A Song for the Shadows
Science fiction short story
This story serves as an origin myth for the world that we see in Ruts.
We were being hunted by demons.
Past the Aquila Cluster we fled, ships bright in the darkness, engines running hot and far past their tolerances. Engineers screamed at us to slow down, the gunners screamed at us to go faster.
We ran.
The Aquila Cluster fell behind us, a shrinking blot of orange and red, and the shadow bloomed and grew larger in its place.
We reached New Antioch, lands we had scouted and settled only two generations before, and we had to keep moving. Messages from the surface reached out to us and pleaded, and we watched with helpless anger and sorrow as the shadow engulfed their world while we ran. New Antioch fell into darkness, the voices fell silent, and the last we heard from them was a long scream that echoed between the cold stars before fading.
We ran.
We lost the Saint Hepaclese when its engines failed and it began to lose speed. Those who could abandon it, did; the rest stayed and fought, and the shadow engulfed them too. Claws and black shapes covering the hull, the gun casemates lancing golden fire into everything that came close - and yet nothing could keep the shadow away.
The agri-bays fell, breached first.
Deep storage fell next, sleeping refugees in their tanks waking momentarily at their final moment before being plunged into darkness and death.
Navigation.
Engineering.
The ice reservoirs.
Captain Sorensen sent a final message from the bridge, and the Saint Hepaclese was gone, a brief sun-flare as the failsafes detonated and martyred it into light and plasma in its final moments.
We ran.
We had no choice. We had no options.
We just ran, and the demons followed.
* * * * *
We were down to two ships when we found the last world.
It had no name, and the astro-logs listed it as a place that had been scouted, logged, and then forgotten. It had been too far away from the rest of the empire, and the nebula that flanked it had struck too many alarm bells on the survey mission for it to receive a final commendation. Exotic radiation sources, novel gravity effects, a tachyon source somewhere that doused the surrounding space with random blasts of things that humans should rather not be exposed to.
Too dangerous for settlement, they had labelled it, and filed it away to be forgotten.
It was our last chance, now, and our priorities were no longer the same.
Desperation changes everything, eventually.
The system’s primary gas giant loomed behind us, shrinking with our passage towards this long-forgotten world. The demons were a day behind us, if not less. We had lost the Chapterbook upon first entering the system a week ago, and the Saint Benedict at the secondary gas giant a few days later. The demons were ravenous, and relentless, and tore the ships apart just like they had destroyed every other ship in the flotilla.
So many, initially, and then fewer, and fewer - and then we were down to four.
Then three, and the gibbering of death stalking the radio waves.
Now two.
We had been readying the colony landers for weeks now. Plans were made, tested, remade - again and again, nervous minds frittering away the hours while we listened to the screams of those who fell behind.
What else could we do, but run?
Fighting achieved nothing. Our guns had been silent for months now, shells recycled into the engineering stockpiles for reaction mass, energy sinks redirected from the light-lance casemates to the reactor buffers.
Every time we fired and struck one of the shadows behind us, three more rose in its place.
It did not make sense to keep shooting, after a certain point.
Even the most devout saw that, eventually.
So we packed the landers, and prepared, and hoped that a chance would present itself.
A last seed, for a last patch of soil, before everlasting night overtook us.
The world ahead of us was green and grey, with forests and oceans and too many clouds - cold lands, the sensors said, lands with little sun where life would be hard. A world with two moons - green-blue in a slow orbit, a smaller red in a fast orbit - with a volcanic chain all along the equator, spewing ash and steam into the atmosphere to darken it. Soft tectonics, it seemed, bending under the pull and give of the moons circling it.
It had been passed over for settlement for a good reason - and to us, now, it was paradise.
We drew lots, to see who could go - after the engineers and biologists and frozen refugees in their tanks had been loaded - and the lucky ones boarded the landers. We watched them - faces solemn, mouths grim, eyes dark, fear rank upon them - and we were not sure whether we saw them or our own reflections as the last hatches closed.
The sensors we had left in orbit around the gas giant screamed.
Our time had run out.
We put on what last speed we could muster, aiming for the gravity well ahead of us. With the speed we brought and the gravity from the world, we could swing around it and slingshot out the other side - running, faster, for the extra week or so it would take before the demons caught up with us again.
I watched the world below us as we screamed past above the upper reaches of the atmosphere, and grey lands looked back at me. It was a bleak place, with a grim air upon it.
A haven-to-be, or so we prayed.
At least it had trees and water.
They could build and plant, if all else failed.
We were in the shadow of the world, its bulk between us and the demons, when we released the landers. Small flares in the dark, and they fell away from us, diving for the atmosphere. A string of pearls, snapped, falling into dark waters one by one - and then the plasma waves swallowed them, and they were gone.
Our final seeds, spent.
We ran, and the demons smelled us, and followed.
We opened our radio channels, listening to their howling behind us, and sang back at them. Hymns from Antioch and Helveticum, songs of our people, songs of our faith and our strength. Songs that gave us courage, songs for celebrations and songs of lament. Songs that told our history, our victories and achievements, songs that covered our tears and our fears and our quaking hearts.
We sang into the night, making ourselves a bright light in the darkness, and drew the moths after us as we fled from the system.
We ran, and the demons followed, and behind us, in a grey patch of land, seeds fell.
We ran, and we did not stop singing for six days.
On the seventh day we rested, and sent a final message into the dark - into and through it, to the harsh world that now lay so many billions of kilometres behind us. We did not know if it would penetrate the shadow, or reach its destination, but it was our last chance.
Remember us, always.
On the eighth day, the demons caught us.
* * * * *
At the landing site, amidst the rain and the driving snow of their first winter on their new world, the colonists - survivors, specialists, lot-drawers, refugees who had entered stasis on worlds far away only to be woken here at the edge of the known universe - received their last message from orbit.
Remember us, always.
After that, there was only silence, and darkness, and the cold light of distant stars as some vast shadow moved further and further away.
Good origin story. No happy ending here!
Great story James! Chilling, and effectively told.