Eaters of the Light

by J. Edward Neill

  The message needs to be compelling, I knew.

  If they’re going to help us, it has to be the finest and most desperate plea ever written.

  I lost track of time.

  As I worked, I forgot the rest of the universe existed.

  When I finished, I backed away from the console, extended my fingers, and swiped the blue symbol hovering above the screen.

  ‘Release Mapper Signal?’ it said.

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  * * *

  “What you’re proposing is suicide,” Strope said to me.

  He, I, and Mina hunkered at a table in my Ring’s kitchen pod. No others were present, not for this meeting. The windows were shuttered against the stars, and we lingered in the shadows, deciding the fate of everything.

  “It’s the only way,” I said. “If we allow the Tombspire to be completed, and if we risk mutiny by bringing a crew half-doomed, we are all of us dead.”

  Mina cracked a slender grin at me. My plan was exactly what she’d always wanted. The girl feared nothing and no one.

  I was proud of her.

  Meanwhile, Strope agonized. I could see he hadn’t slept in the days since telling his crew of Hermes’ death. His eyes were soft and red, and his cheeks dark with a bristling beard.

  “The oldest of your crew will live out their lives aboard Ring One,” I explained again. “The youngest will sleep…and survive. I’ve no idea what’s happened on Sumer in the long years I’ve been away, but I can’t imagine they’ll want to hurt your crew. More likely, they’ll be fascinated. They’ll welcome your crew with open arms.”

  Strope looked hard at me.

  He knew I was right.

  He resisted nonetheless.

  “They’ll rebel,” he argued. “If I stand up and tell them ‘half of you are going to die before you ever leave this ship again,’ they’ll fight. They’ll kill us and each other.”

  “No,” I said.

  “No?”

  “We’re not going to do this softly,” I said. “This won’t be a matter of choice. I’ll wear the Gamma Suit, and if needed, we will remove them to Ring One by force. This is the end of everything. If your entire crew dies, it’s a worthy sacrifice.”

  “Easy for an immortal robot to say,” he shot back.

  “If you think this is easy, you’re wrong,” I said without emotion. “Everyone I’ve ever cared about…entire generations of people…all of them are dead. I know what it’s like.”

  His face burned a feverish scarlet shade. But just as I knew he would, he sank into his chair and let his anger pass.

  “You’re asking me to abandon them,” he said, calm again.

  “Then don’t,” I said. “Stay with them if that’s your choice. I’ll go alone if I must.”

  “No you won’t,” Mina interrupted. She’d hardly said a word for the last hour. “I’m going with you, which means he’s coming, too.”

  Strope remained silent.

  “Your most loyal pilot, the one who’ll fly the second Xiphos, who will it be?” I asked.

  “Babar,” said Mina. “I choose Babar. He’s the best of what’s left. He’s only a tech officer, but I’ve seen him train on flight-sims before. He’s good. He can do what we need.”

  “Good,” I said, and then looked at Strope. “We have our four. Mina and Babar for the warships. Me and you for the Sabre and the Ring. Four people, and four hypo-chambers.”

  “Suicide,” he murmured.

  “It was always suicide, love,” said Mina. “Will you do it?”

  “Yes.”

  111

  I woke long before the others.

  Naked and alone, my first sensation was a needle plunging into my forearm. The resurrection fluid slithered through me, thawing my veins and pumping life into muscles long frozen. I lay on the metal slab for what felt like many hours, amazed my body had survived its bottomless sleep.

  Look at me, I thought.

  More than half my existence, I’ve been asleep.

  I clutched a thin robe around my shoulders and slid off my metal bed. My pain was more remote than I expected, and so I shambled to the Sabre’s cockpit window. Drowning in painkillers and stimulants, my body felt half-underwater.

  But my eyes worked just fine.

  I blinked, and I saw where I’d come.

  I’d been many places in my existence. I’d seen stars collapse and planets break. I’d watched armies of skeletal Strigoi march across black deserts. I’d witnessed light erupt from the hearts of worlds ten-thousand years dead.

  But I’d never seen such a thing as Hades.

  Somewhere out in the deep black far from Andromeda and the Milky Way, a destroyed galaxy lay entombed in shadow. Unbroken by stars, unspoiled by light of any kind, the abyss stretched forever in all directions.

  It was nothing.

  But within the nothing, I sensed there was something.

  I’d long believed the chasms between galaxies were the darkest places in the universe, but Hades’ dark was somehow more profound. Gazing out the Sabre’s window, I felt as if a wall lay before me, a midnight sheet draped across my eyes. If not for the console’s soft blue glow behind me, I’d have thought myself adrift at the bottom of an endless ocean.

  So quiet.

  So black.

  Is this what you felt when you stood in your father’s fields beneath the night?

  Is it, Joff?

  A part of me wished he’d answer. But I’d been asleep for one-hundred eleven years, and no dreams had chased me. The Joff I’d created to keep me company had escaped to a realm I’d never again visit.

  I dropped a second robe over my shoulders and sat before the Sabre’s console. I flicked through a few screens and found the Ring’s systems fully functional. The quantum engines were quiet, and the Ring floating through the darkness at just a few hundred kilometers per minute.

  Everything was as I’d planned.

  I pinged Mina, Strope, and Babar’s hypo-chambers. They remained in deep sleep. They were safe, and wouldn’t wake for another seven days.

  I’d programmed it that way on purpose.

  Still clumsy, I dressed in a black flight suit, pulled at my tired eyes, and stood before the two glass cylinders in the Sabre’s cockpit.

  One was empty.

  The spare body within the other didn’t look right.

  I keyed a few tests into the cylinder’s panel, and I grimaced. Without true hypo-sleep, my backup body’s stasis had failed. The tissues connecting the body’s insides were loose. If I’d inhabited it, I’d have died within minutes.

  It’ll be the same for the other cylinders.

  I’ll have to flush them.

  A fine mess that’ll be.

  I returned to the main console and keyed in one final command:

  ‘Allocate all available ordinance to Sabre.’

  I listened for the sounds of the Ring delivering weapons into the Sabre’s underbelly.

  And for the hum of the light lances charging.

  Satisfied, I left the Sabre behind.

  The walk into the Ring felt longer than ever. My boots rang in the frigid metal halls joining the Ring’s pods to the Sabre and Xiphos ships. As I stepped into the first storage pod and the airlock slammed shut behind me, I closed my eyes and breathed.

  I hadn’t woken myself a week before the others for any real reason.

  I just wanted to be alone.

  Alone. Seven days.

  Joff used to say being alone brings clarity. That the only way to awaken one’s potential was to exist in the absence of others.

  When the thought made me smile, I knew I hadn’t lost my humanity.

  Yet.

  Pod by pod, I circled the Ring. Everything looked as it had before the Hermes crew had overtaken it. The floors were clean, and the windows wide open to Hades’ eternal dark. I wandered past Strope, still locked in his hypo-chamber, and I checked the glass cylinders, in which both my backup Callistas had gone stale.


  I’ll fix them later, I told myself.

  First, time to eat.

  The greatest joy of waking after hypo-sleep lay in my very first meal. I bent over a hot meal in the kitchen pod, downing three amino juice packets and two heated bowls of protein gruel. My body didn’t recognize the lack of taste. I might as well have been an infant, for all that a portion of each spoonful dribbled down my chin.

  As I ate, I contemplated.

  The Hermes crew…half are long dead by now.

  With luck, the other half reached Sumer, hopefully ruled by someone unlike Hephast.

  Braver than I thought, Strope’s crew.

  Glad I didn’t have to kill them.

  I slurped down another mouthful of protein. Already, my body felt recovered.

  It’s time.

  I entered the bedroom pod as if creeping into a room untouched for a thousand years. The Ring’s life-support systems had kept the dust away, and the room felt sterile. The smell of ozone and frigid air hit me the very moment I walked in.

  I loved the feeling.

  At the pod’s console, I stood. The soft blue radiance seemed like the universe’s only light, glittering on my fingertips as I awakened the Ring’s primary computer.

  I had questions only it could answer:

  Distance from nearest star? I keyed in.

  Unknown, the console showed.

  Distance to nearest mass of any kind?

  Unknown.

  Distance from last known location in Andromeda Galaxy?

  Approximately 2.1 million light-years.

  Distance to edge of Milky Way Galaxy?

  Approximately four-hundred thousand light-years.

  I backed away from the console. My calculations had been correct. Hades Galaxy lay far closer to the Milky Way than Andromeda. It explained why the Strigoi presence had been more powerful in the Milky Way, and why it had taken us nearly a thousand years to destroy them all.

  I glanced at the window, whose shutters were open.

  The endless, starless void smiled back at me.

  More questions:

  “Distance to final destination?” I asked the Ring.

  “One-hundred forty-seven light years,” she answered.

  Just a hop and a skip across the night.

  “Scan for—”

  “Anomaly detected,” she interrupted me.

  “Describe anomaly.”

  “Local gravitational forces are below any previously catalogued reading. No interaction between masses detected in a ten light-year radius.”

  No interaction between masses, I thought.

  No gravity.

  The Coffin Engines’ effect is permanent.

  I’d already known, of course. But to hear the Ring confirm the truth touched the most human part of me. Once activated, the Tombspire—the Qubra Sabir—would deliver Coffin Engines to every part of the Milky Way in which the Strigoi believed humanity existed.

  And it’ll be done. Within moments.

  Nothing will survive. And nothing will ever grow again.

  You were right, Joff.

  I’m sorry I ever asked you to stop.

  I gazed out the window for time unknown.

  And I saw what I feared most.

  Nothing.

  The Night is Darkest

  I pitied Strope his human body.

  Hunched in a kitchen pod chair, seventeen hours after waking from hypo-sleep, he still looked like a ghost.

  He’d vomited twice.

  Fainted.

  And slurred his way through sentences that had no meaning in any language.

  With a bowl of lukewarm gruel beneath his nose, he gazed up at me with glassy eyes. His senses were coming back to him, but his body was still angry at his century-long sleep.

  “You said…” He staggered through his words. “You said…they’d be here…by now.”

  “I said I hoped,” I answered.

  “Without them…we’re doomed,” he said.

  I shrugged. “Even with them, we might be.”

  He grappled with the thought and tried to finish another spoonful. The handsome, confident commander was no more. In his place sagged a weary soldier, the lines in his face betraying not physical age, but wisdom earned from suffering.

  For him, the pain is still raw.

  In his mind, he just lost his crew three days ago.

  His brother two weeks ago.

  And his daughter…

  “Where’s Mina?” he asked.

  “Sleeping. Which is where you should be.”

  “And Babar?”

  “Still waking up.”

  “Can we look…at the console again? Maybe they’ve arrived…while I’ve been sitting here…while I’ve been making a fool of myself.”

  I shook my head.

  I knew my calculations had been correct.

  One-hundred eleven years ago, I’d sent the Mapper signal toward Sumer and six other planets in the Milky Way.

  It was possible the signal hadn’t arrived.

  Or that they’d ignored it.

  Can’t blame them.

  It’s been nearly two-hundred years since I’d left them behind.

  “We’ll wait seven more days,” I said. “But if they don’t arrive, we’re attacking alone.”

  He looked at me as if to argue, but instead spooned another bite into his mouth.

  “Okay,” he grumbled.

  The old Strope hadn’t yet vanished.

  After finishing his meal, he let me lead him to the bedroom pod. The old-world wooden-framed bed had little meaning for me anymore, and so when he collapsed among the pillows and dropped off to sleep, I stood watching over him.

  And it only hurt a little to know I’d never sleep there again.

  * * *

  Seven days later, I sat alone in the observation pod.

  In the deep silence, with the darkness beyond the windows heavy upon me, I meditated.

  I am a machine, I told myself.

  I do not love. I cannot feel. Everything I am is only a part of my programming.

  I was made to protect Joff Armstrong from the Strigoi virus, to keep him company during his journey across the stars.

  But now…

  I am reborn.

  I am the destroyer.

  They expect fear. They expect failure.

  These things are beneath me.

  My eyelids snapped open. I glimpsed two tiny lights in the great window, the blue glow in my eyes gleaming against the starless black.

  Behind me, Mina entered the room.

  I heard her soft footsteps, and I knew it was her without looking. The chair beside me – Joff’s chair – was empty. I pushed it out with my foot, inviting her to sit.

  “They’re wondering where you are.” She accepted. Together, we sat and stared at the blackness beyond the window.

  “Are you ready?” I asked.

  “You know I am.”

  “And Babar?”

  “His family was dead before we left Hermes. He’s glad to have made it this far. He’s ready for anything.”

  “I won’t ask about Strope,” I said.

  Mina shook her head. Since saving my life, her guard had fallen. The Calipha’s cold, hard daughter had never been more human. I looked at her and saw a young woman, perhaps the bravest I’d ever known.

  “He and I were never lovers, you know,” she said. “I know you think we were. Our child…our children…it was arranged. My mother forced it. Everything on Hermes…arranged.”

  For all my wisdom, I hadn’t known.

  “I guess I don’t know much about love,” I admitted.

  “It’s okay.” She managed a smile. “Neither do I. Sometimes…I think Strope…he’s fallen for you. But then I see him when he’s alone, and he’s not the same. He’s like everyone else from Hermes. He can’t love because he knows.”

  He knows.

  He’s an orphan, just like the rest of us.

  And he’s going to die out here. Al
one.

  “Enough.” I rose. “It’s time. Let’s find out what’s out there.”

  We left the observation pod behind.

  As I walked out the door, I knew something else.

  I won’t ever see this place again.

  We gathered in the storage pod. Babar and Strope, already dressed in flight armor, spacesuits, and helmets, awaited us. There we stood, three Hermes soldiers clad in white, and me – clad in nothing but seamless matte black.

  I fastened my Gamma Suit armor, snapping every piece in place save for the helmet and arm cannon. When I finished, I stood a full ten centimeters taller than everyone else.

  “Almost feel bad wearing this,” I said to Mina. “It was you who used it best. If you hadn’t captured the Varkolak, we’d have died years ago.”

  “Died?” Strope showed a dry, cold smirk. “We’d be dead. You’d just keep swapping bodies.”

  “Maybe.” I shrugged.

  I hadn’t told anyone, but I’d left all four of my resurrection cylinders empty.

  I’d done the calculations.

  I won’t need another body.

  With the Gamma’s helmet and cannon tucked under my arm, I looked into the eyes of the three bravest humans in the universe.

  “This is when I’m supposed to give you a speech,” I said. “It’s what leaders would do.”

  Mina grinned.

  Babar, ever quiet, closed his eyes.

  Strope stared at me. Maybe Mina had been right. Maybe he’d fallen in love.

  “But there’s no speech I can give you,” I said. “It’s Plan B for us. The Milky Way fleets aren’t coming to help. The enemy has accelerated its plan to complete the Tombspire. They know we caught one of their warriors. There’s no time to go back and build an army.”

  “I hope you’re right.” Strope looked exhausted.

  “I am,” I said. “Surprise will be our ally, and fearlessness our weapon. The Vark will be ready for ten-thousand ships. Let’s see if they’re prepared for four.”