Darkness Between the Stars

by J. Edward Neill

  Death mask, I thought. Might be the last thing I ever wear.

  I remembered something Abid had once told me. ‘What’s one life to save billions?’ he’d said. He hadn’t said my name specifically, but I’d known his meaning.

  “I’m the one life,” I murmured. “He’s one of the billions.”

  “What’s that?” Callista fluttered in front of me.

  “Nothing.” I lowered the helmet with a smirk.

  With a hiss and few popping sounds, the helmet self-connected to the rest of the Vezda suit. Little pop-up displays flickered on the inside of the glass. They showed me everything: external temperature, pressure, air quality, proximity of hostiles. More impressively, when Callista spoke I heard her just as clearly as I did without any helmet at all.

  “Everything working?” she asked.

  “One-hundred percent,” I replied.

  “Ok.” She floated right up to my face. “I’m coming in.”

  When Callista changed shape into a long, snaky stream of particles and slid into the microscopic hole in my helmet’s top, it tickled. Her interface with the suit wasn’t just physical. After just a few seconds, she spread herself throughout every interior surface, becoming more aware of my movements and sensations than I was. It felt like she was inside me, not just the suit.

  “As close to sex as we’ll get,” she quipped.

  I grinned, and I knew she felt it.

  “Your heartrate is normal. Your brain waves, surprisingly stable,” she said. “That’s my Joff. That’s my rock.”

  I rolled my shoulders and sat in the cockpit’s only chair. With the Sabre’s gravity controls, I didn’t need to attach any belts or locks. The ride to Ebes promised to be smooth. Just then, an image of riding in Mom’s old world car slid into my mind. In the car, I’d always had to wear a seatbelt. Mom wouldn’t start the engine without me and Aly being locked in.

  “Your heartrate jumped a little there,” Cal’s voice chimed inside my helmet.

  “I had a thought about Mom,” I said.

  “Oh.”

  I reached out to the console with my left hand. It was as simple as a skypad, with commands a five-year old could’ve followed. I laughed inside my head as I imagined a five-year old me setting off to bomb and slaughter thousands of people.

  “Trajectory for Ebes set,” Cal said.

  “Distance?” I asked.

  “Four-hundred thousand kilometers. The Ring’s quantum engine is off. We’re drifting at about two kilometers per minute.”

  I tapped a symbol on the console.

  “Uncoupling from the Ring.” My fingers darted across the blue-lit buttons. “Ok. It’s done. Reverse thrusters powered. The Ring is falling behind us.”

  All the while, I stared at Ebes.

  At four-hundred thousand kilometers, the planet looked tiny, orange, and fragile. I couldn’t see the fractured mountains and dry, lifeless valleys. The black rivers and oceans were invisible. But I remembered everything. I’d seen it all on the ship’s scopes. I knew something wasn’t right.

  Doesn’t matter.

  Nothing matters.

  I flicked a switch. The Sabre’s control stick emerged from its hiding place in the floor. I hadn’t forgotten my sim-flight lessons from the fortress. Without a thought, I snared the stick and pulled it hard left.

  “You said the original settlements were detected on the planet’s far side, right?” I asked Cal.

  “Right,” she said. “In a series of nine valleys, we should be able to see their cities when we get within a few thousand kilometers.”

  I nodded. And we both fell silent.

  If anyone had asked me what it felt like piloting the Sabre, I’d have told them it was effortless. The quantum engine, even when fired to only a half percent of maximum, pulled us through the void without resistance. I banked hard left to begin the slow spiral to Ebes’ far side, and the Sabre cut through the darkness with ease. We were silent. To anyone on Ebes’ surface, our cloaking system rendered us invisible. If any object: a missile, a projectile, or even another ship, had come within a quarter mile of us, the quantum engine’s field would have torn it apart atom by atom.

  Two-hundred thousand kilometers, I counted in my head.

  A hundred-thousand.

  Ten thousand.

  At eight-thousand kilometers above Ebes, I pressed a button below the console. A compartment popped open, and there sat Alpo in all his one-armed glory.

  “How’d he get here?” I looked at Cal.

  Cal shrugged. “Back in the fortress, I asked Doctor Tiana to bring him. Thought you might like it.”

  I felt juvenile about doing it, but as Ebes filled up the space beyond the cockpit window and the tension welled up inside me, one glance at Alpo’s big silent eyes brought me focus.

  It helped remind me why I was doing this.

  Mom. Dad. Aly.

  Earth.

  I pushed the control stick up and right. The Sabre knifed into Ebes’ atmosphere. I saw the mountains’ reds and oranges rise up beneath me, the deep black of an ocean to our left.

  “Joff.” Cal sounded urgent.

  “I’ll cut the engine in a minute,” I snapped back. “I want to see what we’re going to bomb.”

  “Joff, it’s—”

  “Cal, just give me a minute.”

  “Joff!” she shouted, and finally I listened.

  “What is it?” I pulled back on the stick, lifting us into the upper atmosphere again.

  “We have company.”

  Impossible.

  I tapped two keys on the console. A vid-screen shimmered into view, showing all moving objects within a few thousand kilometers of the Sabre.

  “Wait…how is that possible?” I felt my whole body tighten. “Nothing can see us. It’s not even coming from the planet. It’s coming from—”

  “Behind us,” said Cal.

  I saw it on the console screen. With a flick of my fingers, I zoomed in on the thing behind and above us.

  I couldn’t believe my eyes.

  Soaring through Ebes’ upper atmosphere, a ship was on our tail. I couldn’t fathom how it saw us, not with our technology, or how it could match our speed. It didn’t look like any spacecraft I’d ever imagined.

  It was black, even blacker than the Sabre.

  Its shape was similar to ours, a curved sickle, but its front edge was jagged and its wings pocked with holes.

  It looked as if it were made of bones.

  It looked skeletal.

  I swallowed hard.

  I pulled the control stick hard left, then right, then left again. We covered a thousand kilometers in fewer than ten seconds. But when I looked at the console screen, there the skeletal ship was, hard on our tail.

  “What is it?” I fired the quantum engine up to three percent.

  “I don’t know.” Cal’s movement inside my suit chilled me. “I have a few images of Exodus ships in my memory bank, but they’re all hundreds of years old. They don’t look anything like what’s following us.”

  “I guess they’ve gotten better.”

  At three percent, I was sure the quantum engine would send us up and away from Ebes at a speed no other ship could possibly match. I had a plan in my head to race away, turn around, and come back with missiles and particle beams blazing. The Sabre’s weapons could melt mountains, burn cities to ash, and turn the DNA of any living thing to glass.

  And yet I was afraid.

  We turned hard. I expected to see the skeleton ship out the front window, headed straight for us.

  “Joff,” said Callista, “it’s still behind us.”

  No way, I thought.

  An idea snapped into my mind. I didn’t know why I thought it, but I remembered the drones Dad used to tell me about back on the farm.

  ‘Yeah, duster drones,’ I could hear his voice as if he were sitting in the Sabre beside me. ‘They fly down to the dirt right above the fields. They go fast, really fast, and they shoot out seeds, pesticid
e, whatever’s needed.’

  “Why don’t we use them?” I remembered asking.

  ‘Because sometimes their sensors miscalculate,’ he’d said. ‘And at those speeds, sometimes they hit the ground and destroy themselves.’

  I pushed the control stick down toward Ebes. Inside my helmet display, I saw an image of the skeleton ship racing behind us. It was gaining and gaining fast.

  Good, I thought. Let it.

  At five-hundred kilometers above Ebes, I started slowing us down.

  “Two percent,” I commanded the engine. The skeleton ship lined up its wings with ours, matching our speed.

  “One perfect.” I felt my sweat run faster than my suit could soak it up.

  “One half.” The Sabre screamed toward a mountain range that looked like a spinal column. The skeleton ship remained on our tail.

  “Zero,” Cal whispered.

  At a few dozen kilometers before impact, I pulled the control stick.

  Too late.

  Night Falls

  Fully dressed in the Vezda suit, I climbed down the ladder and set foot onto the dusty orange surface of Ebes.

  If I’d have crashed any other ship in the known universe, it and I would’ve been utterly destroyed. As it turned out, the Sabre was fine. The line of razor sharp peaks we’d clipped had been turned to red powder by the ship’s quantum field. We hadn’t felt a thing as the Sabre hovered down to the surface, untouched save for a few streaks of dirt down her wing.

  A few kilometers away, the skeleton ship had impacted much harder.

  I stood in a twilit valley and watched the trail of smoke rise into the hazy orange atmosphere. We’d been lucky and I knew it. If Dad had been there, he’d have just nodded and accepted it. So that’s exactly what I did.

  “Next time, I’m the pilot,” Cal chirped.

  “Nope.”

  “Why not?”

  “We both know that because I’m human, I’ll take more risks. You’d have been too cautious. You’d have played by the rules.”

  Cal was still inside my suit, but I swore I felt her crossing her arms and pouting.

  She’ll be fine, I thought.

  It’s time to finish this.

  The plan from the beginning had been to locate the Exodus camps and bombard them with the Sabre’s weaponry from high in Ebes’ orbit. After repeatedly scanning the surface and finding no above-ground structures, we’d changed course. It was clear something had happened to Ebes, something Abid and his team hadn’t expected, and so Cal and I had decided to improvise.

  Land near the last known settlement.

  Search for life-signs using the Vezda suit’s technology.

  Kill the survivors.

  Go home.

  I used my left hand to key a sequence into the exterior of the arm-cannon. With four little taps, a tiny panel with a blank screen popped open. I glanced all around us. We’d landed in a valley between two ragged mountain ranges. Or, as I suspected, we’d actually set down in the bottom of a vast crater.

  The mountains weren’t really mountains.

  They were the edges of a crater vomited up after some horrifying weapon had been used.

  “Scan for life signs in a twenty-five kilometer radius,” I instructed the suit.

  A red circle popped into view on the arm-cannon’s tiny screen. I stared at it for a full minute, expecting to see little green dots appear. Green meant life. Life meant Exodus survivors.

  I saw no green at all.

  “Joff.” Cal sounded worried. “I’m not picking up any life signs. According to the map, we’ve landed only eleven kilometers away from the largest last-known settlement. There’s nothing here.”

  “I see that,” I smirked.

  “But…there’s motion out there. Something’s moving in those crags.”

  I flicked the arm-cannon’s panel closed and glanced to the line of razor peaks above us. Spears of red earth pointed skyward. Every peak was fractured, every mountain like a giant tooth. I swore to myself that with a single blast from the arm-cannon, the entire mountain range would’ve shattered the same as glass.

  “The air’s not breathable, Cal,” I said. “There’s no life signs. Nothing human could be out there.”

  “Who said anything about human?” she joked.

  But she wasn’t really joking.

  I knew something was wrong by the tone of her voice. I looked to the distant line of smoke rising from the ship that had pursued us. Sharp, ragged peaks lay between us and our fallen pursuer. I couldn’t see the skeletal craft, but I knew it was out there.

  “We should get back in the Sabre,” I murmured.

  “Yes,” Cal agreed.

  It was too late.

  I took two steps backward toward the ladder leading up into Sabre’s belly, and then I felt the ground shake. A hiss like the world breaking tore through the air, and the impact of something terrible hit Ebes’ soil beside me.

  Without the Vezda suit, I’d have been torn to pieces. I felt myself go airborne, flailing in the dead Ebes’ air like a fish out of water. I landed on the ground thirty meters away. My suit absorbed nearly all the impact, but I felt the shock of hitting the ground thunder through my bones. Stunned, I lifted my head and saw I’d cratered the earth where I’d landed.

  The scientist in me knew I should not have survived.

  The warrior in me awoke.

  I leapt to my feet. I heard Cal shouting in my ear, but I tuned her out. Somewhere in the razor red peaks above, I thought I saw movement, and rather than guess I unloaded ten shots from my arm-cannon in its direction. Each golden ball sizzled through the air and pulverized a toothy spike of rock. One of the shots missed entirely and kept spearing skyward, never to slow.

  Not affected by gravity, I remembered.

  Keep moving, I told myself.

  I jumped. It wasn’t a little earthbound Joff hop, but a Vezda-powered leap thirty meters sideways and up. I landed on the side of a crimson spire of stone, and jumped again.

  And again.

  And again.

  And then I saw it.

  It moved through the peaks above us. It looked black, darker than the encroaching eve, deeper than the midnight between the stars. I fired at least twenty more shots at it, but it was too fast. It slunk between the twisted daggers of red Ebes’ rock and skittered along the tops of the ragged cliff.

  “…two hundred meters, Joff,” I heard Cal say.

  I think she wanted me to run. But I felt the same as I had on the long-ago night when Wendall Wight came to our farm. I wanted to fight.

  I vaulted over sharp spikes twenty meters high. I shouldered my way through warrens of paper-thin rock. I fired the arm cannon through gaps in the stone, expecting the skittering black thing at every turn. From somewhere out there in the dusk, it fired at me, hellish black energy bolts carving Ebes’ spires into molten red ribbons.

  And then, just as I hit the ground in a ring of toothy rocks, a rain of scarlet stone fell upon me. Far above, I saw the black thing standing astride a broken boulder, its skeletal foot dug into the boulder’s top.

  I knew this thing.

  I’d seen it before.

  My dream. In the hypo-chamber. The creatures standing at night’s edge.

  They’re real.

  It stood three meters tall. It looked as though it were made of bones blackened by fire. Between its ribs, I saw twisted machinery pumping dark fluid through its innards. The only part of it not scorched black were its eyes, four of them, white and smoking against the almost-dark evening sky.

  It craned its skull to look down at me, then sprang from atop the boulder.

  “Joff!” I heard Cal scream.

  I fired more shots than I could remember. I hit the thing in its shoulder, its bony hip, and its head. It opened its mouth and tore the night with a vile wail, which even the Vezda suit failed to silence in my ears. It landed on the ground three meters from me and swung its skeletal arm at my face. Claws the length of my arm-cannon scrape
d against the Vezda’s mask, scoring shallow ruts in the unbreakable polymer. I hit it in the face with the cannon, somersaulted over its head, and fired more shots into its back.

  It didn’t expect me to move like I did.

  I wasn’t sure it had ever been stung by a weapon like the Vezda’s arm-cannon.

  I wasn’t sure how many shots I pumped into the skeletal horror’s back. The first few didn’t seem to hurt it, but the final three melted its bones and ruptured the twisted machinery beneath its ribs. As it pitched face-first onto the ground, it wailed. I tried to slap my hands over my ears, but my open palms hit the sides of the Vezda suit’s helmet, and I had no choice but to endure the horrid sound. It split the air, wormed into my skull, and made Cal scream.

  And then, silence.

  Darkness fell upon Ebes. The faint lights of the dual stars collapsed beneath the broken horizon, and the stars blazed overhead. It felt like a dream, kneeling there in the dirt, waiting for the fear to pass, but pass it finally did. I rose to my feet, exhausted, and looked down at the creature before me.

  “You must’ve hit it twenty times,” Cal said softly.

  “More.” I pointed the arm cannon at the smoking pile of black bones and hot, coiled machinery. “Thirty, at least.”

  I felt Cal move inside my suit. The feeling made me shiver.

  “Is it…dead?” I was ready to fire another thirty shots into it.

  “Well that’s just the thing,” said Cal. “You did a twenty-five kilometer scan and picked up nothing. Whatever it is, it blocks our technology. Our scans don’t work.”

  I fired another three rounds into it for good measure.

  It was dead.

  I think.

  I looked skyward. Night had claimed Ebes, and the dust of my battle against the terrifying black thing settled and went to sleep all around me. I couldn’t look at the fallen monster again. Just imagining its smiling, inhuman skull and its oily blood leaking into the dirt made me sick.

  I had to get away from it. Cal sensed it, and urged me on.

  “Let’s go, Joff. I don’t think we should stay here. More of those…things…might come looking for us.”

  “No argument from me,” I muttered.

  Trudging back to the Sabre, I felt bone-tired. My legs hurt with every stride. My fingers were numb. My eyelids threatened to fall and drag me into sleep. With every step, I felt more and more like something was wrong with me.