The Dark Between the Stars

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Tamo’l said, “The laboratories and living quarters are bright and sterile.”

  Fennis took his wife’s hand. “Let’s see what we’ve gotten ourselves into, love.”

  They left the wet landing platform and rode a lift tube down into a dazzling white chamber. Overhead, waves washed across the curved surface of the dome.

  Through thism, Tamo’l sensed the presence of her patients, her friends. Many would come out to greet the new volunteers. With her lens-kith sensitivity, Tamo’l could feel the warmth of their exuberant welcome.

  Shawn Fennis and Chiar’h looked uncertain, but friendly. They smiled as the first group of misbreeds came forward.

  THIRTY-THREE

  TAL GALE’NH

  As the Kolpraxa approached the swelling black nebula, the emptiness grew deeper and darker. From inside the command nucleus Tal Gale’nh watched the sparse stars wink out in the observation dome overhead. The cloud swirled with shadows and expanded like the blood of night spilling out of a deep wound.

  “This is a research ship,” he said. “We have all the sensors we need. Analysis?”

  “It is not dust, Tal,” said one of the scientist kith. “No known astronomical phenomenon. Perimeter measurements are difficult to determine.” The other crewmembers studying their screens just shook their heads.

  The oily-dark blob grew aimlessly. “Dispatch a probe,” Gale’nh said.

  The small device shot from the Kolpraxa’s bow like a flying fish, sailing off with extended fins and antennae that sent pulses into the dark nebula.

  Rememberer Ko’sh watched and waited with grim concern. “Darkness grows without the light.”

  Gale’nh glanced at him, not sure what the historian meant. “Then we’ll bring the light.”

  Readings transmitted from the probe showed nothing, and the response screens remained dark. The scientist kith were confused. “It is not just darkness, Tal. It is a complete lack of light and energy.”

  When the shadow cloud extended toward the Kolpraxa, Gale’nh ordered the helm, “Alter course, keep a safe distance. Shields at full strength.”

  The probe continued to send back signal pings, to the further consternation of the analysis team. “Trying to pinpoint the source of the shadow cloud, Tal. It seems to be emerging from a tear in space.” The chief scientist shook her head. “It is not composed of matter. Not solid. There is no substance whatsoever.”

  The probe transmissions broke into static, then silence. Command nucleus screens went blank and dead. On the primary screen, Gale’nh watched the bright glimmer of the probe plunge into the dark cloud and disappear.

  The scientist kith reviewed the readings and stared at one another, waiting for someone else to offer an interpretation. Finally, a small-statured male with fluttery hands said, “It is just . . . blind entropy.”

  Gale’nh shored up his resolve, remembering the Mage-Imperator’s command. “We need to understand this. We will not succumb to a fear of the unknown.”

  “There is danger, Tal,” said Rememberer Ko’sh. “The darkness is its own warning. We have a great deal of historical precedent.”

  “We have a great many stories,” Gale’nh corrected.

  Ko’sh looked offended. “Those stories are our history.”

  Gale’nh knew thousands of tales from the Saga of Seven Suns, and some of those tales were no longer trustworthy. Ko’sh had reminded his crew of the Shana Rei, but the creatures of darkness were long gone from the Spiral Arm—if they had ever existed.

  What did the Kolpraxa have to fear from a shadow?

  Tal Gale’nh faced the tall rememberer. “What we do now becomes part of the continuing Saga. When faced with our first mystery of this expedition, would you have us turn and flee?”

  Ko’sh lowered his gaze. “I merely record the history, Tal. You are the one who makes it.”

  Gale’nh pressed, “You’re the rememberer—you know the tale of my father. What would Adar Kori’nh do in this situation? What is your assessment?”

  “Adar Kori’nh would investigate.”

  Gale’nh turned to the helmsman. “Approach with caution. Extend our sensors and map that shadow cloud.”

  “Impossible to be accurate, Tal. It changes, it grows. It . . . emerges.” The blackness hung there in front of them.

  Gale’nh directed his gaze to the communications officer. “Open a channel. Let me address it.”

  “Do you think there is anything in that cloud, Tal?”

  “I cannot draw conclusions until we know more.” He turned to the main screen. “This is the Ildiran exploration ship Kolpraxa. We are representatives of the Mage-Imperator, seeking to expand our knowledge.” He paused and listened only to silence as deep as an eclipse. “If there is anything sentient in that cloud, please respond.”

  As the Kolpraxa drew closer, suddenly the helm and control systems began to stutter and shut down. Gale’nh gripped the command rail as the deck tilted. He called engineering. “What’s happening?”

  “Everything is failing—massive systemic errors and shutdowns.”

  The analysis crew called up diagnostics, but the screens flickered and blurred with static. Several panels went dark. Emergency lighting glowed from floor and ceiling rectangles. As the command nucleus dimmed, the faint light of sparse stars shone through the transparent dome overhead.

  “Withdraw to a safe distance,” Gale’nh said.

  “All systems are failing!” the helmsman responded. The engineers fought to reassert control of the ship.

  The black nebula continued rolling toward them. Gale’nh stared up through the observation dome. Blind entropy?

  A deep mechanical silence set in as the Kolpraxa’s engines died, and the exploration ship drifted. Sparks showered from control panels throughout the command nucleus, and the life-support systems shut down.

  The main lights went out, then even the emergency glow was smothered.

  Through the transparent observation dome overhead, Tal Gale’nh watched a midnight pseudopod reach out and swallow the Kolpraxa.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  OSIRA’H

  The faeros frolicked in the churning photosphere of the star Wulfton. Ellipsoidal incarnations of fire itself, the elemental beings dove into the gas layers, while others leaped in joyous arcs, riding magnetic pathways, sailing along wide coronal arches to their apex, then turning and plunging back into the stellar inferno.

  Alone in her insulated observation globe, bathed by the close starfire, Osira’h watched the faeros, sensed them, and felt her remaining telepathic connection to them. During the Elemental War, the faeros had wrought terrible damage, but Osira’h had forced them to obey her. Now, the fiery beings remained quiescent, tamed, yet still dangerous, incomprehensible. The faeros had returned to their unruly isolation. They still knew her and found her marginally interesting but also . . . irrelevant?

  She concentrated harder, trying to maintain the link, but it was frayed. The faeros had little interest in her anymore. Osira’h had a difficult time translating their thoughts, which were so entirely alien. But they did understand that she was no threat to them—not any longer.

  Reaching outward through the pathways of thism, Osira’h could sense the other Ildiran researchers in the nearby stellar analysis station, an orbiting facility outside the coronal zone. She was the only one who ventured this close to the inferno, and to the fiery elementals.

  The Ildiran astronomers at the Wulfton station were nervous whenever she went out in her insulated observation globe, but she sensed the faeros would protect her if she called on them. The fiery ellipsoids were capricious, had been both enemies and allies, but Osira’h knew them—and they knew her. They remained a powerful, looming noise in her mind . . . if only she could grasp it.

  Her globe cruised over the stellar maelstrom below. Convection cells the size of continents boiled up, changing the gaseous landscape every moment. Thanks to many layers of dense filters, her eyes could tolerate the sight. She watched a la
rge dark stain appear on the star, a duller red than the bright orange of the surrounding photosphere—a magnetic storm, a starspot. It was a gateway, as more fiery ellipsoids emerged and then sank back into the layers of hot gas again.

  Osira’h came out here in the shielded globe so she could have solitude, peace among the faeros. It helped her to feel that everything was in balance.

  Because they were a communal race, any individual Ildiran felt uneasy to be alone, but Osira’h was different. As the daughter of the green priest Nira and Mage-Imperator Jora’h himself, she was strengthened by myriad other connections.

  Osira’h was never truly alone because her mind was tightly bound with her halfbreed brothers and sisters. Her four siblings could also feel the faeros, though their connection was not as strong as hers. Gale’nh had his place in the Solar Navy, Tamo’l had her medical research on Kuivahr, Muree’n was being trained by Yazra’h with dreams of becoming the greatest Ildiran fighter ever. Rod’h was the closest of her siblings, the most similar to her; they had the strongest telepathy of the halfbreeds. They shared much and helped each other, but despite their strengths, she and Rod’h were misfits among the Ildirans.

  The Dobro breeding program had spent generations trying to breed a savior, and Osira’h had done her job. Her potent telepathy had brought the faeros and the hydrogues to their metaphorical knees at the end of the Elemental War. The enemy was defeated, the war over. She’d been invaluable in bringing the titanic enemies under control—but now what was she supposed to do?

  She had finished her life’s work when she was still a child.

  Oh, the Empire revered and celebrated Osira’h, but they didn’t understand who she was. The Ildirans were proud of her, although in some small corner of their minds—she could feel it through the thrumming of the thism—they were afraid of her, didn’t know what to do with her.

  Rod’h felt their unique predicament even more sharply than she did. He hadn’t even been given the chance to serve his reason for being—a potential savior with nothing to save. Osira’h had been triumphant, and Rod’h was merely the backup. An unnecessary spare.

  She hoped to keep her brother’s disappointment from hardening into bitterness. She wished Rod’h could be with her at Wulfton. They could have been watching the faeros together, trying to understand them better. But he had refused, claiming he wasn’t interested.

  Beneath the observation globe, a fireball rocketed up like a bullet ejected from the star. The living thing shot past her craft, curious, sensing her. Inside her mind, Osira’h could hear ethereal voices and noises, the fiery intensity of faeros thoughts: a wash of defeat, withdrawal . . . not resentment, but limitation. Even in her closest contact with the fiery beings, Osira’h had not been able to understand why they turned their capricious behavior on both sides of the conflict.

  The hydrogues were similar, as were the watery wentals. The verdani—the worldforest mind that manifested in all the trees of Theroc—was the most easily accessible sentience. Green priests like her mother had long been able to tap into the verdani mind, read the thoughts of the forest, share the knowledge stored there.

  Concentrating now, Osira’h opened up to the fireball that hovered in front of her shielded globe. The flames brightened and swirled, and the ellipsoid spun before it shot off to swim with other faeros in a solar flare. Osira’h felt an afterimage in her brain, a warm tingle from the strange alien presence.

  As her globe drifted, she closed her eyes and cast her thoughts out along the thism web. She listened to the simmering power of the elementals, the crackle of the faeros, the humming of the hydrogues that slumbered uneasily in their gas-giant planets, the sighs of the wentals across open bodies of water, the whisper of verdani voices like leaves blowing in the wind.

  But there was also an uneasy background static . . . ghost voices stirring in the fabric of the universe. She could hear it more loudly than any of her siblings.

  As she concentrated, Osira’h heard an unexpected crack, a sudden strengthening of the telepathic bond with her brother Gale’nh. She knew he had departed on the Kolpraxa for the far boundaries of the Spiral Arm—and now she heard him cry out in her mind. A pitch-black coldness flowed from him, a shadow fell across his thoughts, and Gale’nh suddenly went silent in her mind.

  She knew something terrible had happened to him, to the Kolpraxa, to all the Ildirans aboard it in the unexplored void of deep space.

  When her vision snapped back into focus and she saw the faeros still bobbing in the depths of the star, Osira’h felt no warmth from them, only urgency. A panic? Even the faeros were afraid!

  She activated the engines of her observation globe and raced up above the stellar corona. She transmitted to the astronomers at the astronomical research station to prepare a ship for immediate departure for Ildira.

  She had to report to the Mage-Imperator.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  GENERAL NALANI KEAH

  After General Keah returned to the Lunar Orbital Complex at Earth for a tedious meeting with her Grid Admirals—all quiet on every front, as expected—she insisted on heading out again. She didn’t bother to manufacture a reason; she felt more effective if she kept moving.

  The Lunar Orbital Complex was the administrative heart of the CDF, with enclosed military bases, spacedocks, construction yards, and civilian habitats. Although Theroc was the Confederation’s capital, the military headquarters remained at Earth in the rubble of the Moon. Traditional Theron culture didn’t have the infrastructure to support a major military complex (those gigantic verdani battleships orbiting Theroc, however, scared the crap out of Keah every time she went for an official visit).

  Her Juggernaut was the most powerful ship in the CDF, and she liked to think of it as her office. With a green priest on her flagship, she could be contacted immediately, wherever the Kutuzov might be. The real command center was where she was.

  The Juggernaut continued its long patrol, accompanied by nine Manta cruisers selected from the various grids, “taking them out for a test drive.” This time, Adar Zan’nh also joined them with a septa of graceful Solar Navy warliners. During this joint exercise, all the ships followed the more optimistic scenario that the CDF and the Solar Navy would operate together against an outside enemy. Keah preferred that option. She and Zan’nh had already traded formal dinners on each other’s flagships along the way.

  Following a previously agreed-on course, the patrol group headed toward a cold gas giant named Dhula: a world with rusty red clouds orbited by a crowd of small moons. Dhula lay at the fringe of Ildiran space, unclaimed and unremarkable. Its atmospheric composition made the planet an unlikely candidate for ekti skymining; it was too isolated for human colonists to take notice, nor did the Ildirans seem interested in the world.

  Under the pretext of their patrol, though, General Keah could have a look at the moon cluster, take a few readings. Maybe someone in the Confederation would figure out what to do with Dhula, or maybe it was no more than a planet on a list, a destination for these military exercises. She could live with that.

  She glanced at the sleepy-looking green priest at his station beside his treeling. “Mr. Nadd, anything to report?”

  Startled out of a doze, Nadd touched his treeling, then shook his head. “No emergencies, General.”

  She considered telling the green priest to go back to sleep, but decided that would set a bad example for her commissioned officers. She sat back in her command chair. “Part of me longs for a little excitement—you know, the kind of thing that makes for great CDF recruitment loops. On the other hand, a nice quiet patrol is how things are supposed to be, and it means that all is right with the Spiral Arm.”

  “There’s a boost in pay for hazardous missions,” First Officer Wingo pointed out.

  “Only if you survive to collect it,” said Tactical Officer Voecks.

  After her heroic performance during the Klikiss space battle at Earth twenty years ago, Nalani Keah had worked her way up through the
military. She was a golden girl, but also willing to call out inefficiency or stupidity when she encountered it. She made few friends among the old-guard sedentary bureaucrats, but she drew applause from up-and-coming officers who appreciated the improvements she suggested. Now, as the commander, her mission was to make the CDF lean and agile—an adaptable response force, rather than a bloated and showy institution.

  Keah turned to her comm officer. “Open a channel to the flagship warliner, Mr. Aragao. I need to ask Adar Zan’nh if it’s his turn to come over for dinner and strategy sessions, or for me to go over there.”

  The Ildiran commander’s image appeared, as if he had been waiting for her to call. “General Keah, I have developed a plan for us to map the Dhula moon cluster. I would like your approval.”

  Keah nodded. “It’s approved, Z.”

  “You don’t wish to study it?”

  “Not in the least. I know your capabilities, Z. No one’s better at it than you are.”

  “Very well, we will arrange our exploration ships accordingly.”

  Keah gestured to her first officer, letting him take care of the matter. She hated paperwork and did too much of it when she was stationed back at the Lunar Orbital Complex. Mercer Wingo had won her over when he proved that he could ghostwrite most of her reports.

  First Officer Wingo projected a map of the Dhula moons. The smaller CDF scout ships would do a quick flyover of the outlying satellites, while the Solar Navy would take larger squadrons, because Ildirans tended to get anxious when flying alone. Her Remora pilots could have done the entire operation with far less manpower, but she let the Solar Navy do it their own way.

  Remora scouts flew out on their assigned surveys, while others arced around to “assist” the Solar Navy scouts. Dhula’s first nine moons were rocks and snowballs, with no interesting mineral content, nothing that would attract even the most optimistic and impractical industrialist. Two of the moons showed denser metal concentrations, and Keah flagged them in case anyone wanted to bother with a deeper survey.