you to do something for me,” I said.

  “Anything.”

  I clambered to my feet. My left leg buckled, but didn’t hurt nearly as much as before. I knew why. I didn’t want to, but I did.

  “Joff?”

  “I’m climbing. Give me a moment.”

  “Climbing?”

  “Up.”

  I shambled across the worming tubes and stopped at a wall. Oil wept from tiny holes, leaking into the hollows beneath me. I placed my armored left palm against the wall, and I felt the Strigoi heart’s thrum.

  Knew it.

  Its rhythm matched my own.

  I closed my fingers around a strand of black ligament. It was
sticky, but strong enough to bear my weight. Ligament by ligament, I climbed. It occurred to me that even though the Vezda’s helmet was cracked, I could see perfectly well in the shadows.

  “Joff?”

  “Almost there. It’s like a web in here.”

  “Any Strigoi?”

  “None.”

  Halfway up the lattice of black tissue, I reached one of the needles jutting from the wall. I climbed to the ligaments above it and straddled the needle’s body. I was sure several of the spikes on its side penetrated the Vezda suit, but I felt nothing.

  “Ok, I’m here.”

  “Where?” Cal’s voice cracked.

  “I’m sitting on one of their string reprogrammers. It’s bigger than the ones we used to kill their planet. A lot bigger.”

  “You’re going to break it?” she asked. “Save a few stars?”

  “No. You’re going to help me do something. Are you sitting at the Ring’s main console?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  The Strigoi S.R. was wet with oil. Dark grease coated all the tubes writhing around it. I had to remind myself it wasn’t just oil I was touching.

  It’s blood.

  “Hold on.” I used my armored fingers to swipe the oil away. “Ok. Here it is. No…wait. Now I’ve got it. Can you see what I’m looking at?”

  “A little. It’s so blurry. What’s that black thing? Is that writing?”

  I wiped away the rest of the oil from the curved screen on the S.R.’s side. Strigoi symbols hovered over it. They were ghostly things, moving in the frozen blue light. I had no idea what they meant.

  “What do they say?” I asked Cal.

  “I…I don’t know.”

  “You need to read them.” I said. “Take your time.”

  “Joff, I can’t do this. Are the Strigoi after you? Is there something you’re not telling me?”

  I couldn’t be angry with her. She’d believed me dead twice already.

  “You have to do this,” I told her. “I don’t know how much longer I’ve got.”

  The air went dead between us. A shadow passed overhead, blocking the Strigoi heart’s ghastly light. I heard their voices thunder above the pit, though I didn’t know what they said.

  “Cal? Are you listening?”

  I thought I’d lost her.

  “I’m working,” she said. “Don’t move. I can barely see the symbols. It’s getting darker in there.”

  I know.

  I dared not disturb her. The Strigoi shadows passed twice more. I expected my pain to drive me mad, but it lessened with every moment. I felt no cold. My breaths grew shallower. And always I felt the Strigoi heart in the walls, the beat lulling me toward something other than sleep.

  “Seven-thousand seven-hundred twelve by one-thousand fourteen,” said Cal.

  “What?” I murmured. I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right.

  “They’re not letters. They’re numbers,” she explained.

  “They number the stars? I don’t under…I don’t get it.”

  “I don’t know, Joff. I’m sorry.”

  I closed my eyes. I swore I felt the blood moving in my head. Like sludge, it coursed through my veins. I almost went out, but snapped myself awake at the last moment.

  “Coordinates,” I said. “Seven-thousand seven-hundred twelve by one-thousand fourteen. It’s a location. A target.”

  “How can you possibly know that?” She wept. I could tell it by the way her voice broke.

  “I don’t know it. I’m guessing.”

  “Joff—”

  “You have to listen.” I talked over her plea. “See the buttons on the screen? There’s nine of them. You have to tell me what they mean. And then, when you’re done with that, you have to help me find the coordinates for where we’re at right now. Not the death-sphere, not exactly. The dark planet, the gas giant they’re mining. We have to find it. Do you understand?”

  “Why?”

  “Because…” I felt myself slurring. “We’re going to reprogram this thing. The gas planet is made mostly of iron and methane. We’re going to make two S.R.’s hit it and change everything to hydrogen.”

  She fell into stunned silence.

  “That’s right,” I said. “We’re going to create a star.”

  Turning

  I knew what I’d see.

  But I looked anyway.

  Three pieces of the Vezda suit lay atop a bundle of black tubes at the pit’s bottom. I’d stripped them off while reprogramming the Strigoi S.R.’s. The empty glove, blackened by oil, sat between the forearm gauntlet and the plate for my upper left arm.

  If I’d have removed them when I first landed on the death-sphere, I’d have frozen solid.

  Or maybe not.

  “Did it work? Is there any way to tell?” Cal chirped in my ear. She sounded farther away than ever.

  “No way to tell,” I murmured. “Just wait and see.”

  “Your voice sounds different,” she said. “Are you hurt?”

  “No. Not hurt. Just tired.”

  I couldn’t bear to tell her the truth.

  I held my naked left hand up. In the sickly blue light, my skin looked almost black. I watched the tiny dark tendrils wriggle up my veins. I felt as if my flesh were worm-filled, as if tiny Strigoi maggots were chewing me up from the inside.

  It tickled. But it didn’t hurt.

  It occurred to me that whatever had invaded my body wasn’t organic. The Strigoi disease wasn’t made of some vicious, flesh-craving bacteria.

  Machines, I knew. Microscopic and metal. Everywhere in the air.

  The spider shot my boot. Must’ve slipped in then.

  My fingernails had turned black. The skin atop my knuckles was wasting away, revealing my finger bones. I made a fist, and a tiny dust cloud sloughed off my palm.

  Even worse, I smelled the air. The Strigoi atmosphere permeated my suit, and although it sickened me to think of, I salivated at the odor. I looked at the bundles of tubes atop which I stood. I wanted to cut them open and drink my fill. I was thirsty, so very thirsty.

  …for oil. And blood.

  It wasn’t exactly what I’d had in mind when I’d left my farm sixty years ago.

  A shadow passed over the pit, blocking out the light again. Although the Strigoi’s scans for life could no longer find me, it was only a matter of time before they dug me out of my hole.

  And it wouldn’t take long for them to discover what I’d done.

  “A distraction,” I said to Cal. My voice sounded mechanical. “We need a distraction.”

  “What will you do?”

  “Don’t ask,” I said. “Just watch.”

  I ascended into the web of ligaments again. I still wore the arm-cannon, but the black strands felt cold in the naked fingers of my left hand. Halfway to the top, I licked an oil droplet from my fingertip. My whole body shuddered. I understood why the Strigoi loved their oil.

  Cal talked as I climbed. She knew I wasn’t going to answer. Her words were for herself, a tonic for her grief.

  “…ships are filling the hole you made,” she rambled. “It’s impressive, really. It’s been what…an hour…and they’ve already patched it. The convoys between the dark planet and the sphere have slowed. I think they’re up to something.”

  Of course they are.

  I reached the top of the ligament web. Twenty meters overhead, a hole leading into the death-sphere’s hollow core lay open. The deathly blue light washed over me, and it seemed to my broken body that it felt warm.

  I wanted to hate it more than I did.

  I can’t.

  Balancing atop the ligament ropes, I teetered to the wall. A string reprogrammer jutted halfway out of the fleshy mass before me. It wasn’t one of the two whose destination and effect I’d altered. It was meant for another star, another world. The billions who’d die when it hit its target were beings I’d never know.

  I closed my fingers around one of its spines and pulled with all
my might.

  It wouldn’t come out.

  “You’ll have to blast it out,” said Cal. “Just don’t destroy it.”

  “Right,” I agreed. “We have to make them think this is the one we’re trying to use.”

  She didn’t reply. I heard a lone sob, and it made me cold.

  When I looked up through the hole in the pit’s top, I saw a Strigoi ship move into view. The giant black scythe blocked the light, burying me in shadow.

  Shit. They’re here.

  I blasted the wall around the S.R. three times. Each shot tore into the ghastly tissue, burning the black flesh away. I pulled the string reprogrammer again. The tendons holding it in place smoldered and popped, and I found myself cradling the huge S.R. in my arms.

  “Not as heavy as I thought,” I remarked.

  “Much heavier.”

  Two of the dagger-like spines on the S.R.’s flank gouged holes into my left bicep. It didn’t hurt. I expected blood to pour out, but instead I leaked a red-grey fluid. Thicker than blood, it oozed out of me, pooling in the joint between my bicep and forearm.

  God…

  I couldn’t hold the Strigoi S.R. much longer. I felt my bones quaking, the pain in my damaged left leg clawing its way through my nerves. One misstep, and I’d have tumbled back into the pit’s bottom.

  Just have to get it through the hole.

  And into zero-g.

  I crouched on the ligaments, loaded all my weight, and jumped. My momentum carried me through the hole and into the vast hollow beyond. I triggered the Vezda’s pressurized gas to slow me down, but I wasn’t fast enough. With the string reprogrammer in my arms, I crashed into the Strigoi ship’s bottom.

  I felt my bones buckle inside me. The S.R.’s needles impaled my left forearm. Dazed, I lay flat against the Strigoi ship’s bottom.

  Now. I was sure. Now is when they’ll kill me.

  I wondered how many bones I’d broken.

  I held myself in place by worming my fingers between the ship’s ebon ribs.

  The voices returned.

  I heard only two in place of three.

  The spider, I remembered with a smile. I killed him.

  “…too late for you, light-bringer.” The Strigoi voices rattled my skull. I understood their words better than ever.