The Dark Between the Stars

by Kevin J. Anderson

  He had come back to himself in the Iswander Industries medical center, swimming up through the murk of sedatives that the doctors gave him, only to find that the modular station was in the midst of a turbulent evacuation. Frantic people rushed through the corridors. A crewman ran by, shouting into the doorway, “Another ship leaves in two minutes. Better be gone before the shadow kills us all!”

  In the adjoining room, two doctors were helping an injured ekti worker who had suffered a mishap at one of the pumping stations. One of the doctors looked up at him. “Good, you’re awake—prepare to evacuate!” He quick-released the unnecessary restraints that had held Aelin down. “You’ll have to walk on your own. Hurry!”

  People scurried toward evacuation hatches and landing bays. The doctors guided the other patient into the corridor, and Aelin eased himself out of his infirmary bed. He felt weak, as if his muscles had forgotten how to function.

  But he didn’t want to evacuate—in fact, he had no intention of leaving the bloaters. He had a plan.

  Aelin made his way to a small garment closet, unfolded the door, and slipped inside, closing it behind him. Several minutes later the doctors returned, looking for him. “Where the hell did the green priest go?”

  “Everybody’s evacuating. Somebody must have taken him.” Grumbling, the doctors left.

  Aelin let out a long sigh. Evacuation alarms continued, but by now most of the people had departed from the station.

  He emerged from the closet and tore off his loose infirmary gown. He was a green priest; he needed no clothing other than his traditional loincloth. He worked his way through the well-lit corridors, creeping along, ready to hide if he heard someone coming. The station seemed empty.

  In the loading bay, Aelin found one of the inspection pods still sitting there. The small ship was too slow for anyone to use it for escape, but it suited him just fine. He did not wish to get away. Whatever the crisis might be, it did not interest him.

  With his mind so vast and open, it took him considerable effort to limit his thoughts to mundane matters, such as operating the controls of the pod. This was important. He felt the pull of that presence out there.

  As the inspection pod drifted away from the station, he saw the ominous shadow cloud looming above the extraction operations like a cosmic thunderstorm. Iswander ships rushed everywhere, scrambling for safety. With his newfound sensitivity, Aelin could sense the angry chaos of the Shana Rei, but the bloaters beckoned him.

  He flew out into the emptiness.

  ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTEEN

  OSIRA’H

  After the attack in the archives, Prince Reyn and his parents were kept in secure quarters as the King and Queen prepared to depart for Theroc. Osira’h would travel with them to the supposed safety of the worldforest planet, although she suspected the Shana Rei could reach wherever they liked. She could not forget the shadowy blankness in those possessed Ildirans who had tried to kill them in the Vault of Failures. . . .

  Gale’nh was also distraught about the incident. “I should have felt it,” he told her, hanging his head. “I watched the black nebula engulf the Kolpraxa—but this type of darkness strikes through the thism, as it did on our mother’s birthday. Yet I was unprepared. It can take hold of anyone, anywhere.”

  “But you resisted it,” she pointed out as they walked toward Rod’h’s quarters in the Prism Palace. “Maybe I can, too. Maybe all of the halfbreeds can.”

  Because she would be departing for Theroc in a day, she wanted to say goodbye to her siblings. As she and Gale’nh approached the closed door to Rod’h’s chamber, though, Osira’h felt a thrum of pain like a dagger jab. It came from Rod’h.

  Gale’nh felt it as well. He pushed forward and hurled open the chamber door, prepared to fight, ready to save his brother.

  Startled by the interruption, Rod’h yanked his hand away from the open flames in a bowl of contained fire. His eyes sparkled with a sheen of pain. Embarrassed, he snapped, “You shouldn’t have interrupted me. I nearly succeeded!” He stared at his burned hand, then held it close to his chest.

  Osira’h ran to him, reaching for his arm. When he resisted, she tugged harder, pulling his hand toward her so she could look at the blisters on his palm. “You held your hand in the fire!” The reflectorized bowl continued to shimmer as flames ate at the fuel crystals, building higher with intense white fire.

  Rod’h was defensive. “The faeros are out there, but they don’t care. I was using the fire to call them, to demand that they listen to me. I needed to feel it burn.”

  Osira’h suddenly understood and chided him. “The faeros listen because they wish to—not because you inflict pain on yourself.”

  Rod’h shook his head. “I know the story of Mage-Imperator Xiba’h. He went into the center of Mijistra, stood before his people, doused himself with fuel—then ignited his body, burned his flesh from his bones. And that was enough.” Rod’h clenched his fist, ignoring the pain. “It was enough!” He closed his eyes and turned away from the bowl of bright fire. “I need to do something! Why do I have these powers if not to use them? Why was I born?”

  Osira’h was guarded. “The faeros are capricious. I have communicated with them, in a fashion . . . but they also destroyed many of our worlds. They leveled Mijistra. Do not be so eager to rouse them.”

  “Unless there is no other way,” Gale’nh said.

  He stood fixated, staring at the bowl of fire. He extended his hand toward the bright white flames, hesitant at first and then steady. Reaching his fingers into the fire, he touched the heart of the fuel crystals.

  As soon as Gale’nh touched them, the flames went out.

  He lifted his hand away, flexed the fingers. “We may need more than fire this time.”

  Alone in her quarters, having packed for her trip to Theroc, Osira’h sat meditating. She had lit a small bowl of fuel crystals. The flames were tiny, flickering fingers.

  Even after the end of the Elemental War, she had been among the faeros, had felt their volatile thoughts, incomprehensible emotions of joy and energy, of rage and defeat. Osira’h knew the fiery elementals were afraid of her, and furious with her, but considered her different, an intriguing anomaly.

  Could she call them? Maybe they would listen—but only if they wanted to. She had to make them want to. She had to make them notice her.

  She reached into the bright flame and touched the fire. She flinched from the pain, yanked her fingers back. The white flames danced as if laughing at her.

  She forced her fingers into the fire again, reaching out with her mind. Far away, she felt the faeros, sensed them stir. At the back of her thoughts she held the awful echoing image of Mage-Imperator Xiba’h standing in his own pyre.

  Osira’h kept her hand in the fire for as long as she could endure the burn, then yanked it away. In a distant part of her mind she felt a tremor, a surge of bright heat. The faeros had noticed her.

  ONE HUNDRED AND NINETEEN

  LEE ISWANDER

  The horrific shadow cloud loomed over the extraction field, the harvesting equipment, the bloaters, and their deflated husks. Black hexagonal ships emerged and were joined by another squad of ominous vessels: Klikiss robot ships!

  Alone in the admin module, Lee Iswander transmitted over the main comm, “All ships head down into the star system and regroup.” He remembered those last hours on Sheol, when he had been unable to save his people at the lava-processing facility. Here, instead of being surrounded by magma plumes and thermal spikes, his operations were in the cold dark of space—and the shadow cloud was the coldest and darkest of all.

  Iswander clenched his jaw. This time, he would make certain his people got away. He had no room in his conscience for further blame. The Sheol disaster had been caused by bad luck, overconfidence, and poor planning. Here, though—how could he ever have planned for the Shana Rei and the Klikiss robots?

  Outside, Alec Pannebaker drove a bulky cargo ship filled with ekti cylinders. He accelerated at full
power, but the load was so massive he gained little speed. An obvious target, he seemed to be daring the Shana Rei to notice him. Pannebaker headed up and away from the bloaters, trying to outrun the shadow cloud. Over the comm, he let out a whoop of triumph, as if he did this sort of thing for fun.

  As the robot ships blasted at the evacuating ships, Iswander watched the bloaters, holding his breath. He had seen images of how Elisa “accidentally” ignited the ekti-filled bags in the first cluster—with disastrous consequences. Knowing how volatile the bloaters were, Iswander had taken tremendous precautions, providing shielding and insulation to dampen any ignition source in the ekti-extraction field. Still one stray spark could cause another chain-reaction explosion.

  Iswander narrowed his eyes. Maybe that’s what he needed.

  The extraction yard was not a military installation, and he could not fight an enemy that had trounced the CDF and the Solar Navy, a dark force so terrible that it could crush an entire planetoid. But with the explosive bloaters . . . Once his people got to a safe distance, maybe Iswander could fire a shot to ignite the remaining bloaters. It was the only defensive possibility he could think of. That might be sufficient to scatter the black robot attackers, repel the shadow cloud.

  Maybe, just maybe, his admin module was far enough away to survive the shock wave. But not likely . . .

  As he tensed, running the options through his mind, debating how much he was willing to risk and how valuable the sacrifice would be, Iswander saw a tiny inspection pod leave the admin module. And the pod was flying toward the bloaters, where it would surely be engulfed by the blast.

  By now all personnel should have been evacuated. “Damm it!” Fifteen hundred forty-three was more than enough . . . and he had already lost some people in this mad scramble of an evacuation. He was rapidly losing his chance to inflict damage on the shadow cloud and the robot ships, though. He had to decide.

  It was going to be a debacle either way.

  Just then, the shadow cloud clenched and began to change.

  ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY

  EXXOS

  With their attack gaining momentum, the robot ships careened into the chaotic evacuation activities. Exxos would demonstrate their abilities to destroy, prove the worth of the robots. Success here would ease the pain of the Shana Rei, impress the creatures of darkness, and the robots would benefit from it as well.

  Suddenly his ship lurched to a halt, as if a giant invisible hand had wrapped around it. His engines rattled and roared as he fought to charge into the fray; the hull groaned with the unexpected strain. The robots on the bridge struggled to maintain their balance on clusters of finger-legs.

  “What is happening?” he demanded, but none of the robots could give him a report. “Is this a weapon the humans are using?”

  The ship’s control systems winked out and plunged them into darkness. None of the robot attack vessels could move. Their weapons went dead. Exxos’s crimson optical sensors flared brighter.

  The blackness on his bridge turned into static, and Exxos felt himself falling as the universe dissolved around him. . . .

  He reappeared in the entropy bubble with the Shana Rei glaring down at him with their singular eyes. “Your attack has been aborted,” one of the inkblots said. “We are done in this place.”

  “We could have wrecked this outpost,” Exxos replied. “All of it, killed all the humans.”

  The pulsing inkblots hummed. “We no longer want this place destroyed.”

  Exxos hadn’t understood the choice of this target in the first place, and now he was even more confused. “Why?”

  “We comprehend additional details now,” the Shana Rei answered.

  The vagueness of their response angered Exxos. Retreat was foolish and unnecessary. “But we agreed to destroy all life. That is our plan. We cannot be selective. We are here: let us finish our mission.”

  “No—they do our work.” The shadows refused to explain further.

  “But we must fight,” Exxos insisted. “We have many enemies to destroy. Trust me to envision the long-term plan.”

  The shadows were not swayed, though. “We continue our methodical eradication of the hydrogues through transgates into their gas giants. We access and attack Ildirans through their thism.” The shadow cloud began to collapse out of space and into the dark passages behind the universe.

  “For now, we will withdraw from here. We have chosen a more significant target.” The Shana Rei paused as if conferring, then added, “We will go to Theroc and destroy the new heart of the worldforest. The verdani are powerful and cause us great pain. We have a way to starve them without destroying ourselves.”

  Though frustrated, Exxos decided it was expedient to approve. Theroc was indeed far more significant than a minor human industrial operation in an isolated system. “Yes, that is a preferable target,” he conceded. “We will help you fight the worldforest.”

  Through shifting reality around him, he could feel that the shadow cloud was once again on the move.

  ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-ONE

  AELIN

  Of all the humans at the ekti-processing station, only Aelin understood the sheer power residing in the bloater conglomeration. As he flew the pod toward them, he saw several nodules sparkle and felt a growing hunger in his mind. He wanted to embrace it all, wanted to drown in it.

  He paid very little attention to the shadow cloud, believing that even such darkness was irrelevant to him. As he approached the floating nodules, the gigantic hexagonal ships retracted into the uncertain boundaries of the nebula, which folded up around them. It was not his concern. The inspection pod continued toward the nearest bloater.

  After the shadow cloud collapsed and then vanished into empty space, he heard a buzz of distracting voices cross his comm system. The evacuated Iswander Industries ships hovered at a distance, far from the extraction equipment. Lee Iswander remained in the main admin module, still in contact with his ships. Some of the more daring vessels cautiously returned, while others continued down into the distant star system, waiting to receive the all-clear.

  Aelin, though, had no intention of going back. His pod descended toward one of the swollen spheres. A bloater sparked off in the distance, and others flickered in some kind of sympathetic rest response. He felt the residual ecstasy of the mental surge he had experienced. He longed to feel it again.

  He maneuvered the pod up to the bloater, ignoring the background babble of comm transmissions until a message blared out of the speakers, directed at him. “Who’s in that pod? What are you doing?” It was Lee Iswander’s voice.

  “This is Aelin, Mr. Iswander.” Beyond that, he could not explain what the industrialist was not equipped to understand. “I am among the bloaters. I need to . . . comprehend.”

  He muted the comm and applied gentle thrust to maneuver the pod’s main hatch directly against the membrane. The soft bloater skin shifted around the hull like a mouth forming a kiss, embedding the pod.

  Iswander overrode the comm block, and his voice broke through again. The transmission was rough and staticky. “Green priest, withdraw—back that pod away from the bloater.”

  Aelin had no intention of obeying. He felt giddy with the certainty that he must know what was inside these nodules.

  He disengaged the locking mechanisms, stepped in front of the pod’s hatch, and, without hesitating, opened it.

  He faced the exposed membrane. It exuded an intoxicating smell, like oily electricity. The air vibrated with a powerful summons. He stood there, his eyes half open, letting the bloater know he was there and who he was.

  They had already touched once before. With an ecstatic smile, Aelin plunged through the membrane and into the crackling soup of exotic protoplasm. The blood of the cosmos.

  In the admin module, Lee Iswander lost all contact with the pod.

  ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-TWO

  MAGE-IMPERATOR JORA’H

  After the King and Queen left Ildira, taking the others to safety�
�including Osira’h—Jora’h felt that he should relax. But the sense of brooding, dread, and danger did not diminish.

  Hoping to find some solution to his inner turmoil, he consulted four lens kithmen. Perhaps the large-eyed philosophers, known for their connection to the Lightsource, would have the answers he lacked. Focused on that higher plane of existence above even the thism network, members of the lens kith often had a soothing effect on those around them. Each wore a faceted crystal pendant, which they used to reflect flashes of sunlight into their eyes.

  They sat together under the open sky near a light fountain. “You are the Mage-Imperator,” said one. “You control the thism. You have the most direct path to the Lightsource.”

  Jora’h wanted to take comfort from the words, but they could not strengthen him. “And if the Mage-Imperator loses control of the thism, what then? Twice now the Shana Rei have insinuated themselves into our thoughts, coercing good Ildiran people to do terrible things. I did not sense it. I was unable to protect my people from them. And I do not know how to stop it from happening again.”

  The lens kithmen turned their faceted pendants toward him, splashing reflections across his robes. “Draw upon the Lightsource, Liege. Pull greater illumination into the thism. Shadows disappear when light shines upon them.”

  “Bright lights also cast sharp shadows,” he said.

  Finding no help in their answers, he rose to his feet, exhausted to the core. Jora’h had felt sick inside ever since the assassination attempts against Nira, and then against the human scholar, the Confederation Prince, and his own daughters in the Vault of Failures. He needed sleep. Perhaps next to Nira, touching her soft green skin, he could find a few hours of peace to recharge his own soulfire. . . .

  Knowing he was troubled, Nira did her best to support him. She always did. Even though she couldn’t feel the thism, she understood. Their private chambers were lit with colored light. Four spindly young worldtrees, each taller than Nira, stood around the room. Nira often communed with the worldtrees, tapping into the thoughts of the verdani mind before she went to sleep. But now she gave her full attention to Jora’h. “My shoulders may be strong enough to lift some of the weight from yours, my love.”