And seven Strigoi ships cut through the gloom to intercept us.
“Here they come.” I gritted my teeth.
In a matter of seconds, it began. Our Sabre and the skeletal Strigoi craft tore through deep space at an obscene pace. I banked hard left, streaking directly at them, before pulling the Sabre up and right.
Mid-turn, I fired off scores of leech missiles.
The pulsating black blobs moved at the same absurd velocity as we did. I glimpsed a few of them break toward the Strigoi craft, and I smiled when my enemies scattered.
They’ve probably never seen leeches before.
Who’d want to suck Strigoi blood?
I saw explosive puffs in one of the vid-screens. A handful of leech missiles had erupted into plumes of violet light, each of which were consumed by the vacuum of space. I hoped at first they had hit their marks and killed several Strigoi.
“No.” Cal knew what I was thinking. “The Strigoi…they’re lancing the leeches before they hit. Their accuracy...it’s impossible.”
“Gee thanks.” I rolled my eyes, pushed the Sabre back on course for Hera, and unloaded every last leech bomb we had.
Just slow them down, I thought.
We don’t have to kill them.
We just have to reach the stars.
In thinking such things, I realized what I was doing. The sacrifice wouldn’t be Sylpha’s alone. Even if I annihilated Hera and Zeus, the Strigoi ships would chase us to the end of time.
We’re committing suicide.
Three of the Strigoi ships fired at us. From their cadaverous hulls, I saw pulses of black energy tear through the empty space between their ships and mine. The pulses weren’t straight, but bending and coiling, smoking and twisting as they traced the Sabre’s path. I heard Cal scream and the Sabre’s computer hiss a warning.
I remembered my time in the flight simulators.
I recalled the long, lonely hours and the times I’d stayed up all night just to earn a perfect flight score.
I got this.
I swiped the images off the console screen, darkening all camera angles except for the Sabre’s cockpit window. I gripped the control stick and made our ship do things it probably wasn’t meant to do. I pulled left, and in mid-pull jerked it down and right. I barrel rolled, and saw a stream of deadly energy slide past us, tearing a dark line through the space just outside the Sabre’s window.
I made the Sabre dance.
And I made the Strigoi miss.
The computer protested. Our gravity controls were strained to the Sabre’s limit. The hard rolls, twists, and accelerations threatened to override the ship’s localized gravity and tear the Sabre to pieces.
I didn’t slow down. Not even a little.
“Pressurize the ejectors,” I said to Cal.
“But we’re not close enough,” she argued. “We’ll—”
“Do it,” I commanded. “Do it now. We’re going twelve-million kilometers per minute. We’ll get a little closer and launch at Hera.”
“But…both S.R.’s will eject at the same time,” she groaned. “It won’t—”
I banked hard left and fired a stream of flechettes from the Sabre’s nose at the skeletal Strigoi ship that flew by. I was sure I hit it, but when I banked back and glimpsed the same enemy craft tearing through the space in front of me, I knew our weapons were useless. The flechettes hit the skeletal ships.
…and turned to powder upon impact.
That’s when it dawned on me.
The Strigoi probably had no idea what we were doing or why we were hurtling toward the suns. They’d probably just seen a ship leap out of Ebes’ orbit and thought to kill us out of habit.
“I wonder…” I said I wove between another storm of Strigoi dark energy pulses.
“You wonder what?” Cal had a horrified look on her face.
“If we get close enough to the suns…”
She knew what I was thinking.
With every barrage of Strigoi shots we avoided, they came closer and closer to hitting us. One direct hit was all it would take, I knew. I pushed the quantum engine near its upper limit, speeding us up and slowing us down, oscillating between a million kilometers per minute and twenty million. I wasn’t sure how the Strigoi managed to keep so close. All seven of them changed speeds with me, bending every law of physics imaginable. If I’d have had half a brain in my head, I’d have wet my pants.
Cal pressurized the ejector.
We were minutes from launching at Hera.
And then the Sabre’s radio crackled with the sound of Strigoi voices.
Climbing Olympus
The Strigoi whispered across the void.
I’d expected something harsher, something monstrous. But the haunting sounds they made were far more chilling.
They said things to me. I heard at least three distinct voices echoing inside the Sabre’s cockpit, drifting from the radio like wind over a frozen wasteland. I wasn’t sure how they’d tapped into our frequency. It didn’t matter.
There they were.
Maybe the Strigoi hoped their voices would confuse me, that I’d make a mistake and fly right into a lance of black energy. I didn’t. I pretended flying the Sabre was as easy as being back on the farm, working to fix a tractor before sunset. It was a simple thing, I convinced myself. All I had to do was imagine a new pattern to survive every storm of death.
Yet even as I tore a ragged hole through space and time, I listened to the Strigoi speak. And my fear mounted.
Their whispers sharpened.
The sounds they made became clearer.
At first I thought they were mocking me. But then I heard them use words the Exodus people had uttered. I didn’t know the Exodus language, but I understood what was happening.
They’re trying to talk to me.
They know how to speak human.
I wonder if—
“You cannot hide,” I heard one of them say.
Its voice shook the Sabre’s insides. It sounded dead, yet alive. Callista gasped. I floundered for a moment, nearly gliding into a stream of death particles traveling at a million kilometers per second.
“You know my words?” I shivered.
“We will find you,” said another, quieter yet no less malignant.
“A million worlds,” uttered the third and most powerful, “a thousand galaxies before yours. You cannot hide…from what you will become.”
I pushed the control stick down. Hera came into my view, filling half the cockpit’s window. The very edge of a Strigoi death-stream clipped the Sabre’s left wing, annihilating three meters of the wing’s tip.
Don’t need it, I thought.
Just thirty more seconds.
Come on.
The radio went dead, then crackled to life one final time. I braced myself for the awful sounds.
“We are you,” the first Strigoi whispered.
“You are us,” said the second.
“Long from now, you will know,” boomed the third. “When the last star dies and the Strigoi reign, you will know.”
Get out, I wanted to scream.
I didn’t dare say a word.
Silence filled the air again. I felt rattled, but not beaten. I pulled the control stick hard right, decelerated to a few hundred-thousand kilometers per minute, and swiped all the console’s vid-screens back on.
“Still behind us?” I shouted.
On one of the vid screens, I saw three Strigoi craft hurtling toward the Sabre’s back. “How the hell are they doing it? It’s like they know where I’m going before I do.”
“Joff.” Cal’s voice was soft. “Did you hear what it said?”
Yes, I thought.
“They’re just trying to scare us,” I said.
“They’re saying—”
“I know what they’re saying,” I shouted. “They’re saying they know what we’re doing. They’re saying even if we succeed, they’ll just send more Strigoi from the next galaxy over to wipe us out
.”
“Maybe.” She shuddered. “But they’re also saying they used to be human.”
I’d heard it. I just didn’t want to think about it.
“Doesn’t matter,” I said, and then re-accelerated just in time to avoid being carved in two.
My defiance must have enraged the Strigoi. Even after their threats, I made the Sabre twist and spiral, dancing between many deaths. One of their black beams grazed the Sabre’s bottom and burned a shallow rut twenty meters long, but a thousand other Strigoi shots missed. I pulled the control stick every imaginable way, and then I pulled our nose up.
We were flying directly at Hera.
Blue and bright, she filled the cockpit window. I squinted, unable to bear looking directly at her without burning my eyes. Just as I’d hoped, the Strigoi shots became wild before stopping altogether. I swept my eyes across every vid-screen, and where once I’d counted seven Strigoi ships, only two remained.
Suicidal, I thought. At this range, Hera’s light will destroy them.
“Eject the S.R.’s,” I calmly told Cal.
“But Joff—” she protested.
“Do it. Do it now.”
She flitted to a wall panel and punched a button with all her might. I heard a hiss, and I saw the S.R.’s leave. Even with massive Hera blazing in my eyes, I glimpsed two silver motes glinting against an ocean of blue fire. And then they were gone.
Two S.R.’s for one sun.
I hope this works.
Cal sobbed. She looked at me with a broken heart. I was surprised she didn’t understand.
“We needed to kill both stars, Joff,” she said through her tears.
“We just did…I think.”
“You think?”
“I read it in one of my sister’s science books. When Hera goes nova, she’ll take Zeus with her.”
“But Joff, you don’t—”
Another lance of Strigoi energy struck us. It burned against the Sabre’s backside, a direct hit, yet somehow it didn’t carve us in half.
Even their weapons are weaker in the sunlight.
If I had let the Sabre fly straight for another few seconds, we’d have been annihilated. Hera’s corona would’ve melted us the same as the sunlight on Ebes had vaporized the Strigoi. Wincing against her light, I banked as hard left as I could. I glimpsed our two Strigoi pursuers in a vid-screen. They flew just behind me, ashes streaming from their hulls. When I saw them following me instead of the S.R.’s, I felt a glimmer of hope.
They’re dead. They just don’t know it yet.
“Joff.” Cal’s sobs had stopped. “The hulls on those two Strigoi are thicker than the others. The others melted. These two won’t…not before they kill us.”
“I’ll just keep maneuvering—”
“No,” she cut me off. “The last shot they hit us with…it shredded one of the gravity controls. If we decelerate as fast as you have been, we’ll tear ourselves to pieces.”
I glanced at the console.
The red streak told me it was true.
All this time, I thought with a grim smile.
I knew I’d never see Earth again.
Maybe this is what Mom and Dad meant for me to do.
Maybe not.
But it’s done now.
As we peeled away from Hera, I glanced at the vid-screen one last time. The two Strigoi were just behind us. Pieces of their ships were flaking off, and I swore I saw one of their faces burning behind a smoke-colored window. Hera had destroyed the other five, but these last two were stronger somehow.
Or maybe they just hate me harder.
One of their ships wove through the void, lining up for a final shot. The other reared up beside it. I turned the Sabre gently left, then right again. I could feel our ship’s reluctance. One wrong move, and I’d do the Strigoi’s dirty work for them.
I looked up just in time to see Cal flit into the door between the cockpit and the rest of the ship. Her eyes were downcast, and her blue light dimmer than ever.
“I need you to do something, Joff,” she said. “Listen to me. Don’t talk.”
I stared at her. All of me was tense. My body was waiting to be burned away. I only hoped it wouldn’t hurt.
“Pull the trigger,” she said. “Pull it and hold it down.”
“Pull the trigger?” I made a face. “But Cal, we’re all out of missiles. It won’t do any—”
“Pull it,” she repeated. “Hold it down.”
“Why?” I felt stupid.
The Strigoi ship lined up with us. I heard it whisper something horrid over our radio, but with a swipe on the console I silenced it.
“Pull it,” Cal said one final time. “Hold it down so the missile port stays open. Do it.”
I didn’t think. I keyed in a swift sequence and pulled the red trigger on the control stick.
Cal looked at me, cracked a tiny smile, and vanished.
By the time I understood what she was doing, it was too late. She was faster than I’d ever given her credit for. I released the trigger, but she’d already slipped into the Sabre’s internal systems and expelled herself out of the ship.
Through the missile port, I gulped.
Into space.
I made myself look at the vid-screen again. I saw a pinprick of blue light fly directly at the Strigoi ship behind us. The black, skeletal machine had matched our speed, and so for Callista it must’ve felt like floating across a hallway joining two rooms. She slithered into a crater Hera had burned into the Strigoi’s hull. And then she was gone.
It happened in the space between two breaths.
She invaded the Strigoi ship.
She made it veer hard right…
…and collide with its companion.
Cal...
No.
I felt my heart stutter. I nearly sank to the floor, but I made myself sit up in my chair. When the two Strigoi vessels collided, they broke apart in a catastrophe of bones, twisted machinery, and orbs of oil scattering into the darkness.
Untouched, the Sabre flew into the emptiness.
Callista had saved me.
Shadows and Dust
The Sabre tunneled through space, wounded and aimless. For what felt like eons, I sat in the cockpit chair with my eyes closed. My body was limp. The rise and fall of my chest was shallow. If anyone had seen me, they might’ve thought I was dead.
It was true. A part of me had died.
In the aching silence, I wondered how it had come to this.
Just a farm boy, I laughed inside my head.
I should be digging holes. Working until dusk. Eating griddlecakes with Mom.
Instead I’m out here. Doing what exactly?
Oh yeah, that’s right.
I might never have seen it if not for the Sabre’s computer. She chirped a warning at me, and while lolling in my chair, I allowed my eyes to crack open. The cockpit screen was dark. Through it, I saw only stars. Even though I was still traveling at hundreds of thousands of kilometers per minute, the heavens were fixed beyond the window. The universe was painted on a black canvas, and I felt motionless.
But the vid-screen told a different tale.
I glanced at it only because of the radiance glowing on its surface. The entire screen flashed white, then blue, then a color I had no name to describe. It showed me what was happening behind the Sabre, a place I’d almost forgotten.
Mighty Hera, queen among stars, had begun to die.
The scientist in me knew what was happening. The string reprogrammers, both of them, were instructing every hydrogen molecule in the star to become helium.
All at once.
In normal scientific terms, it was impossible. But the S.R.’s worked on a level beneath atoms, electrons, and common chemistry. They spoke directly to the components of everything, to the strings below and inside the elements.
The reaction happened faster than I’d expected. Hera changed at the rate of several million square kilometers per second. And as she perished, she grew
. Torrents of blue fire erupted from her surface, while ropes of violet light writhed in the space around her. If I hadn’t been going so absurdly fast, I would’ve been consumed. It probably wouldn’t have even hurt. The radiation would’ve split every cell in my body, and the heat trailing it would’ve melted the Sabre faster than I could’ve cried out for my mother.
I remembered Cal. The lump in my throat hurt to swallow.
Hera is blue like Cal. She’s beautiful…even when she’s dying.
Wait, I thought.
I have to see it.
I have to see them.
I lurched forward and keyed a sequence onto the control panel. The little screen flickered back to life. My trajectory through the darkness appeared, a thin white line against a deep black background. I was headed away from Hera in roughly the same direction I’d come.
It meant the Sabre would pass near the Strigoi world.
Which means I can watch them die.
My heart pumped a little harder. The tingling in my fingers faded. I brought up the Sabre’s long-range scope and ordered it to find the Strigoi planet. As fast as I was going, it should’ve been more difficult, but the Sabre’s computer captured the image in seconds.
We’d already flown past the nightmare world.
Which meant we could only see its dark side.
I glimpsed the cursed planet. It looked just as it had before. The Sabre’s scope couldn’t show me every detail, but I remembered it well enough. I picked out the tallest towers, the dark spears vaulting skyward. I saw clusters of ghostly lights, the concentrated dwellings of the dead.
Behind it all, I saw Hera blossoming.
It felt strange to watch such violence without being able to hear anything. Too quietly, Hera exploded. A tormented sphere of blue light, she grew and grew into a bloated tyrant. The Sabre’s scope flickered out several times, and then returned. I saw Hera’s radiance sweep across the Strigoi’s day side, and then swallow and extinguish everything.
For one short breath, I was able to see what became of them.
For taking my Cal, they deserved it.
For slaughtering the Exodus people, they earned it.
Darkness Between the Stars Page 22