“Will you stay and talk awhile?” he asked.
“We’ve talked enough.” I closed the door halfway.
He caught the door with his palm and held it open.
“Callista,” he said, “promise me one thing?”
“What’s that?”
“Dream of me. Just a little. Okay?”
I opened my mouth to answer, but he pulled the door shut between us. And we stood there, eye-to-eye, watching each other through the glass as his consciousness faded.
Dream of you? I wanted to say.
I can only dream of another.
Once the hypo-sleep took him, and once the silence filled every crack of my existence, I faced the Sabre’s cockpit. Piled on the chair, the Gamma Suit lay in a heap. The vid-screens, cold and blank, watched me as I gazed out the window.
With the quantum engines active, I saw nothing. The stars had blurred to black. The other ships in our fleet moved in dark, invisible places. And then I recalled I wasn’t really moving at all. The quantum engines whispered to the universe, and the cosmos spun around me as though I were the center of everything.
Alone, I left the Sabre behind. I walked the empty hallways and reentered the Ring. The pods were as quiet as ever, the silence so thick my naked footsteps sounded like thunder beneath me. I even stopped to look at my pair of sleeping Callista bodies.
They floated in their tanks, as quiet as everything else.
Maybe I should’ve talked to Strope, I thought.
Maybe we could’ve stayed awake another few days.
Just to connect. Just to understand each other.
No.
No, we couldn’t have.
I reached the Ring’s hypo-chamber. Outside its door, I hovered in absolute stillness.
I supposed I could’ve ejected myself from my body and spent the entire trip as my tiny blue self.
Thinking.
Calculating.
Learning.
No.
The same as Strope had done, I stripped my clothes away. Normally, I’d have folded each garment and laid it out flat on the chrome table beside the chamber.
This time, I tossed the wad of black clothes onto the floor.
And with a shiver, stepped into the hypo-chamber.
The door closed atop me. I barely felt the first needle prick my skin, nor the second, nor the third. I sensed my human body slip into sweet numbness. The outer world went dark. The hypo-chamber’s soft whir fell away to nothing.
But my mind remained free and alert.
I was a tiny cluster of blue light again, floating in the small space in the back of a sleeping body’s skull.
Do I want to sleep?
Yes.
Do I want to dream?
I do.
And so I did.
* * *
In a room with metal walls and a frost-covered floor, I opened my eyes. Someone had just draped a towel over my shoulders. I clutched the scratchy thing close to my arms, needing it to stave off the chill.
I knew who’d given it to me.
I knew where I was.
“You’ve been hiding.” He plunked down on the floor and put his arm around me. “I thought I’d lost you.”
I looked Joff in his beautiful eyes. He was a man grown, far removed from the boy who’d watched the stars while standing in his father’s wheat fields.
But I knew he wasn’t real.
“I’m dreaming,” I said. “I know I’m dreaming because I triggered it to happen. I could’ve shut myself down, but I left this part of me awake.”
“So?” he said in his ever-blunt way. “Dreaming is good for the soul. It’ll remind you that you’re still alive. Especially when it’s—wait—how long will it be?”
“Thirty-one years.”
“Right.” He squeezed me. “Thirty-one. That’s a long time.”
I regarded myself. My hands, my feet, my face—everything felt frozen. I’d expected to dream myself as a tiny nano-girl.
But here I am.
Almost human.
“You remember this place?” he asked. “This little locker room?”
I nodded. “Yes. This is your ship—the original Sabre. I hid here after I stopped the Strigoi who were chasing you. You found me behind the wall. I was damaged. I was practically a ghost.”
“That’s right.” His smile looked so much more real than anything in my waking life. “And now you’re back. Only…instead of a little blue hologram girl, you’re you. You’ve got your body.”
I sank into his embrace. Even in my dream, he warmed me. I felt his heat become mine, his lips press on the top of my head.
“You know—” he began, “you could love again if you really wanted to. It’s just like your learning-inhibitors. You could turn them off and know everything there is to know. Or you could let a few nano-bits float away and forget me. You could do it…if you wanted.”
“I know,” I whispered.
“So why not? Why not do it?” He played with a lock of my hair.
It felt so good I wanted to kiss him.
“Who says I want to love?” I answered. “Why is love so important? I’ve lived hundreds of years without so much as tiny flutter inside me.”
His eyes twinkled in the dark.
“And yet here you are dreaming of me,” he said.
I hung my head in shame.
I closed my eyes.
And I dreamed the next thirty-one years with him.
* * *
We lived in fields of golden wheat, during warm seasons never-ending.
We awoke on a soft bed in a quiet room, into which the sunlight poured across us each and every dawn.
We had children. I didn’t know their names. It didn’t matter. No matter how many years passed us by, our younglings never aged, nor fell ill, nor wandered farther than my nightly calls could reach.
And we made love. Each dreamed-of night, we climbed atop one another and did things my makers never could’ve dreamed for me. I’d never known such furious passion to be possible.
But it was.
Thirty-one years became centuries in my mind. I allowed myself to forget who I was and why I’d gone to Hermes. I wasn’t a half-human any longer. I was Callista, wife to Joff, architect of the most peaceful life ever to be known.
It felt real.
The sun on my back. The breeze in my hair. Standing beside Joff at twilight.
I wanted it to last forever.
I didn’t care if I ever woke up.
And then one day, many years after I’d tucked myself away into hypo-sleep, I opened my dreaming eyes to a clouded dawn. Joff wasn’t beside me, and a frozen wind swept into our bedroom window, stinging as much as his sudden absence.
Where, my love? Where did you go?
Afraid, I wandered out into the tortured new day. The sun, so like Sufi, crawled behind a grey winter storm only moments before the first snowflakes tumbled down. I stood there in my gown, my body singing in pain from the cold, the wind, and the sudden loss of the world I’d built.
“Joff?” I called for him. “Where are you?”
I waded into the snow. It fell faster than possible, burying me to my knees. Having half-forgotten I was dreaming, I felt certain I’d die a brutal, frostbitten death.
And still I walked.
“Joff?”
I found him. He kneeled on a snow-dune higher than my head. White powder buried him to his neck, and I ran to him with silent screams unable to tear loose of my throat.
Shivering, blue, and dying, I sank beside him. His eyes were open. His skin was grey. His mouth hung open in terror of something I’d yet to see.
He was already dead.
No.
Please.
I followed what he’d been staring at before he died. And I saw them on the horizon. They came marching through the snow, half-hidden behind a deadly white curtain.
Black bones.
White eyes.
Machine hearts pumping nameless gre
y fluid.
Too soon, they found me. They raised their rifles, burned Joff away, and looked at me with ebon skulls smiling.
Only then did I remember why I couldn’t ever love again.
Only then could I awaken.
Grave B-7 Black
I heard Strope call my name, but I couldn’t answer.
I glimpsed the soft haze of the Ring’s light surrounding me. Strope’s voice, punctuated by the needles gliding in and out of my skin, felt far, far away.
“Thought I’d…thought I programmed…me to wake up…first,” I stammered.
He said something else. I couldn’t make out his words, but I saw his face in a halo of light. As ever, he wore a bright grin.
“You…smiling?” I slurred. “Why…smiling?”
I sensed him move closer. I lay shivering atop a chrome slab, and his shadow fell across me.
“The real you looks good without clothes,” he said. “Even better than your backup bodies.”
If I’d have been fully awake, I might’ve slapped him.
As it was, I lay there and let him slide a blanket atop me.
I traveled across the void to be ogled, I thought.
But the blanket felt so, so good.
Later, after I’d regained my senses and dressed in a sleek black flight-suit, I ate my first meal with Strope in the kitchen pod. If waking from hypo-sleep had been painful for him, I couldn’t see it on his face. He just sat there in his chair, admiring my appetite, while I downed bowls of protein gruel and pouches of amino juice.
He wanted to talk. But my mind was full of everything but words. My dream still felt real inside me. The life I’d lived while sleeping had been stripped away, leaving only darkness.
In silence, I stared at the console behind Strope.
“Not even going to say good morning?” he prodded. I’d only given him shrugs and grunts since awakening.
“I’m waiting,” I said.
“For?”
I tilted my bowl and let the gruel slide down my throat. “The Ring…it’s queuing images,” I said. “We should have a composite view of Grave B-7 Black within a few minutes.”
“We’re still a few billion kilometers away,” he countered. “The fleet’s probes…they’ll take two full cycles to travel to viewing distance and return. Sorry. Looks like you’re stuck talking to me for now.”
I shook my head.
“No probes. Won’t need them.”
“How not?”
“A scientist.” I sipped the last of my amino juice. “From my galaxy. He created a signal able to travel at quantum speed. We call it the Mapper. Before we left Hermes…I programmed ten to scout B-7 Black the moment we stopped. They’ll slow down long enough to capture views of the planet, and then they’ll come back. We used to do probes…seven-hundred years ago. But the Strigoi…they found ways of detecting them. The Mapper signal— the Strigoi won’t see it.”
“Right.” He looked humbled. “I forgot. Your ship, better than ours.”
“Not better,” I said. “Newer. We had seven planets fully dedicated to eradicating the Strigoi. You only have one. More planets mean more people. More people means—”
“…more scientists inventing weapons.” He nodded.
I rose from my seat. I felt fully resurrected, awakened by the purpose I’d forgotten during my dream. The blue light winking on the console told me the Mapper data had already returned. I swept past Strope and erected myself before the screen.
Another light winked – white and urgent. I ignored it.
The other Rings are trying to reach us.
They’ll have to wait.
Strope stood beside me, but I felt no less alone. It was just me and the dark image taking shape before my eyes.
“Is that it?” he whispered.
Yes, I thought, but said nothing.
In full-color spectrum, the image of Grave B-7 Black manifested. I ordered the pod’s lights to dim and the console image to spread beyond its simple little screen. The black sphere separated from the console and floated before my eyes.
I’d long wondered whether the Strigoi infestation of Andromeda would resemble that of the Milky Way.
And now I had my answer.
The first thing I noticed were the ravines gutting the planet, dozens of chasms carving their way thousands of kilometers into B-7 Black’s ruined surface. Down in the abyssal dark, millions of machines thrummed, working their way ever closer to the planet’s core.
Everywhere else, dark cities reigned. Towers, thrice as tall as anything built by humanity, speared into the lifeless, cloudless sky. Ghastly light peered from every window, radiating from the warrens circulating beneath each unholy metropolis.
Must be billions, I thought. Biggest Strigoi planet I’ve ever seen.
I flicked the image with my fingers, spinning down closer to the planet’s surface. Black rivers, flush with Strigoi effluence, swam through the deathly murk in long, straight lines. I zoomed in and saw barges, not unlike floating cemeteries, gliding through the sludge on their way to nowhere.
I felt sick. I stared for a long while, ignoring Strope’s commentary. Not even the Hermes fleet’s urgent signal could tear my attention away.
Know thy enemy, someone had once told me.
Respect them.
Fear them.
Once I had a good sense of Grave B-7 Black, I backed away.
“Assume native Hermes dialect,” I said to the console. “And estimate planetary conditions.”
“Wait, it can—?” Strope tried to interrupt.
The Ring told us everything:
“Average surface temperature – negative two-hundred twelve degrees Celsius.”
“Gravity at surface – 0.899. Removal of eleven-percent of planetary mass accounts for reduced gravity.”
“Atmospheric composition – uninhabitable. No oxygen present.”
“No stellar bodies within detectable radius.”
“No life forms detected.”
“Enough.” I cut her off. “Estimate Strigoi defenses.”
The Ring paused, and then answered:
“…more than thirteen-thousand defensive satellites.”
“…active anti-String Reprogrammer batteries…”
“…caches of death-beam energy detected…”
“…planetary draining extends to five-hundred fifteen kilometers from surface.”
Strope’s eyes widened.
“That’s…impressive. Our fleet wouldn’t have known most of that until we were much closer. We should tell the other ships—”
“This will be a hard fight,” I said.
“Maybe. Possibly. But tactically, it’s no different than—”
“Didn’t you hear?” I cut him off again. “The part about anti-S.R. batteries? It means we’ll have to fly a ship within a few dozen kilometers of the surface. We’ll have to launch at zero range.”
“And?”
“It’s just…unusual…” I trailed off.
“What’s unusual? They can’t shoot everything down. We’ll overwhelm them. They—”
I tuned him out.
And I retreated into my mind.
We just arrived here.
Twenty hours ago.
Grave B-7 is billions of kilometers away.
But they’re already prepared.
“Twenty hours…” I murmured. “It’s not enough time. They couldn’t know we’re here.”
“I’m contacting the fleet.” Strope reached for the console’s flashing white light.
I snared his arm by the wrist. By the look in his eyes, my strength surprised him.
“We have to go.” I squeezed him hard enough to make him wince.
“I’m Commander here.” His face darkened. “I’ll decide when—”
I released his arm.
I stared a hole right through him.
And I left him standing there.
With naked feet, I ran. I sprinted through the kitchen pod’s half-open do
or, and I tore through the rest of the Ring’s pods, pounding through the dim corridors as though every Strigoi in the universe were behind me. Strope shouted after me, but I never slowed.
I’d had a thought.
And it had conquered my mind.
The Strigoi planet – it’s too ready.
They know.
I reached the tunnel leading from the Ring down into the Sabre. I sprinted through the shadowed hall, leapt through the airlocks, and burst into the Sabre’s cockpit. The deep shadows and cold air greeted me like old friends.
But I’d no time to notice.
“Detach from Ring. Now,” I shouted at the Sabre’s console. “Override all safety-checks. At two-hundred meters, ignite engines.”
I leapt over the top of the cockpit chair. The Gamma Suit lay right where I’d piled it thirty-one years ago. As the Sabre shuddered to life, I clapped the Gamma’s pieces to my body – legs first, then chest, then left arm, and finally the right arm cannon. I’d never done it faster in my life.
No sooner did I drop the helmet over my neck than the suit hissed as it sealed me in.
“Callista?” Strope’s voice crackled inside the helmet. “Are you in the Sabre? I’ve connected to the fleet. They say you’re moving into attack position.”
Because I am.
“Listen, Commander.” I talked over him. “Something’s not right. B-7 Black has all defensive systems active. You know what that means?”
“Wait…they know we’re coming?” he guessed. “How? We’re still billions of—”
“Don’t talk. Just listen,” I said. “I’m breaking away from the fleet. I’m attacking now. You need to ignite your quantum engines and retreat. Tell the others to do the same. Don’t just tell them. Order them. I’m giving you total control of the Ring. Don’t worry – it’ll obey you. I auto-programmed your language into it before we hypo-slept.”
“Callista, I’ve done this before,” he argued. “No Vark planet’s ever detected us at this range. It’s impossible.”
Not impossible, I thought.
Not if they know we’re coming.
“Goodbye, Commander,” I said. “If I survive, I’ll explain everything. I’m sorry.”
I swallowed a deep breath.
I switched off Strope’s voice inside my headset.
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