Eaters of the Light

by J. Edward Neill

“I see.”

  “The question stands.” Her eyes were dark in the unlit room. “Reason one or reason two?”

  “Reason two,” I said.

  “How can I trust you?”

  “You know who I am,” I said. “You know what I do.”

  “I know you’re the Congressional Court’s darling,” she countered. “I’ve seen your face splashed all over my datapad. And I know what you really are. You’re an AI, one of two on the planet. If Hephast has his way, you’ll be exiled…or worse. The only reason you’re not already dead is that the people love you. They think you’re real. For now.”

  “I am real.” I sipped my soup again. I sensed Siraya’s hostility, but also her curiosity.

  “My grandfather said you were a thousand years old.” She studied my face. “He said you were made on Earth.”

  “It’s true.” I nodded.

  “He also said you were partly to blame for our family’s exile.”

  “Exile? You mean…Hephast forced you out here?”

  “No.” She stiffened. “Many years ago, your friend doomed my ancestors to imprisonment. He involved us in his affairs. Many years later, the sentence was revoked. Our family became heroes, for all that heroes are worth.”

  “My friend. You mean—”

  “Joff Armstrong,” she interrupted. “You remember him, don’t you?”

  My breath caught in my throat. Almost no one on Sumer believed Joff had ever existed. But this girl, this woman I’d never met, said his name as though she’d known him.

  “My time is short,” I said. “Can you help me? Or should I leave?”

  “Foolish question.” She wouldn’t stop staring.

  “I’ve the feeling you don’t like me.” I stared right back.

  She wouldn’t break.

  “If you know who my grandfather was, you know what he spent his life doing.” Her eyes went dark again. “And you know how Hephast repaid him—with shame and exile. Grandpa spent decades trying to help in the war against the Strigoi, but when he came back from the stars, he was lost. What was left of our family didn’t know him. And after Hephast forced him out here, he didn’t die of old age. He killed himself.”

  “Which means—”

  “Which means I’m going to help you.” She seemed to relish cutting me off. “Not because I want to be friends. But because of what Grandpa said. He knew. He always knew. The enemy isn’t beaten. The Strigoi are out there.”

  She rose from her couch and beckoned me to follow. I trailed her into the house’s darkest hallway, noting how she left all the lights off. Every lamp and glow-strip lived in darkness. It felt uncomfortable at first, but soon I realized if I’d ever had a place to call home, I’d probably live the same way.

  “Your house…not so different from my ship,” I said.

  “It’s funny.” Siraya’s expression remained cold. “Grandpa said the same before he died.”

  We climbed a short stair and entered a room in the house’s upper level. The pale sunlight bleeding through the glass walls pooled on the floor, glinting on a desk, a chair, and shelves stacked high with shapes I couldn’t quite make out.

  I walked closer to one shelf. Strange objects lay strewn across it. Some looked like parts of machines, and others like fossils.

  “This place…it was your grandfather’s office?”

  “Yes,” said Siraya.

  Old scents drifted in the still air. With one sniff, I knew the room had gone years without being disturbed. The rest of the house was sterile, almost too clean, but her grandfather’s stale office smelled of dust, oil, and bad memories.

  “That smell. I know it.”

  Siraya tapped the wall, reprogramming it to allow full transparency. The natural light, though dimmed by leaves and heavy clouds, allowed me to see more of the room.

  “He kept things in here.” Siraya made a face. “Things he found while traveling between the stars.”

  And then I saw it.

  A black skull, larger than any human’s, resting on one of her grandfather’s shelves.

  Four eye sockets. Smiling, dagger-like teeth. Beneath the dust, an eerie obsidian shine.

  “Where…” I shuddered. “Where did he get that?”

  “I hate it, too.” Siraya kept her distance. “He said he found it before he reached Hermes. On a dead planet in a different galaxy.”

  The Strigoi skull never stopped grinning, even in death.

  To them, death is life, I remembered.

  It stinks of oil.

  No, not oil. Blood.

  I looked closer at the other objects on his shelves. I glimpsed pieces of strange machines, hollow tubes, tiny gears, and nameless devices. Her grandfather had plucked the evil treasures from the places he’d gone.

  “He shouldn’t have brought these back,” I said.

  Siraya shook her head. “He said he sterilized them. He knew about the disease they carried. Just like he knew you were the one to cure it.”

  If Siraya and I had any common ground, it lived in our mutual disgust with the Strigoi artifacts. She knew them only as trinkets of her grandfather’s career. But in each piece, I saw something darker.

  That curved bone, a Strigoi finger.

  The strip of metal, part of the armor between their ribs.

  Those tubes, through which their black hearts pump their vile blood.

  “Did he say what he found on Hermes?” My voice was almost a whisper.

  “He told me Hermes is real,” she said. “The colony is about twelve-hundred years old. They live far different lives than we do. At least, that’s what he said.”

  I faced her. Sitting on the edge of her grandfather’s desk, she looked far more relaxed than before.

  I saw sadness in her eyes.

  “The Exodus,” I said. “Hermes must’ve started the colony after the Exodus from Earth. They must’ve known about the Strigoi earlier than the rest of us.”

  “Yes.” Siraya nodded. “He said that, too.”

  I had questions, so many questions. I wanted to know Hermes’ history, its culture, its people. I wanted to know what it looked like, what it felt like to stand beneath its sun.

  Or suns.

  But I asked no questions. Strong-willed though she was, Siraya knew little more than I did. I could tell it by the look on her face. She’d only known her grandfather after his return to Sumer, after most of his life had passed.

  She doesn’t care about Strigoi. About Hephast. About wars that’ll last forever.

  She wants her grandfather back.

  “I need the coordinates,” I told her. “May I have them?”

  She sighed. Some of her coldness vanished, and the sadness around her seemed to thicken.

  “It’s hard,” I said. “I know. I can’t bring him back. But I can honor him. And you’ll never have to see me again.”

  “You’re eager to leave.” She looked up at me.

  “There’s nothing for me on Sumer,” I said. “Not anymore.”

  “Take me with you?” Her question surprised me.

  “I can’t. You’ll have to trust me. You don’t want to go where I’m going.”

  In silence, she moved to the side of her grandfather’s desk. She produced a tiny black key from its hiding place within a mound of Strigoi gears, and she opened a panel on the desk’s side. A little metal door swung open. From the compartment within, she pulled a silver capsule.

  A data pill, I realized.

  Same as mine.

  Wordless, she placed it in my hand and left me standing in the office.

  “Thank you,” I called after her.

  I heard her bare feet on the glass stairs, but nothing more.

  I stuffed the data pill into one of my many pockets.

  And I left the house behind.

  Death # Forty-Eight

  Atop an eternal glass highway, my hover-cab hummed into the night.

  I’d tried to sleep on the cab’s soft polymer seats, but failed. For the last six hours, I
’d gazed out the windows and watched the world speed by.

  I barely recognized Sumer anymore.

  Where once mighty forests had stood guard over small glass cities, a vast metropolis now reigned. Oceans of silver and white towers pricked the night sky, their crowns glittering beneath the stars. Countless hover-cars zoomed past at two-hundred kilometers per hour, more numerous during the late hour than ever during the day.

  Hardly anyone on Sumer needed to work.

  And yet they all had places they needed to go.

  After a yawn, I murmured to the hover-cab.

  “How long until destination?”

  “Eighty-two minutes,” the car’s pleasant female voice replied.

  Eighty-two minutes.

  The last eighty-two I’ll spend on Sumer.

  I remembered the many times I’d called Sumer home:

  Centuries ago, I’d lived in Arcadia for twenty years. I’d become human, or at least I’d dressed up in my first human body.

  After Joff’s death, I returned to Sumer after a long hypo-sleep, and I’d descended to a planet all but conquered by the mind-altering Strigoi virus. I’d stopped the virus’s spread, and I’d enlightened the people about the evil they faced.

  Many years later, as war raged between the stars, I returned dozens of times to aid during the colonization of new worlds. Each time, I’d stood before a different government and appealed for faster, bolder colonization of the Milky Way.

  The war had stretched out into the centuries. And I had traveled Sumer’s cities, rallying pilots, soldiers, and engineers to battle the Strigoi.

  And now…

  The virus had died out.

  The old governments had faded.

  The drive to colonize new worlds had all but evaporated with the war’s apparent end.

  All the people I’d fought beside, all the brave, selfless soldiers who’d left their families to venture into the cold, dark reaches of space were dead.

  I thought long upon it.

  The nature of space travel, even with the newer, faster methods humanity had created, was to leave one’s life behind with each voyage. I couldn’t recall how many decades I’d spent in hypo-sleep. I no longer remembered how many times I’d woken only to realize everyone I’d known had died while I slept.

  Joff would’ve agreed.

  Our lives are brief and full of suffering, he would’ve said.

  Are we worth saving?

  As I looked upon the endless Sumerian metropolis, the answer eluded me. Most of the planet was automated, and most of its people consumed only with finding their next source of entertainment. Everyone existed in a permanent state of stimulation, connected to everything on Sumer except each other.

  Sumer had become Earth.

  All the lessons learned with Earth’s annihilation were forgotten.

  Why am I doing this? I asked myself as I gazed out the cab’s window.

  Because I have nothing else.

  Deep in the night, long after my thoughts melted into a dark and familiar place, my hover-cab slowed. Humming, the cab left the highway for the broad, white-lit streets of Venya.

  In Venya’s outskirts, the pale houses and glass sidewalks were vacant. The people had made their way to the city’s heart for yet another celebration. Only a few windows gleamed with light, and only a handful of lone souls wandered the streets.

  I’d chosen this night on purpose.

  I didn’t want anyone to recognize me.

  “Hover-cab, time for a detour.” I sat up in my chair. “We’re no longer going to Atriedes Street. Take me to the entrance of the government ship hangars.”

  “The hangars are off-limits to civilians,” the cab reminded me gently. “Please present your clearance.”

  “I don’t have clearance. Just take me as close as you can. I’ll walk the rest of the way.”

  “Please be advised—”

  “I know, I know,” I interrupted. “I’m not allowed in the hangars. You’d think after all these years, they’d have given me clearance. What’s the world come to when a girl can’t drive her own ship?”

  “I don’t understand.” The cab sounded confused. “Please repeat your instructions.”

  “The courtyards outside the hangar bays. Drop me there,” I said.

  The cab slid through Venya’s residential district, and like a child I gazed out the windows. I remembered smaller houses during my last visit, but anymore it seemed like everyone lived in towers. The pale, powered-glass spires stood in long rows on the sides of every street. Their tops glittered in the starlight, while the gardens surrounding each one were manicured to perfection.

  To live in such opulence – I couldn’t comprehend it.

  I arrived.

  On a lonely, unlit street, the cab crawled to a silent stop. I had no possessions, and so I stepped out into the night with nothing. My hair still felt damp from the day’s torrential rains. My black flight suit itched, and the cramps in my legs slowed my first steps onto the street.

  Without comment on my strange choice of destination, the cab sped away.

  There, far from the house-towers, alone beneath the stars, I left the road and ambled into the wilderness between Venya and the hangar bays lurking in the distance.

  Beneath fifty-meter tall trees, I walked.

  Across shallow puddles and roots erupting from the dirt, I leapt.

  The shadows felt heavy on my shoulders.

  Good.

  I closed my eyes and thought of the Sabre, in which I intended to soar away from Sumer forever. As I walked, I touched the silver capsule in my chest pocket. I wanted what Siraya had said to be true. If the way to Hermes lie hidden in the capsule, my entire future lay ahead. For the next thousand years, maybe ten-thousand, I’d fight the Strigoi.

  If not, if she’d lied or if her great-grandfather’s data was corrupted, I’d be lost. I’d be a soldier without a war.

  Might as well self-terminate. I smirked.

  A few thousand meters into the forest, I ducked low to the dirt.

  I swore I’d heard something in the night, a crack in the otherwise perfect silence. I couldn’t see the hangars yet; they stood a good two kilometers away, but the sound had come from their direction.

  I knew it in my gut.

  The sound wasn’t a ship taking off or a satellite being launched.

  For as much as Sumer had advanced, its hangars were still largely empty, and its interstellar fleet deployed on planets trillions of kilometers away.

  No.

  It’s gunfire.

  Can it be?

  I slunk between the trees, gliding closer to the hangars. As I moved, I heard noises breaking the night. Short, staccato, and accompanied by flares of yellow light, the sounds rattled me.

  Gunfire, I knew for certain.

  Why would they need guns?

  I arrived at the trees’ end. Beyond lay a wide, grassy field, and farther out lurked the dark shadows of several hundred hangars. Like giant domes, the hangars stood, their silver roofs shielding spacecraft against Sumer’s daily rainstorms. Many were empty, but others housed a variety of ships:

  Transport vessels.

  Near orbit ships.

  Warships.

  My ship.

  I gazed into the fields between me and the hangars. Workers had trimmed the sword-grass lower than I’d ever seen, meaning I was able to see everything. A few hundred meters away, waves of soldiers in full white armor sprinted beneath the glare of dozens of spotlights.

  Soldiers?

  Out here?

  At first, I feared they were coming for me.

  I looked harder.

  I didn’t see hundreds of soldiers.

  I saw thousands.

  Far from the white-clad warriors, glimmering beneath artificial blue lights, hundreds of man-shaped targets littered the field. Some had been sawed into pieces by gunfire. Others were pocked with holes.

  But most looked shiny and new, untouched by the soldiers’ fire.


  War games.

  They’re training.

  I knelt lower in the grass. A line of soldiers fired at the faraway targets, but few of their flechettes struck true. Their aim was terrible, though I couldn’t blame them. Sumer had no official army, and no one qualified to train the next generation of warriors. Anyone hungry for battle had taken to the stars long ago.

  They’d joined me in the war against the Strigoi.

  …and they’d never returned.

  In cold white armor, with black rifles crackling, thousands of soldiers moved in the night. The cheap polymer cutouts they fired on neither moved nor fired back...nor suffered much injury. It might’ve been laughable if not for the strangeness of the mock battle’s timing and the seriousness of the commanders barking orders at the soldiers.

  White armor.

  Dark rifles.

  Hephast’s men.

  If he believes the war is over, why train such a huge force?

  I might’ve understood had the soldiers carried energy weapons meant for fighting Strigoi. But the weapons they carried – rifles with flechettes and explosive grenades – had only one purpose:

  Kill other humans.

  At the field’s edge, I contemplated the meaning of it all:

  If they’re training using old world weapons…

  …Hephast means to militarize Sumer.

  It’s what humanity does, after all. They make war. They’ve gone this long without one, which is unusual.

  And if they start a war, whether against themselves or another planet, Sumer will start to look more like Earth.

  And then what’s the point?

  No one answered.

  No one ever answers.

  I made a choice. No matter the soldiers, no matter whether their guns were for show or Hephast had a darker purpose in mind, my mind was set.

  I’m leaving.

  The only trouble – an army stood between me and my ship.

  I tied back my hair and retreated into the forest. Flashes of yellow light painted the world beyond the trees, yet I remained a shadow. I crept hundreds of meters along the forest’s edge, distancing myself from the main of the army. When I reached the very last tree, I sprinted a short distance to a glass partition.

  Beyond the partition lay a road.

  And beyond the road, the hangars sat in silence.