Eaters of the Light

by J. Edward Neill

  You’re brave, Commander Strope.

  You have Joff’s courage.

  His strength.

  His skill.

  You won’t be remembered for this.

  But you should be.

  For everything…I’m sorry.

  Goodbye.

  I never said a word.

  He understood me anyway.

  Alone, I retreated to the Strigoi computer. A hundred tasks, I’d finished. A thousand more remained.

  Makes sense.

  A weapon like this…not like pulling the arm-cannon’s trigger.

  As I worked, I glanced just once over my shoulder. I couldn’t hear anything.

  But I knew what was coming.

  Ghost in the Machine

  I unsealed the last oil tube.

  The heart-machine thundered beyond the window. In the vacuum, I heard nothing. But I felt it in my bones.

  I’ve done all I can do from here.

  It’s time—

  Behind me, the Strigoi broke through. I saw their white eyes, their black skulls, and their dead hearts beating behind their ribs. They carried no weapons—they needed only their skeletal hands. Clawing their way through the collapsed bone-mortar, they swarmed through the hole and into the Coffin Engine’s command room.

  Strope never stopped firing.

  I don’t know why I turned to fight. I should’ve escaped, should’ve leapt out of my body and into the machine.

  But…

  I can’t just watch them tear him apart.

  I can’t.

  Perhaps I loved him after all. When the first dozen Strigoi crashed into the room and sprinted toward Strope, I loosed a flash of light from my arm-cannon. It spread in a wide swath, engulfing the skeletal vanguard in sunlight.

  If they’d had voices, they’d have screamed.

  Instead they turned to ash.

  Beyond the black cloud, they massed. Hundreds, I guessed at first, then thousands. A sea of white eyes blazed in the darkness, four in each skull, emotionless yet filled with horrifying purpose:

  Kill us.

  Make it hurt.

  Then kill every human in the Milky Way.

  Somehow, they found the frequency within the Gamma Suit. Their voices thundered into my helmet, screams and curses filled with malice.

  “Lightbringer,” they boomed. “Destroyer of the blessed dark.”

  “Deceiver.”

  “Nemesis.”

  “Angel of death.”

  I flicked a tiny switch inside my arm-cannon. All sounds, even Strope’s grunts as he fired into the darkness, collapsed. Surrounded by giant beating hearts, skeletal armies, and breaking bones, I existed in utter silence.

  I was alone.

  Another Strigoi phalanx clawed their way into the room. On skeleton legs, they rushed for Strope and his flashing rifle. His shots tore away their arms, cracked their metal-bone ribcages, and split their skulls, but it wasn’t enough.

  I shouted, the only sound in a dying world.

  And I cleansed the room with light once more.

  Seizing the momentary break, Strope retreated through a cloud of Strigoi ashes. He crouched at my side, aimed his rifle at the tunnel, and fired another volley of golden light orbs into the shadows.

  Eyes wide and full of fury, he looked up to me and said something.

  I heard nothing.

  But I read his lips.

  “What now?” he’d asked.

  Inside my armor, I sagged.

  “Goodbye.” I mouthed my answer.

  He let loose a silent scream, and I swore I almost heard the sound rattle the emptiness between us.

  I’m sorry, Strope.

  I didn’t want this.

  I touched his helmet with my left-hand fingers, inhaled my last human breath, and separated myself from my body. My hunger, pain, and weariness died. Involuntarily, I shivered as I ascended above my fallen self.

  To abandon so much suffering felt sublime.

  Leaving Strope to die was agony.

  Floating above it all, I took the shape of tiny blue Callista. I’d given up so much—my glowing body was only half its original size.

  I hovered above the Gamma Suit and looked down upon my human face.

  Empty.

  Already dead.

  I saw Strope. I floated above him, cracked a sad smile, and turned my back. He knew what was next. He didn’t see the thousand Strigoi clambering through the breach.

  He didn’t want to.

  As they killed him, and as they tore my human body to pieces, I stretched myself into a sharp blue line. The twisted Strigoi computer would be no obstacle. As a unified Callista, I couldn’t ignite the Coffin Engine.

  But inside their system, divided into many parts…

  It’ll be easy.

  I speared myself into a gap between the computer’s bones. The sentimental part of me wanted to witness Strope’s last moments, but I had no time. Inside the Strigoi hardware, I pried out the first sliver of dark data and translated it:

  Qabra Sabir accelerator online

  Intergalactic terminus located

  Destination—Sumer

  I understood.

  The Tombspire is almost ready to awaken.

  They’re going after Sumer first.

  Down I went, deep into the Strigoi hardware. I had no heart any longer, but I felt something throb inside me, the fear of failure pounding through my nano-cells. I descended into black places, webs of tubing and bone-metal labyrinths. I left pieces of myself behind—glowing blue fragments to stop any changes the Strigoi tried to make.

  Can’t let them…undo me.

  As I sank lower and lower, I scraped data from inside the black machine. I hadn’t been able to ignite the Coffin Engine from the command room for a simple reason—the Strigoi had split the controls into four different chambers.

  So that no single entity could activate the Coffin.

  They hadn’t counted on little blue me.

  At a junction deep inside, I committed one final act of violence against myself. In the space between seconds, I split myself into three equal parts. Each was the same, a few thousand nano-particles of shapeless Callista.

  My mind became three.

  It hurt in a way no human could’ve imagined.

  The Callista I’d been, the woman I’d tried to make of myself—she shattered into glass dust.

  And became nothing more than a purpose.

  The strongest part of me fled toward the darkest parts of the Strigoi machine. I felt them chasing me, black viruses haunting me through every corridor. They’d understood at last. They knew what I meant to do.

  But they weren’t fast enough to stop me.

  The farther I flew, the harder the Coffin Engine’s heart thumped. I felt it in the oil tubes writhing beside me, in the bones shivering beneath the heart’s thunderous power. At first, in my weakened state, I feared the terrible sensation.

  No.

  It’s beating faster because it’s building power.

  …for what it’s about to do.

  Two of my three parts arrived at their destinations. In alcoves small and hidden, they slipped into Strigoi computers, disrupted the Coffin Engine’s code, and possessed the enemy systems. They became ghosts, lingering in places they’d never leave, tormenting the Strigoi who thought they’d had control.

  The last part of me entered a chamber far below everything.

  A hollow black sphere opened up, and I floated out of a writhing bundle of tubes. My vision was weak, my senses numb, and yet I saw what awaited me.

  A Strigoi…

  …unlike any I’d ever seen.

  The skeletal hulk, a twenty-armed, thirty-eyed horror, sat alone in the sphere’s bottom, half-swallowed in sickly grey oil. Its fingers played across switches as though it were making music from some evil instrument. The lights in its eyes moved independent of one another, glaring down at the circular computer upon which it worked.

  Before that mome
nt, I’d never known the Strigoi to cling to any type of hierarchy, and yet I knew this creature for what it was:

  A master.

  An overlord.

  A queen.

  I sensed the horror’s agitation. It moved its bony hands at rapid speed across the black-bone machines, waging war against the work my other parts had already done.

  It had no mouth.

  I imagined what it would’ve said had it been able to speak.

  It would’ve been afraid.

  It would’ve begged me to stop.

  Like all creatures, even the Strigoi, it felt it had a right to survive. To exist. To spread.

  But the Strigoi had gone too far.

  Not satisfied with Hades, in which they’d achieved a twisted utopia, they’d desired the darkness of everything.

  No.

  Not on my watch.

  I dove down toward the machine at which the horror worked. Its fingers moved at a terrifying pace, only fractions of a second slower than my other parts could counter.

  Trying to shut the Coffin’s lid.

  Trying to save the Tombspire.

  I flashed beneath its hands and invaded the computer. The energy inside the horror’s machines washed over me, wanting to snuff out my nano-lights. I felt parts of me die, other parts corrupted and turned to shadow.

  And then I arrived.

  Ten meters deep inside the computer, just below the well of oil in which the horror lurked, I came to a final junction of Strigoi data.

  It felt as though I should’ve asked forgiveness for what I was about to do. To destroy so much, no matter the apocalyptic Strigoi desire, seemed like something not to take lightly.

  It deserves a prayer.

  Or a moment of silence.

  Or reverence for what will be lost.

  I gave it none of these things.

  Faster than the horror could de-program everything I’d done, I slipped into a black node of power and triggered it.

  The Coffin Engine’s heart thundered one final time.

  The entire machine quaked.

  And a wave of death, born of a technology I would never comprehend, came to life.

  There’s no undoing it.

  It’s over.

  The horror’s viruses ceased their pursuit. Frantic, they worked to override what I’d done, only to discover the power of their own machine. From the Coffin Engine’s core, circulating in the black tunnel in which Strope and I had first entered, the death-wave erupted.

  I wanted to see it.

  I needed to know.

  Faster than before, I escaped the machine. I exited through a microscopic port, and I left much of myself behind.

  Up I floated, through oil and nameless liquors.

  And as the Strigoi horror’s eyes fell upon a single, oily vid-screen, it and I watched together.

  The death-wave undid the laws of physics. Beyond our single Coffin Engine, it deconstructed everything—permanently. The other Coffin Engines, some thirty in number, fell apart like dust in a solar storm. They became less than ashes, less even than dust.

  Stripped to their smallest particles, robbed of the gravity which made them possible to build, they vanished in a cloud of nothing.

  The Strigoi horror drew back all its hands save for one. With seven fingers, each of them as long as a human arm, it hammered something into the computer.

  The Tombspire’s image flared to life on the screen. The horror and I knew what would happen.

  The Qabra Sabir, breaker of the light, melted the same as everything else. From end to end, the giant black needle broke apart into pieces smaller than atoms. In seconds, the giant weapon became nothing.

  They were right.

  I am the angel of death.

  With the few parts of me remaining, I took shape as a tiny blue Callista. I remembered what Joff had many times called me:

  ‘My little blue hologram girl.’

  And he was right. A hologram was all that remained of me.

  The horror looked up at my floating body. Its eyes smoldered white, its fists seized into twisted lumps of bone.

  I knew what it thought.

  If I could’ve spoken, I would’ve said only this:

  You think…because this last Engine remains…you will survive.

  You realize what you’ve lost.

  …but you believe…in time…you will use this final machine to defeat us.

  You think it’ll only take longer than before.

  I wished the horror could’ve heard me. But I’d no voice any longer.

  I wanted to tell it:

  Sorry. I thought of everything.

  When the tiny String Reprogrammer hidden inside the Gamma Suit’s arm-cannon went off, I smiled. The star-maker claimed the command room, the catacomb room, and everything beyond. Atom by atom, it instructed everything to become hydrogen. Everything—the machine-heart, the rivers of oil, the Strigoi who’d murdered Strope—their cells became light.

  I had no eyes to close.

  But I closed them all the same.

  The last Strigoi machine in Hades became a star.

  And I died just as Joff had died.

  Joff, who’d taught me everything.

  Joff, who’d saved us all.

  Mina

  A little more than ten years after crash-landing on the giant green world of Sumer, I returned to the wreckage of my Xiphos ship.

  It was only morning, but already the two suns beat down upon me hotter than I’d ever endured back home. The clouds couldn’t protect me from their glare, nor did the humid wind much cool me.

  Standing in the early sunlight, I regarded myself. I remembered my skin being snow-white. But after ten years on Sumer I looked as tan as everyone else.

  Or at least, I liked to think I was tan.

  Really, I was just burned.

  “It’s too warm here,” I said to my guide. He was a tall, skinny young man, somehow comfortable in full-length black attire. “On my world,” I declared, “we had only one star—Sufi. Here you’ve got two. And it’s always raining. I can’t figure out how everything hasn’t melted.”

  The young man looked at me, then at my ship. The battered Xiphos lay belly-down in a wet field, rotten tree trunks all around. The crater it’d made upon landing had overgrown with deep green grass, while vines as thick as my legs strangled the old ship’s scimitar wings.

  Not that it mattered.

  I’m never going into space again.

  I looked at my guide. His name was something like Shami, maybe Shayma—I still hadn’t mastered the language well enough to pronounce it.

  “Sham,” I said, “you look like you have a few billion questions. Go ahead—ask. I might look tough, but I won’t hit you.”

  He considered my broken Sumerian words, and he managed a nervous smile.

  “Where?” He pointed at my ship. “Where did it come from?”

  He’d asked me the question I’d answered a few thousand times already. To Sumer’s government, to passersby on the busy Arcadian streets, and to neighbors inhabiting the shiny, glass-walled apartment they’d put me in, I’d told the story many, many times.

  I didn’t really mind.

  Telling stories was more fun than fighting Varkolak.

  “It all started when a blue-haired girl flew into my mother’s mountain,” I began.

  I didn’t expect him to care, but Sham proved me wrong. As the suns fled behind the clouds and the soft rain pelted our glass umbrellas, he listened to my every word.

  I told him about my mother, who’d wanted the Lightbringer killed, and who’d hired a man named Zephayus to help her.

  “I’ll never know how the Vark got to her,” I admitted. “They turned our planet to dust before I could return.”

  I told him about Strope, whom I’d convinced to intervene, and who’d risked his life to abduct the Lightbringer to the Sabre.

  “Lightbringer didn’t know, of course. Do you know how hard it was keeping a secret from her? S
he always looked at us like she knew when we were lying.”

  I told him about the worlds we destroyed, the black towers, and the vampiric aliens who could kill any living thing just by walking within a few meters.

  And I told him how I’d shattered a giant Vark mining world deep in a galaxy known as Hades, and how I’d escaped just minutes before the Lightbringer had activated the Coffin Engine.

  “I’m being rude,” I said at the end. “Her name wasn’t Lightbringer. She called herself Callista, and she told us even though she wasn’t human, she’d once loved someone just as hard as the rest of us. I guess she and her lover were from here, from Sumer. Or at least…I think that’s what she said. Maybe it was another world. I don’t really remember.”

  Sham didn’t understand everything I told him. He’d never heard of the star-destroying Varkolak, of ice-cold Hermes, or of a blue-haired alien-killer named Callista. When I talked about Hades, he looked at me like he didn’t quite believe anything I’d told him.

  “Vark?” he said the word back to me. “They eat stars? We have a legend for this. We call them Strigoi. Mothers tell the children at night. They said it’s why we have two stars—to protect us. But they’re not real. Eaters of the light, you call them? No such thing.”

  I couldn’t do much more than sigh. It wasn’t Sham’s fault he didn’t know about the horrors we’d faced. It had been centuries since Callista had fled his world, and by that time the Varkolak had been wiped out in the Milky Way.

  It was all just an amusing tale to him.

  “It’s why I hired you to bring me out here,” I said after a long silence. “That dingy old ship right there—it’s all that’s left. My planet’s gone. My babies…they’re gone, too. Even the Lightbringer…she’s dead. She’s part of a star by now, or maybe she’s just ashes.”

  Sham shrugged. He was comfortable with his ignorance. Maybe it was for the best.

  For all the time it had taken us to leave the city and ride in a hover-car to the Sumerian meadows, we didn’t spend much time. In the driving rain, as the mist rose up and swallowed us, I circled the Xiphos a few times before instructing Sham to take us home.

  “I thought I’d feel more coming out here,” I said. “But it’s really just an old, dead ship. It’s alone. Kind of like me. I get it. I know how Callista felt. She was alone here…once.”