The Dark Between the Stars

by Kevin J. Anderson

  After returning to his ship on the crater floor, he stripped off his environment suit and quickly set the glass sample vials in a temporary bin on the counter inside the self-contained isolation chamber. The glass tubes had been sterilized, of course, and he would do the full isolation lockdown during the flight back to Pergamus.

  First, though, he had to get away from the asteroid with all possible speed. He didn’t trust that woman. There was something about Orli’s eyes, the determination on her dying face. She was desperate enough, resourceful enough that she just might do something unexpected. Her ship’s damaged engine was dismantled, and once he left the asteroid she couldn’t come after him—at least not soon enough to catch him. She had nothing.

  And yet . . .

  He guided his ship out of the asteroid field and set course for Pergamus, where he would make sure that the repairs and upgrades to his ship were completed this time. Back at the research facility, he would happily endure the many hours of successive decontamination procedures so he could spend time with Zoe. Finally, he would stay long enough that they could have a meal together, talk about life, maybe about their past, maybe about their future.

  Tom Rom would say little, and even Zoe would keep the conversation to a minimum, but they would be together—just as they had been in their last few years of caring for the dying Adam Alakis at the watchtower station on Vaconda. At least he would provide genuine companionship, a small reminder to help Zoe hold on to her humanity.

  When he was safely on course with the autopilot secured, he went into the isolation chamber to inspect the sample vials. Orli Covitz’s blood looked as red as any normal blood, but he knew it was swarming with deadly microorganisms, possibly the last specimens of their kind in existence. Zoe and her research teams would be ecstatic. Within a few days he would be back at Pergamus.

  The ship sailed on . . . but something didn’t feel right. He knew the ship’s vibration. His instincts were attuned to its lifeblood, its rhythms, the unscientific feel of its systems. He returned to the cockpit and studied the control panels. According to readings from the engines, the exhaust train, the power blocks, the numbers were exactly as expected. Before takeoff, he had done a cursory check out of habit and noted no anomalies.

  Now he sat perfectly still, let his eyes fall half closed, and walked backward into his memory, trying to recall precisely what the readings had said. It was an exercise he had learned long ago.

  His breaths were shallow, his focus complete, and at last he remembered the numbers. They were exactly the same as what showed now. All of them. Very unlikely. There should have been some variation between takeoff and now, hours later.

  He touched fingertips against the control panel, drew deeper breaths as if trying to connect telepathically with his ship. There had been slight differences after the temporary repairs he had made on Vaconda, as if the engines were a fraction out of tune . . . but the vibrations felt different and were increasing in intensity.

  He pressed his hands flat on the panel and thought he sensed the vibration jumping. The sound of the engines was too loud, but the diagnostic screens read exactly as they should. Exactly—like a textbook. He purged the diagnostics, reset the sensors, and took new readings.

  That’s when he discovered an overload was imminent.

  Automated alarms rattled through the cockpit. He muted them immediately so he could concentrate. The ship’s systems were damaged. The exhaust train was dumping massive amounts of thermal energy back into the reactor, and the containment was nearing collapse. Temperature spikes had already caused several systems to fail.

  His fingers flew over the controls, trying to shut down or at least reroute the failures, but the ship’s controls were nonresponsive. The damage was already too great. The overload was building to critical levels.

  His mouth went dry, and he froze with just a moment of indecision, which was completely unlike him. This could not possibly be the result of normal damage.

  Sabotage.

  Somehow Orli Covitz had rigged an overload in his engines . . . but she had never left the Proud Mary. How could she possibly . . . ?

  The compy must have done it.

  Seconds after understanding what was going wrong, he concluded that he would be unable to stop it. Overload and vaporization would occur in less than two minutes.

  Tom Rom disengaged the stardrive, dropping the ship out of lightspeed to increase his chances of survival, then took a moment at the controls to perform a data backup, dumping all his records into the secondary systems. This took fifteen seconds longer than expected, and he watched the thermal spikes.

  If his vessel had been fully repaired, the systems might have been stable enough to give him an extra minute, but they were breaking down. When he saw a suddenly increasing gamma cascade, he knew the reactor was failing.

  He dove into the isolation chamber. The self-contained compartment would also serve as a lifepod. It was his only chance. He triggered the emergency launch, bypassed all safety systems.

  The hatch slammed shut with the speed of a falling guillotine blade. It would have amputated his legs if he had been an instant slower. The explosive bolts severed the connectors from the main ship, flinging hull plates away. Tom Rom threw himself against the wall and held on as the escape engines ignited, launching him like a rock from a catapult.

  Then the main ship exploded. The shock wave struck the escape pod like a vicious slap, sending it tumbling. The pod’s engines valiantly struggled to outrace the detonation—but they could not. A wash of light, radiation, and high-velocity debris battered the pod.

  In theory, the containment chamber’s shielding would be sufficient to protect him against the external radiation bath. Even more important, he didn’t want the samples of the plague virus to be destroyed by a bombardment of X-rays and gamma radiation.

  The pod continued to reel out of control in open space. Disoriented, hand over hand, he pulled himself along until he found the inset control panel and activated the stabilization thrusters. Finally, he turned on the artificial gravity.

  Debris inside the escape pod tumbled down to what was now defined as the deck. As weight returned, he felt sharp pains in his body. He had been battered, and he took a moment to touch the sore spots, flex his arms and legs, press against his ribs. Taking inventory. He determined that nothing was, in fact, broken.

  The containment chamber had its own short-range stardrive. Once he recalculated his position using navigational interpolation, he could make his way to a nearby system, acquire other transportation. He had planned for emergencies such as this. His ship had everything he needed in the short term, until he could limp back to Pergamus and present Zoe with an extremely valuable item for her collection.

  With a start, he recalled that he had left the vials of Orli’s blood in the open bin on the counter. Unsecured items had flown in all directions during the buffeting.

  He scrounged around, looking for the three vials. He found loose records, an empty specimen pack, then one of the vials, still intact and sealed, which he retrieved and placed in the cabinet where it should have gone in the first place.

  Under a tumbled analysis tray and a pair of protective gloves, he found the second vial, also sealed. But the third proved elusive. As the evacuation pod continued to stabilize itself and the automated navigation sensors mapped the stars around him to determine his position, Tom Rom scoured the chamber.

  He looked in corners, in between storage and analysis decks. Two rectangular system boxes had shifted apart during the explosion, leaving a narrow gap, and as Tom Rom crouched he saw a glint of the blunt end of a sample tube. He reached into the cranny to pull out the last vial, but when his fingers touched it, he felt the tiny bite of broken glass, a jagged edge.

  He pulled the tube out. His fingers were covered with blood—Orli’s spilled blood, and his own from a small cut. With a detached analysis that was parsecs away from panic, he realized he was also infected now.

  He was goi
ng to have much less time to get back to Zoe Alakis than he had expected.

  ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTEEN

  EXXOS

  Exxos relished the fact that humans and Ildirans knew they would soon become an extinct species. Impatient, he wished the Shana Rei would simply unfold and strike huge population centers, destroy Ildira and the traitorous Mage-Imperator, crush the human capital, and then methodically wipe out one settlement after another. For the creatures of darkness, it should be as simple as snuffing out candle flames. Extinguishing the clamorous disruption of intelligent life bit by bit would ease their pain.

  But the chaotic inkblot creatures chose their own targets and rarely listened to Exxos. The Shana Rei refused to explain why they had chosen to manifest a shadow cloud out here, so far from any known inhabited system. Why worry about a minor industrial outpost, when they could be destroying Ildira instead? What could be interesting about this place?

  But when he objected, the pulsing inkblots turned their singular, glowing eyes toward him. “It calls us.”

  “What calls you?” Exxos asked. “What is here? I demand to know.” The Shana Rei did not answer for a long moment, then the voices echoed around him in the entropy bubble, a thrumming cacophony.“We do not know.”

  The creatures of darkness had their own goals. They were uncontrollable, unpredictable. Exxos knew that would be problematic once they finished the extended plan to exterminate all intelligent life. What if they reneged on their promise to create a pocket universe for the robots to inhabit and rule? Would the Shana Rei turn against the black robots?

  Of course they would.

  Exxos and his comrades had already pooled their calculating power. Planning, always planning, they began to consider alternatives for how they might defeat the creatures of darkness. Fortunately, they would have plenty of time. The annihilation of all other life would take time.

  As they emerged into the normal universe again, the Shana Rei pulled matter out of nothingness in order to create their hex battleships. The effort caused them enormous agony, as if they were flagellating themselves by creating matter—yet they endured, so they could continue to destroy. A paradox.

  When the shadow cloud began its attack on the ekti-extraction field, Exxos and his companions experienced a wrench of disorientation. Then they found themselves on the control decks of their recreated fighting ships. Several of their enhanced war vessels had been destroyed at Plumas, but the Shana Rei simply remade them now, as if nothing had happened.

  Individual robots could not be replaced. The memories of those unmade by the Shana Rei were already lost, but the stored experiences of the remaining ones could be duplicated and shared. As their numbers dwindled, Exxos commanded that all of his companions act as backup for one another, with himself as a primary repository of their existence. He designated himself as the baseline entity.

  Now the gigantic hex ships emerged from the cloud. Even Exxos did not know what sort of weapons the ebony vessels possessed. They projected an entropic field that disrupted or destroyed technological systems, but that was a passive weapon. He hoped the Shana Rei would cease to be passive.

  When the attack began, Exxos commanded the newly manifested robot ships to launch out and destroy, but he was curious to discover what had drawn the Shana Rei to this particular place. He had to understand, had to stay one step ahead of the creatures of darkness, if he intended to continue his bluff.

  He observed the island of strange nodules, the flurry of human activity, bright facilities and equipment that drifted among the cluster. Not impressive. The human population here would be small, and Exxos would annihilate them easily—another wasteful exercise, not sufficiently important, in his opinion, to merit the effort. If the Shana Rei suffered so to create their ships for this particular attack, why would they consider the tiny outpost a worthwhile target?

  What was here?

  He had never seen anything like the strange nodules, an odd anomaly, and the humans were exploiting them somehow. The operations had drained and discarded hundreds of the sacks, while continuing to work on the hundreds that remained.

  The ebony Shana Rei ships hung over the largest complex, but did not move, as if something caused them to hesitate. The creatures of darkness didn’t attack, even though the human ships flurried in a seemingly disorganized evacuation. Many were escaping, but the Shana Rei did not seem concerned.

  Knowing he couldn’t count on the shadow creatures to do what was necessary, Exxos transmitted an order to his robots. “Commence full attack!” Like a flock of black vultures, they streaked into the industrial complex.

  ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTEEN

  GARRISON REEVES

  The shadow cloud swelled near the Iswander ekti-extraction complex like smoke ripping through the fabric of space. Utterly silent, the black nebula reached toward the cluster of bloaters.

  Lee Iswander’s face was markedly pale when he turned to Garrison. “I didn’t listen to your warnings at Sheol—I hesitated too long before I evacuated. I won’t make that mistake again.” He turned to the frightened-looking techs at the admin stations. “Signal our operations to evacuate immediately. All ships out of there! Follow emergency procedures.”

  Elisa was angry. “We can’t give up without a fight, sir. You banked everything on this. It is your chance—”

  “No, Elisa. We’ll pick up the pieces later.” He raised his voice, transmitted over the open channel, “All work crews, find the nearest escape vessel and get away from that cloud.”

  The intercom echoed with distress calls, confused shouts. Evacuation alarms rattled through the connected modules. Ships at docking hatches and in landing bays were quickly crowded with people and launched out into the open, heading away from the bloater-extraction fields in every direction.

  Alec Pannebaker called from the industrial yards, “But, Chief, this ekti hauler is fully loaded. I’m taking it up and out of here. That way, we’ll salvage something at least.”

  “Only if you can do it safely. The facilities can be replaced—and we know there are other bloater clusters.” He turned to his wife and son. “I will not lose personnel again. Fifteen forty-three . . . that was enough.”

  Garrison was relieved. “Thank you, sir. Seth, come with me to the ship. We’ll get as many aboard as possible. Mr. Iswander, we have room for your wife and son. Elisa, are you coming?”

  Elisa placed herself at the doorway. “You’re not taking Seth away from me again.”

  “I’m not taking him away from you. There’s no time for your nonsense. We’re getting out of here. You’re welcome to come with us.”

  Iswander surprised him by interjecting in a firm, commanding tone, “Elisa, I need you to cooperate. Go with Mr. Reeves and your son, see that my family gets to safety.”

  She blinked, taken aback that he would side against her. She rallied visibly, then turned to Iswander. “Yes, sir. You need to leave, too.”

  He shook his head. “No. I’m staying here to wrap up. I can get away in my own cruiser, but I don’t want to worry about you. Mr. Reeves, thank you for your offer to take a few extra passengers. I am indebted to you.”

  Arden said, “No. You have to come with us!”

  Iswander frowned. “I have other responsibilities first, and your duty is to do as you’re told.”

  Nodding to the industrialist, Garrison put a hand on his son’s shoulder and said, “Come on, everyone, let’s go!”

  Elisa hesitated. Iswander said to her, “Leave! That is an order.”

  The huge refinery vessels were gathering momentum, lumbering away from the bloater cluster. One panicked cargo ship accelerated blindly, slammed into a group of deflated bloater sacks, and exploded.

  Around the extraction field, ships flew about like enraged insects from a stirred-up hive. Another evacuating ekti hauler had raced off without securing its cargo, and the heavy tanks of stardrive fuel tumbled out, spoiling the vessel’s weight distribution and sending it into a spin, which ejected even more e
kti canisters. They spread out like unaimed projectiles, and one struck a small ship flying away from an extraction station that was still connected to a flaccid bloater. The tank exploded, ripping open the fleeing ship.

  As he ran into the landing bay where the Prodigal Son waited, Garrison saw the explosion and expected the shock wave to ignite the bloater, which would cause another chain-reaction explosion . . . but they got lucky. The deflated sack did not catch fire.

  Elisa grabbed Seth’s hand and hurried him into the Prodigal Son. When Londa and Arden were also safely aboard, Garrison headed for the cockpit while the others strapped in. In less than a minute, he had primed the engines and launched from the bay into the dubious safety of open space.

  ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTEEN

  AELIN

  With emergency evacuation alarms hammering through the Iswander complex, the green priest prepared his escape. Aelin didn’t know what was happening out there, nor did he care. Everything else was insignificant to what he knew now.

  The song of the cosmos continued to play in his head, deafening him with blinding colors, filling the backs of his eyes with incomprehensible words. He tasted music at the back of his tongue.

  Ever since being exposed to the revelatory bloater flash, Aelin had felt the surreal symphony inside his mind. He never wanted it to stop, and his heart ached to know that he had dipped only a single droplet out of an infinite ocean.

  How he wished he could have shared this with his poor brother. . . .

  Since his rescue, he had been comatose off and on, but Aelin did not mind. While unconscious and drifting, he found that he was able to bask in all the wonders that filled his head. When he woke, though, he felt dull and stupid, his perceptions fuzzy, his vision limited. His treeling was dead—withered by the overload of the flash—but the mind that now encompassed him was orders of magnitude greater than even the verdani.