Darkness Between the Stars

by J. Edward Neill

  “What happened to the city that was supposed to be here?” I wondered aloud.

  “Gone,” said Cal. “Destroyed by the same thing that ruined the rest of this world.”

  “But they’re not all dead. The flare. The thing that attacked us. Someone is still here.”

  “Yes,” Cal sounded worried.

  And if they’d have wanted to kill me, they could have already.

  No.

  They stood right here and lit a flare. Whoever’s here invited me.

  But if I’m wrong…

  I knelt and brushed the dust off the huge handle on the circular door’s exterior. The door was easily three meters in diameter, graven to a smooth fit into Ebes’ surface. Even through the Vezda suit, when I touched my left hand to the handle, I sensed the door’s strength, its weight.

  Without Cal’s mapping, we’d have never known it was there.

  “Joff, should we—”

  I pulled the handle up before she could finish.

  And leapt down into the Exodus underworld.

  Frost

  The walls underground weren’t like Ebes’ overworld.

  In the deep gloom, I walked through a corridor twenty meters wide and twice as tall. Grey pillars, a thousand times stronger than the diseased stone on Ebes’ surface, supported ceilings draped in shadow. Just thirty steps into the silent dark, I knew the tunnels had been excavated by a powerful Exodus machine.

  I saw elegance I didn’t expect.

  Strange, beautiful faces had been carved into the pillars.

  Symbols flowing like water and sharp-lined runes were graven into the floor.

  There was no light, but through my suit’s visor I saw everything. I glimpsed footprints in the dust. I saw doors leading to labyrinthine tunnels. I saw green pinpricks on my helmet’s floating map, giving away the positions of living things.

  “You seeing this, Cal?”

  “Lots of life down here,” she whispered. “But not all the same size.”

  “How’s the air? The pressure? The temperature?”

  “All suited to human life,” she answered.

  “That blue membrane we popped through when we jumped down,” I recalled, “it must keep the hostile atmosphere out.”

  “That much is certain,” she agreed. “It’s not a technology I’m familiar with.”

  We came to a junction of four giant tunnels. Eight columns graven with dark faces and indecipherable symbols ringed the clearing at the tunnel’s union. I wasn’t sure what the Exodus people had been thinking when they carved corridors so huge.

  “Joff,” Cal cut into my thoughts, “two life forms are coming around the corner.”

  I went to a knee and raised the arm-cannon.

  And that’s when they came.

  Two creatures, round and covered in yellow spines, crept around the tunnel wall to my left. They were half as big as a human, and their anatomy was bizarre. With twenty tiny feet each, they skittered along the wall, glaring at me with pale eyes, scavenging the stone like some kind of terrifying caterpillars.

  “What the –?” I gaped.

  “Joff, I think we should—”

  Without thinking, I raised the arm-cannon and fired a single shot at the closest creature. It hit the thing between its eyes. The shot pitted the wall and turned the spiny creature into a cloud of ashes.

  The second creature dropped to the cavern floor and came for us. I let it skitter within ten meters before I blasted it twice. Afterward, all that remained were two puffs of ash floating to the ground.

  “Why’d you do that?” Cal scolded. “Every living thing in a half-kilo probably heard us.”

  “I—I don’t know. I thought they were going to eat me.”

  “No way they could’ve hurt you,” she argued. “Their spines…I think they were made of glass.”

  Not that she could see it, but I rolled my eyes.

  “Easy for you to say, ‘don’t shoot.’ No one would ever try to eat a floating blue robot.”

  “I’m not a robot,” she said.

  I rose to my feet. The dust from the dead creatures settled. In silence, I walked to the center of the four tunnels’ union. Each of the corridors was black and hollow, arterial voids winding down into unthinkably dark places. If I hadn’t seen Callista’s map, I’d have thought the tunnels had no end.

  “What are we doing down here, Joff?” Cal’s anxiety made me shiver.

  “I wanted to see. I wanted to know,” I answered.

  “Know what?”

  “Who fired the flare.”

  “Ok…well,” she sighed, “it’s not like we can walk down these tunnels for the next ten days blasting everything we see. You know I don’t like to talk about numbers, but there’s a few thousand tunnels down here, and if there’s a hidden Exodus colony, our odds of success are one in oh…about eleven-thousand.”

  Fine, I hated myself for thinking it. We’ll run back to the Sabre. We’ll do this the coward’s way.

  Ultimately, Cal was right. We were probably walking into a trap. We’d fought one of the monstrous, skeletal things, but I couldn’t imagine standing up to more.

  “You’re right,” I mumbled.

  “I know,” she said.

  “It’s just…” I shook my head. “I feel like doing this my way, not Abid’s. It’s almost like – I don’t know – I want to see them, talk to them, and ask them why they want to kill us all.”

  Cal fell silent, which meant she understood.

  Walking backward, arm-cannon still half-raised, I retreated toward the hole we’d jumped through to reach the underworld. I glanced at Cal’s map and saw dozens of green pinpricks, but none of them were behind us, and none closer than several thousand meters. If the Exodus traitors had hoped to trap us, they must’ve planned for us to go deeper into the tunnels.

  I hated leaving without looking my enemy in the eye.

  More than that, I hated being wrong.

  A few dozen meters away from the dead-ended tunnel beneath the underworld entrance, I turned.

  And there they were.

  In a flash, nine figures in black armor leapt out of the shadows. I heard Cal curse, and with a glance at my helmet display, I saw none of our attackers showed up as a living green dot.

  My gut feeling was wrong.

  We’re dead.

  I dropped to a knee and fired several shots into the crowding shadows. The things attacking me weren’t monstrous or skeletal like the creature on Ebes’ surface, but they were just as fast, sprinting from the inky dark as if the walls themselves had spat them out. From one knee, I leapt to the tunnel’s ceiling, firing as I ascended. The impacts from my arm-cannon’s golden shots filled the cavern with black powder, and the craters smoked, each one blazing with hot, white burning rock.

  As I came down behind my attackers, I fired wildly. I was sure I hit at least two of them. I saw a red cloud of mist from one impact, and I heard the grunt of another falling.

  As soon as my boots hit the tunnel floor, more of them emerged from the darkness behind me.

  Even with my suit’s visor, I hadn’t seen them waiting, nor had Cal detected their presence.

  One of them tried to tackle me high. I shrugged him off and broke his arm with a slap from my arm-cannon. Another hit me in the head with some kind of glowing rod, but the thing snapped against my helmet, its white light shattering in the dark. I tried to fire at the three charging me from the front, but something hit my cannon, forcing my shots wide.

  And then they were on me.

  There must have been twenty.

  I crushed their bones with my cannon, punched one in its masked face with my left fist, and kicked another so hard he sailed ten meters through the air.

  But there were just too many. They drove me to the ground from behind. I fired wild shots, but three of them snared my right arm and held the cannon down. I felt the weight of several on my back, pulling at the Vezda suit’s seams, trying to tear my helmet off.

  I wa
sn’t afraid of dying.

  I was angry at myself for wanting to know my enemy.

  I should have trusted Abid, I thought.

  “I’ll electrocute them all,” Cal screamed inside my suit.

  “No,” I said as they pounded on my back and pried at the metallic life-support tubes extruding from my shoulder plates. “Those glowing sticks…they’ll kill you.”

  I felt her try to escape the suit. But I couldn’t let her out. Her only chance to survive was if they didn’t know she existed. Keying a combination inside the arm-cannon, I sealed her in with me. She could’ve broken out if she wanted, but at least she’d have known I was trying to protect her.

  Besides, I loved her.

  I didn’t want her to be destroyed with me.

  As I lay there, every limb held down, I looked at my enemies. They didn’t resemble the horrific thing that had drained my life on Ebes’ surface. They were as tall as humans, with five-fingered hands and human faces only partly hidden behind black masks. I heard them speak, and although their language wasn’t one I knew, their voices sounded human. I counted twelve males and eight females.

  Twenty to one, I almost smiled. No matter how many times they hit me and pried at my armor, they couldn’t break through the Vezda suit. I assumed they were talking about how best to kill me.

  I had a feeling Cal was about to try something. I sensed her energy gathering in the arm cannon, electrifying the muscles in my arm. But the feeling went away when a green light winked into existence farther down the tunnel. A tall, slender figure struck another flare to life. It, or rather she, began the long walk toward us.

  Several of the men holding me down shouted at the approaching woman. She didn’t answer. Wearing the same black armor as they, she stopped to kneel beside the two I had killed. I couldn’t see her face, but I sensed reverence in the way she touched her fingers to their fallen bodies.

  She stood and resumed walking toward me. I heard Cal suggest a number of ways to kill several of the men pinning us down. I ignored her.

  This is what I’d wanted.

  Take off your mask, I thought. I want to see what you’ve become.

  And she did.

  Five meters away, the tall woman touched a node on her neck, and the mechanical black mask on her face pulled away.

  “Wait,” I heard her say.

  She knelt so that I could see her. She brushed the ashes from my visor, and her eyes met mine.

  She was beautiful.

  Her eyes were an icy blue, like the frozen streamlets above my farm in the dead of winter. Her face was impossibly pale, as white as if she’d never once stood in the sunlight. Sharp and expressionless, her lips were deep purple, darkened as though the oxygen in the underworld were too low.

  “I could kill her,” Cal whispered. “If she’s the leader, it might prevent them from firing S.R.’s at Earth.”

  Or it might provoke them.

  She was as human as I was, only different. They all were. One by one, I heard their masks flicker open, and I saw several of their faces. In most of them, I glimpsed utter hatred. But on her face, I saw nothing.

  She said things to me. Cal tried to translate, but it came out garbled. I assumed Cal knew exactly what the woman was saying, but wanted me not to understand.

  She wants me to get angry.

  She wants me to kill them.

  Because she loves me.

  After the woman rattled off questions in several different languages, I cleared my throat. Her flare smoldered a deep, eerie green, and my enemies fell silent. I could tell most of them wanted to kill me, but also wanted to hear me speak.

  “Why?” I looked the woman right in her icy blue eyes. “Why are you killing stars?”

  Her face went dark. Her eyes seemed to lose their color. If I’d had to guess, I’d have said she was afraid.

  Very afraid.

  Grim and pallid, she spoke to the crowd holding me down. Cal urged me to fight, to tear out of their grasps and turn them all to ashes. I knew I could have if I’d wanted. I could’ve killed half of them before they knocked me down again.

  I wasn’t sure why, but I thought of Wendall Wight.

  These people didn’t remind me of him.

  “Why?” I asked the woman again.

  No one answered. I felt Cal fluttering inside my suit, torn between obeying me and escaping to wreak havoc on our attackers.

  “Don’t,” I whispered to her. She stopped fluttering. The chills went away.

  I let them lift me to my feet and bind me. They used a strange black rope made of a substance I didn’t recognize. With it, they bound my arm-cannon to my side and tightened my armored ankles together to prevent me from running.

  Even then, I probably could’ve escaped. I knew it, and I think they knew it, too. The way they crowded around me, their hands all over the Vezda suit, suggested they weren’t being cruel.

  They were afraid.

  Maybe they’d expected someone else to come into their underworld.

  They pressed me into their center. Their shoulders were all around me, pushing me, bumping me, moving me forward into the darkness.

  Together, we walked.

  And walked.

  And walked.

  Cal stayed silent the entire time. I knew she hated it, but I also knew she understood.

  We took a left at the first union of tunnels, and then changed direction more times than I wanted to count. I’d glimpsed the underworld on Cal’s map, but as the Exodus people hurried me through countless corridors, I began to understand. I saw small, two-person vehicles sitting in the shadows. I wondered why they were shrouded in dust, and then I realized they’d run out of fuel long ago. More of the spiny creatures roamed the walls, and yet none of them approached us. I glimpsed fallen tents, discarded technology, and grottos filled with scrap metal.

  I even saw bones, several piles of them, all of them human.

  These people…they’ve lived down here for a while. Years, at least.

  Not exactly what their ancestors dreamed for them when they escaped Earth.

  We came to a hole.

  At first, I thought it might’ve been a shallow mine shaft or a pit resulting from a cave-in. But when I peered over the edge, I saw an abyss. The tiny blue number on the inside of my helmet winked at me, telling me the depth of the hole was well over one kilometer.

  “Joff,” Cal warned, “fight them. They’re going to push us down—”

  “No,” I said.

  Several of my captors heard me say it. They looked at me without expression. The blue-eyed woman, their leader, keyed something into a device hanging from her belt.

  They weren’t going to push me into the abyss.

  They were calling up an elevator.

  In moments it arrived, a pale platform of light no larger than ten by ten meters. I’d heard of such things before, but I’d never seen one.

  “A gravity pad,” Cal whispered.

  Led by the woman, most of my captors ushered me onto the gravity pad. Some stayed behind. I looked up at them as we sped down into the abyss, and their faces told me nothing.

  At the bottom, in a place far below the ruin of Ebes’ overworld, the gravity pad touched down. I stepped off, and my captors huddled around me. The walls were different, the stone glittering with dark red garnet, and the pillars supporting the vaulted ceilings graven with faces grimmer and less elegant than those far above.

  I started to wonder.

  Maybe the Exodus people didn’t make this place after all.

  It feels ancient down here.

  It feels alien.

  Cal confirmed it.

  “Joff,” she whispered, “a radiation ping indicates the stonework down here is approximately thirteen-thousand years old. You can tell just by looking; the faces carved into those columns…they’re not human.”

  My captors pushed us along.

  I thought of my farm, and how even in my wildest dreams I’d never imagined being in a place farthe
r from home than Ebes.

  They pushed me down a last corridor, through a narrow tunnel, and into the largest cavern yet. Pale lights emanated from various spots in the darkness, glinting off fearsome red stonework columns, which were everywhere. I saw human faces in the shadows: adults, elderly, and children, all gazing in my direction. Their shelters were spaced out, canvas, stone, and steel, all of them surrounded by islands of debris.

  It was clear to me.

  I’d arrived in the Exodus living quarters.

  And only a few hundred remained.

  Everyone in the grand room watched as my captors led me to the center. A stone monolith, hollowed out and reaching to a ceiling too high to see, awaited me. Grunting, my captors pushed me into the monolith, into which the blue-eyed woman walked ahead of us.

  Inside, I saw machines, beds, and sealed containers. Tools lay scattered about, and sheaves of paper were stacked on dozens of hard steel tables.

  A lab, I realized.

  They’re building something.

  The blue-eyed woman said something to the mass of people guarding me. I saw surprise and anger flash in their eyes. She repeated herself, and still they looked baffled.

  What did she say?

  They didn’t like it.

  She shouted her words for the third time. Her voice was more powerful than I thought anyone capable of. It echoed inside the monolith, stunning all of us to silence. I understood then. She was asking them to leave.

  Their faces hot, their gazes hard as the stone walls, the men and women slunk away and left me alone in the monolith with their leader. She keyed something into the device on her belt, and blue membranes popped over each of the monolith’s six doors.

  We were sealed in, just she and I.

  Everything went silent. With twenty meters between us, we stared at each other, sizing one another up in the column’s pallid light. Cal could’ve severed the black binding they’d used to tie my arm-cannon down. I could’ve blasted the woman into powder. It would’ve been easy.

  But I had no desire to kill.

  Not yet.

  “I’m looking for someone,” I said to her.

  She walked within ten meters. She didn’t appear to be armed. Her gaze chilled me even through the Vezda suit.