“…you are us, we are you.”
“…make oil of your bones.”
“…become what you hate most.”
I shook my head to force the voices out. I looked left and right, but saw neither the squat, four-armed Strigoi nor its tall, monstrous brethren. The skeletal ship accelerated away from the pit and into the blue-lit hollow. I grasped its ribs with my fingers and held on.
The S.R. vibrated in my grasp.
My body quaked inside the Vezda suit.
The muscles in my left arm tore.
I couldn’t help but scream. Everything in my shoulder snapped: bones, nerves, and tissue. I held onto the S.R. as long as I could, but when the ship made a hard turn, it came free of me. The S.R. spiraled out into the vast hollow. I hoped the Strigoi would see it and believe it was the one I’d reprogrammed.
An instant later, my muscles gave out. I realized the Strigoi scythe was trying to shake me loose. I let go of it just before it changed direction again, and I tumbled into the hollow, arms and legs flailing.
“…finish the light-bringer,” I heard them say.
“…prepare the shadow.”
As I spiraled away into nothing, what was left of my heart sank. A Strigoi dreadnaught scudded toward the pit I’d abandoned, doubtless to pluck out the two string reprogrammers I’d altered. All our work had been for nothing.
“I’m sorry, Cal.” I closed my eyes.
“I see it,” she answered.
“We did our best,” I said. “There never really was much hope. Do you think the next volley will be for Sumer?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
She didn’t answer.
Instead, she talked to me about everything except the Strigoi. I hurtled through the hollow, my momentum unchecked, and listened as she told me about all the times she wanted to confess her love.
“When we first left Earth.”
“When you survived your first Strigoi on Ebes.”
“When you found what was left of me on the Sabre.”
I used the last of the Vezda’s pressurized gas to stabilize my flight through the hollow. I soared past the Strigoi heart and the blockade of ships guarding it. I felt its rhythm thump inside me, lulling me closer to a dark state of mind. I felt the vampiric machines flutter in my veins, and I knew my body was lost.
My mind will be next.
The S.R. I’d released tumbled ahead of me. It and I were destined to impact a faraway wall. I wondered which would kill me: the collision or the swift march of madness in my veins.
And then I remembered I was already dead.
“Cal?”
“Yes.”
“I’m going to hit the wall. I can’t slow down. With the suit in the shape it’s in…”
“I know.”
“Promise me you’ll leave here,” I said. “Promise you won’t commit suicide. The Ring won’t do enough damage if you ram the sphere. It won’t matter.”
“I know.”
I closed in on the wall. I wasn’t sure how fast I was going, though I imagined several thousand kilometers per hour. My mind slipped and out of consciousness. I felt no pain. I felt nothing.
The S.R. hit the wall moments before me. It tore a chasm into the fleshy barrier, vanishing into the black tunnels beyond. I held on to a tiny hope that its impact might ignite the reprogrammer’s dreadful power and turn the Strigoi to dust, but it was a foolish thought. It was lost, and I was about to be likewise.
I passed beneath a Strigoi dreadnaught. The giant thing was all bones, metal, and twisted black pipes. In its many claws were more S.R.’s. There were enough to kill a thousand stars.
I glimpsed the heart one final time.
It beat inside me.
“We are you. You are us.”
Cremation
The heart beating inside me was no longer my own.
I opened my eyes, and my first thought was how pleasant my new existence felt.
I’m not numb. I just can’t feel anything.
I see no colors. My eyes work better than ever.
I’m dead. But this isn’t the afterlife.
The absence of pain was strangest. All my life, indeed for the lives of every human who had ever lived, the subtle sensations of pleasure and pain were ever present. To feel nothing, none of the thousand small textures I’d experienced every day of my life, was liberating.
I wasn’t senseless, frozen, or delirious.
Freedom from humanity was far more exhilarating than I’d expected.
I tried to stand in the shadowed place into which I’d fallen. The faraway wall was punctured where I’d struck it. Bone rubble and fragmented marrow lay scattered and burned at my feet. My visor was shattered, my breastplate cracked, and my left arm dangled limp at my side.
Nothing hurt. None of it bothered me.
On one leg, I stood and inhaled a deep breath of the Strigoi atmosphere. I tasted rot, bone, and old, old death, and though I knew my stomach should’ve turned, it tasted sweet as rain.
I’d have removed the rest of the Vezda suit, but my left hand was useless and my right arm still locked in the arm-cannon. I wondered how long I’d last.
Will they let me exist like this? As one of them?
Or will they cook my bones into broth and reprocess me?
“You’re not dead,” I heard her voice in my ear. She came to me as if from a dream, clawing away the webs inside my head.
“Callista?”
“Who else?” she said. “You’re moving. How are you not dead?”
She didn’t sound sad anymore.
But she’s afraid. She’s trembling. I can tell.
“You saw my arm?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“And my broken leg?”
“Yes.”
“And the holes in my visor.”
“You’re breathing their air,” she said.
“I wouldn’t really call it breathing.”
I shambled to the hole I’d made in the wall. Peering out, I saw dozens of Strigoi ships closing in. Behind them, a dreadnaught blocked out most of the deathly blue light. They came for me, I knew. For what purpose, I couldn’t yet say.
“I’ve only been knocked out for a few seconds?” I asked.
“You should’ve been completely annihilated.” Her voice cracked.
I held up the arm-cannon and grinned. I wondered what my face looked like, if I’d grown two extra eyes, and if they burned with cold white lights.
“Dad would’ve been impressed.” I regarded what was left of the Vezda suit. “He’d have said, ‘they don’t make things like they used to.’”
She didn’t laugh.
“I don’t know what you’ve become.” Her breaths were sharp. “Your voice…it sounds more machine than man. But you’re still in there, I think. And if you are, there’s something else you need to do.”
“Not sure I have doing anything left in me,” I admitted.
“Be quiet and listen,” she said. “The S.R…you know…the one. I saw it the same as you did. It hit the wall above you. You need to look for it. You need to guard it.”
“Guard it?” I tried to stand upright, but every bone in my left leg had turned to powder. All I could do was limp.
“You know the reason why,” she said.
“They’ll kill me,” I replied.
“You’re already dead.” She sounded cold. “I know that now.”
I almost laughed at how right she was. But even then, even with so few of my human senses remaining, I loved her. I didn’t have cruelty in me. Not for her.
Not yet.
“It won’t matter.” I shambled back into the room. Machines lined the wall, pumping nameless fluids through glass cylinders. “I saw the ship. It went to the pit. It found the S.R.’s. They know.”
“Suppose they don’t,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“That big ship…the one with the claws. It’s just like the ones I’ve spied fl
oating outside the sphere,” she said. “They load up the reprogrammers all at once. They stuff them into a dark place. And then…after a while…they fire them into space.”
“You mean…there’s a chance?” I was still capable of feeling stupid.
“Find it, Joff. Find the S.R. You know what you have to do.”
Find it.
Pretend it’s important.
Distract them from what we’ve done.
I supposed I could’ve sat and let my fate come to me. It was tempting, so tempting. Despite Callista’s pleas, I had no real hope. It wasn’t a thing I was capable of feeling. The changes to my body were nearly complete, and the turning of my mind had begun.
“I don’t…I don’t know if…what does it matter?” I asked. “Sumer’s dead one way or another. Better that they all die. Better for humanity to end.”
“No,” she said. “It’s not. There’s no time to explain. And you don’t believe that. Now go.”
I did as she demanded. It wasn’t courage that drove me, nor vengeance. I craved direction, and she gave it to me. My mind was ready to be enslaved. The process was meant for the Strigoi to control me, but in that moment Callista was far more powerful.
I trudged out of the room through a door. I didn’t feel sick or weak when it pulled me through into the black tunnel on its other side. I shambled ahead into a corridor ten times my height. My shattered leg dragged beside me. I needed it no longer.
“Look to your left,” she instructed. “There. See it? Thank god your visor isn’t completely broken.”
A hole in the tunnel revealed where the S.R. had penetrated. I moved closer, scraping the wall with my arm-cannon. There, beyond a broken pipe and severed bundles of Strigoi electronics, the S.R. lay in a dead-ended tunnel in the dark. To reach it, I limped across pools of oil and crawled over mounds of rubble.
Look. I stood above the S.R.
Mostly intact.
Tough little things.
“Joff?”
“I know. I hear them. I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what?”
“I didn’t kiss you sooner.”
I heard a wall rupture behind me. The voices of dozens of Strigoi invaded my mind. I couldn’t pick apart all their threats, insults, and promises of pain. I understood only that they’d blasted a hole through the tunnel I’d just used. They were the elite, the deadliest of their kind.
And among them, I heard the rumble of the two greater Strigoi.
The squat one with four arms.
The tall one with bones bigger than me.
With all my weight on my right leg, I stood above the S.R. and waited. Light from the death-sphere’s core leaked through the holes they’d burned, only it wasn’t blue anymore, just cold and grey. I heard their feet clattering on the floors. I saw their shadows massing in the tunnel beyond me.
When I felt them flick their draining powers on, I smiled. They didn’t yet know I’d already died.
I raised my arm-cannon.
And I whispered to myself as if in prayer, wanting nothing more than to destroy just a few more Strigoi.
I fired before the first one rounded the corner. My golden shots hit its rifle and cracked its skull right between its eyes. Dazed, it fell, and the rest of them swarmed.
In the ruined hall I’d backed into, I had no way to escape. The Strigoi fired their rifles, unleashing black energy bursts between the narrow walls. One clipped my helmet, another froze and shattered most of my left arm, and still another burned off what remained of the Vezda’s breastplate.
I stood tall. I didn’t fire back right away. Half-frozen, half-burned, I waited for them to charge.
And as they crowded the darkness, I shot the pool of oil beneath them.
Seven of the horrors got caught in the smoking grey flames. Screaming, one fired his rifle, carving the monster beside him into two. Fire consumed the rest. I heard ribs separating and bones bursting. Smoke blossomed, filling the dead-ended hall. I pulled the arm-cannon trigger without stopping.
A hundred shots, I fired.
No. Two hundred.
How many I destroyed, I couldn’t have said. Fifteen, I boasted to myself. At least. I fired so many shots my eyes burned with the aftermath. Strigoi bones crumbled in the darkness, and their white eyes went black beneath the smoke. I heard their screams. All I could do was keep firing.
After slaying still more, I felt an energy bolt hit my arm-cannon. The weapon I’d trusted across the decades splintered, snapping my forearm. When I pulled the trigger a final time, the cannon’s tip ruptured.
I was sure I saw my fingers burning.
Before I could react, a gravity burst hit me and hurled me into the wall. The impact tore more of my armor away. I felt no pain, only the sense that most of my insides were destroyed.
“Ow,” I whispered to myself as I lay in a bed of oil and burning bones.
I saw their eyes through the smoke. The squat Strigoi and its monstrous brethren had come. The horrors had used a gravity weapon to extinguish the flames and hurl me back. The tall one ducked beneath the frozen ceiling, leveling its massive rifle at me.
A voice crackled in the darkness.
The sound wasn’t from the Strigoi.
It came from the Vezda’s helmet, which lay in fragments beside me. Somehow, its receiver still worked, which meant I heard Cal’s sobs. Whatever she said, whatever she tried to tell me, I no longer understood. The disease inside me had reached my brain, and her screams were just scrambled noise.
Burned, frosted, and battered, I raised my broken arm-cannon at the two Strigoi elites. I had no finger with which to pull the trigger, and so in my delirium I could only smile.
“Pew, pew,” I mocked. “You’re dead.”
Once more, Cal’s voice echoed in the dead-ended hall. She sounded broken-hearted and afraid, but somehow calm. I didn’t know the truth anymore. The idea of emotions had crumbled inside me. Things such as sadness and fear did not exist.
The massive Strigoi fired its death-beam at the Vezda’s helmet. Streams of black energy curled through the smoke. I saw the last of my armor freeze and melt beside me. Cal’s cries went silent. I knew I should’ve felt something for her. I wasn’t capable.
“Light-bringer.” The giant Strigoi reached me. It snared my arm-cannon in its skeletal fingers, crushing what was left of it. Its three white eyes burned a few centimeters from my face.
I tried to imagine what had ruined its fourth eye.
I knew the answer.
Sunlight.
Strings
Ages ago, Doctor Abid had explained to me how string reprogrammers worked.
“It changes the strings,” he’d said. “You know what strings are, right?”
“Smaller than atoms.” I’d answered. “The strings make up everything. Their shape and motion tell everything in the universe what to be.”
“Exactly. And this device, the S.R., it tells the strings how to move. It can instruct carbon to be oxygen. It can make complex molecules break into simpler ones, or vice versa. It can—”
“Wait…” I’d stopped him. “Can it…? I mean…if it were strong enough…could it…?
“Could it turn off a star?”
“Yes.”
For millions of years, the Strigoi had done so. They’d snuffed galaxies, wiped out billions of stars, and annihilated countless civilizations. Those they hadn’t killed, they’d reprocessed. In their quest to darken the universe, they’d become the most ruthless and efficient organisms ever to exist.
Only they weren’t alive.
Or dead.
Or anything I could understand.
I’d often wondered how many death-spheres they’d created.
One per galaxy?
Hundreds?
Thousands?
With Earth’s destruction and the eradication of every deep space colony, humanity would end. Had I still been human, I’d have spent the rest of my life pondering it.
What was our meaning
?
Did we ever have any value?
Will the universe go dark?
Will it last forever?
As it turned out, I didn’t have the time to consider the meaning of everything. I opened my eyes to a Strigoi horror with its boney fingers wrapped around my throat. Its skull was many times bigger than my own, and the black fluid pulsing through its organs was loud enough to hear through its ribs. I wanted to ask it questions, but I was a broken thing. My insides were pulped, my every bone cracked.
My eyes were all that worked.
The Strigoi giant squeezed my throat near to bursting, then released me. It and the brute behind it gazed into the corridor, in which hundreds of black bones smoldered. They said things to each other, and yet I heard nothing. All I could do was sit and stare and wait for them to end me.
I blinked, and felt my heart flutter.
I glanced to the Strigoi, who faced me in unison.
I wondered if Cal had ignited the Ring and rammed the death-sphere. If she had, the damage would’ve been vast, but not nearly enough to destroy the Strigoi creation. I wanted to be sad for her, but mustered only one thought:
She’s lucky. She was the last human ever to exist.
Gazing between the Strigoi, I resisted the final closing of my eyes. I knew if I let them fall, I’d never open them again. And it seemed to me I felt pain once more. The longer I stared, the more it burned.
When will they kill me?
What are they waiting for?
My pain wasn’t the human in me gasping for one last sensation.
It wasn’t confined to my eyes, my head, or my skin.
I felt it everywhere, sharp as a thousand knives dancing on my flesh.
The Strigoi felt it, too.
They dropped their weapons and opened their mouths in screams I couldn’t hear. Their knees buckled, their bones bending in horrifying angles. I couldn’t comprehend. I imagined our shared pain was a part of something every Strigoi endured. I daydreamed it would end, and I’d awaken in an oil vat a thousand years later.
No.
Wait.
What’s that?
Beyond the Strigoi, I glimpsed a light. It was grey at first, needling through the hole they’d punched into the tunnel beyond. The light is what injured me and dropped the horrors to the floor. Its pallid grey became white. Its whiteness sharpened, carving a path through the shadows.
Shadow of Forever (Eaters of the Light Book 2) Page 20
