It hates the light, I knew.
Like the sun burning its eyes.
With all its dark fury, the Strigoi swung its rifle toward me and lanced the cavern air with a stream of cold, black energy. But I had already jumped, and from ten meters above, I rained down seven more shots, the last of which split the beast’s skull and melted the twisted machinery protecting its brain.
I hit the ground beside the fallen horror. I couldn’t help but look. Beneath the bones and coiled machine carapace, I glimpsed its insides. Its organs looked long dead. The mass of tissue inside its skull writhed in the low flames like worms in the dirt.
I couldn’t imagine what the Strigoi were.
Or once had been.
Or wanted to become.
Living death, was all I could think.
And I ran to fight the others.
More Will Come
Craters of hot stone hissed as they cooled.
Smoke from the burning dead floated past my helmet.
My feet felt heavy every time they hit the ground, thumping in the cold silence.
More will come, I knew.
I walked without aim through the smoke and shadows. I came across many fallen, and all of them looked dead. Even without the Strigoi’s energy weapons, most would not have survived the attack. I saw several bodies untouched by black fire, yet still slain. Their faces were frozen in pale, pale death, while their lips and eyes were dark.
Drained.
Their life sucked right out.
I felt it, too. I felt my body weaken, my heart stutter. But I also felt Callista buzzing away inside my suit, reenergizing me a few million cells at a time.
“I’d be dead if not for you,” I murmured as I wandered through the carnage.
She didn’t answer.
She was furious. And busy.
The three Strigoi hadn’t killed everyone. Not quite. From deeper in the cavern, I heard wailing. It hurt my heart and slowed my steps. Each camp had sent a handful of fighters, though only a few of them had survived. I saw one of the same young women who’d helped capture me. She staggered beside me, walking back toward a cluster of tents. Her mask was down, and she glanced at me with hollow eyes.
It didn’t matter that I’d killed the three Strigoi.
It was my fault they’d come in the first place.
I couldn’t look at the young woman for longer than a second. I felt cold with shame, numb with sorrow. I trudged on into nothing, and I saw more people on my way to nowhere. They staggered the same as I did, as lost as the stars the Strigoi meant to snuff.
“I’m done. You’re fixed,” said Callista.
“I can feel it,” I sighed.
“A simple thanks will do,” she said. “How many more times will I need to save your life before you stop doing stupid things?”
“I don’t know.” I almost smiled. “I figure more Strigoi will come. They’ll send a few thousand this time. There’ll be no saving me.”
Her irritation was strong.
“Joff Armstrong,” she said it the same way Mom would have, “you listen to me. We’re not going to die. We’re going back to the Sabre right now. I heard what the Sylpha woman said. Sunlight kills them. It’ll be dawn soon. We’ll have time to escape before those things come for us.”
For all the good it did, I rolled my eyes. “Come on, Cal. You know they’ve destroyed the Sabre by now. It’s a stone’s throw from the entrance to this place. It’s scrap metal by now.”
“No,” she said flatly.
“What do you mean, no?”
“I mean it’s not destroyed.”
I rolled my eyes again. “You can’t know that. We’re sitting under a few kilometers of rock. Your sensors don’t work.”
She argued. I shut her out. I walked the next hundred steps while ignoring everything she said. I didn’t care anymore.
It’s not as if I can kill them all, I thought.
Later, after I’d shambled past an ocean of death, I found myself wandering toward the monolith. A few people had gathered near it, maybe twenty in total, all but one of them older than me. They hunkered on the outer walls and watched me walk by. They didn’t look angry. They didn’t even seem sad.
If I’d have guessed, I’d have said they were already dead inside.
They know more are coming.
“Joff, don’t go in there,” Cal begged me. “I mapped the way to the surface. Just turn around and leave.”
It hurt me to ignore her.
But I did.
I walked into the monolith. None of the membrane doors were active. I saw a few young people huddled against the inner walls. They talked about me, and I knew they hated me. I still didn’t care.
“Because of what happened, we may have succeeded.” Cal lowered her voice. “Those things killed more than a hundred people. I know what you’re thinking, but—”
“You know it’s not true,” I rumbled.
“No I don’t,” she argued. “With so many dead, they might not be able to launch the S.R.’s. Even if it was an accident, those things coming here might have saved Earth. We can get in the Sabre. I know you want to go home. It’s daylight up there. Just turn around.”
For the first time in my memory, I felt sure Callista was wrong.
About so many things.
She heard me and Sylpha talk, and she still believes the Exodus people are killing stars, not the Strigoi.
She thinks I still care about our mission, about Abid. I don’t.
And she thinks I care about going home.
I meandered deeper into the monolith. I had no awareness of what was going on around me. The more I thought about it, the more I knew I had never believed I’d go home. The greater part of me had always known I’d never see Earth again.
“Think about it, Cal,” I murmured. “If these people had the power to destroy stars, they’d have killed ours first. It’s not them. It’s those things.”
I allowed myself a morbid smile.
I bet Abid knew this would happen.
He knew the Strigoi would see me.
He knew they’d follow me here.
Easier to let them finish off these people than to hope a farmer boy would do it alone.
I trudged to the monolith’s center. That’s when I saw Sylpha near her wreck of a bed. In her arms, she held a little boy and wept. The boy was her son, I understood. She’d never mentioned him.
And why would she?
I looked at her, and I imagined she was my mother and I was the limp boy in her arms. I shivered so hard I thought I might die.
I didn’t know why, but I walked up to her.
“Sylpha, I’m sorry.” I kneeled. “I am. Please…I didn’t know any of this would happen.”
I expected her to ignore me. It’s what I would’ve done in her situation. But to my surprise, she laid her son on her bed. With eyes red and empty and her soul broken, she stood and looked down at me.
“Better sooner than later,” she said.
I looked up. I didn’t understand yet.
“In another few years we’d have run out of food.” She glanced down at her son, his body drained of life. “I’d have watched him die slowly, and he would have watched me die just the same. So in this way, you’ve helped us.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“The way I see it, you have just a few hours,” she said.
I shook my head. If I’d have been in my right mind, I would’ve understood. But kneeling on the stone in the monolith gloom, I comprehended nothing.
“I know what will happen.” A tear ran down Sylpha’s face. “You’ll go up there, you’ll leave orbit, and as soon as you reach the edge of space, they’ll lance you and your pretty ship to ashes.”
I gulped.
“Doesn’t matter. You’re still going to do it,” she continued. “Yours is the first ship we’ve had in hundreds of years, Joff Armstrong. It’s a funny thing Abid did, making sure you were the only one who can fly it. He must’ve
known you’d fail. He knew you would land and we would try to take your ship away.”
What is she saying? I thought.
I wanted Callista to help me understand.
She didn’t.
“How will my ship and I get shot down?” I asked Sylpha. “I’m down here. I’m sure by now the Strig—”
“No.” She put her palm on my helmet. She looked angry, like she wanted to close her fingers and crush my head. “Your ship is fine. I told you already. My scouts went up there. I hoped they’d beat the Strigoi to the site. I hoped they’d launch. But no such luck.”
“Launch?” I felt stupid.
“My scouts are dead now.” Her face looked ready to shatter. “But not before they put a vid-beacon in the dirt. There’s five Strigoi guarding your ship. It’s daylight now, so they’re asleep. You have about ten hours.”
I stood. In the suit, I was much larger than her, but somehow I still felt small. She didn’t flinch. For at least that one moment, she was the hard, expressionless Sylpha I knew.
“You were going to steal my ship?” I asked her.
She nodded.
“And use it to do what, exactly?”
“Destroy Zeus and Hera,” she said. “Annihilate the Strigoi.”
I made a face.
“For that, you’d need at least two S.R.’s.”
She looked beyond me. I followed her gaze. Tables full of scrap parts, sheaves of paper, drawings, half-built machines, and five-hundred year old weapons lay in great piles behind me.
But in the chaos, I saw a hidden design.
“You’re a scientist?” I asked her.
She nodded again.
“You’ve been building something. A weapon. Two weapons. Something deadly. Something you stole from…them. Lukas Mosk, Wendall Wight…they sent you the parts you needed.”
“Finally, you understand,” she said.
“But…” I shook my head. “The Strigoi slaughtered your men. Which means—”
“They took the two string reprogrammers we made.” She finished my thought.
“Meaning at dusk tonight, we’re all dead.”
“Not all of us.” Her face fell into shadow. “Not you. Not if you get to them before they awaken.”
I pulled my helmet off, sat down at a table, and let Sylpha Frost, the woman I’d been sent to kill, explain how to destroy a world full of nightmares.
At Dawn they Sleep
I stood in a pool of blue sunlight. It washed over me, shining bright on my armor.
It warmed me none.
The Strigoi had punctured a gaping wound into the underworld. A hole twenty meters wide, its edges crisped black, opened straight to the sky. The great blue star Hera smoldered almost directly above the hole, meaning the day was already half dead.
Meaning everything is half dead.
I allowed myself the briefest moment of pride. If I hadn’t killed the three Strigoi, every last human in the underworld would’ve been butchered.
Though of course, with Sylpha’s plan, we would all die regardless.
“Is it up there?” I asked Cal. She’d been silent the whole way up. She’d never seen death before. The graveyard the Strigoi had left in the cavern had changed her.
“It’s there,” she answered. “Right where we left it.”
“And the Strigoi?”
“I sense nothing.” She sounded worried. “It’s the same as before. They’re not alive, so they don’t show up on my scans.”
I knelt in the pool of Hera’s light. I sucked in as deep a breath as any human ever had.
And I jumped.
Fifty meters, I soared upward. It was the Vezda suit’s upper limit, and it was barely enough. I grabbed the hole’s rim and pulled myself up. No sooner did I scramble to my feet and backed away from the edge than a brittle chunk of scorched stone broke off and fell into the darkness below.
When it hit the underworld’s floor, it shattered like glass.
“Lucky,” I breathed.
“Very lucky,” Cal agreed.
I stood on Ebes’ surface and looked skyward. Both stars were high in the sky, almost touching. Great golden Zeus and beautiful blue Hera were my protectors, I hoped. And even though Ebes was broken far beyond hope of ever again harboring life, I felt sad looking upon her. I tried to imagine a river running through the valley we stood in. I closed my eyes and dreamed of trees with scarlet leaves rustling in the breeze.
“Joff, we have to go,” Cal urged. She sounded gentler, and I was glad for it.
“Ok,” I said.
We went back the way we had come. Slabs of broken rock had fallen across the valley, no doubt felled by the Strigoi’s passage. We walked under arches of glassy orange rock and tread across carpets of crimson dust.
“Are we sure this is the right thing to do?” I asked as I climbed a stair of dust and stones toward the ridge.
“No.” Callista was blunt. “We could hit orbit, make for the Ring, and sail right back to Earth.”
I shook my head. I wasn’t about to do any such thing. I knew why Cal kept suggesting it. She really did love me. I was all she had in the universe, a thought that made me sad.
We mounted the ridge and strode across the plateau. Even though the night was still hours away, I walked with fear at my back, keeping a pace to match Ebes’ dry, dead wind. Even with the power of the Vezda suit, I was afraid. With the last Strigoi I’d slain, I had seen its eyes. It had smiled at me even as I’d fired the killing shot.
It knew something I didn’t.
And finally we saw it. The Sabre sat in a clearing of dust the color of fire. As we neared it, we knew Sylpha had told the truth.
Five spheres the shade of midnight ringed the Sabre.
They were big enough to house one Strigoi each, to protect the horror within until nightfall. Sylpha had told me the spheres were all but indestructible, but that maybe, just maybe, the blasts from my arm cannon would be powerful enough to crack them open.
Within one of the spheres, we hoped two string reprogrammers were hidden.
Hope.
I hate that word.
“What if those things took the S.R.’s back to their planet?” Callista queried.
“Why would a robot ask a question she already knows the answer to?” I smirked.
“I’m not a robot,” she huffed.
“If the S.R.’s are gone…” I hesitated. “I don’t know what we’ll do.”
My smirk faded as I approached the Sabre. The five coffin spheres ringed the black ship, twenty meters away on each side. I saw what the Strigoi had done. The seven warriors Sylpha had sent to steal the Sabre were piled in a heap just beneath its belly. Wisps of smoke rose from their smoldering bodies. With their simple weapons, they’d stood no chance.
Sweating inside the Vezda suit, I walked to the first of the Strigoi coffin spheres. I remembered being brave when I’d faced Wendall Wight and when I’d stood on my farm and seen the stars go out. But no longer. Opening graves was not for me.
“What do I do? Just blast them open?” I wondered aloud.
“Can’t hurt to try,” said Cal. “Stand at an angle in case your shot rebounds.”
Her advice probably saved us both.
I stood at a sharp angle and fired two shots at the closest Strigoi coffin. The balls of golden energy hit the shell and bounced off, ricocheting into a spire of red rock some fifty meters away. The rock spire collapsed into corpselike dust. The sphere was unblemished.
Annoyed, I fired ten shots more. Some bounced off and burned craters in the ground. Others soared skyward into forever.
Not even a scratch, I observed.
“Get in the ship, Joff,” urged Cal. “Close your eyes so you don’t have to see the bodies. I’ll ping the Sabre and call the ladder down. We’ll fly to the Ring. It’ll be ok.”
I almost did it.
I almost walked away.
But I couldn’t.
I remembered the anguish in Sylpha’s eyes. I rememb
ered how Abid had used me. I remembered standing beneath the stars with my teddy bear in my hands, not yet knowing the tiny points of light in the sky were already being extinguished.
“I have an idea,” I said.
“I’m listening.” She didn’t sound pleased.
“You go inside,” I told her. “You open them.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you. There has to be a seam somewhere. Only one of us can break themselves into a few hundred-thousand pieces. And it’s not me.”
She expelled herself from the suit. The jolt of her leaving sent a shiver into my entire body.
And there she floated, as beautiful as ever. I realized I hadn’t seen her since we’d left the Ring. Staring at her, I almost forgot my fear.
“You aren’t serious.” She hovered with her arms crossed. “You want me to crawl in there with those…things?”
“Split yourself up,” I said. “Only send in enough of yourself to open each sphere.”
She glared at me, her bright eyes burning with the same blue fury as Hera’s fire.
“Are you afraid?” I asked.
“Are you?” she shot back.
“More than I’ll admit.”
That did it. She uncrossed her arms and floated away. She looked sad in a way I didn’t know was possible.
“Only for you, Joff.” She shook her head. “Only for you.”
She twirled in the dead Ebes’ air. Her beauty was lost as she became something other than a tiny blue girl. I saw her expel tiny fragments of herself, breaking her body into motes no bigger than grains of sand. It happened so quickly, so quietly. In a cloud of particles, she swarmed over the Strigoi coffin.
Good thing it’s not windy, I thought.
Else she’d be blown away.
I worried for her.
One part of me hoped she wouldn’t find a way in, and that she’d take her familiar shape again.
Another part of me thought she might lie and say she couldn’t find a seam. We’d have to escape, which is what I knew she wanted.
But the darkest part of me feared she’d break into the black sphere only to be overwhelmed by whatever poisonous technology awaited within.
I stood still, my cold breaths rising inside me. I looked up at the suns, and I swore I saw them falling toward the horizon faster than they should have.
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