A Light in the Dark

by A. K. DuBoff

  I jogged up next to him and crouched down to inspect it. There were no distinguishing features on the smooth, matte black finish. “Is there a whole boulder somehow packed in there?”

  Cautiously, Kaiden reached out to touch it. Though his fingers easily wrapped around the form, he couldn’t get any purchase on it. He tried with both hands. “Gah! This thing must weigh a ton. Or several, maybe.”

  We tried to lift it together, but it still didn’t budge.

  Kaiden shook his head and stood up. “I don’t think that’s going anywhere.”

  “This magic doesn’t make any sense.” Kaiden’s and Maris’ abilities had clear roots in the ancient magic of lore, but I couldn’t imagine where mine stemmed from. If our abilities truly were a manifestation of our hyperdimensional consciousness, then it scared me to think what had transpired to make we want this as a part of myself.

  “Strange or not, this is a powerful ability, Elle. Based on how you took out that rock, imagine what you could do to a bunch of those monster things that attacked us on the Valor world.”

  “That’s true.” Except, it was one thing to rip apart or crush a rock. I didn’t love the idea of doing that to a living creature, but that was my reality.

  Kaiden seemed to sense my discomfort. “But hey,” he continued, “just because you have these abilities doesn’t mean you need to use them. We already have a good team dynamic going with the slashy, punchy, magicy-ness. This can be a… last resort.”

  “Yeah, having a special bonus offense can’t be a bad thing,” I realized.

  “Rocks made for good target practice. You can stick to that as long as you want.”

  “I guess I’ll need to find another victim.” I evaluated the black sphere that used to be a boulder. “Too bad, since this one was perfect.”

  “Maybe the sphere itself can be a target?” Kaiden suggested.

  “Not sure what I’ll be able to do with that. I doubt I can condense it further. What else is there?”

  “Break it apart like you did with the boulder?”

  Breaking apart and crushing the same unfortunate piece of rock sounded like a tedious way to spend the afternoon, but I suppose I didn’t know what was possible until I tried. “All right, stand back.”

  We returned to where we had been standing when I’d compressed the sphere. I held out my hand while I concentrated on the light from my first attempt, committed to push back the dark that wanted to close in around my mind. Slowly, a white orb formed in the palm of my hand. I launched it toward the black sphere.

  The sphere was encased in white light. I focused on it, willing the form to expand into the boulder that once stood in its place. But, that creation was lost—crushed out of existence. I could feel it.

  However, the black sphere began to tremble on the ground. Kaiden and I together hadn’t been able to nudge it. The trembling intensified. My brow furrowed with exertion as I attempted to rend the sphere apart. Instead, it began to levitate.

  “Elle, that’s amazing!” Kaiden whispered behind me.

  “I don’t know how…” Excitement rippled through me as I thought about the power literally at my fingertips. This new ability combined with my enhanced physical strength and agility would enable me to do almost anything. If I ever came face-to-face with the aliens, they would be in trouble.

  I spent the next half-hour trying variations of the techniques—levitating, splitting, and compressing using various rocks around us. None of it felt natural to me, but by the end, my initial reservations had subsided; I had new powers, and I was ready to use them.

  The practicing was eventually interrupted by a call from Toran in the distance. “Elle! Kaiden! Come here.”

  “Coming!” Kaiden yelled back.

  I presently had the black sphere suspended in the air, trying to see how long I could hold it. So far, it’d been three minutes and twenty seconds. “Can he wait a few minutes? I’m on a roll,” I said. The sphere dipped a little as my concentration faltered.

  “You can try again later, Elle.”

  I glanced toward him. “But this time—” My attention lapsed as I turned away, and the sphere launched in the direction I was looking: right at Kaiden.

  He ducked just in time to miss the super-dense orb hurtling toward him. “Whoa!”

  The sphere struck the base of a crystal spire, letting out a piercing ringing as the crystal vibrated. I brought my hands up over my ears to deaden the sound, but it pulsed inside me. That trill… I’d heard it before. It was within the Darkness.

  Finally, the intense ringing faded, and I removed my hands from my ears. “Sorry! Are you okay?”

  Kaiden took a deep breath. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  I was horrified to see that the black sphere had been embedded ten centimeters into the hard ground. If it had hit Kaiden, he would have been killed instantly. “I didn’t mean to.”

  “Accidents happen.” Kaiden looked shaken.

  “Still, I shouldn’t have been playing with—”

  “It’s fine, Elle,” he insisted. “Let’s just get back to Toran.” He turned to leave.

  “Hey, did you… sense anything when that crystal vibrated?” I asked as I started to follow.

  He nodded after a few seconds. “Yeah, it’s weird. Some images popped into my mind, but I don’t know what to make of them.”

  Now that he mentioned it, there had been a faint visual component to my reaction to the sound. I’d thought it was a vision blackout, but as I reflected, I detected the signs of a starscape.

  We hurried back to the shuttle’s landing site. Toran and Maris were standing next to the crystal Toran had been observing.

  “What was that sound?” he asked as soon as he saw us.

  “I accidentally hit a crystal. It’s okay—”

  “I saw something,” Maris murmured. “Why would that make me see anything?”

  I had no idea, but the image kept solidifying in my mind. A memory.

  And the place… it was so familiar to me.

  Dread closed in at the edges my mind. My chest constricted, and my heart pounded in my chest. I could barely breathe through the panic. The memories flooded back to me—Darkness ripping through the fleet and disintegrating the Hegemony ships before my eyes against the bright backdrop of the spatial anomaly.

  That place… that was where we did the last reset, moments before we were about to die.

  My breath caught in my throat. “Stars! I remember.” I looked around at the horrified expressions of my friends.

  Tears filled Maris’ eyes. “I do, too. It all happened so fast.”

  Kaiden took an unsteady breath.

  “How is that possible? One vessel took out a fleet of Hegemony ships?” It didn’t seem real to me even though the memory was as strong as if I’d lived it moments before.

  “This explains why we reset,” Kaiden said. “What chance do we stand against an enemy where one of their ships can level dozens of ours in a matter of minutes?”

  I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to dismiss the concerns, but the truth was I believed the worries were legitimate. We didn’t stand a chance against an enemy that powerful. At least, not facing them head on.

  “Let’s talk to the commander,” I said. “If we’re going to beat these bad guys, we need to set a trap.”

  21

  “They’re going to… manufacture the ships?” Colren gave me a quizzical look from across the conference table in Central Command.

  “In all fairness, we don’t know for sure if they were being generated in real-time or if it was some kind of gate technology,” I admitted. “But the point is, if we wait for one of those ships to finish coming through the anomaly, we’re done for.”

  “But we do know where they’re going to be,” Kaiden emphasized. “And if things play out like they did last time, we have a limited window to get the upper hand.”

  “How do you know the location?” the commander quest
ioned.

  “Well, we don’t exactly,” Toran replied. “But I remember the method we used to determine the point. As soon as I’ve cleaned up and isolated the signal we recorded on Crystallis, we’ll be able to segment it and cross-reference it with the other worlds’ signals.”

  “If we need military aid, then I’ll need something more to bring to my superiors than a hunch,” Colren said.

  “It’s not a hunch, Commander. I remembered that I’d analyzed the signals emanating from each of the worlds consumed by the Darkness,” Toran explained. “They’re paired in a way to denote a set of coordinates. But it’s incredibly complex. We need a master key.” He tapped on the tabletop where the signal from Crystallis was displayed. “This is that key. The amplification from the crystals allowed us to pick up the full pattern without going directly to one where the signal is strongest—an infected world. The network is all… well, connected. Crystallis gave us a strong enough antenna to listen.”

  The commander considered the explanation. “Without getting bogged down in the technical details, I think I understand the concept well enough to support the case to the admiralty. Finish documenting where we need to go and I’ll make sure we have our fleet meet us there.”

  “I will,” Toran acknowledged.

  Colren rapped his fingers on the tabletop. “And the timing?”

  “Vague,” I admitted. “We had a discussion about that on the flight back from the planet, and we suspect the encounter happened maybe a week from now in the other timeline.” Using terminology about timelines bothered me since we hadn’t actually time-traveled, but it was the easiest way to characterize what we were experiencing. Resets were supposed to be straightforward—to change the outcome of a specific incident. But when that incident affected the fate of interstellar civilization, I suppose matters were bound to get complicated.

  “If a week is the target, then we’ll shoot for three days to give some breathing room.” Colren rose from the table.

  “Is there any way we can help with the preparations?” I asked, standing to face him.

  “Nothing at the moment, but stand by. You’ve given us a fighting chance, thank you.” He departed.

  “I need to get to it.” Toran pushed back from the table.

  Kaiden nodded. “I guess we should get in some practice while we wait.”

  It took Toran nearly seven hours to complete his isolation of the Darkness transmission signal. Kaiden, Maris, and I divided our time between combat practice in an empty storage room and offering feedback to Toran whenever it was requested of us. When Toran had finished segmenting the signal and used the pairings to determine the coordinates, we passed off the information to Colren. Then, the real waiting began.

  I expected us to make a jump soon thereafter, but a check-in with Colren revealed that we wouldn’t make our move until the rest of the fleet was ready to mobilize. Given the enemy threat we were expecting, the Hegemony’s leadership thought a unified front would be best.

  Three days passed while the interstellar preparations were made. Two worlds that had been identified before we sealed the Archive as future targets for the Darkness completed evacuations early so the assigned ships would be available for the alien engagement. As the time for action neared, we were told that a scouting party had been sent ahead, and they’d given the all-clear for the fleet to move in. All we could do was hope that nothing changed in the time between the report and when we dropped out of our jump.

  Shortly before the scheduled jump, we were summoned to Central Command to meet with Colren. We joined him around the conference table in our usual fashion. Unlike most meetings, however, he adjusted the glass walls facing the bridge to make them opaque.

  The action immediately put me on alert, and I exchanged worried glances with Kaiden as we took our seats.

  “Thank you for coming,” Colren began. “In half an hour’s time, we’ll jump to the coordinates where we expect the spatial anomaly to appear. We’ll be joined by eighty of the Hegemony’s warships. The rest of the fleet has been assigned to the most strategic worlds to provide whatever protection they can should this engagement not end well.”

  “As long as we prevent the anomaly from completely forming, there won’t be an engagement,” Kaiden replied.

  “Right. About that…” Colren folded his hands on the tabletop. “That’s why I called you here.”

  My heart dropped. The commander’s sober tone was one of reluctant resignation. I braced for the news.

  “After stating the case as clearly and in as many ways as I could, the admiralty drew their own conclusions. Whereas I insisted we needed to strike fast and hard, they’d like to attempt a peaceable resolution.”

  Kaiden laughed. “No! You can’t be serious.”

  Colren’s grim nod said it all. “I believe what you’ve told me. You’ve earned my trust. That’s why I’m telling you this now. I genuinely believe their ordered course of action is not in the Hegemony’s best interest, but I’m obligated to obey. After all, if a peaceable solution is viable, we could save countless lives. That’s too great a chance for me to ignore.”

  I shook my head with disbelief. Maybe the reset had somehow messed with their heads.

  “But when talking to the aliens doesn’t work?” Toran prompted.

  “I need you ready to perform a reset so we can get another chance and hopefully get things right,” the commander stated.

  “How?” Kaiden asked. “I only have a vague recollection of some sort of device.”

  Colren nodded. “The observation crystal—it’s near the bridge. If you performed a reset before, it would have been with that.”

  “Right, but even if we do…” I faded out. He knew full well that we’d face the same situation with the aliens that we were in now. There was no need to spell it out.

  “Which is why you need to figure out a way to remember whatever happens here,” he said. “It’s imperative we find a way to prevail and end this reset cycle. This is your task.”

  “No offense, but you’re just telling us now?” Kaiden shot back. “We’ve been sitting around twiddling our thumbs for three days.”

  “The order just came through—probably so I wouldn’t have time to submit a formal protest,” Colren revealed. “I hate to ask more of you, but as the sole civilians on this ship, you four are the only people not bound strictly to the admiralty’s orders.”

  I imagined even telling us his misgivings was a violation enough as it was, so I didn’t press the issue. “We’ll do our best to brainstorm a solution before the jump,” I said.

  He inclined his head. “Thank you. I hope that solution doesn’t become necessary, but we need to be prepared for all contingencies.”

  “We’ll get started right away,” Toran told him.

  Colren looked us each in the eyes in turn. “I’ll show you where to find the observation room and set up your access credentials so you’ll be ready. We’ll meet again after the jump.”

  After a short tour of the room near Central Command, my team adjourned to our lounge, processing the news that the prevailing plan was now to attempt contact with the aliens.

  “There’s, like, zero chance they’re going to respond in a friendly way, right?” Maris asked, breaking the silence as we gathered around the table.

  “Yeah, I can’t imagine any other outcome,” I agreed.

  “That’s so stupid. Why would they try to talk to them?” Kaiden shook his head and groaned.

  “They know we’re overpowered,” Toran replied. “The Darkness expanding through the crystals is faceless and vicious. Ships mean there might be intelligent life on board. If we can’t beat them with force, the next best hope is to appeal to reason.”

  “Do you think it’s the right call to talk to them, then?” I asked.

  “Oh, stars no!” He scoffed. “They’re going to get everyone killed.”

  “So, a reset is almost guaranteed to be necessary. How do we make
sure we don’t make these same mistakes again?” I looked at my friends’ faces around the table. They were scared and concerned. We should be.

  “Well, maybe going through this more than once will help us remember faster than we did last time,” Maris suggested.

  Kaiden shook his head. “This to too important to leave to chance.”

  It was. Somehow, the vital information had to be part of us—a powerful imprint that would still be at the forefront of our consciousness even after a reset.

  “We need intentional touchstones,” I said, a plan starting to form in my mind. “Focus on things we know we’ll see right away after the reset and tie them in our consciousness to the important information we need to remember.”

  Kaiden lit up. “You may be onto something with that. Like how we started to remember when we kissed.”

  “That’s touching, but how in the stars are we supposed to build memory associations for complex coordinates and information about fleet movements?” Maris asked.

  “We don’t need coordinates, only a prompt to seek out the lead to that information,” I replied. “And we need to know what hasn’t worked, but witnessing the destruction seems to help that come through just fine.”

  “What kind of alternative plan should we suggest?” Kaiden questioned.

  “That’s for our alternate selves to figure out,” Maris said.

  Toran didn’t look convinced. “That’s a difficult situation to put ourselves in, isn’t it?”

  I was about to take Toran’s side, but then I thought it through. “Maris does have a point. Our new selves will potentially have two sets of memories to pull from as they start to remember. I believe in myself and us. They’ll figure it out,” I said.

  “They won’t even have a chance if we can’t make the memories stick,” Kaiden stated. “How do you propose we go about making these ‘touchstones’?”

  “Hold clear, distinct memories in our minds that are tied to specific places,” I began. “We need to think through what actions we’ll likely take right after the reset—preferably with a strong emotional component, so we can tie the memories to those actions. We also need to decide what the vital information to convey is. It can’t be anything too complex, but it needs to get the point across.”