Shadow of Forever (Eaters of the Light Book 2)

by J. Edward Neill

  I swallowed the lump in my throat. She was more right than she knew.

  If we’d been together, I’d have stayed with her.

  If we’d had a family…

  A house…

  A life…

  “I’d have stayed on Sumer with you,” I admitted.

  “I know.”

  Nosfera

  I awoke, and I knew the Ring had stopped.

  I peeled myself away from sleeping Cal and padded across the bedroom pod. The ship’s console, too bright for my tired eyes, booted up by itself. With a yawn, I rubbed my eyes and leaned over the deep blue screen.

  It read:

  Velocity – 0.0002 kilometers per second

  Targeted mass no longer defined

  Distance from targeted location – 201,004,940 kilometers

  Nosfera system not defined

  “Not defined?” I asked the Ring’s computer. “What does that mean?”

  I stepped away and let it sink in. I’d programmed the Ring to come no closer to Nosfera than two-hundred million kilometers. My hope had always been that the Strigoi wouldn’t detect us at such a distance.

  Staring at the console, I wasn’t sure whether we’d arrived.

  ...or whether we’d journeyed billions of kilometers off course.

  No stars.

  No planets.

  This isn’t a system. It’s a graveyard.

  While Cal dozed, I sat before the console and worked. I manually adjusted the Ring’s long-range scopes, searching the vast darkness. I scanned for radiation, Strigoi ships, and movement of any kind. The dark planetoid I’d seen on Samison’s datapad appeared to have vanished.

  The death-sphere was nowhere to be seen.

  We’re in the wrong place, I assumed.

  Or maybe…I shivered. The Strigoi sphere moved.

  Engrossed in the console, I didn’t notice when Cal slid out of bed and slinked up beside me. She leaned into me with a sigh, and I jumped nearly out of my skin.

  “I didn’t hear you,” I said with a shiver.

  “Sorry.” She knelt beside my chair. “You were lost. We’ve stopped, haven’t we?”

  “Yes. But—”

  She rested her head on my shoulder. I felt her hair on my neck, her fingertips caressing me. For six days, we’d done little besides sleep, eat, and touch. I’d abandoned my obsession to love her. I’d lost my focus.

  And now…

  “What’s the matter?” She sensed my agitation.

  “The Strigoi sphere…it’s gone.” I shook my head. “I can’t find its gravity signature. I can’t find anything. Samison knew about the stars and the seven planets. They vanished decades ago. But the sphere…it’s nowhere.”

  Her tousled hair hung across her eyes. But through the long blue strands, I knew the look I saw.

  Hope.

  If the sphere’s gone…

  “Careful. We don’t know anything yet,” I cautioned her. “The Strigoi could be hiding.”

  “But you said—”

  “I know what I said,” I snapped, and regretted it immediately.

  I gave all my attention to the console. Cal dressed, brought me breakfast, and draped a blanket over my shoulders. If she was upset, I couldn’t tell. In fact, I hardly noticed her at all. My fingers were flames roaring over the console’s surface. I needed answers. Lacking them, I doubted everything I’d believed.

  “Where is it?” I asked. “There should be something. Gravity, radiation, something.”

  “Be calm, Joff.” Cal stood beside me.

  I can’t.

  We sat for hours in the darkness. I urged her to leave me, but she wanted none of it. Too quiet, she watched me obsess over the console’s data, living and dying with me as I scanned the Nosfera void.

  Nothing. It’s empty.

  If nothing else, the view was stunning. We’d arrived at the galaxy’s edge, the farthest spiral of the Milky Way. Behind the Nosfera void, the galactic core blazed in a glorious cataclysm of blues, whites, and yellows. I’d seen it before, and yet I’d rarely paid attention.

  All I could think of was my failure.

  My eyes hurt after hours of staring. My body rebelled at my inaction. I stood, fuming, and I shook the console by its frame. I wanted to break it, but I couldn’t let Cal see me lose myself to anger.

  I stormed off. Looking miserable, she just sat there.

  Might’ve been better had the Strigs killed us in our sleep, I thought as I left her in the darkness.

  Hours later, after exhausting myself with exercise, I hunkered alone in the observation pod. I hadn’t seen Cal since leaving. Her empty chair hurt to see. I’d glimpsed the hope in her eyes, her desire to never find the Strigoi, and I’d dismissed her.

  Because I’m obsessed.

  I leaned forward on my chair’s edge and gazed at the stars spinning beyond the window. It seemed there were fewer, so many fewer. I couldn’t tell whether it was my mind playing tricks or the Strigoi had already begun their endgame.

  I almost didn’t care.

  Behind me, the door slid open.

  Cal walked in.

  I knew what I expected. I thought she’d come to scold me for my anger and then woo me back to bed. In my state of mind, I’d have done anything she asked. She was all I had. If I shunned her, I’d be lost.

  But when I saw her face, I knew I’d guessed wrong. She hadn’t come to scold or woo me. Pale, shaking, and unable to look me in my eyes, she stopped halfway across the room.

  “You need to come with me,” she said.

  “What’s wrong?” I pushed myself out of the chair. “Are you sick?”

  “Just come,” she said again.

  She walked, and I followed. Questions burned on my tongue, but I swallowed them. She kept a quick pace, more robotic than ever. If I’d had to describe the look on her face, I’d have said terrified.

  She led me back to the bedroom pod. The windows were shuttered and the lights dimmed. The air hung in cold curtains atop me. Opposite the bed, the console’s screen glowed its eerie blue.

  I knew what I’d see even before I saw it.

  “Sit,” Cal instructed. “And look.”

  I sat. I looked. And I saw.

  There in the deep void on the console’s screen, something festered. A colossal sphere, its sides the black of a starless night, floated in the endless dark. Cracks in its body emitted a vulgar red light, the sickly gleam like blood leaking from a body freshly fallen.

  I glanced at Cal and swallowed.

  We’d found what we’d been searching for.

  And in the years we’d spent sleeping amid the stars, our enemy had been busy.

  Flowing in and out of the sphere’s scarlet cracks were ships, thousands of them. The skeletal craft were larger than those I’d fought so long ago, and yet all too familiar. Shaped like sickles of blackened bone, they wove in strange patterns, carving through the emptiness like ghosts. Those flying into the sphere carried husks of some dread material in their claws. Those that left carried nothing.

  “They’re dropping off cargo.” I barely breathed. “Where’d they get it from? Where are they going?”

  Cal tapped the console three times, opening a vid-scan she’d captured before fetching me.

  “There,” she said. “To that.”

  I gazed with wide eyes at the giant planet on the screen. The bloated gas sphere was darker than anything, even the Strigoi themselves. Scores of scythe ships moved in its foreground, all of them near to penetrating its smoking black clouds. I counted more skeletal ships curling in the darkness away from the planet, hunting its moons. The moons were many, and yet all looked broken, harvested down to their bones.

  Feeding the Strigoi sphere.

  “The planet…it’s huge,” I exhaled. “And so dark. There’s got to be a hundred moons.”

  “I scanned them.” I heard Cal’s fear in her voice. “They’re all carved up. The Strigoi aren’t just mining them. They’re devouring everything.”


  My heart slowed in my chest. My vision blurred. The truth was: in the days I’d spent entangled in bed with Cal, I’d begun to share her hope. Contented, I’d lain with her in the dark, and each time she’d kissed me I’d wanted to find the Strigoi less. They began to flee my mind.

  Only to rise again.

  With a shudder, I panned back to the Strigoi sphere. Its surface was pitted and cracked, the red glow crawling out like lantern light from inside a skull.

  “How’d you find it?”

  “I ran a simulation.” Her face paled. “I told the Ring’s physics engine to pretend the stars that used to be here went supernova. It only makes sense; the Strigoi hate the light. They probably destroyed the stars once they were done soaking up their power. And their deaths hurled everything beyond Nosfera’s boundaries.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  “A few hundred-million kilometers beyond where Nosfera used to be,” she said. “Samison’s calculations weren’t off by much. But he never could’ve known the Strigoi sphere was moving.”

  “And the dark planet? The one they’re flying around?”

  “Ejected from the system when Nosfera’s stars were destroyed,” she explained. “Far enough away and big enough not to be destroyed. We weren’t looking deep enough. The planet’s huge. It’s three times Jupiter’s size. Or at least…three times what Jupiter once was.”

  “…before Jupiter died.” I finished her thought.

  “Right.” She looked sick. “And now the Strigoi thing is orbiting it. Soaking up all its resources. Eating it.”

  She backed away from the console. I sat there and I stared. The measurements on the screen told me all I needed to know:

  Non-natural structure detected

  Diameter – 5,271 kilometers (approx. 1.5 times Earth’s moon)

  Composition – unknown

  Origin - unknown

  No life forms detected

  No life forms, I thought.

  Because they’re already dead.

  “What happens now?” Cal asked the question I feared most.

  I flicked two fingers across the screen. The console went black, dropping the bedroom into near total darkness. The only sounds were our breaths. The room felt cold, too cold, as if we’d plunged underwater.

  “The idea…” I felt stupid saying it. “…was to program the Ring to collide with the Strigoi sphere at max quantum speed. It’d happen at a few million kilometers per second. It’d be fast enough to destroy anything.”

  “Suicide? Your plan was suicide?” She crossed her arms.

  “No. We’d uncouple the Sabre first. I had a daydream of us flying away. We’d take turns in the Sabre’s hypo-chamber. We’d go back to Sumer and cure the Strigoi contagion. It felt possible when I dreamed it. I thought we could do it.”

  “Joff—”

  “I know,” I interrupted. “It can’t be done. That thing is too big. The image on Samison’s datapad...it was old. I saw its core, but now it’s all covered up. I mean, maybe we could line the Ring up with one of the big red cracks. And maybe we could—”

  “No.”

  “No?” I questioned.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “You think they’ve spent a half-century building something you could crash a ship into and destroy? Come on, Joff. They know what you did to Ebes. The core you saw on Samison’s pad is buried beneath a thousand kilometers of metal and bone. They’re not stupid. If you’re right and they’ve killed entire galaxies before, they’re the smartest creatures ever to live.”

  “They’re not alive,” I countered.

  “You know what I mean.” I could feel her rolling her eyes.

  I slumped deep into the chair. “Yeah, I know,” I rumbled. “We have no weapons. We have no plan. It’s us against millions of them.”

  We’ve crossed oceans of time.

  …for nothing.

  “So I’ll ask again,” she said. The hope in her eyes hurt to see. “What will we do?”

  I didn’t have the courage to answer.

  The Hive

  I sat with the Vezda suit’s helmet in my lap.

  And I considered what Callista would think of me.

  She was still asleep, still drowsing in our bed without any idea what I’d done. She would know when she woke, of course. The sleep capsule I’d slipped into her water had a telltale aftertaste she’d sense the moment she sat up in bed. She’d have a headache and her mouth would be dry.

  Her heart would be broken.

  I traced the pale, curving line etched into the helmet’s visor. I’d killed the Strigoi monster who’d scratched it more than sixty years ago, but I’d never forgotten how close it had come to ending me. Its four white eyes had burned a hole in my memory I’d never lose.

  It hadn’t wanted to kill me so much as dispose of my life.

  Quickly.

  Efficiently.

  With a scream and a puff of ash.

  The memory filled me with dread.

  And with purpose.

  I lowered the helmet onto my shoulders. The suit hissed as its pressure stabilized. I’d considered waiting until I was closer to the Strigoi death-sphere, but I figured one of their ships was likely to find and destroy the Sabre, leaving me floating in deep space.

  I didn’t want to die suffocating with boiling blood.

  When the Strigoi caught me, I didn’t want a slow death.

  I want it quickly.

  Efficiently.

  The Sabre drifted free of the Ring. I waited until the Ring fell a few hundred meters behind before igniting the Sabre’s quantum engine. In silence, the ship lurched toward the Strigoi death-sphere. Or, as I’d learned decades ago, it instructed the universe to let me through.

  I’d never really understood how the quantum engine worked.

  It didn’t matter.

  Soundless, I soared away from Cal and the Ring. The quantum engine made the Sabre cut through space to the tune of eleven-million kilometers per minute. I could’ve gone faster, but there was no need. At only a few hundred-million kilos away, the trip to the Strigoi sphere promised to be brief.

  No sense in speeding death up.

  One last time, I tried to daydream of Cal, of her fingers clasped in mine, of her mouth and her body beneath me. I couldn’t do it. Already, my mind was emptying.

  I arrived.

  At ten-thousand kilometers away from the Strigoi sphere, I powered down the quantum engine. The universe came into focus around me. Beyond Nosfera, the galaxy ended, and the darkness felt complete.

  And there it is.

  I saw the loathsome sphere, its bony black crust, the pallid red light leaking through its kilometer-wide cracks. On the Sabre’s vid-screens, I glimpsed thousands of Strigoi craft floating in lanes around it. Their claws bulged with containers, their wings sharp and skeletal. Far to the right, I caught sight of the giant dark planet. My scanners told me it was composed of iron and methane. I didn’t know what the Strigoi called it, if anything. To me, it looked like a tomb.

  I bounced in the Sabre’s cockpit seat. I sucked in a breath and exhaled an apology to Cal. My right arm was locked into the Vezda’s arm-cannon, and so I snared the control stick with my left hand.

  And aligned the Sabre with the largest of the Strigoi sphere’s cracks.

  At first, the lanes of Strigoi ships betrayed no reaction. I carved through the blackness straight for the massive sphere, and I saw no change in the patterns they flew. I wondered if the skeletal ships were auto-piloted or whether I’d surprised them completely.

  But at four-thousand kilometers away, six ships broke away and came for me. It was hard to see their dark wings through the cockpit window, but on the Sabre’s vid-screens I counted them. Three swung up and to my left. Three dove down and to my right.

  “Not friendly?” I smirked. “Oh well.”

  If the Strigoi were capable of fear, they had no real reason to feel it for me. In battle against them many years past, I’d exhausted the Sabre�
�s every leech bomb, flechette, and missile. None of my weapons had done any damage, of course. It had been the sunlight that had melted their ships.

  And their planet.

  Still smirking, I dared no evasive action. Three to a side, the Strigoi fired coils of deadly black energy at me. Each of the smoking black beams swam through space at the Sabre. The weapons were beautiful in a way. I’d once seen a snake on Earth, its body rippling across shallow water, whose movements the black beams mimicked.

  An instant before the energy weapons would’ve torn the Sabre to pieces, I fired the quantum engine, leapt three-thousand kilometers closer to the sphere, and flew into the giant hollow crack.

  I wasn’t sure if the six Strigoi pursued me. Their ships were faster, yet with a glance at the Sabre’s vid-screen I saw nothing behind me.

  I almost dared to hope.

  Just as I killed the quantum engine and piloted the Sabre into the crack, Cal’s voice burst into my earpiece.

  “Joff! Joff!” she cried out.

  “Now’s not the time,” I said.

  At so great a distance from the Ring, I knew it’d take several seconds for her to hear my voice, and several more for me to hear her reply. I used the moment of silence to weave into the crack. The walls were oily and pitted, the texture like a corpse’s insides. I was a gnat pestering a behemoth.

  I expected to die within seconds.

  “Where are you?” I heard Cal say.

  I swung the Sabre through a web of black columns. Like grotesque ligaments, the fleshy columns dangled between the walls. I couldn’t imagine their purpose.

  “I’m inside the sphere.” My voice echoed in the Vezda’s helmet. “I’m going to cause as much damage as I can. I left a note under your pillow. I’m sorry. I love you.”

  The crack narrowed. Walls that had been a kilometer apart squeezed me into a space a few hundred meters wide. With the Sabre’s quantum field, I clipped several of the dangling ligaments, annihilating them. I couldn't help but hope a few Strigoi were destroyed with each one.

  I heard Cal shouting. I regretted leaving her, hating myself for walking away while she slept. It was too late, I knew. I slowed the Sabre to a crawl, and I glimpsed the crack’s terminus. The lights at the bottom weren’t red, but sickly blue, the color of lifeless flesh.