The Burning Dark
Authors: Adam Christopher
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For Sandra, always
Acknowledgments
My thanks to everyone who made this book what it is, including my crack team of early readers: Kim Curran, Amanda Lynn, Mark Nelson, Andrew Reid, Sharon Ring, Amanda Rutter, Kate Sherrod, James Smythe, and Jennifer Williams. Thanks also to Danielle Stockley for her valuable insight (and for introducing me to the best hot chocolate in New York City).
I’m grateful to two people in particular, whose life-changing notes and edits helped shape this story from when it first appeared as something luminous and fragile called
Ludmila, My Love
: my agent, Stacia J. N. Decker, of the Donald Maass Literary Agency, and my editor at Tor, Paul Stevens. Stacia’s eye for detail and deep understanding of the text were vital (we in Team Decker are a lucky bunch of writers, no doubt about it), and Paul’s suggestions on what might
really
be going on aboard the U-Star
Coast City
were a revelation. You’re holding this book in your hands because of them. Thanks also to Pablo Defendini for the Puerto Rican Spanish and the suggestion Serra probably knew a thing or two about Santeria. And to Will Staehle—my friend, you’ve done it
again
.
This book has a
long
history, so my apologies if I’ve left anybody out, but a big thanks to Lauren Beukes, Joelle Charbonneau, Mur Lafferty, Emma Newman, Kaaron Warren, and Chuck Wendig.
Finally, to my wife, Sandra, whose endless support, enthusiasm, understanding, and love make everything worthwhile. Thank you, and I love you.
Contents
The Situation on Warworld 16 Has Been Resolved
Part Three: The Ghosts of Subspace
Aokigahara and the Girl with Blue Eyes
Part Four: And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead
YOMI
In the shadowland of
the dead, she sat and cried for her husband, but the prison was sealed and she could not leave and nobody could hear her.
The shadows surrounded her, swarming like living, breathing creatures. The shadows caressed her skin, holding the rotting flesh onto her bones. Things crawled over her and ate the flesh, but the shadows kept her firm, kept her whole as the things ate, and ate, and ate.
It was too late.
She had eaten the food of the underworld, and she could not return. So she sat in the shadows, and cried for her husband, and things ate her flesh.
Abandoned, imprisoned in the dark, her fury burned like a black sun. Trapped in the basement of the world, she waited, and grew resentful. Her mind didn’t break, not exactly, but it grew as black as the walls of the prison in which she sat. The walls that rippled and cracked and filled her head with the roar of the ocean when she touched them, but that did not yield or break. They were solid, inviolable.
He had left her here, left her trapped while he returned to the land of the living. He had tricked her and betrayed her. The one she loved had betrayed her.
They were
one;
they were
kindred
. Yet here she sat, in the dark, imprisoned beyond time, beyond space. In the dark, her despair turned to hate.
She knew now that she could not return, that she was changed and that the world had changed. She also knew that he would pay, one day. She would have vengeance. She would have revenge.
Her tears dried as the last scraps of flesh were eaten from her face. The endless night of her prison grew even blacker as her dead eyes were sucked from their sockets like rotting eggs by something crawling and screaming in the shadows. In their place a blue light shone, the cold blue light of the end of the world. Her eyes lit the prison. The things that crawled squirmed to escape her.
In the dark she burned.
She stood in her prison for the first time in eternity and screamed for revenge. She would return to the world outside, not to life, never again to life, but to find him, and punish him, from here to the end of time. This she vowed.
Then she sat in the black nothingness and waited. Her husband had sent her here; there was no way out. Someone would need to free her. But she knew someone would, in time. The living were curious, and the dead were patient.
And then it came: a knock and a voice, from somewhere else, somehow. An offering, a proposal. A way out. And it was so simple, all it needed was power, just enough to crack the walls of the prison. And if there was a crack, she could reach out and touch the world. She could reach out and drink her fill of life, a thousand souls a day, until she was whole again. And then, when she was whole, she would be able to break free. She would be able to escape, and her husband would not be able to flee her wrath.
In the dark she burned, and she pressed her skull to the wall, and she listened.
THE RELIEF OF TAU RETORE
This is how the
shit went down. Lemme tell you about it, right now.
We came out of quickspace at oh-fifteen, which, even pushing warp as we were, was still too damn late. And when we popped back into the universe above Tau Retore, there was already a gap in the arrowhead. One ship hadn’t made it—engine burnout in quickspace, or some such. That can happen, and the loss—hell, any loss—was a shock. But we had a job to do first and my crew was fast, filling the gap without even needing an order, sliding the pack of cruisers together just
so
. It was pretty sweet, lemme tell you.
So, formation tight, one ship down. We spin down into planetary orbit, braking hard so the cone of warp exit didn’t knock the goddamn planet off its axis. That’s why you don’t pop quickspace until you’re far off out into the unknown. It’s bad enough pushing just a spaceship through the gap between
now
and
now,
but, trust me, you don’t want a planet dragging in your wake. The whole universe shakes when a single mote of dust leaves it to fly quickspace. Shove a spaceship through the hole, the universe shakes, gets mightily pissed off, and then gives you a smack at the other end. Universal punishment. God doesn’t like you messing with his shit, that’s for sure. That’s what the quantum dampeners are for. A whole planet?
Forget about it
. They don’t make dampeners big enough for
that
.
Anyway.
We came in hot and close, but we were too late. They were there already, on the other side of Tau Retore, and we couldn’t see the main body, but we could see its claws stuck deep into the mantle of the planet, the liquid interior spilling out around the talons like hot blood. And the claws.
Jesus
. Shit, man, I’ve seen them do it before, the way they crack a planet open, then spin it—
spin it!—
like a spider. Don’t know how they do it, how they find the sheer mass to build machines as big as moons. At the heart of a Mother Spider lies the guttering embers of a star, we know that much, and as the claws reach the core of their victim, the planet’s magnetosphere gets all fucked up to shit, and they siphon the energy off that too. That’s some crazy tech, way beyond what we got. And it’s an amazing sight, the death of a planet—a planet physically pulled into pieces by the biggest fucking machine in the universe. You don’t forget a sight like that, not in any kind of hurry.
You could hear it on the bridge. The viewscreens were green with the shitstorm of quickspace, then they flashed, then we’re almost in fucking orbit around Tau Retore and that
thing
sucking the power and the life out of it. And everyone, everyone on the bridge of each of the twenty-three ships left in the arrowhead cries out in horror, and the captains give their pilots the command to decelerate and change course to deflect the nose of the warp cone past the planet, but they’re already doing it and cursing blind as they do. Because in front of us there’s a Mother Spider eating a planet, and the planet is bleeding. And on our ships, the comms channel is choked with one hundred people shouting in surprise and praying to whatever gods or goddesses they hold dear and precious.
I mean …
Jesus …
Anyway.
We were too late to save it, really. We knew it, but that didn’t mean we weren’t going to try. So the arrowhead is in formation and we push the warp cone up just as it fizzes out over Tau Retore’s north pole and we slam it toward the Mother Spider. If we can take that out, then the planet will at least stay in orbit, and if it stays in one piece, then when this whole crazy shit is over they can send out some terraformers to reconstitute the landscape and restabilize the core while whoever is left alive goes on vacation to Elesti or Alta or somewhere nice with beaches and sunsets.
Now things start to get interesting, because the Mother Spider has seen us. It’s weird, it really is. I don’t think the Spiders have actual spiders wherever they’re from, but they sure as hell built their whole space tech around them. You know those little spider egg sacs, those balls of web on a leaf that you flick and then they break and about a million of the shits swarm out over everything? Just like that. The Mother Spider’s still chowing down and we’re flying toward it—and the U-Star
Boston Brand
is right in front, leading the charge, because I’m goddamn Fleet Admiral for the day and I want to get there first—when the main body
splits,
kinda like one of those paper folding games that girls make in school. You know, it’s a kinda pyramid, you stick your fingers in, and it opens up, like a flower, and there’s writing and jokes and suggestions about who loves who.
You know?
Anyway.
The Mother Spider opens and more Spiders come out—little small ones, half the size of our U-Stars, coming out of these shells that they shuck off like cocoons, and then they unfold their legs and head toward us. There’s some more swearing but I order comms silence. Then—
Bang!
The ship that filled the gap in the arrowhead? Gone. These Spider babies are like their momma. They don’t have weapons; they have
claws
. So they close in and latch on to your hull, and start chewing it up, and with so many of them swarming—hundreds,
thousands
maybe—they take just a second or two to reduce a U-Star to particulate matter. I don’t know whether they ever developed projected energy, or even projectile weapons. Maybe they just think eating enemy ships is funny. So:
Bang!
U-Star
Gothamite
is history, nothing but metal and vapor. But we’re in comms silence now, and that seems to keep everyone cool, I guess because they’re now looking at me for instructions and trying not to think about how a U-Star can be taken out just like that. It takes the responsibility off them, let’s them disengage, the conscious mind giving way to training and experience. Which is good for battle. You need your cool, and you don’t need your emotions. Plenty of time for that later.