Eaters of the Light

by J. Edward Neill

Doubters.

  I glimpsed Mina, who said something to her mother, but who then walked past me without saying a word. I wished I’d spoken with her after meeting Zephayus, but I’d been banished to the mountain. I hadn’t been able to speak to anyone.

  Through it all, the man remained at my side. Once the dome had nearly emptied and the vibration of departing hover-spheres shook the air, I faced him.

  “Not sure I like the idea of having a commander,” I said. “Who are you?”

  He peeled his hood back. He and I were the same height, his golden eyes a striking contrast to my deep, dark blues. Fresh-faced and smirking, he didn’t look anything like a soldier.

  And certainly not a commander.

  Nose-to-nose, eye-to-eye, we stared each other down.

  “You’re judging me.” He grinned. “You think I’m too young.”

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Strope. Actually – Castian Strope Dakash, Tenth of Dakash, Son of the Ninth. But I prefer Strope.”

  “It’s not that I think you’re too young.” I ignored his smiles. “It’s that I think everyone on this planet is too young.”

  He backed one step away from me, still grinning. To anyone else, he must’ve seemed quite the dashing young soldier.

  To me, he felt like opportunity.

  “Walk with me.” He waved me forward.

  Instinctively, I glanced back at Maliah’s dais. She stood on her marble slab, perched high above a group of white-clad worshippers. Despite their clamoring for her attention, she managed a glare in my direction.

  Exactly as I’d expected.

  I followed Strope from the dome. Instead of leading me to a hover-sphere, we took to the mountain paths. With lanterns and glow rods, hundreds of others had a head start up the steep, winding stairs. And so we walked behind them in the shadows, the snow catching our robes as we ascended.

  The bitter cold cut me, but I didn’t let Strope see it.

  “Are you the one they’ve sent to kill me?” I asked calmly.

  “Kill you?” he laughed. “Hardly.”

  “If not you, then who?” I raised a brow. “Zephayus – even he stood up for me. I’m surprised. I was sure he’d—”

  “Zephayus? That ancient thing?” Strope snorted. “No. He didn’t stand up for you. He recommended the High Council imprison you. ‘In the lowest cell of the darkest mountain,’ he said…or something like that. It didn’t much matter. The High Council overruled him. You should’ve seen the Calipha’s face.”

  I stopped climbing.

  Strope stopped beside me.

  In the falling snow, I watched the worshippers and their lights vanish high above.

  I hadn’t trusted Zephayus.

  But I allowed myself to hope.

  “Something’s the matter with your face,” Strope grinned.

  “I should’ve trusted my instincts.”

  “You’re a robot.” He shrugged. “Didn’t know you had instincts.”

  “I’m not a robot.” I shook my head. “And yes, they programmed me to have instincts. ‘Calculated intuition,’ they called it. And my intuition told me not to trust Zephayus.”

  Strope just couldn’t stop smirking.

  “I know you’re not a robot.” He started climbing again, and I followed. “I’m only making a joke. Truth is, you being an AI is the reason I asked for you. That, and you having a thousand years of experience turning the Vark to ashes.”

  I searched his face for deception.

  Either he was better than Zephayus at hiding his lies.

  Or he’s being honest.

  After a long, cold ascent, we reached a door in the mountainside. Strope slid a small device through a reader in the panel outside, and the steel slab hissed open.

  We’re high up in the mountain. I shivered.

  I’ve never been here.

  We entered, and the door thundered shut behind us. I dusted the snow from my shoulders and walked beside Strope down a narrow, empty hall. The air felt littler warmer than outside, but at least the wind had abated.

  “There’s an attack planned,” Strope said as he walked.

  “I know.”

  “Oh?” He chuffed. “And do you know where? And how? And why?”

  “I know you’re running out of time,” I answered. “I know the Calipha believes the Varkolak are closer than ever to finding Sufi. And I know your defensive cubes can protect your planet, but not your star. And what’s Hermes without Sufi, after all?”

  Strope slowed. For the first time, I saw something other than a grin on his face.

  “A graveyard.” He nodded. “Not that it matters. When the Vark figure out where we are, they won’t send String Reprogrammers. They’ll send the Coffin Engine. Nothing’ll matter then. We’ll be shadows and dust. Mostly just dust.”

  “And so you’re in a hurry,” I said.

  We stopped walking. The chrome-walled passage had reached a four-way intersection, in which we stood alone. Pallid lights washed over us, seemingly coming from nowhere. For as far as we’d walked, we’d yet to encounter another soul.

  It didn’t surprise me. The mountains hall felt like a passageway within a tomb.

  “If I let you join us,” he said, “will you swear to obey?”

  His question made me bristle.

  My intellect rebelled against the idea of obedience.

  I’ve ended more Strigoi than everyone on Hermes combined.

  And yet…

  “Do I get my ship?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “My Ring? My battle suit?”

  “Those, too. You’ll need them.”

  “Then I’ll obey,” I said. “Only because I know I’ve little choice.”

  He raised a dark eyebrow.

  And a fresh smirk crawled across his lips.

  Deeper, we marched. A thousand meters down a wide corridor, we came to a door. Six men swathed in white robes and encased in pale armor stood outside the circular chrome portal. Unlike Maliah’s personal cadre, none of Strope’s men wore masks.

  “Commander,” they greeted Strope. They were older than him, but gave their respects nonetheless.

  At least until they saw me.

  “Master Strope, forgive me,” said a grey-haired behemoth of a man. “What’s she doing here?”

  Strope looked at me.

  Oh, I thought. He wants me to answer.

  A test.

  “Your government wants to destroy the Vark before they destroy you.” I stared at the six soldiers.

  One snorted.

  Then another.

  I walked closer. They saw only the exterior me, the slender, pale girl with blue hair and a pretty face. They thought me a machine, perhaps an old-world AI whose instructions compelled me never to confront a living human.

  “You don’t think I can kill?” I said to the much larger men. “I wonder—or maybe I just can’t remember—how many Varkolak worlds I’ve turned to ash. How many times have I faced them in the flesh, how many legions of black bones and white eyes? I sometimes ask myself, ‘how many have I destroyed?’ There have been so many—I can’t remember.”

  They had glares for me, but no words.

  I pushed past them and entered the room beyond.

  If the control sphere far below Perseph had been a quiet, computerized tomb, Strope’s barracks within the mountain was a grand cathedral. From the door we entered, a wide, circular tunnel reached down into the mountain depths. And from the tunnel, hundreds of passageways were carved into the cold, grey stone.

  I saw rooms for sleeping, many abandoned for lack of soldiers.

  I glimpsed equipment chambers, barren but for empty weapons racks and crates of obsolete munitions.

  And I saw soldiers, most of them pilots, docked into machines in the wall. Their faces were masked, their eyes covered as they flew simulation battles against imagined Strigoi scythe-ships. I saw at least two-hundred men and women. But all were too engrossed in their sims to see me.
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  Their shouts echoed in the cavernous hall.

  At least they’re enthusiastic.

  “This is home,” offered Strope.

  “Home,” I repeated with a grimace.

  I’ve seen a thousand places like this.

  Barracks filled with eager men and women.

  Fresh faces, excited at the notion of flying into space and making war against aliens.

  Maybe I should’ve done this alone.

  “Shall I give you a tour?” Strope asked.

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “You’ll think me rude, but I’m not interested,” I said. “This place has nothing to do with what’s about to happen. I want to know about our mission. I want an introduction to the people who’ll be fighting at my side. And…more than anything, I’d like some breakfast.”

  “Well then…” he nodded. “Come with me.”

  In a white-walled mess room, alone but for ourselves, Strope and I sat and dined. If there was one thing I didn’t mind about life on Hermes, it was their diet. Lacking the climate for extensive farms, roaming livestock, and giant gardens, the world had mastered the art of minimalist nutrition:

  Spiced protein gruel.

  Beverages made of frozen fruit harvested from the valley.

  Amino cakes with the texture of clouds and the taste of air.

  Strope watched me devour my meal. The look on his face was as if I’d just chewed the cables off a Strigoi.

  “Didn’t think you’d much like our food,” he remarked.

  “For eight-hundred and sixteen of my thousand years, I’ve been floating in space,” I said between bites. “And I’ve occupied forty-nine bodies during that time.”

  He made a face somewhere between a smile and surprise.

  “Thing is,” I continued, “the scientists who made me never perfected the advancement of my taste buds. So while my bodies begin at twenty-three years developed, my sense of taste is that of an infant. Every time I die, my palate starts over. But I’m in luck. The protein wafers and interstellar gruel are ideal. The textures are simple, the flavors mild, and the nutritional value better than any food made for terrestrial life.”

  Strope’s eyes widened. I gave him secret credit for having already shown me more expressions than anyone else on Hermes.

  “Forty-nine bodies?” he asked.

  “I keep spares aboard the Sabre and my Ring. Would you like to see them?”

  “Who wouldn’t?” he said.

  Nearly everyone else in the universe, I thought.

  * * *

  I’d asked for no tour.

  Strope gave me one anyway.

  As his pilots, oblivious to my presence, waged pretend interstellar war within their sim machines, Strope led the way into the bowels of his garrison.

  He showed me Hermes’ advanced weapons stores. We looked over light rifles, self-destroying fission drones, and an array of String Reprogrammers, the latter of which were powerful enough to turn even the largest planets into infant stars. I was impressed, though not surprised. The fleets based in the Milky Way had been using such weapons for hundreds of years.

  Still deeper in the tunnel, he brought me to a vacant flight-sim machine. Cabled into the mountain rock, the grey machine resembled the cockpit of a Hermes’ war frigate, or so he told me. Looking at the mass of grey-painted tubes and worn equipment, I noticed a different resemblance altogether.

  Tubes. Metal. Hard. Cold.

  Like one of the Strigoi.

  “Everything else on this planet is white,” I remarked. “But these sim machines, they look almost like…well…you know.”

  Strope made a face. “We know. We keep them ugly so the Calipha won’t come down here. She doesn’t like machines. Anything that looks even remotely like a Vark is forbidden elsewhere in the mountain.”

  I wondered whether he’d ever actually seen a Strigoi up close.

  I didn’t ask.

  As we wandered the lowest part of the barracks, exploring hidden weapons caches and decommissioned flight machines, an alarm sounded in the cavernous halls above. I froze where I stood, but Strope smiled yet again.

  “Time for mess,” he said.

  “Again?” I asked.

  He clucked his tongue at me. “Well…you said you liked the food.”

  He faced the tunnel behind us and waved at me to follow. The alarm stopped, and the garrison’s clamor echoed off the stone.

  I couldn’t help myself.

  I peered once more into the cavern’s bottom, in which the shadows pooled atop mounds of machinery.

  “What’s the matter?” Strope asked as we walked.

  “Nothing,” I lied.

  Those machines look Strigoi.

  Because they are.

  They’re scavenged.

  I shuddered and followed Strope up and out of the darkness.

  * * *

  Back in the barracks’ heart, where the mountain hall reached vast heights and the stones beneath our feet were smoothed by centuries of soldiers’ footfalls, we arrived. The men and women who’d been piloting sims abandoned their machines by the hundred, pouring into the white-walled mess rooms.

  Many looked our way, eager to greet their commander.

  Almost all paled when they saw me walking beside him.

  “Is this how it’s to be?” I asked. “Me, the false human, unnerving your soldiers before we leave?”

  “No,” he answered.

  “No?”

  “No,” he repeated. “Now’s your chance to change everything.”

  Hope for Hermes

  In a pale room’s heart deep within the mountain, with white light washing the faces of the hundred men and women surrounding me, I sat beside Strope and faced the crowd.

  Strope had introduced me already.

  “Callista,” he’d called me, the first person on the planet to do so.

  And after naming me his co-commander in a room full of people who’d only ever heard rumors of my existence, he’d turned me over to their questions.

  “How many missions have you flown?” asked a teenaged pilot boy from the room’s far corner.

  “Depends on what qualifies as a mission.” I remained calm despite the glaring light – and glaring eyes. “I suppose the nearest answer is three-hundred fifty-seven. That’s how many Varkolak planets and installations in whose destruction I’ve participated.”

  If they were impressed, their eyes didn’t admit it.

  “Are you affected by the Vark draining?” asked someone behind me.

  Without turning, I answered, “No. I’m immune. I’ve been vaccinated.”

  Never mind that I’m the vaccine.

  “Are you a machine?” A young woman asked the question they all wanted answered.

  I knew they wanted to see the difference between me and themselves.

  “Not a machine,” I said. “I’m a nano-light intelligence housed in a small cortical plug. The plug is light-wired to my body’s brain, giving me full control over my arms, legs, and all the normal human motor abilities. I feel pain. I experience emotions. My sense of smell is like yours. My eyes see in the same spectrum as yours do. I’ve even self-limited my learning so as not to artificially inflate my intelligence. I have a mind much like yours, only driven by light instead of electrical impulse.”

  Most of them looked pleasantly surprised.

  Though several deepened their frowns.

  “Lady Callista,” said the youngest boy among them, “why’s your hair blue?”

  I almost smiled.

  “When the scientists on the planet of Sumer began designing my body, they insisted my hair and eyes match the color of my nano-body. Like you, they were afraid of my potential as an AI. They wanted me to be easily recognizable. I didn’t like it at first, but now…now I think I’ll never change it.”

  …because Joff liked it so much.

  “Is it so they could find you and kill you if you got too powerful?” he asked.

  Y
es, I almost said.

  “It’s…possible,” I admitted.

  The questions kept coming. I knew what Strope wanted. These were the pilots joining us on our mission, and he’d arranged for them to gather in this particular mess room. Strope wanted them to see me, and for me to see them. He wanted to study my reaction beneath the weight of their reverence.

  …and their disdain.

  They’d all heard of me.

  My arrival on Hermes had filled the screens of every datapad worldwide.

  Some hated me.

  Some distrusted me.

  But most of them, especially the young, were filled with a curiosity they’d never known. I was a living machine, and yet somehow not a Varkolak.

  I was new to them.

  I was hope.

  And then came a question from the oldest woman in the room. She looked nearly forty, and the burns on her face told me she’d only barely survived an encounter with a Strigoi death-beam.

  “Why shouldn’t your ship be ours?” She stood and glared. “They say it’s got tech a few hundred years ahead of ours. So why won’t you be a good girl and unlock it? Let someone who knows what they’re doing – someone who’s not a half-step from being a Vark – pilot your pretty ship into war.”

  I almost looked at Strope.

  But I knew he wasn’t going to intervene.

  I faced the woman warrior. Even at thirty meters, I saw her size, her strength, and her disgust.

  “None of the reasons I give will be enough to please those of you who don’t trust me,” I said to her and to the dozens who loved her for standing against me. “I’ll say only this: I am no Vark, nor anything similar. I am literally made of light. Your ancestors – the very first people who lived on Hermes – taught my makers how to build me. And they taught well, for here I am, a thousand years along, a destroyer of every Varkolak in my galaxy. No demon I’ve met has yet to survive me. And no shadow has gone unbroken. So I think I’ll keep my ship. And I think you’ll be happy I did.”

  My words did little to change her mind.

  But they did make her sit.

  And say nothing more.

  The questions ended, and I sat beside Strope in relative peace. I tuned out the remarks muttered at the room’s fringes, especially those whispered at the elder soldier woman’s table.