Darkness Between the Stars

by J. Edward Neill

  “I’ve done everything you asked. I haven’t complained. I haven’t asked questions. My only friend here is a little blue girl, and my only job has been to move iron and run. A lot.”

  Abid understood. I saw it in his eyes.

  “Ok, Joff. You’re right.”

  I put down my fork. “I don’t want to be right. I want to know why I’m here.”

  He looked me dead in the eyes. I wasn’t intimidated, not anymore. “Have you ever seen a two-thousand year-old movie?” he asked me.

  I didn’t answer.

  “Here. I’ll show you.”

  I followed his gaze to a corner of the mess hall behind me. There, up by the ceiling, a black screen was fastened to the wall. It looked like a big skypad, smooth as any surface in the world. I hadn’t really noticed it all the other times I’d been in the room.

  “Wallpad,” commanded Abid, “Play the Exodus Information Sequence.”

  I stared at the screen.

  And probably didn’t blink for the next hour.

  The wallpad flickered on. The lights in the mess hall dimmed. I turned my chair around, enraptured, as images sprang to life on the screen.

  A voice boomed in the background:

  “Treachery in London!” a man shouted. “Aiden Frost and his followers hunker down! Hundreds of extrasolar craft loaded and prepared for liftoff!”

  A grainy image, far less crisp than anything I’d seen on a skypad before, filled the screen. Giant silver spheres, each almost as big as a city, sat on massive curved platforms. By the way the image shook, I guessed whoever had filmed the spheres had been running.

  The booming voice returned.

  “Government forces repelled! Attempts to halt the Great Treason foiled! Exodus spheres launched!”

  I watched as images filled the screen.

  I saw what looked like hundreds of explosive projectiles scream through the air toward the silver spheres only to be vaporized by an unseen force.

  I heard screams of women and children, and I witnessed masses of people standing on ruined city streets. They gazed skyward, every single one of them looking heartbroken.

  And then I saw craters, each of them absurdly wide, but shallow. Fires smoldered inside them, while blackened dirt and burning rocks smoked at their edges. The curved platforms were gone. The spheres had been ships, and they’d leapt into space.

  “…Exodus traitors!”

  “…abandoned Earth for the false promise of other worlds!”

  “…millions gone, all of them doomed!”

  I watched.

  I barely breathed.

  “I know about the Exodus,” I offered to Abid. “My dad told me.”

  “Just watch more,” he instructed.

  The images afterward made me shiver.

  I saw hunger.

  I saw death.

  I felt some small part of the world’s pain.

  Abandoned by the best and brightest of humanity, the people left behind struggled to survive in a planet-wide wasteland. The Thousand-Year War ravaged the earth. Every major city lay in disastrous condition, and every family was broken. Husbands had left wives to search the stars for a new homeworld. Engineers, astrophysicists, and great thinkers had leapt skyward in their great spherical ships, leaving the rest of humanity to pick up the pieces of a famine-stricken world.

  I watched and I learned. It felt like my brain recorded every bit of the awful imagery. Every time the man’s booming voice returned, he was angrier. Every soundbite was of someone: an old woman, a skinny child, an angry man, all of them filled with rage.

  “…cowards!”

  “…hope they all die out there! Especially Frost!”

  “…they’ll never find what they’re looking for!”

  The screen faded to black.

  And after a long silence, flickered back on.

  The next images were crisp and clear. I knew right away we’d leapt ahead by hundreds, if not thousands of years.

  A woman in a black dress appeared on the screen. Her dark clothing was tight-fitted to her arms and throat. Her surroundings were drab grey, and the walls of the room she stood in were undecorated. She reminded me of Castyn Clarke.

  “Good evening, citizens of Earth,” she announced while standing behind a black podium. “Tonight, on midwinter’s eve, I bring to you the best and worst of news.”

  The image cut to masses of people filling the streets of a very Donva-like city. Jet towers and pure white houses gleamed beneath the sun. Standing shoulder to shoulder by the tens of thousands, the people cheered. It felt somewhat staged, but the fact that so many of them were smiling and chanting meant something important had happened.

  “The wonderful news first.” The woman in the uncomfortable black dress returned. “As of five o’clock this afternoon, the hegemonies of Europan, Araban, and Southren have signed a treaty. As you all know, this union has been sought for many years. And now, to everyone’s benefit, it is with great personal joy I announce the creation of the W.E.G., the Western Elite Government, who will protect, serve, and align all peoples of the world. It is as we have hoped, citizens. This will be a glorious reign. All nations will be one.”

  Even though she used the words, “great personal joy,” I couldn’t help but notice she didn’t smile.

  I guess joy doesn’t mean what I thought it did.

  “But…” The camera zoomed in on her face. “All news is not good.”

  The image cut away from her, away from the crowded streets, and away from Earth. The visual of a planet emerged onto the screen. My eyes widened, and when I glanced at Abid, I saw him grimace as if in anger. It was a strange-looking world, obviously not in our solar system. Its atmosphere was rusty orange and deep red. Its oceans were small compared to Earth’s, and its surface was dark and rugged, mostly covered by deep, dark forests. The whole planet was dangerous looking.

  “This is Ebes.” The woman’s somber voice echoed behind the planet’s image.

  Ebes, I remembered. Lukas Mosk. He sent the material there.

  Or so Castyn Clarke said.

  “Ebes.” The woman said the word with disdain. “When the Exodus missions spread out, it’s to Ebes the bulk of their fleet went. Our remote sats and orbital scopes tell us this ugly little planet has breathable air and liquid water. It orbits a binary star system. It’s known the Exodus traitors named the stars Hera and Zeus, after a pair of old world pagan gods.”

  I gazed at the two stars. One was a deep cerulean blue, the other a hot yellow. Years ago I’d used my skypad to view similar systems. To me, they were utterly, breathtakingly beautiful. I could tell the black-dress woman didn’t think the same.

  “And today…tonight…” She stared hard into the camera. “…we’ve learned of a new treachery.

  “And it comes from Ebes.”

  The camera pulled away from the planet and its stars. I almost begged Abid to go back, to let me see the stunning images again.

  Instead, he commanded the wallpad to pause.

  “But—” I protested.

  “You’ve seen enough,” he said. “For the rest, it’s better if I narrate. I understand the science far better than the newscasters.”

  How to Silence a Star

  In the mess hall, with a plate of half-eaten griddlecakes cooling on the table, I sat and wondered just what Doctor Abid was about to tell me. I felt like he’d showed me just enough to invoke my curiosity, but not enough to truly educate me.

  Besides, there was something about the wallpad videos that bothered me:

  They never really said why everyone wanted to leave.

  “Joff.” Abid’s voice jarred me. “Did your mother ever talk much science with you? Did she tell you about S.R.’s?”

  “Essars?” I made a stupid face. “What’s that?”

  “No, not essars. S.R.’s. It’s what we call an acronym. The S stands for string. The R stands for reprogrammers.”

  “Oh.” I felt dumb.

  Abid talked to
the wallpad.

  “Wallpad, bring up an image of a string reprogrammer. Newest model, please.”

  I had no idea what I was about to see.

  In a blink, an image popped up on the wallpad. Against a black background, a long silver device appeared. I couldn’t tell how big it was; there was nothing else on the screen to compare it to. It looked like some kind of long, narrow needle, but with all manner of tubes writhing around it.

  “Is that it?” I stared.

  “Do you know what it does?” he asked me.

  “No. Is it a weapon?”

  “Not exactly.” Abid scratched his chin. “I mean, that’s not what it’s intended for. Not our version, anyway.”

  “Oh. So what’s it do? And what’s it have to do with the Exodus? And Ebes?”

  Abid pointed at the wallpad. “Wallpad, bring up a demo of a functional S.R.”

  “Real life or simulation, Doctor Abid?” the wallpad asked. Its voice was pleasantly neutral, the same as my skypads back home.

  “Real life,” Abid answered.

  I knew he’d say that.

  The screen went dark again, then silver. The wallpad flashing images had begun to annoy me. Maybe Dad’s distrust of technology had finally carried over, or maybe I’d grown tired of wondering what any of the things on the wallpad had to do with me. But the more I sat there, the more I was bothered by it.

  Even so, I watched.

  The lights in the mess hall went fully dark. The wallpad lit up with the image of an S.R. sitting on a metal stand in the middle of a grassy field. A man in a white lab coat strolled up with a heavy bucket swaying in his grasp. He set the bucket down beneath the S.R.’s needlelike tip and walked away at twice the speed he’d approached.

  I noticed several things:

  The string reprogrammer was about twice as long as the man in the lab coat was tall.

  One of its ends looked needle sharp, while the other had a hole bored into it, as if it were meant to be fitted onto something else.

  It looked like a machine, but it didn’t appear to be connected to a power source.

  A voice from offscreen shouted something. I didn’t catch what the man said. I was too busy studying the S.R.’s shape, trying to understand exactly what I was looking at.

  All of a sudden, the bucket the man had dropped exploded. I jumped halfway out of my seat, rattling the chrome table and spilling my cup of milk. I glanced back at Abid, but he didn’t say a word. He just nodded at the screen.

  Keep watching.

  A plume of black smoke engulfed the wallpad’s screen. It swallowed up the S.R. and sprinkled dark powder on the camera lens recording the event. I thought to myself, well that’s great. They blew it up.

  I heard a sharp, metallic hum. It came from the wallpad, but it felt like it shook the entire mess hall. I sucked in a breath, and watched as the cloud of black smoke disintegrated. Billowing in one moment, it vanished in the next. It wasn’t as though it’d spread out and vaporized. It was as though something had swallowed it right up. Instantaneously.

  The S.R.

  I waited and watched. The hum died out. Everything went silent.

  “How?” I asked at length.

  “It told the smoke to be air,” said Abid.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The string reprogrammer. It told the carbon in the smoke to become oxygen and nitrogen. It reprogrammed the explosion to be something else.”

  I stared at the screen. It was just the long, silver needle sitting there in silence. I saw a few fragments of the bucket lying in the grass, but no trace of the smoke remained. I must’ve sat there for a full minute, waiting and watching for something else to happen, and Abid never once interrupted.

  “So…” I said after a long quiet, “did my mom invent this?”

  Abid leaned on the table. “No. This technology has been around for a few thousand years. We didn’t know much about it until recently. The Exodus traitors, however…”

  I faced Abid. The light in the room had begun to brighten, but I felt a shadow falling on me. That something could do what the S.R. had done might not have impressed most boys my age, but I was astounded. And I knew, somehow, something terrifying had been revealed to me.

  “I still don’t understand,” I said.

  Abid folded his hands.

  “It changes the strings,” he said. “You know what strings are, right?”

  “Smaller than atoms.” I remembered studying one of Aly’s books. “The strings make up everything. Their shape and motion tell everything in the universe what to be.”

  Abid looked almost proud. “Exactly. And this device, the S.R., it tells the strings how to move. It can instruct carbon to be oxygen, which is how it ate up the smoke. It can make complex molecules break into simpler ones, or vice versa. It can—”

  “Wait…” I stopped him.

  We looked each other dead in the eyes. It was as if he knew what I was thinking and what I was about to say, but he wanted to hear me to say it out loud.

  “Can it…? I mean…if it were used…if it were strong enough…could it…?”

  He waited.

  “Could it turn off a star?”

  His flat, expressionless mouth blossomed into a smile. It was as though I’d asked the only question in existence that mattered.

  “Yes, Joff. Yes it can.”

  He smiled, but I felt a void in my chest. To me, a star dying wasn’t something to smile about.

  “It’s not funny,” I said.

  His smile vanished. He sat up and wiped his face, and the same shadow I felt in me seemed to settle over him.

  “You’re right. It’s not.” He frowned. “It’s just…I didn’t expect you to put it together so fast.”

  “Who’s doing it?” I asked. “Who’s turning off the stars?”

  Abid was sweating. Except for his momentary smile, it was the first time I’d seen anything other than indifference in him.

  He swallowed hard.

  “It’s complicated, Joff. Many years ago, we think the Exodus settlements built the S.R.’s to help make other planets habitable. Aiden Frost and his scientists, they knew most of the places they’d go wouldn’t be ready to support human life. The mixtures in the air might be wrong, the pressures too high or low, the quality of the dirt too toxic to grow anything. So they made S.R.’s…thousands of them we think, and they used them to make the planets they found habitable by humans. The reprogrammers were small at first, but still powerful. If they’d only shared this with us, who knows? Earth might’ve been different. The wars, the famines, everything… But even now, we can only replicate slower, weaker versions. Enough to stop a cloud of smoke, sure. Enough to help out in our factories, yes. But Frost and his team, they made the reprogrammers on a much bigger scale. We don’t know how, not yet. But they made the S.R.’s billions of times more powerful than anything we’ve managed here on Earth.”

  I thought about it for a second.

  “So now they’re killing stars?” I asked.

  Abid nodded. His cheeks were pale. I’d never seen someone so deadly serious in my life.

  “You remember Lukas Mosk?” He stared at me.

  “Yes.”

  “You remember the materials he smuggled offworld before being caught and executed?”

  “Yes. I mean…sort of. I know what Castyn Clarke said.”

  “Hardware for string reprogrammers.” Abid’s knuckles were white. “Big ones. Massive ones. More powerful than anything we’ve ever seen. The next star they kill won’t be in some far off system. No…they killed those years ago. The next star they kill—”

  “Ours,” I said.

  Abid didn’t need to answer.

  * * *

  Even wrapped in boxing gloves, my hands hurt from pounding the bag.

  “Hit it high,” the angry little sprite commanded.

  “Now middle. Middle again. High again.”

  I finished with a flurry, pummeling the heavy black punching bag
with more hits than the sprite had demanded. After a hundred more, I glared at the floating speck of silver and tore the gloves off.

  “There.” I tossed them on the floor. “Happy?”

  In a chrome-floored, hundred-windowed gymnasium, they’d locked me in yet again. After my meeting with Abid, I’d done the same things as the previous fourteen days.

  I lifted heavy iron dumbbells.

  I ran on the treadmill.

  I jumped on boxes, did more pushups than I could remember, and punched the heavy bag until my knuckles blistered under my gloves.

  “Why isn’t Callista here?” I growled at the stupid sprite who’d pushed me to exhaustion. “She’s here all the other days. Why not today?”

  “Irrelevant,” the sprite chirped. Its voice wasn’t like Callista’s. It was tinny, snotty, and especially today, annoying.

  “Not irrelevant,” I snapped back.

  “Report to shower hall.” The sprite floated toward the gym’s only door. “Then report to mess hall for last meal.”

  I sat down on a padded bench and uncoiled the sweaty wraps from my fists. My knuckles were bruised, the spaces between my fingers raw. The sprite kept chirping about how it was time to go and how I was going to be off-schedule. I ignored it.

  What can it do? I thought with a smirk. Tell on me?

  After a few minutes, the sprite got the message. It activated the black glass door and zoomed into the hallways beyond the gym. For the first time in days, I was alone.

  I sat there with my head in my hands. I was tired. My body hurt. I felt like a prisoner.

  I was a prisoner.

  Two weeks. No Mom. No Dad.

  These people are messing with me. This is some kind of experiment.

  And my only friend is a little blue hologram.

  My aloneness didn’t last. I heard the door slide open behind me, and I didn’t even look up. I knew who it was when the door shut and no footsteps sounded.

  “Cal?” I said. I couldn’t believe I already had a nickname for her.

  She floated up to the bench and sat on my shoulder. Her little blue nano-body was just warm enough to be comforting.

  “What’s wrong, big guy?” she asked.

  “I’m a prisoner, that’s what.” I rubbed my eyes. “I assume you knew that. I’m sure they tell you everything.”