Darkness Between the Stars

by J. Edward Neill

  I figured the Vezda suit would’ve absorbed most of the hard impacts. It hadn’t, or at least it seemed like it hadn’t. It was almost as if the mere presence of the thing I’d killed had drained me of my strength. I didn’t mention it to Cal. I tried not to let it show. But I felt it every time my boots hit the shadowed Ebes’ soil.

  What was that thing?

  What didn’t Abid tell me?

  Why does my entire body hurt?

  Just meters away from the ladder leading into the Sabre, I staggered and sank to the ground. My breaths moved in and out of my lungs at a ragged pace, and my heart thudded weakly beneath my ribs.

  “Joff?” Cal worried. “Joff, what’s the matter?”

  “Is the…suit broken?” I stammered. “Am I breathing Ebes’ air?”

  “No. Integrity holding,” she replied.

  “My vitals…are they ok?”

  After a short silence, I felt her move. “You have no injuries. No broken bones. No tears, lacerations, or internal bleeding.”

  My head felt heavy on my neck. “Well that’s good,” I murmured.

  “But…” The way she said it made me shiver. “…your body temp is down. Your heart rate is slower than it should be. You’re not taking in oxygen at a fast enough pace.”

  “Wait…why?” I slurred. “How…could that…be?”

  “Joff—”

  * * *

  I awoke. The night was thick over Ebes, and the starlight much sharper than on Earth. I winced as I sat up. After flexing my fingers and sucking in a huge breath, I realized I felt better.

  What happened?

  Did I sleep? Faint?

  Did I die?

  “Cal?” I don’t know why I whispered her name instead of just saying it.

  “You’re back.” She sounded relieved.

  “Well…yeah. What happened?”

  “I just saved your life.”

  I scoffed. With the Vezda suit unharmed and the creature slain, I couldn’t comprehend how I’d ever been close to death.

  “How long have I been lying here?”

  “About two hours.”

  “Two hours? But—”

  I felt her move her body into the suit’s helmet. Somehow the effect was calming.

  “You were losing heat. Your vitals were shutting down. On a cellular level, your body was leaking energy. So I gave you some of mine.”

  “No way.” I squinted my eyes. “I’ve studied enough science to know better. Radiation levels here aren’t high enough, especially at night. I wasn’t hurt. I wasn’t—”

  “Joff, just be quiet for a second,” she said. “It wasn’t Ebes or some mysterious leak in your suit. It was the creature. Your proximity to it caused your organs to start failing. I’m not sure how the creature’s systems generated the effect, but it did. It was…I guess the word humans would use is…vampiric.”

  I hadn’t heard that word since I’d been a little boy. Mom – at least I thought it had been Mom – had once told me a bedtime story. Monsters. Wooden stakes. Garlic. I hadn’t been particularly impressed.

  “Vampiric? You mean it siphoned my energy?”

  “Yes. On an atomic level, it penetrated your suit and slowed the reactions between every single cell in your body. Good thing you had a Callista nearby. I split myself up into a few hundred-thousand nano-bots and kick-started your body. Tell me; how many other girls would’ve done that for you?”

  She was serious. Her laugh gave her away.

  I didn’t thank her or get sentimental.

  I just stood and shook my arms to make sure they still worked.

  “I guess that’s why they picked you,” she said. “You don’t dwell much on feelings, do you? You just do things. Look at you…even now you’re ready to fight again.”

  She was right. I didn’t want to talk. If the Exodus traitors had changed themselves into life-sucking, black-boned horrors, the last of my doubts about our mission had faded away.

  They’d become the enemy.

  Everything Abid had put me through was justified.

  Follow the Green Fire

  I was halfway up the Sabre’s ladder when the wind rose against me.

  I couldn’t feel it inside the Vezda suit, and yet I saw the dust swirl in the starlight, the dark powder of Ebes’ broken surface blowing all around me. I descended two rungs on the ladder and gazed into the night. A storm was coming, and it wasn’t like anything I’d ever seen.

  “We should probably go inside,” Cal advised.

  “I want to see.” I shook my head.

  She huffed, “haven’t we almost died enough for one night?”

  “Nope.” I shrugged.

  I slid down the ladder and hit the ground with my boots. Ebes didn’t have a moon, but the stars blazing through the thin atmosphere offered more than enough light to see what was coming. With the Sabre as my umbrella, I watched a black cloud of dust take shape in the sky. It came from the direction of the black creature’s fallen ship. Corrupted clouds of dusky vapor devoured the night, eating my view of the stars a few thousand at a time. I knew I should’ve climbed into the Sabre, but I couldn’t move. I wanted to see the storm with my own eyes.

  “Will it hurt our ship?” I asked Cal. “Should we leave?”

  “We should get back inside,” she stressed. “But no, it won’t hurt the Sabre. The storm is glassy rock and hard dust. The wind is tearing it right off the highest peaks. The rocks here are delicate. A few decades of this, and Ebes’ surface will be completely flat.”

  Delicate, I thought.

  This planet is decaying.

  Just like me a few hours ago.

  The storm washed over us. I raced up the ladder just in time to evade the shards of glass, grit, and red powder. Safely inside the Sabre, I tore off my helmet and stood at the cockpit’s window.

  “Think we should leave?” I asked Cal.

  “No.” She sounded nervous. “We’re only eleven kilometers from the last known colony. I’m concerned that if we fly the Sabre into the atmosphere, more of those things will find us.”

  “So after the storm, we walk,” I said.

  “Yes. If the storm ends before the night.”

  “What about an aerial bombardment? That was the plan.”

  She extracted herself from my suit. I felt a rush of electricity ride up my skin. Her absence made me shiver.

  “Not sure if you’ve noticed.” She floated before me, beautiful as ever. “No life signs appear on our scanners. No visible settlements. No signs of anything.”

  “But if they’re like that…thing,” I countered, “they won’t show up on our scans.”

  She put her hands on her hips. I knew the look she gave me.

  “Joff, it’s possible, maybe even likely, the Exodus people are already extinct.”

  Extinct. I retreated into thought.

  Maybe they killed themselves.

  Maybe there are no S.R.’s.

  Maybe tomorrow we get to go home.

  No.

  Callista wanted me to sleep. I wasn’t having it. After my blackout, I felt refreshed. It was as if I’d slept for ten hours, not two. I wasn’t sure what Cal had done to me, and I wasn’t going to ask.

  So I sat at the cockpit window and watched the storm ravage Ebes.

  Clouds of shadow dust twisted and spun between the peaks. Glassy rock fragments collided and made sparks, which in turn ignited the dry earth. I saw tiny fireballs erupt, pale lightning tear the night open, and showers of dust sparkle before going dark again.

  Cal was right. A few years of storms, and Ebes would be griddlecake flat. It made me wonder what the Exodus people had done to their planet.

  A string reprogrammer misfire?

  A failure during terraforming?

  Or was this on purpose?

  The storm lasted a few hours, and then died away to nothing. The night fell silent again, and I faced the Sabre’s scanners, near obsessed with the thought of more skeletal ships descending upon us.

>   Cal’s right, I began to think.

  If we fly, they’ll find us.

  She floated up beside me.

  “You’re dying to go out there, aren’t you?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  It was time. I knew it. Cal knew it. We could’ve waited until sunrise, but the thought of pacing inside the Sabre for hours and hours didn’t settle in me.

  I wanted to know what was out there.

  I slid my helmet down and felt Cal invade my suit again. This time it didn’t tickle.

  “Do you have a plan?” she asked.

  “Sure do,’ I answered.

  I flicked a switch, and the Sabre’s inner hatch hissed and opened. As we clanked down the ladder toward the outer hatch, my mind was busy.

  “Moles,” I said. “We used to have moles.”

  “Moles?” Cal was confused.

  “At our farm. Whenever the weather got bad or we’d run the tractors, they’d hide underground. Mom suggested we use a fancy government sonar ping to map out their tunnels and seal off the holes, but Dad didn’t want to do it. He wanted to let the moles be. ‘They were here first,’ he used to say. ‘They don’t ruin much.’”

  “You think the Exodus colony is underground.” Cal moved into the suit’s head-space.

  The Sabre’s inner hatch hissed shut. The outer hatch opened. I zipped down the ladder and stood tall in the night. I waited for more of the skeletal horrors to leap out at me. But there was nothing.

  “Underground. It’s where I’d go,” I said to Cal. “Poisonous air. Nasty storms. Secret project to shut off all the stars. If the Exodus people are here, I bet they’re moles, hiding from everything.”

  “I guess it’s possible,” Cal conceded.

  “Let’s take a walk,” I grunted.

  And off we went.

  As we walked into the night, I called up a digital map of Ebes. It floated inside my helmet, translucent, a tiny replica of the terrain on which we’d landed. Callista added to it, using her glowing blue nodes to highlight our destination amid the tattered spires and broken cliffs.

  “The brightest dot – that’s the last known settlement,” said Cal.

  “I know.” I nodded. “That’s where we’re going.”

  I walked along the valley floor, ankle deep in a river of orange glass left behind by the storm. If I’d have been barefooted, my feet would’ve been bloodied after two steps and severed after ten.

  “Couldn’t grow anything here,” I mused as we climbed a sharp slope at the valley’s end. “There’s not a plant protein in the universe that could survive in all this glass.”

  Callista was busy scanning for movement, but was able to talk all the same.

  “If you could be home right now, farming, growing, and working on all those machines, would you?”

  “Knowing what I know?” I asked. “Stars dying, aliens things trying to kill me, all of it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Impossible to say,” I admitted.

  “Well…say it anyway,” she pried. “I’m curious.”

  It wasn’t easy for me.

  “They knew,” I sighed. “The government…my parents. Either that or they planted the idea in me. I was just a little boy staring at the stars, but I knew I’d be out here. Maybe not here exactly, but not on Earth. I guess they knew I’d handle it better than the others. While everyone else was playing with their sprites, dream-bots, and skypads, I was digging in the dirt, reading books, and dreaming of much more.”

  “Books?” Cal sounded perplexed.

  “Dad always made Aly get real books.” I shrugged. “No skypad texts, not for her.”

  “Oh,” said Cal. “You still didn’t answer the question. Would you rather be farming than out here with me?”

  “Sorry.” I shrugged again. “I still don’t know the answer.”

  I leapt to a cliff ledge and pulled us up. We walked for a while, and then stood at the highest point atop a weathered ridge some hundred kilometers long. Storms had shaven the ridge’s top nearly flat, reducing the razor spires to blunted red mounds.

  We were halfway across it when the sky ahead turned green.

  Surprised, I dropped to the ground, arm-cannon pointed into the darkness.

  “What is that?” I felt my heart race. “Where’s it coming from?”

  “There’s something in the air. Look straight ahead and up,” Cal hissed.

  There it was, glowing in the night. A flare, blazing hellish green in Ebes’ toxic air, floated down toward the ground several kilometers ahead. It turned the night a ghoulish color. My very first fear was that more of the skeletal black creatures would see it and come for me.

  If there are more, I thought.

  If the first one wasn’t a dream.

  “A flare makes no sense.” I sank lower to the ground. “Why would someone give their position away?”

  I could feel Cal thinking.

  “Maybe they don’t know we’re here,” she said. “Maybe it’s meant for someone else.”

  “Yeah…more vampires,” I spat.

  We watched the green flare fall into a warren of daggerlike peaks below the ridge. Down there, the shattered landscape looked more treacherous than anything I’d ever seen. If the Exodus colony was hidden, they couldn’t have picked a deadlier location.

  “Well…stay here or keep going?” Cal asked.

  I let her question hang in the air.

  If we used the Sabre, we could flatten the entire place with just two or three bombs.

  But they’d see us coming.

  I wasn’t sure why, but the knot in my chest told me not to run back to the Sabre. Something was off. With every thump of my heart, I came close to grasping it.

  “We go on foot,” I declared.

  “Knew you’d say that,” sighed Cal.

  Down, down the ridge we went. The warrens below, draped in shadow, threatened us with scarlet spires and sharp peaks. I bounded down the ridge, wincing when I heard the ground fracture beneath my boots. In the distance, the green glow began to fade. The flare had hit the ground and was burning away.

  I knew it couldn’t have been fired by one of the horrors who’d attacked me.

  Or at least, I wanted to believe it.

  Callista whispered warnings to me. I tuned her out. Shouldering through the spikes of fragile red rock, I leveled my arm-cannon forward, waiting for any slight movement.

  If it moves, kill it, I told myself.

  It was against my nature to think such things.

  I didn’t care.

  I picked up my pace. I heard the ground crackle and break, and I saw the last embers of the flare illuminating the earth ahead. In the Vezda suit, I moved quicker than any human could’ve run. I was tireless, perhaps because of my training, or maybe because of the fire burning within me.

  And then, after a furious run, I skidded to a stop in a ring of red spires. I checked the map glowing inside my visor. I was standing on the bright blue dot Callista had marked.

  The Exodus settlement was supposed to be there.

  The dead flare lay on the ground in the center of a great clearing. I spun in every direction, aiming my arm-cannon at any shadow I thought might be brave enough to move. I pointed up at the crowns of the red spires and down at the fractured earth.

  “No life signs,” I heard Cal chirp.

  For a full two minutes, I wedged myself between two spires and searched the shadows. I flicked buttons inside the arm-cannon, altering my helmet’s spectrum of vision.

  Infrared.

  Ultraviolet.

  Gamma.

  Nothing. I saw nothing.

  “Joff,” Cal whispered. “You listening?”

  “Yes,” I murmured.

  “I’m going to make a map,” she said. “It’ll go two kilometers in every direction. Up. Sideways. Down. If any of your moles are near, I’ll find them.”

  “You’re using a sonic pulse?” I asked. “Won’t they be able to feel it?”

  I
could almost feel her grin. “Just a tickle. They might like it.” And then she did it without my asking.

  I felt the sonic pulse leave the suit, but didn’t hear anything. A few seconds of silence passed. I held my breath and kept my arm-cannon leveled two meters above the lifeless flare.

  “Anything?” I asked.

  Cal’s answer came not with words, but with a second map illuminating my helmet’s display. I saw blue lines hanging in the air, some straight, others coiling down. I knew right away what I was looking at.

  “Moles,” I uttered.

  “Just like you said,” Cal agreed.

  I focused on the map she’d made. I was reminded of the irrigation network Dad and I had put into the earth on our farm. Long lines and curving channels crisscrossed, shaping a vast web of tunnels beneath us. With just a few moments of study, I knew the Exodus underworld was right beneath us.

  “Two questions,” I said.

  “Fire away,” replied Cal.

  “Where’s the entrance? And was the flare for us…or someone else?”

  “You know…” Cal sounded skeptical. “…the Sabre has ordinance capable of penetrating deep tunnels like these. Two or three corruption bombs, and boom, the top half-kilometer of passageways will be destroyed. The rest will be buried.”

  I let myself think about it.

  I knew what Abid would want me to do.

  But I also knew myself.

  “No,” I said.

  “No?” questioned Cal.

  “I want to see them.”

  I expected her to argue, to pout, to remind me that if I died or was captured, the entire mission – my entire life – was all for nothing. If I failed, it meant the Earth’s sun, my sun, might meet its end from a string reprogrammer.

  But being a good friend, all Cal did was sigh.

  “Ok,” she said. “See the dead flare? Ten meters beyond it is a door. It’s big, made of…let’s see…an alloy not altogether different from the Sabre.”

  “Which means humans made it,” I deduced.

  “Maybe.”

  I walked to the flare and kicked it aside. A few green sparks smoldered, and then died. I took three strides forward. A dark circular line was etched into the rock, marking the underworld’s entrance. I could barely believe my eyes.